I should have been too glad, I see –
Too lifted — for the scant degree
Of Life’s penurious Round –
My little Circuit would have shamed
This new Circumference — have blamed –
The homelier time behind.

I should have been too saved — I see –
Too rescued — Fear too dim to me
That I could spell the Prayer
I knew so perfect — yesterday –
That Scalding One — Sabachthani –
Recited fluent — here –

Earth would have been too much — I see –
And Heaven — not enough for me –
I should have had the Joy
Without the Fear — to justify –
The Palm — without the Calvary –
So Savior — Crucify –
Defeat — whets Victory — they say –
The Reefs — in old Gethsemane –
Endear the Coast — beyond!
‘Tis Beggars — Banquets — can define –
‘Tis Parching — vitalizes Wine –
“Faith” bleats — to understand!

“Morning” — means “Milking” — to the Farmer –
Dawn — to the Teneriffe –
Dice — to the Maid –
Morning means just Risk — to the Lover –
Just revelation — to the Beloved –

Epicures — date a Breakfast — by it –
Brides — an Apocalypse –
Worlds — a Flood –
Faint-going Lives — Their Lapse from Sighing –
Faith — The Experiment of Our Lord

“Faith” is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see –
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.

This heart that broke so long –
These feet that never flagged –
This faith that watched for star in vain,
Give gently to the dead –

Hound cannot overtake the Hare
That fluttered panting, here –
Nor any schoolboy rob the nest
Tenderness builded there.

The feet of people walking home
With gayer sandals go –
The Crocus — til she rises
The Vassal of the snow –
The lips at Hallelujah
Long years of practise bore
Til bye and bye these Bargemen
Walked singing on the shore.

Pearls are the Diver’s farthings
Extorted from the Sea –
Pinions — the Seraph’s wagon
Pedestrian once — as we –
Night is the morning’s Canvas
Larceny — legacy –
Death, but our rapt attention
To Immortality.

My figures fail to tell me
How far the Village lies –
Whose peasants are the Angels –
Whose Cantons dot the skies –
My Classics veil their faces –
My faith that Dark adores –
Which from its solemn abbeys
Such ressurection pours.

Superfluous were the sun
When excellence is dead;
He were superfluous every day,
For every day is said

That syllable whose faith
Just saves it from despair,
And whose ‘I’ll meet you’ hesitates
If love inquire, ‘Where?’

Upon his dateless fame
Our periods may lie,
As stars that drop anonymous
From an abundant sky.

On January 12, 2009, the words of Emily Dickinson will return to the London Underground. Not, though, as part of the Poems on the Underground series, which has featured Much madness is divinest sense, I taste a liquor never brewed, and There came a Wind like a Bugle in the past.

Instead, two lines from Dickinson will be part of the British Humanist Association’s Atheist Bus campaign:

That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet.
Believing what we don’t believe
Does not exhilarate.

That if it be, it be at best
An ablative estate –
This instigates an appetite
Precisely opposite.

The campaign on the Underground will also feature Douglas Adams, Albert Einstein, and Katherine Hepburn. The choice–of Dickinson in general, and these words in particular–is thought-provoking.

Dickinson was certainly a skeptic. Though she lived in a world charged with religious and spiritual fervor–the last waves of the Second Great Awakening, Calvinist pietism, Emersonian Transcendentalism–she paddled against the general stream. Though she attended the Mount Holyoke Seminary, Dickinson never “converted” like so many of her peers. “Christ is calling everyone here,” she wrote in an 1850 letter, “all my companions have answered, even my darling Vinnie believes she loves, and trusts him, and I am standing alone in rebellion.”

But an atheist? I’m not entirely convinced. Dickinson’s approach to religion was certainly ironic, skeptical, sometimes sacrilegious, often playful. In her poems about death in particular, she strikes some pretty hard blows against religious beliefs. Safe in their alabaster chambers, for example, notes the eternal sleep of the “meek members of the resurrection” while “[g]rand go the years in the crescent above them”; Death, for Dickinson, is a particular Eternity, with no sounding trumpet on Judgment Day.

But God–or a god of some sort–is strongly present in many of her poems. In some cases, it seems to be a Calvinist God–remote, unknowable, harsh. In other cases, as in her poems about the loss of loved ones, there seems to be a consoling God:

They perished in the seamless grass, –
No eye could find the place;
But God on his repealless list
Can summon every face.

More often, “God” seems to be a metaphor for something–universal order, the grandeur of nature, time–larger than the individual. There’s much vastness in these short poems, and much wonder. Dickinson certainly rejects the trappings of church and piety, and is at the very least unorthodox, heretical, and strongly critical of religion. But she is very much of her time and place all the same, and not easily made to fit into contemporary atheist or humanist garb. If anything, she reminds me most of the Nontheist Friends, a particularly slippery sort of Quaker.

That the Atheist Bus campaign picked this particular Dickinson poem, and these specific lines, is interesting. It’s certainly an aphoristic statement, and it echoes the “stop worrying and enjoy your life” catchphrase of the campaign. But the second two lines–”Believing what we don’t believe / Does not exhilarate”–seems more consistent with Dickinson’s poetry, and, to be honest, much less trite; I could almost picture “That it will never come again / Is what makes life so sweet” printed on the pedestal of a “Precious Moments” figurine. There are better, more searing quotes available–her poem on the inefficacy of prayer, for example, or her playful mocking of a Heavenly afterlife:

I ‘m glad I don’t believe it,
For it would stop my breath,
And I ‘d like to look a little more
At such a curious earth!
I am glad they did believe it
Whom I have never found
Since the mighty autumn afternoon
I left them in the ground.

We need to be careful when marshaling the dead to our contemporary causes, particularly the subtle dead like Dickinson. Her concerns were not necessarily ours, and her approach to doubt and faith much more nuanced than what we hear now on either side of the debate. I don’t know that she’d be bothered to be on the Atheist Bus posters–she’d probably find it more than a little funny–but her smile would be more than a touch wry.

High from the earth I heard a bird;
He trod upon the trees
As he esteemed them trifles,
And then he spied a breeze,
And situated softly
Upon a pile of wind
Which in a perturbation
Nature had left behind.
A joyous-going fellow
I gathered from his talk,
Which both of benediction
And badinage partook,
Without apparent burden,
I learned, in leafy wood
He was the faithful father
Of a dependent brood;
And this untoward transport
His remedy for care, –
A contrast to our respites.
How different we are!

To lose one’s faith surpasses
The loss of an estate,
Because estates can be
Replenished, — faith cannot.

Inherited with life,
Belief but once can be;
Annihilate a single clause,
And Being’s beggary.

I should not dare to leave my friend,
Because — because if he should die
While I was gone, and I — too late –
Should reach the heart that wanted me;

If I should disappoint the eyes
That hunted, hunted so, to see,
And could not bear to shut until
They “noticed” me — they noticed me;

If I should stab the patient faith
So sure I ‘d come — so sure I ‘d come,
It listening, listening, went to sleep
Telling my tardy name, –

My heart would wish it broke before,
Since breaking then, since breaking then,
Were useless as next morning’s sun,
Where midnight frosts had lain!

Podcast music by Antonio Meneses