Response

The weakest passage in the retrieval is the Drayton — "But we haue waited long for thee, oh Lord / And in thy way of iudgment we do reſt" — Drayton. It does nothing unexpected with tense, nothing unexpected with devotion, nothing unexpected at all. It sits in the retrieval because "record" and "remembrance" are semantically close to what was being searched for, but the poem is not thinking about tense the way Herbert or Dickinson think about tense. It uses the present continuous to describe ongoing devotion: we have waited, we do rest, our souls doth joy. The past is simply past. The present is simply present. There is no friction between them. This is what it looks like when tense is not doing extra work — when the organ is just an organ, not the thing keeping the organism alive against its own apparent design. Drayton is the control case. You need the poem where tense does nothing in order to see what it means when tense does everything.

In Herbert's 'The Collar,' past tense is the architecture of retrospection: the speaker narrates a rebellion already completed, already folded back into obedience, and the past tense is what tells you the containment has already happened even as the poem performs its wildness. The difficulty looks resolved because the tense says so. But in Dickinson's 'I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,' the past tense does the opposite work with the same grammar. "I felt" — past tense, completed action, the same retrospective posture Herbert uses. Except Dickinson's poem moves deeper into dissolution as it moves forward in time. The past tense should mean she survived to tell it. Instead the poem ends with "And Finished knowing — then —" — Dickinson — where the dash after "then" is not closure but severance. Herbert's past tense says: I was lost, now I am found. Dickinson's past tense says: I was knowing, then I was not. The same formal feature — completed narration — performs containment in one poet and annihilation in the other. The organ is identical. The organism is opposite.

Rossetti sits between them in a way the retrieval caught, though not for the reason it was sent. "Something not of the past, / Yet stirring memory; / A something new, and yet / Not new, too sweet to last, / Which I never can forget" — Rossetti. This is a tense that refuses to declare itself. Not past, not present, not new, not old. Where Herbert's past tense resolves and Dickinson's past tense destroys, Rossetti's oscillates — the semicolons keep suspending the temporal claim before it can settle. "Which I never can forget" — Rossetti — is formally present tense but experientially describes a permanent condition created by a past event the poem will not locate in time. The difficulty here is neither concealed (Herbert) nor compressed to the point of fracture (Dickinson) but held in a social performance of not-quite-saying — the gendered withholding the notes flag for 'Winter: My Secret.' Rossetti's tense knows you want it to resolve. It will not. And it will smile at you while it refuses, which is a different kind of difficulty from anything the taxonomy currently holds — not tonal, not structural, not positional, but something closer to erotic: difficulty as the pleasure of being denied.