Mark Wagner wrote, in the "Questions for the Poetry Editor" topic:

Hi

I quite enjoyed the at times frenzied discussion about The Darkling Thrush, and so . . .

Dickinson's poem seems to be an unusual one in its length, breaking with her shorter 8 line and 12 line stuff. She's got something more to say than usual, but doesn't get around to the details. It is the same tantalizing vista she brings us to with 'wild nights.' What happened there? as the saying goes.

The meditation on life's duties as a way to engage sense, to embrace the quotidian as a way to ease some sort of spritual / emotional pain, seems secondary (to my ear) because of one line in particular: One way in might be that use of the 'we' when she writes 'but since we got a bomb.' The other wes and ours in the poem sound like the 'royal variety, but that 'since we got a bomb' seems more personal, that she is shutting in reponse to or with another person. And they -- not she -- have received this affront, this wounding, it has come from without, was given, and this raises a confounding question: what is the gift that stops a life, that urges the soul to shut down?

Mark's idea of considering that later "we" as a dual plural, not a general one, accords with the sense that the cataclysm that virtually ended life was erotic. In the light of the passage you cite, Mark, the earlier "we" of "When the Errand's done/ We came to Flesh—upon—" which seems in itself to indicate something like "humankind in general" takes on some of that intimate, dual connotation.

It's a thought that for me underscores Dickinon's power of having things two ways: she is humble and arrogant, forthright and teasing.

I would explain the change from "I" to "We" this way: the poem begins as a statement about a reaction to her personal feelings and changes into a philosophical quest about human existence and purpose.

I completely agree, o Bottomfish. I often find Dickinson's poems very comforting, and not alienating at all. I feel like part of that "we," and recognize this experience. Some of her poems seem to be written from a highly personal and idiosyncratic perspective, but also somehow "for" all of us. It may be in fact that we readers in the 21st century are closer to her than those who surrounded her: there is a lot of literature on the world she lived in, and how she interacted with it, but suffice to say obviously she was different from most of her community, and those differences were magnified by the particularities of her personality.

Yes, I join Matt and Bottomfish in this feeling of Dickinson's art as an inclusive, welcoming spirit. Her intensity in writing is not that of the closed door that is our story of her life.

An interesting topic here in relation to Mark Wagner's "dual" understanding of "we" is in the "Eros" topic, posts by Mark Turpin, Patsy and others:

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