song

I’m ceded, I’ve stopped being theirs;
The name they dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church,
Is finished using now,
And they can put it with my dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools
I’ve finished threading too.

Baptized before without the choice,
But this time consciously, of grace
Unto supremest name,
Called to my full, the crescent dropped,
Existence’s whole arc filled up
With one small diadem.

My second rank, too small the first,
Crowned, crowing on my father’s breast,
A half unconscious queen;
But this time, adequate, erect,
With will to choose or to reject.
And I choose — just a throne.

Again, Dickinson uses religious imagery–this time the “born again” baptism experience–to describe the experience of worldly love. In a way, this is the opposite of “The Song of Solomon”: where the apparently secular imagery of “The Song of Solomon” has been given a decidedly religious slant (so as to justify keeping an interesting bit of secular writing in the Bible, one suspects…), here a set of deeply religious images are used to secular effect.