Of Tribulation, these are They,
Denoted by the White –
The Spangled Gowns, a lesser Rank
Of Victors – designate –
All these – did Conquer –
But the ones who overcame
most times –
Wear nothing commoner than snow –
No Ornament, but Palms –
Surrender – is a sort unknown –
On this superior soil –
Defeat – an outgrown Anguish –
Remembered, as the Mile
Our panting Ancle barely passed –
When Night devoured the Road –
But we – stood whispering in
the House –
And all we said – was “Saved”!
Link to EDA manuscript. Originally in Poems: Packet XXIII, Fascicle 13, dated ca. 1861. First published by Higginson in the Atlantic Monthly (68 October 1891), 277. Courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
Dickinson included this poem in her July 1862 letter (L268) to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, where she called attention to the misspelling of “ancle” and, more importantly, where she explained that the “I” in her poems was “a supposed person.”
Emily Seelbinder argues that this poem, as others that refer to white clothes, borrows heavily from the Book of Revelation, chapter 7, a page that Dickinson dog-eared in her Bible. The chapter describes the celebrations of the children of Israel who have been “sealed the servants of our God” (Rev. 8:3-4), who form “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues … clothed in white robes” (Rev. 7:9). Here is the most relevant passage:
And one of the elders answered, saying unto me, What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they? And I said unto him, Sir, thou knowest. And he said to me, These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
Seelbinder goes on to point out the poem’s emphasis on “other-worldliness,” of the inversion of worldly signs and spiritual signs, the transformation of earthly grief into heavenly triumph. We should note the demotion of “Spangled Gowns” to a lesser Rank than the “white robes” of the righteous. Judith Farr discovers that in the 1860s, fashionable women like Dickinson’s worldly sister-in-law Susan showed a preference for “spangled” or sequined evening gowns. From this fact, Domhnall Mitchell concludes that white served Dickinson as “a determinant of virtue and value against vulgarity and excess.”