Safe in their Alabaster Chambers –
Untouched by Morning –
and untouched by noon –
Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection,
Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone –

Grand go the Years,
In the Crescent above them –
Worlds scoop their Arcs –
and Firmaments – row –
Diadems – drop –
And Doges surrender –
Soundless as Dots,
On a Disk of Snow.

This poem gets much of its power from simple phrasing and a clear overall arc, contrasting meek stillness and suppression with the grand cosmic and historical movements that are first presented, as it were, in an objective point of view, then, in a startling twist, from the point of view of the deaf and silent dead. What makes the poem marvellous and hauntingly memorable is its combination of forceful simplicity with ripples of suggestion that tug the mind in many different directions, hinting at complicated, contradictory, fluidly shifting layers of feeling as we read.

Some ripples flow from the associations of words. Take “safe” for a start. Metre gives this word quiet but thought-provoking emphasis, making us hear it simultaneously in very different ways. We can hear the speaker as contemplating and envying the way the dead are shielded from the shocks of worldly life, like snails in their shells. Or it can suggest that the dead are safely disposed of, tucked away and kept from bothering the living. In this sense, we may think of Hamlet’s words as he hides Polonius’s body – “Safely stowed!” or Macbeth asking the First Murderer whether Banquo is definitely dead and hearing the reassurance that “Safe in a ditch he bides / With twenty trenched gashes in his head, / The least a death to nature.” As the stanza develops there’s a constant flickering between thinking of the dead as enviably protected and thinking of them as deprived. If “chambers” and “sleep” suggest comfortable security, “Untouched by Morning – / and untouched by Noon” suggests deprivation. “Meek” suggests that the submissiveness of the dead is a matter of weak will but it also invokes the blessing of the meek in the Beatitudes. To some the “roof of stone” in line five might suggest the strength of protection enjoyed by the dead but the word “Stone” seems to me to fall with a chilling weight, and its contrast with “Rafter of satin” makes me think of the iron fist in the velvet glove, the implacable force behind the superficial comfort of the padded prison.

I can’t help relating the poem to ideas about the place of woman in the prosperous American middle classes in the mid 19^th century, the extent to which even a highly gifted, educated and intelligent woman was expected to sacrifice her life to husband and family, or in Dickinson’s particular case, to a widowed father, and to what I imagine to be her ambivalent feelings about the reclusiveness of her life. In this context the comparison I find myself thinking of Madeline in Keats’ Eve of St Agnes, in bed in her chilly room, warmed only by her own body, “Blissfully havened both from joy and pain, / Clasped like a missal where swart paynims pray, / Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain, / As though a rose could shut and be a bud again.” Her havened state has its own blissfulness but is essentially unripe, and fulfilment will only come with Porphyro’s love, even if that also means facing the dangers of the wider world.

As well as by the resonance of individual words, tone in the poem is expressed by metre. For example, I said that the second stanza presents the large movements of history and the cosmos “as it were in an objective point of view”. This isn’t quite right because it seems to me that the first four lines have a subtle flavour of mockery in silent reading and the potential for downright satire in reading aloud. The brilliant division of what could easily have been four-beat lines into shorter two-beat ones pushes grandeur into grandiosity by intensifying the stresses on “grand”, “years”, “Crescent” and “above”. It’s well nigh impossible to read them with respect for the pauses between them without a suggestion of empty inflatedness, BUT the tone in which one does so can be either satirical (mocking pompous pretension) or wistful, whether out of pity for the vanity of ambition and by extension of all earthly life or in sorrow at the speaker’s exclusion from it.

What I’d like to be able to do at this point is express how beautifully the poem fades into its perfectly cadenced ending, how its rhythmic shape  lingers in the imagination like music, but I haven’t the words.