Emily Dickinson

Drowning is not so pitiful

DROWNING is not so pitiful
As the attempt to rise.

Three times

Folk belief that drowning victims surface three times before sinking permanently. Dickinson treats it as fact ('t is said') to build her theological argument.

Three times, 't is said, a sinking man
Comes up to face the skies,
And then declines forever
To that abhorred abode

abhorred abode

Not heaven—this is the grave or death itself. The shock is that God's 'grasp' delivers you there, not to paradise.

Where hope and he part company,—

grasped of God

Passive construction: God seizes him, he doesn't go willingly. Being 'grasped' sounds violent, not comforting.

For he is grasped of God.
The Maker's cordial visage,
However good to see,
Is shunned, we must admit it,
Like an adversity.

Like an adversity

The poem's turn: we avoid God's face the way we avoid disaster. Meeting your Maker is something to dread, not desire.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Drowning Metaphor's Dark Logic

Dickinson opens with a counterintuitive claim: drowning itself isn't the worst part—the attempt to rise is more pitiful. She's using the folk belief that drowning victims surface three times before final submersion, but her interest isn't in the physical process. Each rise represents hope, struggle, the body's refusal to accept death. The pitiful part is fighting against the inevitable.

The poem pivots at line 5 with declines forever—a euphemism that sounds almost gentle until you hit that abhorred abode. This isn't heaven. Dickinson deliberately avoids calling it hell, but 'abhorred' tells you it's not paradise either. It's the grave, or death's realm, or wherever hope ends. The location matters less than the separation: Where hope and he part company.

The theological shock comes in line 8: he is grasped of God. The passive construction is crucial—God seizes him, pulls him down. This isn't salvation; it's capture. The Maker's cordial visage in line 9 sets up the poem's final reversal. 'Cordial' means warm, friendly, life-giving (from Latin *cor*, heart). But we shun that face Like an adversity—like a calamity, a disaster, something to flee from. Dickinson is saying the quiet part loud: we don't actually want to meet God. Death, even with God's 'good' face attached to it, remains something humans instinctively resist.

Dickinson's Calvinist Inheritance

Dickinson grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, steeped in Calvinist theology where God's sovereignty was absolute and often terrifying. Her father and grandfather were pillars of the Congregational church. She attended revival meetings, read theology, knew the doctrine inside out—and never joined the church. This poem shows why.

The Calvinist God doesn't wait for your consent. Election, damnation, salvation—all happen according to divine will, not human choice. When Dickinson writes he is grasped of God, she's describing predestination's iron grip. The drowning man's three attempts to rise mirror human efforts at salvation, which Calvinist doctrine deemed useless without God's grace. But here's Dickinson's twist: even with God's intervention, the outcome feels like adversity.

The poem's final two lines—we must admit it—force reader complicity. She's not just describing one drowning man's experience; she's making a claim about universal human nature. We say we want eternal life, want to see God's face, but our actions (our shunning) reveal the truth. Dickinson wrote hundreds of poems circling this tension: the God she inherited versus the God she could actually believe in. This poem doesn't resolve it—it just states the problem with brutal clarity.