Emily Dickinson’s Time and Eternity LXV Sara Manlowe College

In considering the matter of Emily Dickinson’s poem LXV of Part Four: Time and Eternity, it is worth noting that she wrote in one of her letters that ‘To be human is more than to be divine, for when Christ was divine, he was uncontented until he had been human’ (Donoghue, 16). The relationship that she implies between the human and the divine is complicated, inverting the common notion that being divine is, by its definition, more being human, but her only qualifier is ‘more’ – she does not say how, or why, or in what way being human is more than being divine. To say that Christ was uncontented until he had been human again suggests a myriad of concepts, including the fact that divinity is something that can be discontented, which would itself be an imperfect divinity, meaning that Emily Dickinson, in her belief of God, does not believe in his perfection, in turn suggesting that she does not believe in any perfection. Yet the classic difference between the human and the divine is imperfection: humans are imperfect. If Dickinson’s definition of divinity is imperfect too, however, where does one draw the line between human and God? We can extrapolate that Christ, in finding some form of contentment in being human, found...