Hi, Ralph. I've got an Emily-based sonnet exercise over at D&A, so you thread piqued my interest, especially your noting a turn in 712. Haven't got time for a long post, but here are some things that popped into my head as I was reading what you wrote.
If you are writing an essay to submit for publication, you will strengthen your argument by suggesting that the "conceptual rhyme" derives from the parallel structure of Hebrew poetry via the Bay Psalm Book, granddaddy of hymn meter in New England. I privately have called this device "thought rhyme" for the last thirty years. Yours is an interesting, original idea--that Emily uses "thought rhyme"--and I would love for you to make your case airtight, giving us all a new tool for understanding how Emily's poetry works.
You also may want to check into some scriptural/doctrinal matters. While on the cross, Christ told the repentant thief that he would be with Christ in Paradise that very same day, presumably right after death. Later on in the NT we are told that there will be a bodily resurrection. I always solved this seeming contradiction by assuming that the Soul of a saved person went and hung out in some kind of Heavenly waiting room and then on Judgment Day the body was beamed up and reconstituted/perfected by a divine version of Star Trek's transporter. Obviously, I'm not worried about the mechanics of it, but Emily seems to be at least in the territory of these issues, and she would have been very familiar with the scripture involved. My immediate impression is that Emily's rhyme/meter starts out perfect and whole, then decays until the sound changes characteristic of rhyme stop at the identity, appropriately "ground": the poem's rhyme sceme as a whole is a metaphor for bodily decay, becoming one with the earth, also biblical, dust to dust. The slant rhyme in the last stanza "matches" the contradiction/dissonance between how much time has passed and how the liberated Soul/consciousness "feels." The upshot of the whole poem is that the speaker is emotionally ambivalent about being freed from bodily life. To use my metaphor, the first three stanzas, the Soul is headed for the Heavenly Waiting Room and not concerned about abandoning the Body. After the turn, the Soul experiences some kind of empathy with/nostalgia for the abandoned, decaying Body, and maybe longs for "the day when the dead in Christ shall rise," to be re-united with the senses, physical feeling. A very nice meditation, gentle questioning, of the Body/Soul dichotomy.
Sorry to go on so, but I enjoyed the opportunity to think about Emily for a while. Thanks!
Best wishes,
Lee
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