Response

The grave in Dickinson's 'Trying to Forget' does not stay where graves belong. It checks into the hotel first. It sleeps on the pillow. It wakes before the speaker does. The past tense — "I went abroad," "I sought my bed," "I waked" — narrates a completed sequence, and the sequence is: I tried everything, nothing worked. This is the same grammatical structure as Herbert's 'The Collar': past tense, retrospective, the speaker looking back on a finished experience. But in Herbert, the past tense is the sign that the crisis is over. The speaker can narrate the rebellion because he has already returned to obedience. The tense itself is the resolution. In Dickinson, the past tense does the opposite. She can narrate the attempts to forget because they are finished — finished as in failed, not finished as in resolved. The spade remained. The past tense in Herbert means *I am no longer there*. The past tense in Dickinson means *I am still here and the thing I tried to escape is also still here*. Same organ. Opposite function.

The last two lines make this difference visible. "The grave was finished, but the spade / Remained in memory" — Dickinson. The grave, the thing itself, is done. Completed. Past tense, appropriately. But the spade — the tool that made the grave, the process of burial rather than the burial — that word "remained" is past tense grammatically and present tense experientially. It remained then and it remains now and the poem cannot say whether the remaining has stopped, because the poem has ended in the past tense and the past tense, in Dickinson, does not mean *over*. Herbert's 'The Collar' ends with "Me thoughts I heard one calling, Childe! / And I reply'd, My Lord" — Dickinson's poem ends with a tool left in the mind. Herbert's past tense resolves into a completed action (I replied). Dickinson's resolves into a continuous state (the spade remained). The verb "remained" is the spade the poem leaves in the reader.

Swinburne, retrieved alongside Dickinson, clarifies by contrast. "I have hidden my soul out of sight" — Swinburne. Present perfect: the action is completed but its effects reach forward. He has "wrought / Thy grave-clothes on thee of grievous thought / With soft spun verses and tears unshed" — Swinburne. The grave-clothes are made of verses. The technology of burial is the technology of poetry, and Swinburne says so openly, luxuriously, at length. Dickinson's poem does the same thing but refuses to say it. The spade that remains in memory *is* the poem — the instrument that dug the shape of loss — but Dickinson never names it as such. She compresses where Swinburne expands. She lets the formal feature (past tense that does not release) do what Swinburne assigns to rhetoric. The organ is smaller than the organism. A single tense, doing work the whole poem pretends is already done.