For this – accepted breath (F230B, J195)

For this – accepted Breath –
Through it – compete with Death –
The fellow cannot touch this Crown –
By it – my title take –
Ah, what a royal sake
To my nescessity – stooped down!

No Wilderness – can be
Where this attendeth me –
No Desert Noon –
No fear of frost to come
Haunt the perennial bloom –
 
But Certain June!

Get Gabriel – to tell – the royal syllable –
Get saints – with new – unsteady tongue –
To say what trance below
Most like their glory show –
Fittest the Crown!

Link to EDA manuscript.  Originally in Packet XV, Fascicle 9, ca. 1862. First published in Letters (1894), 216, from the Bowles copy (A); also Life and Letters (1924), 254-55; and Letters (1931), 205. Unpublished Poems (1935), 27, from the fascicle (B), as three six-line stanzas. Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

This poem is also linked to Samuel Bowles; Dickinson sent the second stanza to him, and wrote out the full version into Fascicle 9. It brings together a cluster of images similar to those in “Title Divine,” but without the agony: the crown, a title taken, royalty and the angel Gabriel announcing “the royal syllable.”

Although the imagery of death, saints and the angel suggests the crown is a heavenly one, the opening lines describe “accepted Breath” as competing with Death, and it is this signal of resignation to life that confers title and entitlement on the speaker. The second stanza describes the “perennial bloom” of a “Certain June” that suggests both an Eden on earth and in Heaven.

William Shurr calls this a “riddle:” what human experience is most like glory in heaven, it asks, and he finds the answer to be marriage. Shira Wolosky sees here “human language invested with a power whose source remains divine.”

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