heaven had come
Past tense—this isn't hypothetical. Something actually happened that felt like divine presence, then left.
choose my door
Dickinson often imagined death or grace as a visitor. The door is literal—her Amherst house, her seclusion.
double loss
First loss: the thing itself departed. Second loss: now she knows what she's missing. Ignorance was easier.
Reading Notes
The Logic of Near-Misses
The poem's argument turns on "EXCEPT"—the whole first stanza is a conditional clause. Dickinson says: *if* heaven hadn't come so close, *if* it hadn't seemed to pick her specifically, then the distance wouldn't haunt her. She's blaming proximity for her suffering.
This is backwards theology. In conventional Christian thinking, a brush with grace should comfort you. Dickinson finds it torturous. The closer heaven came, the worse the aftermath. She'd rather never have hoped at all—the fourth line's confession of prior hopelessness matters. She wasn't expecting this.
The poem likely records a conversion experience that didn't take. Dickinson's letters from the 1850s describe revival meetings where she felt pressured to profess faith but couldn't. Many friends converted; she didn't. This reads like the aftermath of feeling something genuine, then watching it leave. The "grace" that departs in line 5 is both theological (God's favor) and experiential (a moment of certainty).
What 'Lost to Me' Means
The final line's repetition—"'T is lost, and lost to me"—distinguishes two kinds of loss. First: the thing is gone objectively. Second: she personally has lost access to it. Why split this?
Because Dickinson is arguing that her loss is worse than universal loss. If heaven were equally distant from everyone, that's one thing. But it "seemed to choose my door"—it came close to *her* specifically, then left *her* specifically. She's not mourning abstract divine absence; she's mourning being passed over after being singled out.
The double loss works mathematically: she lost the experience itself, *plus* she lost her former ignorance. Before, she didn't know what she was missing. Now she does. The haunting in line 3 is permanent—distance will torment her because she knows exactly how near heaven can come. This is the cost of almost having something.