Most people would expect grief to pull a person down alongside the one who is failing. Emily Dickinson opens by admitting she expected exactly that: "I rose -- because He sank -- / I thought it would be opposite." What follows is the story of a surprise. When "his power dropped," the speaker's "Soul grew straight." Someone else's weakness calls up a strength she hadn't known she had, and the poem traces that strength as it builds, step by step, until the final line: "I lifted Him."
Dickinson never says who "He" is, and the poem is richer for it. The imagery suggests someone dying. There is the "Film" over his eyes, the "Dews" that hold his "Forehead stiff," and the "Grave" that waits at the end of the "low Arch of Flesh." Beyond that the text stays open. He might be a loved one, or he might stand for something in the speaker herself. What the poem makes clear is the shift in their relationship. She begins as a bystander and ends as a rescuer, and when she says "I met him -- / Balm to Balm," she comes to him as an equal, healer to healer.
Royal vocabulary runs through the poem: a "Prince," a "Casque" (a helmet), "Emperors." Dickinson turns the dying man into a fallen noble, and the speaker acts as his attendant, singing to him and reminding him of his dignity. Her comfort is also an argument. "Best -- must pass / Through this low Arch of Flesh" makes the body a doorway so low that even the greatest must stoop to go through it. The next lines insist that no helmet is "so brave" that it can "spurn the Grave." Death is the great leveller, and in this poem that is a consolation, because it opens onto the "Worlds" where "Emperors grew" and remember those who "were true."
The sound of the poem follows the speaker's growing confidence. The opening lines have almost no rhyme: "sank," "opposite," "dropped," "straight" sit apart, like someone still unsteady. The rhymes then tighten. "Off" and "stiff" almost chime, then comes the clean "brave" and "Grave," then the triple "knew," "grew," "true." The ending is the firmest of all, with "Hymn," "within" and "Him" locking together. The lines are short and clipped, and they are noticeably pared down in the first stanzas. Dickinson often borrowed the sound of church hymns, and here the borrowing becomes the subject. The speaker "sang firm -- even -- Chants," and the word "firm" and the smooth, level "even" describe the steady rhythm she gives the dying man to lean on.
The best touch comes at the end. In the last stanza "Hymn" and "Him" sound identical, so singing and the man being lifted blur together. The speaker works with "Thews of Hymn," muscle made of song, and "Sinew from within." Her comfort is physical, even athletic. Then the poem does something the earlier stanzas haven't: it stretches. "And ways I knew not that I knew -- till then --" runs on longer than any line near it, as if the speaker is surprised by her own ability. The dashes make the line hesitate, then push on. The next line, "I lifted Him --", is so short and plain that it lands like a weight being raised.
The poem matters for the way it overturns a familiar story. Strength does not shrink in the presence of weakness. It is discovered there, and it grows from inside the person who has to give it. Dickinson also locates that strength in language and music, so the speaker's voice becomes the means of rescue. The poem could have been a conventional deathbed scene about resignation. Instead it is about the surprise of finding one is capable of more than one thought, and the dash after "Him" leaves the lifting unfinished, with the man raised but not yet set down.