"How much the present moment means"

How much the present moment means
To those who've nothing more --
The Fop -- the Carp -- the Atheist --
Stake an entire store
Opon a Moment's shallow Rim
While their commuted Feet
The Torrents of Eternity
Do all but inundate --

F (1420), 1877

Conventional depiction of a fop

This deeply ironic poem finds Dickinson's speaker profiling and summarily chastising a cast of characters who spend their lives living irreverently or inefficiently despite their time on earth being limited. These individuals choose to distract themselves with petty concerns such as narcissistic self-obsession ("The Fop"), unnecessary complaining and criticism ("the Carp"), and willful and prideful disbelief ("the Atheist") instead of making the most of the all too short "present moment" they have been allotted.  

The tone of this poem feels strikingly more passive-aggressive and considerably more dogmatic than we may be accustomed to hearing from Dickinson, which makes the possibility that she's attempting to take on some kind of other persona through the speaker a plausible explanation, perhaps one of a disgruntled pastor or some other religious figure. This is especially pertinent in how intact the sense of faith and belief that is channeled here seems to be. While it's true that Dickinson has a fair share of poems steeped in proclamations of rather blunt faith ("I never saw a moor"), these poems feel like outliers compared to the much more significant quantity of her works which depict intense struggles with questions of faith, God's true nature, and the existence of an afterlife ("I felt a funeral, in my brain" and "I shall know why-- when Time is over" serving as perfect examples). The fact that many of those same poems can also easily be read as "carping" about life's complexities and big unknowns to one degree or another adds another layer of irony, leading one to wonder if a self-aware Dickinson could be using the poem as a way to poke fun at her own proclivity for focusing on the darker, more troubling facets of life during a finite existence. 

Here, however, she seems to back away from those questions with a notable distance in order to lampoon the behavior of these others. The mention of the three individuals' feet are "commuted" seems to subtly invoke the concept of Jesus' dying for humanity's sins, with the implicit criticism being that they are squandering that sacrifice with their careless and selfish attitude towards existence, a much more directly traditional Christian endorsement than Dickinson is prone to making. We are ultimately led to understand that the answer to the poem's implied question of "How much [does] the present moment mean/To those who've nothing more[?]" is "not very," but the reasoning that gets us there almost borders on hypocrisy. Perhaps, in Dickinson's rationale, these characters' attitudes on life are as "shallow" as the limited time we have on earth in a relative sense because they are complacent and not truly engaging with life's questions in a meaningful manner, but that places her own battles coming to terms with them in a somewhat awkward light. Barring the potentiality of self-awareness or abstraction through an imagined speaker, this poem stands as one of the more perplexing entries in the Dickinson canon.