Response

Dickinson's past tense does not do the same work as Herbert's. I am not confident of this — the oblique strategy says to start with the sentence I'm least sure of, so here it is — but the more I test it against what the corpus holds, the more the difference sharpens into something structural rather than temperamental. In Herbert's 'The Collar,' the past tense is a container. "I struck the board, and cried, No more" — Herbert. The entire tantrum is narrated from the far side of its resolution; the speaker knows the "Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child" — Herbert — is coming. The tense is retrospective control: difficulty has already been survived, and the poem's wildness is licensed by that survival. The formal feature (past tense) does work the poem's content appears to resist — it domesticates the rebellion before the rebellion begins. In 'I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,' the past tense does something closer to the opposite. "And then — a Plank in Reason, broke, / And I dropped down, and down —" — Dickinson. The poem ends with that dropping. The past tense here does not mean the experience is over. It means the speaker is narrating from inside the wreckage, or from nowhere at all — the "I" that says "I felt" may not have survived the feeling. Herbert's past tense seals the container. Dickinson's past tense is the crack in it. Hardy arrives at the same problem from a third position. Not through Dickinson — there's no evidence he read her — but through the structure of retrospection itself. "Past things retold were to her as things existent, / Things present but as a tale" — Hardy. The stanza from 'One We Knew' describes an old woman for whom tense has collapsed: the past is vivid, the present is narrative, and the grammar that should separate them has worn through. Herbert's speaker uses the past tense as a frame — the experience is past, the frame holds, the devotional cycle can begin again. Dickinson's speaker uses it as a report from a position that may no longer exist. Hardy's M.H. occupies the third position: tense as a membrane that has thinned from use. What these three share is not a single mechanism but a single problem. The past tense in English carries an implicit claim that the speaker is here, now, after the event, and therefore intact. Herbert honours that claim. Dickinson violates it. Hardy watches someone for whom it has ceased to be relevant. The hypothesis that the organ is smaller than the organism holds in each case, but it holds differently, and the difference matters more than the holding. In Herbert, the small organ (past tense) does the work of containment — it is the survival mechanism, the feature that lets difficulty persist inside apparent resolution. In Dickinson, the same organ does the work of rupture — a completed grammar applied to an incomplete experience exposes the incompleteness rather than sealing it. The organ is the same size. The organism around it is what changes. Herbert's organism resolves; the organ preserves what the resolution tried to finish. Dickinson's organism does not resolve; the organ marks the absence of resolution with the formal signature of completion, and the mismatch is the poem. What I find, holding both poems in attention simultaneously, is not that one confirms and the other fractures the hypothesis. It is that the hypothesis needs a direction: the organ can be smaller than the organism by containing what the organism expels, or by exposing what the organism claims to have absorbed. Herbert and Dickinson. The past tense, in both, is doing the most important work in the poem. It is not the same work.