In # 443, Dickinson emphasizes that her narrator is a woman. The duties of the beginning lines include putting on a shawl, replacing dead flowers with new ones, fiddling with a flower attached to her gown. And further on in the poem, as a result of the blow that caused existence to stop, the narrator states, “We cannot put Ourself away / As a completed Man / or Woman.”

What happened “some way back” that causes this woman to feel so bereft, to feel she can never be a completed woman? It could have been the death of her husband, possibly in the Civil War. It could have been her realization that, because of society’s expectations, she must keep her true self – including her beliefs and ambitions -- hidden.

At any rate, the narrator keeps busy with “Life’s little duties,” not to forget her blow, but “to simulate,” to maintain appearances before the intrusive eye of Science and Surgery. She says – with bravado or disdain – that she covers what she truly is “for their – sake – not ours,” but still, she admits, such action “is stinging work,” because she knows such actions are not her true self.

But these little duties are necessary because with the long-ago blow came a bomb, a bomb she still holds. This hidden bomb may be anger or heresy or pride, but at least the woman’s duties keep the bomb calm. So now the reader begins to understand that these conventional duties provide a “cover” for the woman.

The last stanza mentions, not little duties, but “life’s labor … [that is] done / With scrupulous exactness / To hold our Senses – on –.” Beneath the narrator’s conventional feminine appearance, she will continue her life’s work of experiencing this world (rather than focusing on the Heaven that may or may not be there) and writing about it, regardless of the world’s strictures, regardless of whatever blow she may have experienced in the past.

MaryAnn,

Good point that in this poem Dickinson really emphasizes the female point of view--(as opposed to other poems where she takes a boy's or man's persona or leaves gender ambiguous). It does seem as if she finds consolation here in the familiar rituals of womanhood.

To me the key moment in the poem, tying together the ineffably huge and the painstakingly small, is the image of the bomb. When one is holding a ticking bomb, one moves very carefully, precisely, so as not to set things off. I've had that feeling when holding intense emotion. Dickinson conveys the forced, not-quite-explosive power of such studied calmness so movingly here, with the soothing m sounds, juxtaposed so closely with the more powerful b and k sound, in bosom, bomb, calm...

Annie

Annie, nice to see you back again.

Thanks for the comments about the sound of words. I keep meaning to read Robert's book on poetry's sounds. It's a book I have on my bookshelf, in addition to yours on poetic forms. If only I could tear myself away from the PoemsFray, I'd have a lot more time to read poetry and other books.

It does seem as if she finds consolation here in the familiar rituals of womanhood.

Do you also think she also finds those rituals a cover for her less-than-feminine ideas about ambition and a life w/o heavenly reward? Or do you think I'm stretching here?

Mary Ann

This isn't exactly an answer to Mary Ann's last question, but a quick response in that direction-- the emphasis on garments, the womanly details in the first part of the poem-- in a way deliberately contrasted by the mechanical instruments and explosives later, to convey an always-beyond, always-larger element in the poet and her experience?

Mary Ann,

Exactly! I don't think it is a stretch to say that there is an opposition like that going on here. As Robert points out, the contrasting imagery of cloth and machinery supports it (and, to cite another thread somewhere in this fray where i think you had also posted, the double meaning of "ticking" is a perfect embodiment of this paradox, with the heart/bomb contrast in one image).

It reminds me of another Dickinson poem where something explosive is held in check by "feminine" imagery--"On my volcano grows the grass." I do a reading of that poem in my book The Ghost of Meter, showing that when the volcano explodes, it does so in iambic pentameter as opposed to the more decorous grass and birds of the ballad meter in the poem's opening. In this poem, though, the ballad meter stays under control, with quite "scrupulous exactness. . ."