The World is Not Conclusion. But the next? (Landres

 April 29, 2021

When I first read Dickinson’s line “This World is not Conclusion,” (line 1) I read it as “this world is not conclusive,” that is, an essential feature of this world is inconclusivity; furthermore I thought it meant that there’s no conclusion whatever. Dickinson, however, didn’t phrase her poem this way. Yes, this word is not conclusion, but that doesn’t mean there is no conclusion: for a species stands beyond this world that lacks its own conclusion (2). But what stands beyond that species? Dickinson does not say. Perhaps that species is conclusion for this world. 

Dickinson’s reason for claiming the world is not conclusion is that a species stands beyond. If the species stood, instead, apart, it would have no bearing on the conclusivity of the world; so in the species’ standing beyond it must also have a connection with the world such that the world may properly be called inconclusive in consequence.

So we shall ask, what is the character of this species, of this posited “conclusion”? The species is a mischievous Puck to humans, an actor upon them. It manifests as desirable, slippery, and ever-present. Its action is invisible, but positive (3-4); sensed, but not apprehended. People try to guess and gain it, but are forever thwarted in their efforts. This action between this species and our own is, according to the poem, unidirectional; it acts upon us, “nibbles at our the soul” (24), but cannot be apprehended, nor even stilled (23). This species seems to conclude our world and our lives in the fashion of a limit (akin to Kant’s concept of noumena) at once irrupting into the world and residing beyond it.

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