"I'm ceded -- I've stopped being theirs --"

I'm ceded -- I've stopped being Theirs --
The name They dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church
Is finished using, now,
And They can put it with my Dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools,
I've finished threading -- too --

Baptized, before, without the choice,
But this time, consciously, of Grace --
Unto supremest name --
Called to my Full -- The Crescent dropped --
Existence's whole Arc, filled up,
With one small Diadem.

My second Rank -- too small the first --
Crowned -- Crowing -- on my Father's breast --
A half unconscious Queen --
But this time -- Adequate -- Erect,
With Will to choose, or to reject,
And I choose, just a Crown --

F (353), 1862

Despite all the different lenses of interpretation and varying schools of thought critics choose to view her life and work through, Emily Dickinson comes across perhaps most consistently as a fierce individualist. This image is given considerable weight by poems like this one, which effectively functions as a declaration of independence of sorts, following its speaker's powerful recognition of her newfound autonomy and agency to make decisions for herself that she has discovered on her journey to maturity.

The poem's content certainly welcomes a feminist reading, particularly along the lines of marriage. The first stanza's fixation on the shedding of "The name They dropped" on the speaker at her christening as a baby (a choice decided for her) could possibly be being juxtaposed with the adoption of the "supremest name" of her potential husband, a choice that she now makes "...consciously, of Grace." However, the speaker's note that they possess the "Will to choose, or to reject" and their ultimate choice of "just a Crown" in the poem's final line seems to suggest a resistance to marriage as an institution and a prioritization of the sovereignty of self instead. 

There is also ample evidence that allows one to read the poem as a commentary on religion and spirituality in a somewhat similar manner. Dickinson's speaker seems to renounce the kind of religion pushed upon her as a child when she was "Baptized, without the choice" in favor of the newly informed version she has been granted through experience. As Wendy Martin notes, when it came to matters of faith Dickinson often conducted herself in thoroughly "non-traditional terms" (58). Thus, the notion of her proclaiming her ability to choose how to define her own individual brand of faith, or reject it entirely, feels prescient in this case. 

Potential representation of "The Crescent"  

Dickinson's diction throughout the poem also provides us interesting in-roads for interpretation. There's a certain degree of bitter detachment in her inverted phrasing when she states that the name she was christened with "Is finished using, now," almost personifying it as a kind of parasite she's finally free of. The Dickinson lexicon gives one possible meaning for "The Crescent" that Dickinson refers to as the "domain above the grave where the moon waxes and wanes." If we're to interpret that as emblematic of life itself, then the next line's assertion that "Existence's whole Arc, filled up" was illuminated to her is paradoxical. How can the whole arc be filled when one has only experienced a crescent of it, and, smaller still, only a mere portion of that Crescent itself?

In this sense, it may be particularly worth noting that the final stanza's word pairing of "Adequate -- Erect" occurs again in a later poem, "The Props assist the House" (F 729): 

The Props assist the House

Until the House is built

And then the Props withdraw

And adequate, erect,

The House support itself

And cease to recollect

The Augur and the Carpenter --
Just such a retrospect
Hath the perfected Life --
A Past of Plank and Nail
And slowness -- then the scaffolds drop
Affirming it a Soul --

Taken in tandem, this later poem almost seems to function as a more meditative reflection on some of the ideas espoused in "I'm ceded." Perhaps eventually Dickinson came to reevaluate the name "dropped" on her as well as the dolls and spools of thread of her childhood not as hindrances to her achieving her individuality, but merely as some of the components (i.e. props) that allowed her to be able craft it in the first place. The vocal assertion of her independence may constitute her "second Rank" while the more nuanced reflection on how she got there that this poem offers could very well represent the successive one, and another portion of The Crescent. 

Martin, Wendy. The Cambridge Introduction to Emily Dickinson. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

http://edl.byu.edu/lexicon/term/602442