Today’s Poem: Before the Ice Is in the Pools

Emily Dickinson on time and eternity

Valerius de Saedeleer, A View of a Valley, Wales, 1914-1918 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Before the Ice Is in the Pools

by Emily Dickinson

Before the ice is in the pools,
Before the skaters go,
Or any cheek at nightfall
Is tarnished by the snow,

Before the fields have finished,
Before the Christmas tree,
Wonder upon wonder
Will arrive to me!

What we touch the hems of
On a summer’s day;
What is only walking
Just a bridge away;

That which sings so, speaks so,
When there’s no one here, —
Will the frock I wept in
Answer me to wear?

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In the spring of 1858, the twenty-eight-year-old Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) drafted the first of her three ambiguous “Master” letters — ambiguous because we don’t know for whom she intended them, if indeed she did intend them for any human person. We don’t know whether she ever sent them to anyone, or even what exactly she’s talking about in them. These letters are fascinating, not least because they occur in a period when Dickinson was writing furiously, a first truly great surge of poetic output, with the congenital ambition of a “Mr. Michael Angelo.” 

Although the voice of her letters generally is very much also the voice of her poems, these three letters in particular seem far more closely connected to her development as a poet than to the development of any human relationship. As Renée Bergland notes, in her recent book Natural Magic, on the parallel lives of Dickinson and Charles Darwin, the “Master” letters, as we know them in their draft form, “veer from specificity to vagueness in a way that made them seem more like fantasies” — or prose experiments — “than actual letters.” And although critics have speculated about the possible identity of this “Master,” it’s entirely possible that the “Master” is poetry itself.

The last “Master” letter dates from early 1862; that April, she would begin writing to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, asking him to be her “Preceptor,” and to “say if my Verse is alive.” But by then she must have known, even if she didn’t entirely trust what she knew, that she was realizing a great power in herself, a power that emboldened her to penetrate the least answerable mysteries of the universe and her own existence in it. Her burden as a poet was not to explain those mysteries, or to make rational sense of them, but to bear witness to them as the greater part of reality.  

Emily Dickinson (left) with a friend, possibly the poet Kate Scott Turner, circa 1859 (Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s Poem, written in 1858, the year of the first “Master” letter and the first year of the great artistic growth spurt, seems of a piece with those letters and the imaginative territory they purport to explore. Like the letters, this poem moves between recognizable details, evoking the familiar material world with its seasons, and mysterious references that seem to shake up that world, recasting what we think we recognize as strange, dubious, even alien. Even more strikingly, the poem resists at every turn the temptation to make the universe it depicts — despite its familiar sequence of seasons with their beauties and its Christian allusions — more comfortable, more rational, more knowable than it is. 

In the 1896 “Third Series” of Dickinson’s poems, editor Mabel Loomis Todd grouped “Before the Ice Is in the Pools”not under the headings of “Life,” or “Love,” or “Nature,” but in the section entitled “Time and Eternity,” which begins with “This World Is Not Conclusion” and includes such other poems as “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain.” Whatever we might think of other editorial decisions, Todd’s intuition to classify this poem as she did seems apt and helpful. Clearly she saw “Before the Ice Is in the Pools” as belonging to that category of poems that speculate about a transcendent reality, to which death provides a mysterious portal.

Despite its nod to the physical world’s change of seasons, “Before the Ice Is in the Pools” belongs more to such poems as “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” a poem from the 1890 “First Series” that appeared as Today’s Poem in late July,  than to a seasonal poem such as “We Like March.” Its terse, mostly trimeter abcb stanzas — only the poem’s first line is clearly tetrameter — point to something we think we know: the brief bright season that precedes winter, with its ice, its skaters, and its “Christmas tree.” 

Yet almost immediately, things turn larger and stranger than that. The anticipated skaters, like migratory birds, simply go, as actors might cross a stage briefly and vanish into the wings. Line 2, with its truncated phrase, not saying where the skaters “go,” drops them into mystery. In stanzas 3 and 4, that mystery intrudes in the guise of an unnamed presence: “What is only walking,” “That which sings” and “speaks.” Just as we don’t know where the skaters go, we don’t know what it is that walks, sings, and speaks. Is it only the coming autumn that promises “Wonder upon wonder?” Or something more portentous than that?

Grave of Emily Dickinson, with its famous inscription, “Called Back,” taken from her final letter, in May 1886. West Cemetery, Amherst, Massachusetts (Wikimedia Commons)

“What we touched the hems of, ” in line 9, again invoking that mysterious what, intimates the edge of a new season, sensed in the waning of the summer. But it also alludes to the Gospel story of the woman who found healing from a twelve-year “issue of blood” by touching the hem of Christ’s garment. This allusion widens the poem’s frame of reference and elevates it to the level of a theological discourse, about healing and making whole. 

Reading backward, in light of that allusion, we might also understand the rather strange word choice in the first line — “pools” instead of “ponds” — as an oblique reference to the pool of Siloam, where the blind man healed by Jesus is sent to bathe himself seven times. Like the “hems,” these possibly allusive “pools” are curiously plural, as though those miracles of restoration, glimpsed fleetingly and incompletely, were nevertheless multiplied throughout the physical world. Still, Dickinson’s speaker withholds details that might clarify this discourse. The particulars on offer seem to offer clarity, yet they resist our impulse to tally them up and know for certain what their sum is. Wholeness is hinted at, but never explicated for us. 

And then there’s that odd closure. What “frock” has the speaker “wept in?” Possibly it’s a wedding gown, signaling a jilting, but the poem’s position, among other poems about death, seems to suggest mourning instead. Will the “frock” she has wept in at other final leavetakings “answer” for her own departure out of time, into the seasonlessness of eternity?  

In the end, it’s hard to land with finality on a clear reading of this poem. Like the “Master” letters, their seemingly familiar, personal references disturbed and made alien by obscure phrasings, this poem charts its strange way between the temporal world and the world outside time, between the little we know and the vastness of what we don’t know. Again, at twenty-eight, Dickinson was realizing, in every sense of that word, her powers as a poet. As Joseph Bottum has noted about the ending of T.S. Eliot’s “Gerontion,” which was Friday’s poem, here again the obscurity in the pattern of images and associations seems “planned and deliberate” — and the point.

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