Emily Dickinson

I know that he exists

I KNOW that he exists
Somewhere,in silence.
He has hid his rare life

our gross eyes

**Gross** meant 'thick, dense, dull' in the 1860s—not disgusting. She's saying our senses are too crude to perceive God, like trying to see through fog.

From our gross eyes.
'T is an instant's play,
'T is a fond ambush,

fond ambush

**Fond** = foolish (archaic sense). God's hiding isn't loving—it's a foolish trick, like a child's game of hide-and-seek that goes wrong.

Just to make bliss
Earn her own surprise!
But should the play
Prove piercing earnest,

the glee glaze

Eyes **glaze** when they die—the moisture dries, leaving a film. The playful 'glee' literally freezes into a corpse's stare.

Should the glee glaze
In death's stiff stare,
Would not the fun
Look too expensive?
Would not the jest
Have crawled too far?

crawled too far

Jokes that **crawl** are like insects—they started small and harmless but have spread into something repulsive. The game metaphor collapses into disgust.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Game That Kills

Dickinson frames theological doubt as a child's game gone lethal. The first two stanzas use playful language—'instant's play,' 'fond ambush,' 'bliss,' 'surprise'—to describe God's hiddenness as cosmic hide-and-seek. The idea: God hides to make finding him sweeter, like a parent hiding to delight a child.

But stanza three pivots on 'piercing earnest.' What if the game isn't a game? 'Piercing' suggests both emotional pain and physical penetration—the playful has become violent. The 'glee' of religious seeking literally 'glazes' into death's stare, using the physical fact of how eyes cloud after death.

The final stanza's questions are devastating because they use economic language—'expensive,' 'too far'—to measure theological cruelty. If we die before finding God, the joke has cost us everything. The poem never answers its own questions. Written around 1862, during the Civil War's mass deaths, this reads like Dickinson asking: what if God's silence isn't mysterious but sadistic? What if we're dying in a game with no winner?

Dickinson's Conditional Grammar

Notice the poem's structure: two stanzas of assertion ('I know'), then two stanzas of conditional questions ('should,' 'would'). She's not denying God exists—she's gaming out the consequences if the theology is wrong.

The 'But should' that opens stanza three is the hinge. Everything after is hypothetical, marked by subjunctive verbs: 'should prove,' 'should glaze,' 'would look,' 'would have crawled.' She's not making claims; she's asking her reader to imagine the worst-case scenario.

This was radical for the 1860s. Dickinson doesn't argue against God—she treats theology like a math problem with variables. If X (God's hiddenness) and Y (human death) are both true, then Z (divine cruelty) might follow. The poem's power is in making that logic feel inevitable, even as the questions remain unanswered.