Summary
The speaker says that she died for Beauty, but she was
hardly adjusted to her tomb before a man who died for Truth was
laid in a tomb next to her. When the two softly told each other
why they died, the man declared that Truth and Beauty are the same,
so that he and the speaker were “Brethren.” The speaker says that
they met at night, “as Kinsmen,” and talked between their tombs
until the moss reached their lips and covered up the names on their
tombstones.
Form
This poem follows many of Dickinson’s typical formal patterns—the
ABCB rhyme scheme, the rhythmic use of the dash to interrupt the
flow—but has a more regular meter, so that the first and third lines
in each stanza are iambic tetrameter, while the second and fourth
lines are iambic trimeter, creating a four-three-four-three stress
pattern in each stanza.
Commentary
This bizarre, allegorical death fantasy recalls Keats
(“Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,” from Ode on a Grecian Urn),
but its manner of presentation belongs uniquely to Dickinson. In
this short lyric, Dickinson manages to include a sense of the macabre
physicality of death (“Until the Moss had reached our lips—”), the
high idealism of martyrdom (“I died for Beauty. . . One who died
for Truth”), a certain kind of romantic yearning combined with longing
for Platonic companionship (“And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night—”),
and an optimism about the afterlife (it would be nice to have a
like-minded friend) with barely sublimated terror about the fact of
death (it would be horrible to lie in the cemetery having a conversation
through the walls of a tomb). As the poem progresses, the high idealism
and yearning for companionship gradually give way to mute, cold
death, as the moss creeps up the speaker’s corpse and her headstone,
obliterating both her capacity to speak (covering her lips) and
her identity (covering her name).
The ultimate effect of this poem is to show that every
aspect of human life—ideals, human feelings, identity itself—is
erased by death. But by making the erasure gradual—something to
be “adjusted” to in the tomb—and by portraying a speaker who is
untroubled by her own grim state, Dickinson creates a scene that is,
by turns, grotesque and compelling, frightening and comforting.
It is one of her most singular statements about death, and like
so many of Dickinson’s poems, it has no parallels in the work of
any other writer.
