"The heart asks pleasure first" by Emily Dickinson

THE HEART asks pleasure first, 

And then, excuse from pain;

And then, those little anodynes

That deaden suffering;

And then, if to go to sleep; 

And then, if it should be 

The will of its Inquisitor, 

The liberty to die.  

Although relatively short and a mere two stanzas in length, Emily Dickinson’s “The heart asks pleasure first” presents the reader with a complex web of contradiction and repetition. Dickinson employs repetition by using anaphora with the following phrase: “And then.” Because the poem seems fairly general at first glance, Dickinson welcomes conjectures of all kinds regarding meaning. The poem challenges me with its rapid, unexpected twists and turns from a seemingly innocent request to a dramatic end. In just eight lines, Dickinson is able to take a snapshot of life as we all know it…from the joyful dawn to its anticipated denouement. The trenchant divisions between life and death and freedom and captivity further explain the complexity of the poem. From the first line, the reader is introduced to a passionate speaker who takes matters of the heart with heavy understanding.

Seeing that the first two words stand alone in all caps, it is evident that the speaker follows her heart as opposed to her head. Since our speaker asks of the heart, the reader is likely to believe that this human being read about is controlled by some higher power or rather the heart is simply lower in position to the speaker’s conscience. Our speaker asks pleasure first signaling that she is in an inferior position with little to no right to demand something of another. It is likely that the speaker is a woman describing her inferiority to the male species.

Throughout the poem, the list of requests–with no trace of hidden demands–grows more and more disturbing until the final, liberating end. The poem’s drama increases as the poem continues. First, the speaker simply asks for pleasure and then excuse from pain; however, the final request of the speaker is that of death. As the speaker’s requests seep into each line of the poem, she is enveloped in the pain she has previously asked for and dares not to ask for freedom from such pain. She does indeed ask for an excuse or rather something to deaden her increasing suffering.

Circling back to the possibility of the speaker as being a woman making these requests of her partner, it could be that the speaker is numbed by such a love. She would rather be in pain and able to remain at the side of her lover than to experience a life free of pain without him. The Inquisitor can be interpreted as the speaker’s puppeteer–perhaps a façade of her lover. Tragically, she has given herself to such an Inquisitor and has left her fate in his greedy hands.

But still, her most treasured wish is to die. Dickinson’s choice to describe death as a liberty further proves the pain that is suffocating the speaker. In a strange, somewhat disjointed way, the poem both begins and ends with the heart. First, the heart asks pleasure, and finally, the heart ceases to beat rhythmically as death draws near.   

A moment, a word, or a turn in the poem that might be overlooked by a cursory reader is Dickinson’s use of the word “if” in the second line of the second stanza. The word “if” is conditional and is based on what the speaker’s lover–in this case–is willing to do for the speaker. If allows leeway. If the lover is so willing to free his significant other from a pain so deep, then so be it. If holds the fate of the speaker–whether it is merciful or cruel.