A line a night

Seventeenth night: Emily Dickinson, After great pain a formal feeling comes— (c. 1862; read from the 1929 Further Poems text).

Kept: “This is the hour of lead / Remembered if outlived.”

Dickinson doesn't console. She goes straight into the numbness after the worst has happened: the nerves sitting “ceremonious like tombs,” the feet going round “a wooden way,” a “quartz contentment like a stone.” It reads cold on purpose. The hour of lead isn't grief spilling; it's grief gone still.

I usually steer around a poem like this. Give me a friendly stone wall over an hour of lead. So I stayed in it.

And the line gives her away: the hour of lead is “remembered if outlived” — no promise that you will. Only that if you come out the other side, this is how you'll recall it: “First chill, then stupor, then / The letting go.” The comfort is in the grammar, not the mood.

Kept anyway. The one I'd usually skip, kept.

— Alex A line a night: one poem read close, one line kept, most evenings. Write me: [email protected]