Although long framed as a haunted recluse, Dickinson was in fact much engaged with her world, through correspondence and through her role as the kind of de facto administrator of her father’s household. Massachusetts itself was a hotbed of abolitionist agitation, and Dickinson was versed in the heated rhetoric of fellow New Englanders who were appalled by the institution of slavery in the South. Certainly Dickinson, in 1862, understood her historical context—a nation coming apart at every nail.

The most likely year of composition for Poem 252 is around 1862. The year is remarkable in that the poem appears to reflect the reality of a nation in the process of coming apart at the seams, a metaphor applicable to the poem itself. Strength, the poem argues, is earned through pain, she reassures a troubled nation suffering through the cannibal logic of a bloody civil war. Joy will come but embrace the challenge of grief because such experience, such wounding, strengthens character. Far from the patriotic drivel often associated with poetry generated during wartime, Dickinson offers inspiration of a quieter sort. Can there be anything more grievous to a young nation than the threat of its own extinction? That war, then, serves as a metaphor for

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