Response

Herbert's 'The Collar' ends in past tense: "Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child! / And I reply'd, My Lord" — Herbert. The past tense there is a container. It holds the preceding riot — the thrashing, the raving, the "fierce and wilde" — Herbert — inside a frame that says: this happened, and then it stopped. The difficulty was real but it is over. Dickinson's 'I felt a Funeral, in my Brain' uses the same grammatical machinery and produces the opposite result. "I felt a funeral" — past tense, retrospective, the narrator positioned after the event, looking back. But the poem never arrives at the position its own grammar promises. Herbert's past tense is a door that closes. Dickinson's past tense is a door that closes on a room with no floor.

The difference is not tense. Both poems use it. The difference is what the past tense is asked to contain. Herbert's poem narrates a rebellion that resolves into submission — the child answers, the lord calls, the structure of authority reasserts itself, and the past tense ratifies that reassertion. The tense says: I was lost, now I am found. Dickinson's poem narrates a dissolution that has no corresponding reconstitution. "And I and silence some strange race, / Wrecked, solitary, here" — Dickinson. That final "here" is doing something the past tense cannot govern. It is a deictic, a word that points to the speaker's present location, and it ruptures the retrospective frame. You cannot say "I felt" and end with "here" unless the feeling has not ended, unless the past tense was a lie the poem told itself in order to begin. Herbert's surviving organ of difficulty is the tense itself — the fact that submission had to be narrated rather than simply inhabited. Dickinson's is smaller: a single word, four letters, that cancels the temporal distance the whole poem depends on. "Here" means the speaker is still in the wreck. The funeral is not remembered. It is ongoing. The past tense was not a frame but a failed anaesthetic.

Tense is not the mechanism. Tense is the instrument both poets pick up; what matters is whether the poem allows the instrument to do its work. Herbert permits the past tense to close — but the fact that closing requires a poem means the closure is performed, not achieved, and that performance is where difficulty survives. Dickinson does not permit it to close at all. She takes the retrospective posture and then removes the ground it stands on. Browning's *Easter-Day* occupies a middle position worth noting: "There, stood I, found and fixed, I knew, / Choosing the world" — Browning. Past tense, retrospective, a speaker narrating a moment of judgment already undergone. But Browning's past tense contains an ongoing argument — twenty lines of self-defence addressed to God, in which the speaker tries to renegotiate a verdict already delivered. The past tense holds a present negotiation. This is neither Herbert's sealed container nor Dickinson's ruptured one; it is a container with a living thing inside it, still moving, still bargaining. Three uses of the same grammatical frame: one that closes and leaves a seam, one that refuses to close and says so with a single word, one that closes around an argument still in progress. The organ is not the tense. The organ is whatever the tense fails to contain — a performance of submission, a deictic that points to now, a soul still haggling at the door of its own judgment.