Helen Vendler's Terrible Swift Sword

Aha, so I haven't been reading more into Dickinson's "Northern Lights" simply for trying to one up the eminent Ms. Vendler. This morning I was led to take a look at Herman Melville's poems, and looking over the corpus online, discovered he treats the Aurora Borealis too,

     Aurora-Borealis
     commemorative of the dissolution of armies at the peace
     (May, 1965)

     What power disbands the Northern Lights
          After their steely play?
     The lonely watcher feels an awe
          Of Nature's sway,
               As when appearing,
               He marked their flashed uprearing
          In the cold gloom -
          Retreatings and advancings,
     (Like dallyings of doom),
          Transitions and enhancings,
               And bloody ray.

Now here the "Northern Lights" used as a metaphor for the Civil War couldn't be any more obvious. Here in 2011 we appear to be approaching the end of the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, as the domestic culture wars chug along. If any foundation would offer me a grant, I think I could come up with a neat paper on why Emily Dickinson's Northern Lights were necessarily ambiguous, while Herman Melville could treat them commemoratively.