Time's consummate plush
Plush is fabric—velvet, upholstery. Time literally cushions memory like furniture padding softens hard edges.
Bisected now
Bisected means cut in half. Adult griefs literally divide childhood sorrows into smaller portions by comparison.
So easy to repair
The poem's turn: we envy childhood pain because it was fixable. Adult grief isn't.
Reading Notes
The Mathematics of Grief
Dickinson uses precise geometric language: citadel (fortified structure), undermined (dug beneath), bisected (cut in half). She's treating emotions like engineering problems. Childhood grief "threatened" and "undermined" like a siege, but adult grief simply bisects—divides what you thought was whole.
The key word is bleaker. Not "bigger" or "worse"—bleaker. Adult griefs are colorless, empty, unfixable. They make childhood sorrows look "sleek" (smooth, manageable) and "easy to repair." The poem's insight: we don't outgrow pain, we just encounter pain that can't be fixed.
Consummate means complete, perfect. Time doesn't just soften memory—it upholsters it perfectly. The metaphor suggests something almost luxurious about distance from childhood pain, which sets up the poem's bitter envy in the final lines.
Dickinson's Typical Move
CONTEXT Dickinson wrote 1,800 poems, most unpublished in her lifetime. She rarely titled them—"Childish Griefs" was added by editors. Her typical structure: set up a metaphor, then twist it.
Here's the twist: the poem pretends to be about nostalgia ("remember when our problems were small?") but it's actually about envy. That verb matters. We don't just remember childhood grief fondly—we envy it. We want it back. Because adult grief "devastated childhood's realm" suggests childhood itself is destroyed, not just childhood problems.
The final phrase "So easy to repair" is devastating because it's ambiguous. Easy to repair the grief? Or easy to repair childhood's realm itself? Dickinson leaves it open: maybe childhood was fixable in ways adulthood isn't.