None can experience sting Who Bounty—have not known— The fact of Famine—could not be Except for Fact of Corn—

Want—is a meagre Art Acquired by Reverse— The Poverty that was not Wealth— Cannot be Indigence.

-Fr 870, J771, 1864

The first stanza is classic wisdom. We’ve seen Dickinson hammer this point home in poem after poem. (So does Buddha, by the way, and many other helpful guides besides.) Lack and fulfillment are two sides of a coin. You can’t have one without the other. The untenable tension between the two drives one, eventually, to a realization of equanimity, toward a position of balance and poise.

In the next stanza the thought continues,

*Want—is a meagre Art Acquired by Reverse—*To exist in state of want, or, unfulfilled desire, is an ideal. It’s an art. But how do we pull off this paradox? How do you remain perpetually in a state of desire without actually having that desire filled. It’s a conundrum.

“Want,” as it is used here, can mean both desire and lack. When you put the two meanings in the same word and learn to deal, it is then that it becomes “Art.” You are, at once, both full of desire and in acceptance of being without the object of your desire.

Dickinson calls this a meagre art.

At first it seems this means the art of want is lacking in comparison to the art of having. But knowing Dickinson, I think she’s saying something different. She’s turning it around to say something like “less is more.” It’s not so much that the art itself is lesser, is meagre, but that mastering meagreness, having less, is the art.

Meagre is an interesting word. It can mean both lacking in quantity, as in, you have less, but also lacking in quality, as in, you are less. The poet here is feeling meagre, or lesser, precisely because she once had something so great. Having once had so much more makes not having it so much more difficult. This is a theme we see running through Dickinson’s poems. She seems to have experienced a love so great that everything else pales in comparison. She is therefore left contending with overwhelming want. But this intense contention also drove her art. The want drove the art. The meagreness drove the art.

It leaves me as a reader in an odd dilemma This suffering, this meagre want, is what drove Dickinson to her art. And yet, would we wish it on her? I wouldn’t. And yet, would I deprive myself, and the world, of these poems? I wouldn’t.

The Poverty that was not Wealth— Cannot be Indigence.

These last two lines are the imperative; you have to make art, however meagre, because “The Poverty that was not Wealth/ Cannot be (must not become) Indigence.”

Indigence is a state of extreme poverty, of destitution. To avoid this, we make art, however meagre it might be in comparison.

There is a funny little twist in the line “The Poverty that was not Wealth.” This is worded in such a way that you can read that line as, “The poverty that was not (the same as the poverty of) wealth…” Wealth has its own dangers. It’s another kind of poverty, perhaps a worse one in its way, because it is always in danger. It hasn’t yet had to deal with the "reverse." It’s only wealth in passing, so it will have to deal with this eventually. The art of want however has nothing more to lose. Once you have mastered the meagre art, the only reverse is for the better.

-/)dam Wade l)eGraff