She dealt her pretty words like Blades

I'm working on some poems that relate to tarot imagery, specifically the suit of swords, and was struck by this Dickinson poem I just rediscovered for myself: 

She dealt her pretty words like Blades --

How glittering they shone -- 

And every One unbared a Nerve

Or wantoned with a Bone --  

She never deemed -- she hurt -- 

That -- is not Steel's Affair --

A vulgar grimace in the Flesh -- 

How ill the Creatures bear -- 

To Ache is human -- not polite -- 

The Film upon the eye 

Mortality's old Custom -- 

Just locking up -- to Die.

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Lots of different ways of reading the poem, of course, but

I'm thinking about poetry as a blade, the words that cut

and slice, get to the bones of the matter, the painful

heart of things we often don't wish to see.  

She also articulates, in this poem, the essential duality of 

the sword as symbol, that it is both a weapon and a tool. 

An instrument of pain, but also a metaphor for analysis, 

the cutting necessary to see.

"She never deemed--she hurt--/That--is not Steel's 

affair--," swords are intellect, air, they are not useful

in the world of feelings, you don't use a sword, either

literally or metaphorically, if you're afraid you might

hurt someone. Something you have to put aside 

when you put on the costume of the queen of swords.

She seems to sympathize, if we read the poem with 

an ironic tone, with those hurt by word-blades; 

society, she suggests, has no tolerance for those 

who hurt and own their hurts in public. Better, 

in this society of swords, to lock ourselves up 

(in a real or imagined coffin?) and "die."

So interesting, too, though it has nothing to do 

with the poem, in which she uses the word

"blades" instead of "swords," how the word 

word is buried in the word sword.