Losing someone who never left the room: Dickinson on love going cold
Nobody dies and nobody departs in this Emily Dickinson poem. The beloved is still right there, yet distance has crept onto her face and into her voice. The world looks unchanged, the speaker admits, but love has migrated elsewhere, and she calls the hardest poverty the payback owed for worship.
The first stanza sets up the paradox with blunt economy. The speaker realises she has lost a woman who has not gone anywhere; what has travelled is remoteness, visible in her expression and heard in her speech. The next quatrain pushes the strangeness further. The beloved is "Alien, though adjoining", like someone from another race, crossing a region without latitude even while she seems to stand still.
In the third stanza nothing physical has shifted. The elements are the same and so is the universe; only love has undergone a kind of transmigration, the word usually used for a soul passing into a new body. The speaker cannot say how it happened, only that it did.
The last stanza, twice the length of the others, turns to accounting. Nature has taken back a day the speaker paid dearly for. True poverty, she concludes, belongs not to someone labouring for liberty or for a family, but to the person forced to make restitution for idolatry. Having adored too much, she must now repay the debt.
Readers often look for the real people behind such lines, and Dickinson's life offers candidates. Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, her brother's wife, received the dedications of at least eleven poems, and some scholars argue that censorship blurred a relationship that may have been romantic. Her early bonds were complicated too. She wrote warmly of her father, but described her mother as cold, joking to a confidante that she had been an awful mother yet still preferable to none, and recalling how as a child she ran to her brother Austin whenever trouble struck.
Source: Now I knew I lost her --
