WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Poetry Fix: Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, Part Two

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

Today, Erika Kyba reads through the end of "Sic Transit Gloria Mundi," by Emily Dickinson. We begin to tie together the themes of moral bankruptcy, surface versus substance, and modernity, served with a slice of devilry.

Welcome to The Poetry Fix on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm your host, Erica Kaiba, bringing you your weekly fix of poetry from across time. Today we're reading an excerpt from Emily Dickinson's Sikh Transit Gloria Mundi. If you'll recall from last week, this poem is partially a lament for the loss of authentic courage and nobility. Dickinson believes that superficial gentility has replaced these values. We see this in the opening stanza today as the poet's sarcastic. asserts that a coward will remain, sir, until the fight is done, but an immortal hero will take his hat and run. We can find little traces of gentility in these lines, the obsequious

deference to an ambiguous sir, and the absolute foppery of the supposed hero, who makes sure to take his hat before he runs away from the battle. What Dickinson is trying to tell us is that the values of her world have been emptied out. When we think of immortal heroes, we think of Odysseus, Aeneas, King Alfred, George Washington, men who saw a battle to its end and thus one glory. But it's as if Dickinson is saying that now we just focus on the glory part of the equation. In the age of gentility, reputation matters more than substance. So, in the words of the ironic speaker, you might as well take your hat and your dignity and get out of the fight, because our age no longer values the struggle that brought it glory. It's addicted to the

varnish on top of the vessel. It matters very little, whether or not the vessel is hollow. The very next stanza begins, Goodbye, sir, I am going, which makes you wonder whether the speaker is identifying himself with the coward running away from battle. Because Dickinson just gave us the image of one man staying in battle and the other running away, and now the speaker announces his departure.

Now we might begin to speculate on the identity of the speaker and this unknown sir. The last person that Dickinson addressed in the poem was the biblical Adam. One of the stanzas we read in the last episode asked Adam to put down his apple and come away with me, so shalt that have a pippin from off my father's tree, implying then that the speaker and Adam have different fathers. And if Adam's father is God, things aren't looking too pretty

on the speaker's paternity test. Dickinson might just be suggesting that the speaker is of a devilish origin. It's a harsh light to cast him in, but it does make sense, especially given the stanza where the speaker tries to tempt Adam to an even better apple from his father's tree, literally placing himself in the same role as the servant in Genesis. Now, if the speaker is indeed devilish, that tells us a little bit more about Dickinson's condemnation of gentility. St. Augustine viewed evil as a participation in non-being, so when we do something bad, we're distorting, destroying, or perverting something good. Satan is, of course, the ultimate iteration of that, essentially existing as a negation of God's goodness. So let's take Dickinson's

genteel speaker and suppose that he is meant to be identified with a little bit of devilry. What we've seen the speaker do so far in the poem is to take the values of nobility and heroism and empty them out one by one. We just talked about how the speaker has taken cowardliness and made it heroic, as long as the fighter can make it out of the battle with his hat. Earlier than that, when the speaker claimed that rascality was heroic and insolvency was sublime, he similarly took these high poetic conceits of heroism and sublimity, and reduced them to all that was base, sneaky, sly, and lacking in substance. The word insolvency being glorified tells us a lot, too.

Dickinson is accusing her age of being morally bankrupt, defined by the absence of a thing. If she had a copy of Augustine's work open while she was writing this, and Dickinson was quite theologically well-read, it seems likely enough that she's pinning this moral bankruptcy on a fairly dark spiritual origin. So in the parting scene, the new tempter tells Adam that he must go because his country is calling him. And he asks Adam to allow him to wipe a weeping eye at his parting. It's as if he's trying to compose himself, concerned with appearances once again. The real emotion that produces weeping must be wiped away, erased, in order to preserve a smooth veneer. So the tempter cannot

offer Adam real tears, but he can offer Adam a Bonnie Dune. In all likelihood, this is a reference to Robert Burns' The Banks of Dune. That poem wistfully looks back at the Bonnie Dune, that's in the first line, referring to Scotland's Dune River, as the poet remembers when he used to court his false lover there. And boom, there's the theme of appearances versus reality once again. The whole theme of the Banks Adoon is that everything can seem beautiful and lovely, but if there's no substance there, you're going nowhere. The Banksadune ends with the lover stealing away a rose and leaving the narrator with the thorn. So this literary illusion is really a warning on Dickinson's part. We're in an age where we're being promised the Bonnie Dune.

But if we confuse appearances with reality, wealth with prosperity, or pleasure with purpose, things aren't going to end very well for us. Dickinson continues to play with the images in Bonnie Dune, writing that, When the hand that plucked it hath passed beyond the moon, the memory of my ashes will consolation be. If we have that original poem in mind, we're thinking of the hand that plucked away the rose, leaving behind the thorn. In this case, the speaker is leaving Adam behind with the memory of his ashes. He's progressed so far down the trail of non-being that he's not even leaving behind ashes, real physical remains of himself. Adam will have to content himself with a memory of the thing that was.

The complication now is that the devilish speaker is leaving the poem, claiming that he's going to pass beyond the moon and leave only the memory of his ashes. Isn't that a good thing? Turns out, not necessarily. As we briefly touched on in the last episode, Dickinson scatters the poem with references to scientific discoveries. And a turn that we start to see during the Enlightenment period is that intellectuals increasingly want to view the universe as clockwork, purely material, with no room for spirits or ghouls, partly as a result of these new discoveries about how the world worked.

So of course the devil character is leaving now. He successfully tempted Adam to a mechanical view of the universe, which leads to an emptying out of all that man valued or feared, including the devil himself. Now Adam will have to content himself with a memory of a world populated by spirits, good and bad, before modernity disenchanted it. With all that said, let's dive in. Siktranzit Gloria Mundi by Emily Dickinson.

A coward will remain, sir, until the fight is done. But an immortal hero will take his hat and run. Goodbye, sir, I am going. My country calleth me. Allow me, sir, at parting to wipe my weeping ye. In token of our friendship, except this bonny dune, and when the hand that plucked it hath passed beyond the moon, the memory of my ashes will consolation be.

Then farewell, Tuscarora, and farewell, sir, to thee. You've been listening to The Poetry Fix with Erica Kaiba. If you enjoyed this episode, consider following the Poetry Fix on Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts. And if you have any poems you want to see in a future episode, email your suggestions to The Poetree Fix at gmail.com. Join me next week and we'll be reading an excerpt from Milton's Comus.