“‘Tis so appalling – it exhilarates –” (A Poem)

Written in 1862, Emily Dickinson’s “‘Tis so appalling – it exhilarates –” is one of many pieces composed by the poetess that deals with death. As August Nigro argues, the work, and several of the others which share the same theme, represents a very nineteenth-century English perception of pessimistic thinking which is also displayed in the literature of Henry David Thoreau: “to see through crumb rather than banquet, pain rather than pleasure, intimations of mortality rather than immortality, and consequently dying rather than living.”[1] Indeed, Thomas Cooley expands this concept to contend this cynical view of death is uniquely English. For Americans, as expressed in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, there is a tendency to willingly resign to the darkness of mortality; whereas, for the English, there is a vehement fight against its encroaching presence.[2]

‘Tis so appalling – it exhilarates –
So over Horror, it half Captivates –
The Soul stares after it, secure –
A Sepulchre, fears frost, no more –

To scan a Ghost, is faint –
But grappling, conquers it –
How easy, Torment, now –
Suspense kept sawing so –

The Truth, is Bald, and Cold –
But that will hold –
If any are not sure –
We show them – prayer –
But we, who know,
Stop hoping, now –

Looking at Death, is Dying –
Just let go the Breath –
And not the pillow at your Cheek
So Slumbereth –

Others, Can wrestle –
Yours, is done –
And so of Woe, bleak dreaded – come,
It sets the Fright at liberty –
And Terror's free –
Gay, Ghastly, Holiday![3]

Works Referenced

Cooley, Thomas. The Ivory Leg in the Ebony Cabinet: Madness, Race, and Gender in Victorian America. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001.

Dickinson, Emily. “‘Tis so appalling – it exhilarates –.” Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them. Ed. Cristanne Miller. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 179.

Nigro, August. The Diagonal Line: Separation and Reparation in American Literature. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1984.
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[1] Nigro, 128.
[2] Cooley, 209.
[3] Dickinson, 179.