‘Not Joy, But a Decree’

Abstract

This poem of Emily Dickinson’s falls within the great tradition. Its God is the God of ‘Eternity’, and ‘Eternity’ is the goal of ‘Being’s’ pilgrimage through time. Her God of the new scientific and social order, however, is ‘God of Width’; ‘His Scene, Infinity’; His ‘Continent’, ‘All Latitudes’. These phrases are taken from three of her poems, written at different times. In another poem she speaks of

the Stupendous Vision

Of His diameters.

(no. 802)

His time is the clock-time whose ultimate in death is mere cessation or the passage from ‘mortal numeral’ to unresolved particle in infinite space. When time is spatialised in the clock-face and the celestial mechanics, and reduced to endless repetitiveness, it resolves itself into infinity, infinite space; not into its transcendence in eternity — infinity is a quantitative concept, eternity a qualitative one.