I knew in January what I would be getting for you all as a graduation gift. I knew then because you all shocked me by returning a record number of poems written in response to the optional midterm question that prompted you to write a poem in response to a Chesterton passage. Normally I get one or two; you all gave me ten! Needless to say, I knew I would be getting you all a collection of poetry when you graduated.
I ultimately decided on Emily Dickinson because her poetry is paradoxically accessible and elusive. I think you’ll find her easy to read in terms of her vocabulary and imagery but by no means simple to comprehend. Her poetry is enigmatic, revealing her own deep contemplations about the nature of life and death and provoking the same contemplation in the reader. Some of her poems imply big questions, many of which go unanswered. Rather than trying to “cross the infinite sea and so make it finite,” as Chesterton put it, Dickinson’s poetry “floats easily in an infinite sea.” [1]
This particular collection, Bulletins from Immortality, contains many beautiful poems about the soul and eternity, many of which are not from Dickinson’s widely-known body of work. One particular poem stands out to me as especially appropriate to highlight as you graduate:
In many and reportless places
We feel a Joy –
Reportless, also, but sincere as Nature
Or deity –It comes, without a consternation –
Dissolves – the same –
But leaves a sumptuous Destitution –
Without a Name –
As you move on to colleges, careers, vocations, marriages, and families, my prayer for you is that you find this joy Dickinson writes of. We tend to think of joy as simply the highest version of something like happiness or generally positive emotion. But that’s not really what Dickinson is speaking of here with her joy that leaves a paradoxical “sumptuous Destitution.” C. S. Lewis makes it a point to distinguish joy from things like happiness or pleasure, instead defining it as “unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.”[2] It’s that desire to “get round in front” that Syme speaks of in The Man Who Was Thursday. It is simultaneously a frustration and an overwhelming sense of peace. It is attainment without fulfillment. It is already, but not yet.
I hope you have experienced this joy to some extent already. If you have, expect it to deepen throughout your life. If you haven’t yet, wait expectantly for God to give it to you. As you grow closer to Jesus you will more and more start to see with what Dickinson describes as “Compound Vision”: “Light – enabling Light – / The Finite – furnished / With the Infinite –” [3] Eternity, and the promise of an eternity spent with Christ, echoes throughout this life. So seek after Him each day, knowing that “in [His] presence there is fullness of joy.” [4]
[1] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.
[2] C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy.
[3] Emily Dickinson, “The Admirations – and Contempts – of time –”
[4] Ps. 16:11
