"The Life we have is very Great"

The Life we have is very great.

The Life that we shall see

Surpasses it, we know, because

It is Infinity.

But when all space has been beheld

And all Dominion shown

The smallest Human Heart’s extent

Reduces it to none.

Fr 1178

Like “Split the Lark - and you’ll find the Music”, this poem makes an argument against the ideas of empiricism. One method Dickinson uses to invoke themes of empiricism is her word choice. In the first four lines, the speaker has established life and what comes after it, almost in units of measurement. Life is “great”, a word that implies both value and size. But, what comes after it, what we shall “see”, or observe in the afterlife, must be greater in value and size because it is infinite. The following lines, lines 5-8,  really focus in on the ideas of empiricism, or the idea that knowledge only carries power when it can be proven with empirical evidence. The speaker posits the idea that even if one could observe all of space and time, and all its dominions, it would not be more valuable than even the smallest human heart. This is a stumbling block to the idea of empiricism. The measuring of a human heart, in the context it is used within the poem, is impossible to observe, measure, or prove by empirical methods.

The last two lines confidently state that what cannot be measured about the smallest human heart reduces all that can be learned through direct observation to nothing in comparison. In this way, the speaker defies ideas of empiricism by asserting that there is something sacred and exalted about humanity, some spiritual truths that exist despite the fact that they cannot be charted or measured in a purely scientific way. While I know Dickinson was not against science or scientific study, it seems that she was wary of complete reliance on empirical scientific measures as a way of discerning knowledge and truth to the exclusion of any other. Another poem that is extremely similar in theme and message is her poem “Split the Lark - and you’ll find the Music” (Fr 905), in which a bird is dissected in order to find its song. In both poems, the speaker is insistent in its assertion that there are some truths that cannot and should not attempted to be observed or measured scientifically.

Dickinson’s poetry is often focused upon expressing her own experience with humanity and the human condition. The photograph above shows the sharp contrast between a human and the infinite surrounding universe. In the face of a night sky and its depths, many people may feel small in comparison. Dickinson takes this idea of smallness and turns it on its head in her poem, insisting that what lies in the human heart is large enough to shrink everything else to nothing. To her, the human experience was not reduced in value because of its inability to empirically explain itself, in fact it seems to hold more intrinsic value because of this fact. There is the empirical, and there is the spiritual. In poems such as this, it becomes clear that Dickinson did not discount the spirituality of human existence in favor of empirical knowledge.