A solemn thing – it was –
I said –
A Woman – white – to be –
And wear – if God should
count me fit –
Her blameless mystery –
A timid thing – to drop
a life
Into the +mystic well –
Too plummetless – that it
+ come back –
Eternity – until –
I pondered how the bliss would
look –
And would it feel as big –
When I could take it in
my hand –
As +hovering – seen – through
fog –
And then – the size of this
“small” life –
The Sages – call it small –
Swelled – like Horizons – in my
+breast –
And I sneered – softly – “small”!
+purple +return + glimmering +vest
Link to EDA manuscript. Originally in Packet XIV, ca. 1860-1862. First published in Poems, (1896). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
This poem struck a discordant note in Dickinson’s first editor, Mabel Loomis Todd, who was always concerned with the salability of Dickinson’s works and the protection of her reputation. In Poems (1896), the third collection she edited, Todd gave the title “Wedded” to what Martha Nell Smith calls a “culturally blasphemous poem,” and to make that stick, cut out the last two stanzas, where the speaker grows powerful and “sneered” at the “Sages” who dared see her life as “small.”
Many scholars see a direct allusion to Dickinson’s dressing in white in this poem. In an essay from 1983 titled “The Wayward Nun,” Sandra Gilbert says that though the poem is partly obscure, it is eminently clear that “Dickinson’s white dress is the emblem of a ‘blameless mystery,’ a kind of miraculous transformation that rejoices and empowers her.” Maurya Simon calls this “a poet’s poem: that is, one that focuses upon the poet’s relationship to her own power and that ultimately exposes her willingness to submit to that power.”
Fog is an intriguing version of whiteness; not quite white, but blanking out the landscape or the mind. The conjunction of fog and “glimmering” as a variant for “hovering” sheds a glamor over this moment when the speaker holds the “bliss” of acceptance into the mysterious ranks and watches it swell into the limitlessness of horizons.