Renunciation -- is a piercing Virtue --
The letting go
A Presence -- for an Expectation --

Emily Dickinson was a very complicated and very troubled woman.  But as she wrestled with her demons, she found words available as a solace and skillfully articulated her anguish.

In the above poem, she was wrestling with loss and risking a descent into madness.  “Renunciation” was the term she chose for rejecting the “common sense” world she lived and breathed in—a “presence”.  This “presence” can be thought of as her egoic consciousness (see Eckhart Tolle), a bit of fiction she had subscribed to which plugged her into that “common sense” world.  Norman O. Brown once noted, “The ego is a veil we spin to hide the void.”  Emily’s “veil” was precarious at best.

In another one of her poems she described this loss of egoic consciousness as “a funeral in my brain.”  And then she concluded the poem with the lines:

And then a plank in reason, broke,
And I dropped down and down–
And hit a world at every plunge,
And finished knowing–then—

Note that she “hit a world at every plunge.”  So, even though the demons of madness were besetting her, she found a world at every step and then “finished knowing—then.  Her ego survived the descent.