(no subject)

[proximoception]

I died for Beauty — but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining room —

He questioned softly "Why I failed"?
"For Beauty", I replied —
"And I — for Truth — Themself are One —
We Brethren, are", He said —

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night — We talked between the Rooms —
Until the Moss had reached our lips —
And covered up — our names —

I can't possibly be the first to have noticed that this is clearly a tribute to Keats and Shelley. Keats ("load your rifts with ore") dies for beauty in the sense of dying while still living for it, Shelley likewise truth. Keats is, what, a year in the ground at Rome's Protestant Cemetery when Shelley is buried nearby. They don't recognize each other at first, being dead and in the dark--and personality is somewhat less important there. Shelley politely quotes Keats' own poem to him when he realizes who he's with--Dickinson knows what an influence Hymn to Intellectual Beauty had on Keats' Odes, clearly. They talk till their names are covered up, lips stifled, meaning: their poetry is in dialogue, our memories of them intertwined, until that time when they shall be forgotten. See Westminster Abbey, the plaques joined by a flourish, above Shakespeare's bust. As for the "why they failed," see perhaps Browning's Childe Roland.

Kinsmen met a night.

Dickinson's heart is more with Keats, hence her speaking his part.

Bloom links Strange Meeting to a passage in Revolt of Islam. I can't remember the details, perhaps Dickinson's working off that too.

The teacher had some other explanation. I had to shut my mouth because it's an invasion to go into all that.

(See Mamet's The Edge, last line, for a differently ironic twist on dying "for" something.)

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I always took the poem as E.D. rebuking junkets. He says that truth and beauty are brethren, and she allows him to think so. But she prefers beauty and is subtly contemptuous of his invocation of truth. But i'll have to think about your version, which seems pretty convincing off the bat.