Emily Dickinson The Heart Asks Pleasure

Dickinson starts her poem by saying “The heart asks pleasure” and I think that there is a lot of significance with this line. In this line we are able to understand the relationship between the heart and all of its desires. The fact that the heart is asking for pleasure, excuse from pain, anodynes, to go to sleep, and the privilege to die implies that the heart carries a subordinate status to whoever it is asking. There is a certain amount of dependency that the heart has on the “Inquisitor” to help alleviate the pain and torture that is stirring within the heart. This also establishes that your heart is not controlled by its owner, but rather is at “the will of its Inquisitor.” This lead me to question who the Inquisitor was. This could be implied as a love partner who the heart allows to determine its happiness or this could mean something along the lines of religion and God as the creator of your heart. I am not sure who Dickinson left her heart to, but I think that maybe this poem allows the reader to determine their own Inquisitor in their lives. This could make the reader question whether they have control over their hearts desires or whether that is in the hands of their own form of an Inquisitor.

The first line also establishes a systematic order of what the heart desires. The heart first wants pleasure, excuse from pain, then anodynes. I think that Dickinson did this to illustrate the state of the heart and how it desires to be happy and have pleasure, but knows that that is not always feasible. As the poem continues the heart becomes more and more desperate and by the end the heart acknowledges that the only thing needed is the privilege to die. This organizational pattern that Dickinson uses really demonstrates our own feelings toward our heart. We all would love for our hearts to be filled with pleasure, but we sacrifice daily and just end up settling for whatever our heart can get.

The final thing that this first line helps to establish is the amount of torture and pain that the heart is going through. We can see the emotional hope decay over the course of the poem as Dickinson approaches the final line in which she states “the privilege to die.” We see the desires of the heart fade and decrease over the course of the poem. With each line the desire of the heart becomes more painful and deadly. The heart asks for deaden from suffering and then the privilege to die. In setting the poem up in this manner I feel that Dickinson has accurately portrayed the varying degrees of hold that the Inquisitor can have on your heart. By the end of her poem it is clear that the Inquisitor has complete and absolute control over the heart and that results in the heart’s death.