Emily Dickinson's "The Soul has Bandaged moments"

Emily Dickinson's “The Soul has Bandaged moments" (J512)

The Soul has Bandaged moments—
When too appalled to stir—
She feels some ghastly Fright come up
And stop to look at her—

Salute her— with long fingers—
Caress her freezing hair—
Sip, Goblin, from the very lips
The Lover— hovered— o'er—
Unworthy, that a thought so mean
Accost a Theme— so—fair—

The soul has moments of Escape—
When bursting all the doors—
She dances like a Bomb, abroad,
And swings upon the Hours,

As do the Bee—delirious borne—
Long Dungeoned from his Rose—
Touch Liberty—then know no more,
But Noon, and Paradise—

The Soul's retaken moments—
When, Felon led along,
With shackles on the plumed feet,
And staples, in the Song,

The Horror welcomes her, again,
These, are not brayed of Tongue—

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/246444 Source: The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998)

Please tell me the electricity of this poem makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. BTW, four line stanzas but Dickinson arranges one verse paragraph to have six lines and ends the poem with a slant couplet.  That shows her concern for patterns and some non-ordinary counting.

Some “ghastly Fright” approaches the soul, salutes her, and then with “long fingers” caresses “Her freezing hair.” Long is not an extraordinary modifier of “fingers,” but I think it evokes a skeletal image here—part of the personified Fright. And freezing evokes a strange image here. Does hair freeze? The Fright then sips at her lips the way her lover had earlier. She exclaims that it’s an unworthy picture that superimposes this Fright on the image of her lover. I’ll admit the grammar in that second verse paragraph is garbled. Whatever the best way of untangling it is, certainly she is disturbed by the joining in her mind of this Fright and her lover. Sometimes I wonder whether William Faulkner had this poem in mind when he wrote the ghoulish story “A Rose for Emily.” That’s about another soul who needed to be bandaged.

Then she enters a second movement, when the soul escapes. It dances like a bomb, perhaps in the sense that you can’t very well restrain a bomb.  Are you going to throw YOUR body on it? As this image modulates into that of the bee, something new enters—the hint of The End. The soul swings upon the Hours like a bee. Where is this bee—long Dungeoned from his Rose— headed? To oblivion. But notice the grammatical distortion that explodes when she transforms the noun “dungeon” (a prison cell) into a verb. The soul and the bee escape and as they Touch Liberty they are wiped out, they know no more. That would mean the end of knowing . . . but then the Master (that’s Dickinson!) give us a lesson in using line breaks. The escaped bee and soul know Noon, and Paradise. Knowing did not come to an end as we slow readers thought.

The third movement of the poem garbles not only the grammar but the metaphors and images. It begins by telling us the escaped soul has been recaptured, presumably by the Fright. It is led along like a “felon” with shackles on its plumed feet, / And staples—in the Song. The implied image is that of the soul as a bird of some exotic kind (“plumed feet”?). And then the metaphoric energy leaps back up to the extraordinary level of the soul’s having “Bandaged moments.” The recaptured soul’s song is stapled. That’s hard to visualize but it IS powerful and its emotional meaning is unmistakable. (What an Incredible Metaphorist Dickinson was!) Do you agree?

The last two lines confirm our suspicion that the Fright, now renamed the Horror, is her captor, sarcastically welcoming her back to renewed torture. The last simple declaration is that we mortals do not speak, bray, of the doom we face.