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EMILY DICKINSON'S ECSTASY OF AGONY

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From: The Boston Globe
Date: 20001112
Author:MARIANNE NOBLE

Emily Dickinson spent her life pursuing ecstasy. She sneered at "contentment's quiet suburb," and set her sights higher, on a sublime rapture. In fact, she staked her life on it, giving up many normal pleasures and accepting that she would have to suffer in order to touch the fringes of eternity.

For each extatic instant

We must an anguish pay

In keen and quivering ratio

To the extasy?

But for her, anguish and ecstasy were so intertwined that she didn't simply see pain as a price paid for pleasure. Sometimes ecstasy itself seemed agonizing to her. In one poem, beginning "One Joy of so much ...

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