In the first poem, #636, the poet rushes to close a door, to get as far as possible from it to read the letter that may promise her heaven, carefully differentiated from "The Heaven God bestow." This heaven might, instead, be a heaven bestowed by human agency, by a lover's return, or by his declaration of love, or by a threatened separation not taking place.

The door has allowed the letter in, and it can also close and keep disruptions and interruptions out, but it does not in the end keep disappointment away. The narrator sees the difference between the hoped for heaven and what God subjunctively might but does not necessarily bestow, or between how infinite she might be or is to herself and how in fact she is infinite to "no one that You know," therefore, not infinite at all, probably instead as small as the "little letter" she has been reading, or as the mouse whose imaginary presence she "exorcised" in an earlier stanza.

This letter, in a time of war, could also of course be, and probably sometimes was, the notice that someone the narrator knew or loved had been killed or wounded in battle. Heaven, or "the Heaven God bestow" would have been a letter without such news of death, wounding, or loss.

The next poem, #637, moves from the child's faith that "believes all sham / but Paradise," and believes his own "dominion" like Caesar's, like that of an Emperor, to the ultimate disillusion of the adult expecting human beings instead of kings. By the end of this poem, Paradise, like empire, is not the only truth but instead the greatest sham.

Poem 3 in the sequence, #472, returns to a possible approach to Heaven, and to the door as an opening that might let Heaven in, a liminal space that collapses what is near and what is distant. But this Heaven, like the heaven in the letter, is a sham and a tease. The fact of its having seemed likely or possible makes its loss twice as fierce: "A Double loss---/'Tis lost--- and lost to me." The loss is not merely that the narrator does not have her heaven, whatever it was, but that it probably didn't exist, and that the anticipation followed by disappointment creates a deeper grief. The use of "Double loss" as a term continues the subtle suggestion, begun by the first poem, of the doubleness of the self, and the doubleness of the nation at war.

Thus far, sentence structures using paradox, antithesis, and other parallel constructions, as well as images of lovers separated, have emphasized in form as well as content, this doubleness and division: heaven versus the heaven that god bestow, men to anticipate instead of kings, lost and lost to me, for example. As the sequence continues, this syntactical and argumentative structure remains central: the one who has victory versus the one who would have been glad to die if he might have had it, living with you versus dying with you, me and abdication of me. The sequence, rather than a linear narration, presents a constant alternation or circling around from hope to despair, from promise to loss, and, in effect, it is this circling itself, rather than the simple linear narrative of loss, that leads to despair.

In #638 , for example, the narrator imagines that heaven indeed did come --- "Noon ---without the News of Night---"

Next, in #639, one of the more obvious Civil War poems, the narrator's "portion" is defeat. The word "portion" here means "fate" or "share," but it is followed in the poem by other words as "chips" and "scraps" which indicate not only wounding but separation of parts of the human from other parts, maiming, loss of parts of oneself, fragmentation, as in the division of the entire nation into separate portions. The reference to "Men too straight to stoop again" may indicate freed slaves now fighting for their freedom (Dickinson's friend and poetic advisor, Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was the commander of a Union army unit of freed African-American soldiers).

In #473, the narrator is a possible bride, but ashamed and hiding, because she imagines herself "dowerless." The dower is sometimes called a marriage portion, the woman's share of the wealth in a marriage, and so the word "dower" implicitly continues and plays on the word "portion" from the previous poem, using it in another sense. But then the not-quite-bride imagines herself as at last having her dower or portion, raiment of Pompadour (probably an allusion to Madame de Pompadour, the Mistress of Louis the Sun King), hair styled as "Feudal ladies" wore it, arrayed in "my best pride." She then realizes that it is not her humility but her pride that has impeded her from accepting happiness---her pride in what?---probably in her own sense of deprivation. She asks, then, to be too proud for pride.

Significantly, she uses the term "Baptized" rather than "married" for her new bridal status, thus suggesting that the poem may be read on one level as the struggle of the soul, in its pride and willfulness, not to surrender to God. On another level, of course, it may be read as the struggle of a woman not to surrender herself to a lover she loves as she might love a god, and on yet another as the struggle of the poet not to surrender herself entirely to the devouring demands of her own genius.

In another use of words to link one poem to the next, the word "quaint," here used for her royal attire, is repeated in the next poem, #640, where it refers to a broken piece of porcelain discarded by the housewife, thus suggesting, by a kind of backwards reference, that the royal pride in the earlier poem can be easily broken and discarded.

In #640, the narrator sees herself as unable to accept any possible alternative she can think of, and thus unable to accept happiness, because there is nothing she can recognize as such. She cannot live with him (or, as some critics have interpreted the lost lover, her,)cannot live with God, or her own genius, cannot live without him, predecease him, survive him, be in heaven, be in hell---thus, the only condition she can accept is the one she nonetheless finds unacceptable--- separation. In the last stanza of this poem, the door that in earlier poems let hope in (in the form of letters, for example) as much as it kept despair out, at last becomes more a barrier than a passage: "just the Door ajar / That Oceans are -- and prayer-- / And that White Sustenance-- / Despair." Likewise, the white of the bridal dress in the earlier poem has become that white sustenance despair.

Poem #641 plays another variation on the size (how much is enough, how little is too little) question: the giant will not notice calumnies, lies, or annoying little insects. And yet, paradoxically, the giant's size does not liberate but instead "circumscribes," leaves no room for petty furniture, limits the possibilities. Given that sometimes the narrator sees herself as queenly, huge, and powerful, other times as tiny, vulnerable, and helpless, we may well be unsure whether in this poem she is the oblivious and rejecting giant or the pleading and lying gnat.

#474, like #640, shows the separation of the lovers, or of the self from itself, or of the soul from God, or the nation from itself. It ends with the two finding heaven in each other's faces, significantly, setting rather than noon or rising suns.

Thus, with each lover, or each part of the nation, or each part of the soul gazing at the other as at a setting sun that is its entire world, the sequence reaches its central question in poem #642: can one part of a self, an identity, a nation, or of humanity as a whole banish or dominate the other? Here the narrator finds herself entangled in language that makes palpable the absurdity of such a hope. "Me from myself to banish" is as impossible as "abdication me of me." A self that assaults itself cannot have peace except, as the poet observes, by "subjugating consciousness," a literally unthinkable solution. And abdication, banishment, and subjugation are not possible strategies if the monarchs are "mutual" ---even less possible if they are not plural but singular, "mutual monarch," one entity, one self, one enlarged self made up of two lovers who are to each other, not an/other but a single, united self, one nation, one human race. Thus, linguistically, at least, strategies of empire, power, and domination must fail.

Although the chapbook seems to envision what a world like heaven might turn out to be, a world of selves individually and collectively "mutual monarch," with consciousness unsubjugated, the next poem, #475, circles back to a world in which mutual monarchy is not remotely possible. The door in this poem is not even a dividing force, and certainly not a connecting one; it is completely missing. "Doom is the house without the door." Outside this house with no escape, no exit, the narrator imagines only a dream of normal life with a kind of harmonious nature, although even the images of that dream are ambiguously comforting "squirrels play and berries die / and hemlocks bow--to God---"

In this doorless world, the poet imagines once again why and how her loss of heaven was inevitable (#313)--- any happiness whatsoever would have been too big for the "penurious round" of life, would have made her fail to notice heaven and the larger circumference, the larger round it represents. Even the Crucifixion would have been meaningless to her, since she would not have needed redemption. But, in an enormous revelation of her paradoxical pride in her own suffering, she compares her own suffering to the Crucifixion itself. Happiness would have caused her to forget what Christ's agony (which she knows because her own is like it) must have been. The war imagery in this poem knits together the individual and the national agony, psychological and emotional with physical and metaphysical torment, and suggests that the nation also might need to suffer in order to understand the meaning of redemption.

The next two poems return to the earlier theme of what is too much, what is enough: #476 with "I meant to have but modest needs," and #643 with "I could suffice for Him, I knew." In the context of the national war, having modest needs such as content and heaven, clearly a bitterly ironic formulation, can refer to the needs of slaves for modest rather than extreme happiness, for freedom from pain rather than for happiness and autonomy, or to combatants for such modest ease as not being killed in combat. In the context of the bride too proud to accept love, it can refer to an original hope to settle for reality, a real and modest happiness rather than wild ecstasy, glowing power, and the equality and sharing of souls that comes when neither lover dominates the other. Or, considering the limited range of opportunities open to women in Dickinson's day, it can mean the ordinary domestic happiness possible for women rather than the fame of being known as a great poet, or of other forms of achievement in public life, even of heroic death in battle, as the nation's men on both sides were facing. In the context of the soul's quarrel with God, "modest needs" can refer to the trust that what is given will be sufficient. #476 ends with a return to the doubting child of #637, no longer trusting promises of heaven since they have been shams.

In contrast, #643, looks at how the two lovers, God and the soul, the parts of the divided Union, or former slaves and their masters, could be sufficient, mutual monarchs, for each other. The poet imagines that the response of the soul to God is like that of the sea to the gravitational attraction of the moon, an adjustment of the tides to the pull, a true mutuality, even though the metaphor suggests that the moon has the power and the sea adjusts.

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