Emily Dickinson

Glee! the great storm is over

Disproportionate celebration

That exclamation mark is doing dark work—celebrating four survivors while forty drowned. The forced cheerfulness makes the horror worse.

Glee! the great storm is over!
Four have recovered the land;
Forty gone down together
Into the boiling sand.
Ring, for the scant salvation!
Toll, for the bonnie souls,—
Neighbor and friend and bridegroom,
Spinning upon the shoals!

Spinning upon the shoals

Bodies caught in underwater sandbanks, turning in the current. The euphemism makes it more disturbing than graphic description would.

How they will tell the shipwreck

Winter shakes the door

Maritime New England detail—winter storms rattling doors trigger shipwreck stories. The door-shaking becomes the sea still claiming its dead.

When winter shakes the door,
Till the children ask, "But the forty?
Did they come back no more?"
Then a silence suffuses the story,
And a softness the teller's eye;
And the children no further question,
And only the waves reply.

Only the waves reply

The dead can't answer. The sea keeps the forty. Notice how the poem ends with permanent silence, not comfort.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Mathematics of Grief

Dickinson opens with a ratio that doesn't add up emotionally: four saved, forty lost. That 10:1 death rate should produce mourning, but the poem starts with "Glee!" The exclamation mark forces celebration where none belongs, creating immediate tonal dissonance. This was the reality of 19th-century maritime disasters—Nantucket and other New England ports regularly lost entire crews while a handful survived to tell the story.

The command to "Ring" for survivors but "Toll" for the dead splits the church bells' response. Ringing celebrates; tolling mourns. But notice "scant salvation"—even the celebration is grudging, acknowledging how few made it back. The phrase "bonnie souls" is interesting: bonnie means attractive or fine, a term more Scottish than New England. It beautifies the dead, makes them picturesque rather than rotting.

"Neighbor and friend and bridegroom" specifies who drowned—not strangers, but the fabric of the community. Bridegroom is particularly cruel: someone just married, pulled into the sea on the shoals (underwater sandbanks that catch ships and bodies). The present participle "Spinning" makes it continuous—they're still down there, turning in the current.

Children Learning Death

The poem's second half stages a scene Dickinson would have witnessed: winter storms rattling New England doors while survivors tell shipwreck stories. Children ask the question adults won't: "But the forty? / Did they come back no more?" That double negative ("no more") is how children actually talk, and it's more devastating than proper grammar would be.

Watch what happens next. Silence suffuses the story—spreads through it like liquid. Softness enters the teller's eye—not tears, but something vaguer, a blurring. The children learn not to ask further questions. This is how communities teach the limits of inquiry, how grief becomes a social silence.

The final line is merciless: "only the waves reply." The dead don't come back. The sea doesn't apologize. There's no heaven here, no reunion—just water continuing to move over the bodies it took. Dickinson refuses consolation. The forty stay forty, stay gone, stay spinning on the shoals while the living learn when to stop asking questions.