I Can Wade Grief

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1891

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Historical Context

Although long framed as a haunted recluse, Dickinson was in fact much engaged with her world, through correspondence and through her role as the kind of de facto administrator of her father’s household. Massachusetts itself was a hotbed of abolitionist agitation, and Dickinson was versed in the heated rhetoric of fellow New Englanders who were appalled by the institution of slavery in the South. Certainly Dickinson, in 1862, understood her historical context—a nation coming apart at every nail.

The most likely year of composition for Poem 252 is around 1862. The year is remarkable in that the poem appears to reflect the reality of a nation in the process of coming apart at the seams, a metaphor applicable to the poem itself. Strength, the poem argues, is earned through pain, she reassures a troubled nation suffering through the cannibal logic of a bloody civil war. Joy will come but embrace the challenge of grief because such experience, such wounding, strengthens character. Far from the patriotic drivel often associated with poetry generated during wartime, Dickinson offers inspiration of a quieter sort. Can there be anything more grievous to a young nation than the threat of its own extinction? That war, then, serves as a metaphor for the Himalayan mountains, the titanic challenge of which makes giants out of mere men. Every day, her nation was immersed in the gravitas of war without end, the reality of casualties, the dead and the mutilated. Loss, grief, sorrow they are the stuff of a nation at war. Without mentioning soldiers or battles or North or South, Dickinson then offers her quietly inspirational poem to a grieving nation split by war.

Literary Context

Emily Dickinson was both a part of her literary era and apart from it. Although it may seem neat, the emergence of American poetry during the 19th century can be triangulated from three towering figures: Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Emily Dickinson. Dickinson was the only poet of the three who elected obscurity, never pursuing the publication of her poems. If Whitman represented the aggressive, idealistic new American spirit answering to no authority and Longfellow the staid, inherited sense of the dignified public poet offering wisdom into living a moral life, Dickinson introduced the concept of the sensitive, terribly imperfect, vulnerable poet exploring the traumatic experiences of the heart. For that poetry, there was no literary context.

Dickinson, well-read and aware of both Whitman and Longfellow, followed her own inclinations in her verse. Thus, the literary context for Dickinson reflects not so much her contemporaries as her father’s library in Amherst. Raised a Congregationalist, she was fascinated by the plainsong richness of the Old Testament Psalms. She responded to the eccentric effects of the cascading metaphors, inventive rhythms, and sonic subtleties typical of English Renaissance poetry, particularly the metaphysical poets George Herbert and John Donne. Although she publicly disdained Whitman’s controversial Leaves of Grass (1855), she found in his splendid grossness the invitation to reconstruct inherited poetic lines and the license to find her way to the integrity of a poem that reflected her own sensibility. Moreover, Poem 252 tests Whitman’s endorsement of surging optimism and suggests that power comes as well from embracing pessimism and discovering the unsuspected resilience of the heart whatever the dimensions of its wounding.