from What is Poetry?

Reading Emily Dickinson I come across a poem I don’t remember seeing before:

If anybody’s friend be dead
It’s sharpest of the theme
It goads me, like the Goblin Bee –
That will not state – its sting.

It’s perfect, seeming to describe the poet’s response to the death, not of friends, but of friends’ friends, and how this goads her – ‘like the Goblin Bee’ – and then that delicious last line: ‘That will not state – its sting’. ‘That will not state’ suggests the bee hides its sting, withholds it, though it’s always there, waiting, but ‘state’, like so many words in Dickinson, carries more than one meaning, suggesting not ‘making a statement’, but ‘state of being’, ‘state of dwelling’, so that what we see is a sting somehow hovering statelessly between two realms, the earth and the underworld or afterlife. And this in turn suggests that the bee’s sting is paradoxically sharpest when it’s at a remove, withheld or hovering between states, just as the death seems paradoxically more painful if it is at one remove. And what of that ‘Goblin Bee’ hovering between earth and the underworld? The ‘Goblin’ suggests an almost-human element in the bee, that it can hover between the two realms suggests that, like humans, bees too might have an existence after death. Or maybe not? And if not, is it the same for us? The way the meanings unfold and proliferate is typical of Dickinson, and I am beginning to wonder why I have never noticed this poem before. I take another look. It’s poem 509, ...