Afraid! Of whom am
I afraid?
Not Death – for who is He?
The Porter of my Father’s Lodge
As much abasheth me!
Of Life? ‘Twere odd I fear a thing
That comprehendeth me
In one or two existences –
+Just as the case may be –
Of Resurrection? Is the East
Afraid to trust the Morn
With her fastidious forehead?
As soon impeach my Crown!
+As Deity decree
Link to EDA manuscript. Originally in Poems: Packet XIII, Mixed Fasciles, ca. 1862. Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. First published in Poems (1890), 135, with both alternatives adopted.
This poem is dated to summer 1862 and was copied into Fascicle 16. Although it does not directly refer to spring, it connects several images we have been tracing in those clusters of meaning.
Maryanne Garbowsky, who reads Dickinson’s poetry for its agoraphobia, observes:
In each stanza, the speaker asks the question—first of death, then of life, and finally of resurrection—and in each instance she denies her fears. [The poem] asks a question the poet may have asked herself as she became more phobic and housebound.
In the third stanza, the speaker questions her fear of the “resurrection” in images we see in “The sun just touched” (F246A, J232), discussed earlier. She asks,
Is the East
Afraid to trust the Morn
with her fastidious forehead?
Recall that this forehead was “unannointed” [sic] the earlier poem. The speaker answers with some pride:
As soon impeach my Crown!
And yet, does she protest too much?
Sources
Garbowsky, Maryanne. The House without the Door: A Study of Emily Dickinson and the Illness of Agoraphobia. Rutherford, N. J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989, 109.