Sacrifice of praise 3 That I did always love

Emily Dickinson was an enigmatic genius. Her poetry presents condensed thought, ideas triggered by allusive but precisely chosen and positioned words, often indicating the direction rather than the content of thought.

"Her poetry is ‘romantic’, that is derived from observations and meditations on phenomena of ‘nature’, but it is also metaphysical, making use of unusual and extended metaphors."

Quite – but such comments hide as much as they say. Reading Dickinson’s poems can be like encountering the astringent wisdom of the Desert Fathers, or the contemplative challenge of Zen teaching, but in the diamond-cut terminology of a 19th Century New England woman, who knew a bit about desert, solitude and the essential if elusive wisdom that resides in words and silence, when each is rightly used.

Metres of shelf space and gigabytes of word documents are devoted to secondary studies of commentary, criticism, context and much else about Dickinson. More important is the work of reading her – and allowing her poetry to do its own work. That work is best described by the word ‘deep’, used in a currently fashionable sense of "deep listening", "deep feeling", "deep understanding".

That I Did Always Love (No. 549)

That I did always love

I bring thee Proof

That till I loved

I never lived—Enough—

.

That I shall love alway—

I argue thee

That love is life—

And life hath Immortality—

.

This—dost thou doubt—Sweet—

Then have I

Nothing to show

But Calvary—