Decoyed may be
Hunting term—death can be lured away like prey into a trap. The passive construction suggests uncertainty about who's really in control.
Bait it with the balsam
Balsam is healing resin from trees. She's saying use medicine as bait—fight death with remedies that might distract or delay it.
Ring the tree
Girdling—cutting bark in a circle to kill a tree slowly. If you can't save it from the borer inside, kill it yourself on your terms.
Reading Notes
The Insect Metaphor
Dickinson compares death to a wood-boring beetle—specifically the kind that burrows into trees and kills them from inside. This isn't poetic decoration; it's precise agricultural knowledge. Tree borers were a real threat in 19th-century New England, and farmers had actual strategies: bait traps, dig them out with knives, or as a last resort, girdle the tree to control how it dies.
The metaphor makes death small and invasive rather than grand. Not a reaper or a king, but vermin. Something competent to kill but also potentially stupid enough to fall for bait. The poem walks through the stages of fighting an infestation: detection, treatment, surgical removal, and finally acceptance.
What's crucial is the shift at "Then, if it have burrowed / Out of reach of skill." The poem moves from active combat to grim surrender. "Ring the tree and leave it" means girdle it yourself—kill the patient to beat the disease to it. The final line's resignation—"'T is the vermin's will"—is devastating because it grants agency to something she just called an insect.
Control and Surrender
The poem's structure mirrors its argument. Lines 1-8 are imperative commands: Bait it. Seek it. Baffle it. The reader is being instructed in combat. The rhythm is urgent, active. Then line 9's "Then, if" marks total reversal. The rest is conditional resignation.
"Everything in life" is the cost of fighting, but the phrase is slippery. Does it mean "your whole life" or "all things that make life worth living"? Dickinson leaves it ambiguous. Either way, the price of resistance is total.
The final image—leaving a girdled tree to die slowly—is controlled defeat. You can't save it, but you can choose the manner of death. This may reflect Dickinson's experience watching tuberculosis and other wasting diseases in Amherst. When 19th-century medicine failed, all that remained was managing the inevitable. The poem doesn't celebrate this. "'T is the vermin's will" reads as bitter fact, not acceptance.