You there--I--here--With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are--and Prayer--
And that White Sustenance--
Despair--
Solitude is not a state merely to be chosen. The space between any two human beings, however proximate, is as astonishing as an ocean, and [Emily] Dickinson lived and wrote in order to honor that astonishment.
As was often her practice, Dickinson offered several choices for certain words in this poem: the "White Sustenance" of despair might be a "White exercise" or a "White privilege." Dickinson couldn't choose between these alternatives, and she doesn't want us to choose, either; the existential dilemma embodied by the poem cannot be locked up in words too easily. This is why her poems are so endlessly unsettling--they threaten constantly to exceed themselves.
from The Nation: Ardor and the Abyss
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