#644 proposes a final separation. "You left me---Sire---two legacies---" suggests that the lover, or God, or the nation, or her own talent, or some necessary part of her has at last abdicated, or abandoned the narrator, and that the only two remaining remembrances are the legacy of love which would have been sufficient, and "Boundaries of Pain---/ Capacious as the Sea--/ Between Eternity and Time---/ Your Consciousness--- and Me---" There is an internal contradiction in the language here; "Boundaries" that are "capacious as the sea" abolish the idea of boundary as limit or of sea as contained by land, and substitute an infinite space, a container with no external walls. And the two gifts themselves are contradictory, love on the one hand, pain on the other. The pain is capacious, large, sufficient, just as the love would have been. The word "boundaries" harks back, like a musical motif, to those earlier encompassing words "circumscribe," "circumference." Even the sea, here an infinite and unbounded container, was earlier configured as a door, simultaneously separting one lover from the other, and opening to permit the possibility of passage.

The final poem, #477, begins with this same image of the compass points: "No Man can compass a Despair---" Compass here means both "go all around, contain," and "accomplish, exhaust." Construing Dickinson's langauge narrowly, I like to imagine that when she says that no man can compass a despair she does not exclude the momentary possibility that a woman might. In any event, for whatever closure this brings her, the narrator recognizes that like a musican forced to return to the beginning and repeat the same theme again, she is circling the same impossible route, that each day when the sun sets it feels like a progress of sorts, but it is actually an eternal cycle. And yet she has not arrived at an entirely hopeless ending. The desperate seeker is not without a guide or a messenger. "His ignorance -- the Angel / that pilot him along--" suggests that even if there is no external angel (literally, the word angel means "messenger from God") to guide him, his own lack of knowledge of when it will end is sufficient to sustain him.

Maybe.

"Pilot", like the earlier "bestow," is an indeterminate, subjunctive form of the verb, so there may be no certainty, only lack of certainty that there is no guide, a built-in double negative that may or may not cancel itself out. I also tend to think that, when the poet imagines a paradise of "Mutual Monarchs," whether these are a united nation, a free society rather than one based on racial or gender inequality, a self at one with its own desires and powers, two lovers united as one mutually equal self---in all these instances, the idea of an Angel, a divine Messenger, a pilot sent by God, is ruled out. The guidance, like the mutual monarchy, more probably comes from within.

Let me comment, finally, on how the alternate word choices Dickinson leaves further add to the complexity and multiplicity of the sequence, often drastically altering a possible meaning. For example, in #643, "surveyed" infinity is the primary choice offered us.

But the two alternate words she leaves us, "delayed" and "deferred," completely change the sense of the sentence. To survey infinity implies that you can see it, or even map or chart it, precisely delineate its bounds, as a surveyor might a plot of land. This language, therefore, poses an inherent contradiction" an infinity that can be mapped, with its precise boundaries surveyed, is no more infinite than a sea that can be bounded. An infinity that can be "delayed' or "deferred," however, is an infinity of time rather than of place. We are no longer looking at it and mapping it, but looking for it, waiting for it to take place. The contradiction, although still implicit, is less obvious. After all, an infinity of time that is subject to delay or deferral is likewise not precisely infinite. Deferring it implies that it had a beginning which has not yet occurred, and that therefore it is not infinite at all.

By leaving these choices of alternate language to the reader, Dickinson in effect has made us "mutual monarch" of her poetry's meaning along with her. We the readers decide, along with the poet, which exact language we want to use to constitute the poem in this particular reading. We might choose otherwise another time, as might she. When we add this liberty of word choice to the other choices her use of indeterminate language offers us, we see a radical use of liberty and encouragement of difference, not only as themeatic content, but in the forms of the poems themselves, in the central poetics of their making.

A question, therefore for Dickinson's readers: Is Dickinson's approach chaotic, orderly, or both?

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