Rethink.

“Expec­ta­tion — is Con­tent­ment…” (807)
Emily Dick­in­son

Expec­ta­tion — is Con­tent­ment -
Gain — Sati­ety -
But Sati­ety — Con­vic­tion
Of Necessity

Of an Aus­tere trait in Plea­sure -
Good, with­out alarm
Is a too estab­lished For­tune -
Dan­ger — deep­ens Sum -

Com­ment:

The poem plays with “expec­ta­tion:” one expects “gain [is] sati­ety,” but “con­tent­ment = gain = sati­ety” is a legit­i­mate read­ing. “Expec­ta­tion” is itself a “gain?” Itself “sati­ety?” “Expec­ta­tion” moves by degrees to some­thing it absolutely isn’t: first it is con­tent­ment, which is an absence of unease. Then it becomes “gain,” which is more than an absence. Finally, “sati­ety” is a sur­feit: there’s more than one needs or maybe even wants. Even then, of course, there’s a catch: it’s a par­tic­u­lar sort of “satiety.”

That brings us to the sec­ond trap: Is it “con­vic­tion of neces­sity” merely, or “con­vic­tion of neces­sity / of an aus­tere trait in plea­sure?” The first “expec­ta­tion” con­cerned “is,” a rela­tion of equal­ity (or iden­tity). But the sec­ond stanza begins with “Of.”  It is easy to under­stand “neces­sity” being the same thing as “an aus­tere trait in plea­sure:” we con­vince our­selves that what is nec­es­sary is that plea­sure has some­thing within it which sat­is­fies so as to cause mod­er­a­tion. If one empha­sizes “neces­sity of an aus­tere trait in plea­sure” as a log­i­cal unit, one gets the same read­ing. “Of” is almost work­ing the same way as “is” above, except that “of” sig­nals pos­ses­sion, and that is what the rest of the stanza con­cerns. Instead of “gain,” we are pre­sented with “good,” and instead of “sati­ety,” a lack of fear; “con­vic­tion” from “sati­ety” is now “a too estab­lished For­tune” upon which the lack of fear rests. “Dan­ger — deep­ens sum” hangs loosely after “Is” has reasserted itself in the third line.

So what has hap­pened? Our attempt to define “expec­ta­tion” ran aground because “expec­ta­tion” has two senses: in one sense, it is not lim­ited and wholly immod­er­ate. One expec­ta­tion brings upon another. In another sense, it is emi­nently rea­son­able: it sets forth some­thing to be ful­filled and waits, even if not patiently. The trick to see­ing the impos­si­bil­ity of hap­pi­ness from hopes real­ized (i.e. com­pare this with a crude read­ing of Matthew 7:7 to see what Dick­in­son may be get­ting at) is to see what hap­pens when you have too much of a good thing, and still assume the exis­tence of the good: those gains are accounted by “an aus­tere trait in plea­sure.” The assump­tions add up and destroy any ratio­nal­ity in “expec­ta­tion:” one has to take plea­sure, no mat­ter how sim­ple, and as one is tak­ing plea­sure one must ignore that still-small voice say­ing that some­thing might not be right. For­tune at this point is in command.

“Dan­ger — deep­ens Sum” is some­thing I really have to think about: “sum” in Latin is “I am,” and all of you are aware that in the Phaedo, Socrates con­ceives of the prob­lem of body/soul unity briefly as arith­meti­cal: how does 1 + 1 = 1, which is what you need to say that we are whole per­sons? Is the dan­ger com­ing from the prob­lem of expec­ta­tion, or stand­ing out­side it? It seems strange to link ratio­nal­ity and fear within a more philo­sophic per­spec­tive, but phi­los­o­phy and dan­ger are most cer­tainly linked. In Xenophon’s “On Hunt­ing,” the Greek word for boar is a pun on the par­tici­ple mean­ing “being.” The “boar” can gore you with its horns — rais­ing you — or tram­ple you. The only way to kill a boar is to have a friend with one, who will take it from the flank should any­thing go wrong. Some expec­ta­tions involve more than the self.

• Emily Dick­in­son, “Each Sec­ond is the last” (879)
• Emily Dick­in­son, “Away from Home are some and I” (821)
• Emily Dick­in­son, “How well I knew Her not” (837)
• Emily Dick­in­son, “Apol­ogy for Her” (852)
• Emily Dick­in­son, “When I have seen the Sun emerge” (888)

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