Emily Dickinson

Along the Potomac

ALONG THE POTOMAC.
When I was small, a woman died.
To-day her only boy

Potomac = Civil War

The Potomac River was the border between Union and Confederate territory. This is a Civil War poem about a soldier's death.

Went up from the Potomac,
His face all victory,
To look at her;  how slowly
The seasons must have turned
Till bullets clipt an angle,

Geometric death

Dickinson uses surveying language—bullets 'clipt an angle' so he could 'pass quickly round' the corner from life to death. War makes dying mathematical.

And he passed quickly round!

Pride in heaven?

Christian theology says pride is a sin, even in Paradise. But can a mother not be proud of her dead soldier son? Dickinson questions the doctrine.

If pride shall be in Paradise
I never can decide;
Of their imperial conduct,
No person testified.
But proud in apparition,
That woman and her boy
Pass back and forth before my brain,

Permanent vision

They don't rest in peace—they 'pass back and forth' like stars in orbit, forever moving through her mind.

As ever in the sky.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Geometry of War Death

Dickinson treats the soldier's death with strange mathematical precision. The mother waits while 'seasons must have turned'—time measured in agricultural cycles, slow and domestic. Then suddenly 'bullets clipt an angle' and he 'passed quickly round' the corner into death. The surveying language (angle, clipt, passed round) makes battlefield death sound like a geometry problem solved by bullets.

This isn't how people usually talk about war deaths. No glory, no heroism, no 'he gave his life for his country.' Just: time moved slowly for the waiting mother, then bullets changed an angle and he was dead. The clinical language makes the violence more shocking, not less.

'His face all victory' is the only conventional war language in the poem, and it's ambiguous—does his dead face look victorious, or is this the hollow phrase people use at military funerals? Either way, Dickinson immediately pivots to the theological problem of pride.

The Pride Problem

CONTEXT This poem was likely written during the Civil War (1861-65), when Dickinson was in her thirties in Amherst, Massachusetts. The Union recruited heavily from New England; local women would have lost sons.

The poem's central question: 'If pride shall be in Paradise / I never can decide.' Christian doctrine says pride is the deadliest sin—Lucifer fell through pride. But what about a mother proud of her dead soldier? What about the soldier proud to die for the Union? Dickinson says 'No person testified' about the 'imperial conduct' of the dead—no one can report back from heaven about whether pride is allowed there.

So she leaves them 'proud in apparition,' haunting her mind 'as ever in the sky'—like constellations that never set. They don't get Christian rest or resolution. They stay proud, they stay together (mother and son), and they stay in motion. Dickinson gives them the afterlife theology won't: eternal pride, eternally visible.