Emily Dickinson

As imperceptibly as grief

AS imperceptibly as grief
The summer lapsed away,—
Too imperceptible, at last,

Perfidy = betrayal

Summer's departure happens so slowly it can't feel like a betrayal. Dickinson uses a moral/legal term for a natural process—watch for this pattern.

To seem like perfidy.
A quietness distilled,
As twilight long begun,
Or Nature, spending with herself

Nature spending alone

"Spending with herself / Sequestered" means Nature using up her resources in private. The afternoon is isolated, hidden—summer ending without witnesses.

Sequestered afternoon.
The dusk drew earlier in,
The morning foreign shone,—

Courteous yet harrowing

The oxymoron is the key: a polite guest who torments by staying too long, then leaving. Good manners that cause pain.

A courteous, yet harrowing grace,
As guest who would be gone.
And thus, without a wing,

Without wing or keel

No bird flight, no boat. Summer leaves by some third method—neither air nor water transport. Sets up the final paradox of "escape."

Or service of a keel,
Our summer made her light escape
Into the beautiful.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Grief Comparison That Isn't

The opening simile is a trap. Dickinson says summer passes "as imperceptibly as grief"—but grief doesn't fade imperceptibly. Grief is brutal, obvious, acute. What *does* fade imperceptibly is the *memory* of grief, the slow way acute pain becomes chronic background.

So the poem is actually about two departures at once: summer leaving, and the way loss becomes normalized. The "perfidy" line confirms this—it stops seeming like betrayal because you can't pinpoint when it happened. You look up one day and it's gone.

Dickinson wrote this around 1865, after the Civil War's mass death and her own period of intense grief (her mentor Charles Wadsworth had moved away, several friends died). She's documenting how loss becomes livable—not through healing, but through imperceptible adjustment.

The Escape Artist

The final stanza pulls off something strange. Summer "made her light escape / Into the beautiful"—escape usually means fleeing *from* something bad *to* safety. Here it's reversed: summer escapes *from* our world *into* beauty, as if existence itself were the prison.

The word "light" does triple duty: (1) easy, effortless; (2) not heavy, weightless; (3) illuminated, bright. Summer leaves without the mechanical means of "wing" or "keel"—no bird, no boat—because it dematerializes. It doesn't travel; it transfigures.

This reframes everything. The poem isn't lamenting summer's loss. It's envying summer's escape. The "harrowing grace" of the guest makes sense now—we're harrowed because the guest gets to leave and we don't. Dickinson, who rarely left her house in her later years, writes summer as the ultimate recluse: "sequestered," spending time with herself, then slipping away into pure abstraction. The beautiful isn't a place. It's the condition of having escaped.