Emily Dickinson

As by the dead we love to sit

sit with the dead

Not literally sitting by corpses—this is about memory and absence. The dead become 'wondrous dear' precisely because they're gone.

As by the dead we love to sit,
Become so wondrous dear,
As for the lost we grapple,

grapple

Wrestling term. We're physically struggling to hold onto what's already lost, even though living people surround us.

Though all the rest are here,—

broken mathematics

The math doesn't work anymore. Normal arithmetic can't calculate the value of what's gone—the equation is shattered.

In broken mathematics
We estimate our prize,
Vast, in its fading ratio,
To our penurious eyes!

penurious eyes

Penurious = poverty-stricken. Our eyes are poor, impoverished—they can only see what's here, not what's lost.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Economics of Loss

Dickinson treats grief as an accounting problem. The poem's central metaphor is economic: we're trying to calculate the value of the dead, and our math keeps failing. She uses precise financial language—"estimate," "prize," "ratio," "penurious"—to describe something that resists measurement.

The phrase "broken mathematics" is the hinge. Normal equations assume stable values, but loss creates a paradox: the dead become infinitely more valuable precisely because they're gone. Their worth increases in "fading ratio"—as they fade from us, their ratio of value to presence approaches infinity. It's mathematically impossible, which is why the mathematics breaks.

"Penurious eyes" reveals the trick. We're poverty-stricken not because we lack things, but because our vision is limited to the physical world. We can see "all the rest" who are here, but we "grapple" (wrestle, fight) for what's absent. The living are somehow worth less than the dead—another broken equation that grief creates.

Dickinson's Dash Work

CONTEXT Dickinson wrote this around 1862, during her most productive period and amid the Civil War's mass death. She lost several close friends in the early 1860s and was obsessed with mortality.

Notice how the dashes work here. The first stanza's dashes create interruptions—"Become so wondrous dear," sits isolated, as if the thought itself is precious and set apart. The final dash after "here,—" mimics the grasping the poem describes: we're reaching past the living ("all the rest") toward absence.

The poem's structure mirrors its argument. It's two quatrains of hymn meter (alternating 8 and 6 syllables), but the second stanza abandons easy rhyme. "Prize" and "eyes" rhyme, but "ratio" doesn't fit—the form itself breaks down, just like the mathematics. Dickinson often used broken hymn meter to signal broken faith or broken logic.