necromancy
Not raising the dead—necromancy originally meant divination by consulting the dead. Dickinson wants the power to inflict, not cure.
instill the pain
She's asking to *cause* pain, not heal it. The surgeons try to 'assuage' (soothe), but she wants to create what they can't fix.
Reading Notes
The Power to Wound
This poem inverts the usual Dickinson formula. Instead of depicting pain, she wants to inflict it—specifically, pain that "Surgeons assuage in vain." The word instill means to introduce drop by drop, suggesting deliberate, measured cruelty rather than sudden violence.
The necromancy reference is key. By the 1860s, necromancy had two meanings: raising the dead (popular usage) and divination through consulting spirits (original meaning). Dickinson's "wizard erudite" suggests learned magic, not graveyard conjuring. She's asking for specialized knowledge—how to create unhealable wounds.
Context: Dickinson wrote obsessively about psychic pain that has no physical remedy. Poems like "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" and "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" catalog suffering beyond medical reach. This poem flips the script: instead of being the victim, she wants to be the inflictor. It's her revenge fantasy in miniature.
The Repeated Stanza
Dickinson almost never repeats entire stanzas. The verbatim repetition here functions like an incantation—saying it twice to make it work, like a spell or prayer. The obsessive doubling suggests she can't let the wish go.
The repetition also creates ambiguity about whether this is one plea or two separate moments of the same desire. Is she stuck in a loop? Is the second stanza escalation or echo? The poem becomes a demonstration of its own subject: unhealable fixation.
Notice what's missing: no explanation of *why* she wants this power or *who* the target is. The poem is pure desire for the ability to wound, with all context stripped away. That absence makes it more disturbing than if she'd named a specific grievance.