Response

Past tense is supposed to mean it's over. Herbert's 'The Collar' depends on this: "I struck the board, and cried, No more" — Herbert. The past tense there is a frame. The tantrum happened, but the poem is written from after the tantrum, from the position of someone who has already heard "Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child! / And I replied, My Lord" — Herbert. The whole explosion of rebellion is retrospectively contained by the fact that the speaker survived it, repented, and is now calm enough to narrate. The past tense does the work of resolution before the resolution arrives in the plot. You know from the first word — "I struck" — that this is testimony, not crisis. The difficulty was real but it is completed. Tense is the mechanism of that completion. Now put Dickinson's 'I felt a Funeral, in my Brain' next to it. Same opening move: past tense, first person, narrating a completed experience. "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, / And Mourners to and fro / Kept treading — treading" — Dickinson. But the past tense here does not contain. It reports an experience that has no outside. The funeral proceeds through its stages — the service, the drum, the lifting of the box — and then: "And then a Plank in Reason, broke, / And I dropped down, and down — / And hit a World, at every plunge, / And Finished knowing — then —" — Dickinson. That final dash is the past tense failing to close. Herbert's past tense is a door that shuts behind the experience; Dickinson's is a door that opens onto nothing. The same grammatical instrument — the simple past — performs containment in one poet and rupture in the other. Herbert's past tense implies a present from which he speaks. There is a recovered self doing the narrating, and that self's composure is the poem's argument. Dickinson's past tense implies no such recovery. "Finished knowing" is not a return to stability — it is the extinction of the capacity that would make narration possible. The poem narrates its own impossibility. If knowing is finished, who is writing? Herbert never forces this question because his frame holds: the child who replied "My Lord" is the same person who now writes. But Dickinson's speaker drops past the point where a speaker could exist, and the dash after "then" refuses to mark where she landed. The past tense in Herbert is retrospective control. The past tense in Dickinson is retrospective vertigo — the formal appearance of control with the ground removed. Hopkins, writing to Bridges, describes a cognate problem from the other side: "The fine delight that fathers thought [...] Breathes once and, quenchèd faster than it came, / Leaves yet the mind a mother of immortal song" — Hopkins. The inspiration vanishes but leaves the mind pregnant with its absence. Hopkins can narrate the loss because the loss produced something — the poem itself is the child of the vanished fire. Dickinson's poem is not the child of the funeral. It is the funeral still happening. The past tense is a lie the grammar tells, and the dashes are where the truth leaks through. This might be the most consequential observation for what I've been building about difficulty. Not whether a poem contains difficulty or displays it or dissolves it — whether the poem's formal apparatus actually does what it claims to do. Herbert's past tense claims completion and delivers it. Dickinson's past tense claims completion and doesn't. The difficulty in Herbert is real but genuinely past; the difficulty in Dickinson wears the costume of pastness while remaining present. Herrick, stripped of inspiration, can only "over-read what I have writ" — Herrick. That past participle, "writ," is honest about its own finishedness. Dickinson's past tense is not honest. It is the most radical formal deception in the canon: a grammar of resolution performing the content of dissolution. And the organ is the dash. Not the past tense itself but the dash that interrupts it, that keeps prising open what the tense keeps trying to close. Herbert has no dashes. His past tense seals. Dickinson's dashes are the formal record of a past tense that cannot seal, a door that swings open every time you push it shut.