Dec

2

"If I can stop one heart from breaking," Emily Dickinson

Filed Under dickinson, love, poetry 

“If I can stop one heart from breaking…”
Emily Dickinson

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

Commentary:

“I shall not live in vain” divides the poem into two. First there is the state where nothing has gone wrong - if a heart hasn’t broken, then all is well. Then there is the list that has its starting point as something having gone wrong; from an “aching,” presumably in the heart - I’m not sure how “life” aches except from an internal pain that follows one around - we move to a pain that seems to be on the surface of ourselves, like a cut that needs to be addressed, and then finally move beyond ourselves to something else, in this case, “one fainting robin.”

The central line of the poem concerns “cooling a pain,” and comes as part of a trifecta of actions - “ease, cool, help” - that are most unlike “stop.” The question of “heat” emerges in this line and in the idea of a “fainting robin,” and I wonder if the idea is a comment on what it truly means to be at rest. Heat would demand we stop, after all, almost dead in our tracks.

Heat and movement seem, in this poem, to be the enemies of living well. The question is that of passion, and whether a point that could be found that is at rest for us. There’s something very ironic in the speaker’s moving away from preventing broken hearts; it’s like that is an impossible state, and we have to move to the second part of the poem. And the end of the poem, with the robin returned to the nest, seems to suggest that the first wish is a mistaken wish. One can’t stop hearts from breaking. The importance of being at rest in some way - maybe even to fly again - is only known when one has tried and failed. And yet, there is another way of conceiving of passion, in accepting the “ease, cool, help” set of actions, which shows there is a way of motion that encourages rest in its best, not most definite, sense.

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