Elizabeth Paul
ENAM 984
Mr. Cushman
July 6, 1999
Emily Dickinson and the Poetic Metaphysics of Absence
I have perfect confidence in God & his promises & yet I know not why, I feel that
the world holds a predominant place in my affections. I do not feel that I could
give up all for Christ, were I called to die. Pray for me Dear A. that I may yet
enter into the kingdom, that there may be room left for me in the shining courts
above.
(L 13)
Austin came to see me when I had been here about two weeks & brought Viny &
Abby. I need not tell you how delighted I was to see them all, nor how happy it
made me to hear them say that 'they were so lonely.' It is a sweet feeling to know
that you are missed & that your memory is precious at home.
(L 18)
While Dickinson’s letters are almost always charged with subtle irony and
sarcasm, I believe the first citation expresses a sincere and deeply felt concern about God and a
heaven made very real to her through her Christian upbringing. She states that the world holds a
predominant place in her affections and that she doesn’t think she could give this up for Christ.
However, in a way, this love for the world only seems to exacerbate her desire to know God.
God’s absence in the world which holds so predominant a place in Dickinson’s affections only
makes him a more powerful presence in her thoughts and feelings. So much so, that she entreats
her brother to pray for her. Paradoxically, the absence of God was a significant presence in
Dickinson’s life, as it was in many Christians’ lives at the time.
With the first citation expressing her sensitivity to God’s absence, the second citation
evinces Dickinson’s sensitivity to absence in human relationships. In this letter, as in many
others of her youth, Dickinson harps on the subject of missing someone. In this case, she is the
one being missed by her family, and it gives her a certain pleasure to know that she is missed.
This, like the first citation, evinces a sensitivity to, and in this case even a conscious appreciation
for absence and the way the absence of something allows for a paradoxical presence of that thing
in thought.
We see Dickinson creating mysterious absences mimicking that of God consistently
throughout her life and poetry. This systematic use of absence suggests that it was a strategy.
Furthermore, the connection of that strategy with religion suggests that it was a strategy by
which Dickinson sought to discern truth and reality. Thus, Dickinson’s use of absence was not
only a strategy, but the practice of a metaphysics. For, in addition to the strategy’s connections
to religion and the systematic use of absence which unifies her life and work, the way in which
her poems express her belief in the real reality of thought and impress it upon the reader suggest
that what appears to be a personality trait in these early letters matured into nothing less than a
poetic metaphysical practice.
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The paradoxical presence of absence which is central to Dickinson’s metaphysics is also
central to Calvinist perspective she inherited with her New England upbringing.1
Sewall tells
us that Edward Dickinson emphasized the importance of schooling more than religion in the
lives of his children, that he "was first of all an ambitious man, busy with quite worldly affairs".2
In a letter regarding his brother becoming a Christian, Edward Dickinson wrote:
"Truly I cannot but rejoice at such news from a brother so dear to me as he is, and
for whom I have so high an opinion - and I hope he is really prepared for that
happy future state of existence, for which we all ought to be ever in readiness, but
which I am sensible I have always neglected - and fear I always shall."3
While this tells us that Emily Dickinson's childhood was not dominated by a strictly enforced
Calvinism the way it might have been, it also speaks to the inescapable presence of Calvinism in
their lives as it was in New England at the time. It also hints at the essence of the Calvinist
perspective that became the strategy of Dickinson's practice of her poetic metaphysics. That
essence is an abiding awareness of a "future state of existence". The doctrine of the elect, the
belief that some were saved while others were damned, neither identified until the moment of
Judgment, meant that "no matter what the proportions of fear and hope which this situation
encourage(d) in the believer...it is in the future that the deepest reality lies".4 Dickinson inherited
the fundamental belief that real reality existed in a future time and, as the imagery of heaven,
Eden, and paradise throughout her poetry would suggest, in a supersensible place.
"What made Puritanism into a dynamic system" writes John Robinson in Emily
Dickinson: Looking to Canaan "was a double scale of time and a dual sense of place."5 What
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made Dickinson's poetry such a dynamic system was this dual sense of place and the paradoxical
sense of the presence of absence, when one of these places is supersensible. When the real
reality is supersensible, and one's most immediate sense of reality is mental but also primarily
physical, this real reality takes the form of absence or ignorance. But it can also take form in
thought. For example, God is intangible and, therefore, physically absent. One is also ignorant
as to what God is like and what his plan is. He is represented by mystery which is the
paradoxical presence of absence, in thought. Yet, this is a presence. The mystery of God or of
the real reality which has its form in the absence of God or reality in physical form, causes one to
think about God and reality all the more. And the supersensible thereby takes form in thought as
well as in physical absence. Furthermore, a presence in thought is a presence in a person’s life,
as the thought of God and the Judgement provided the Calvinists “a powerful incentive to behave
as if they were saved”.6 In as far as thinking about God and supersensible reality made it present
in thought and thus in a person’s life, it was a way of making truth itself present.
The Calvinist pracitce of making the present subordinate to the future state of reality is
mimicked in Dickinson’s strategy. In Landscape of Absence, Kher thoroughly articulates
Dickinson's strategy of absence by which she realizes the presence of truth:
"The ratiocinative mind functions on the surface of the concrete phenomena as
projected into time and space. But the poetic mind fructifies by moving on both
planes, the outward and the inward, simultaneously, and thereby transcends the
merely spatio-temporal dimension of things. The poet, then, sees the invisible in
its visibility and the visible in its invisibility. What remains absent to the eyesight
becomes present to the insight. The concreteness of what is absent is self-evident
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to one who sees creatively, one who transforms the opacity of objects into
transparency. This inner-outer movement is fully embodied in Dickinson's poetry
and suggests a constant relationship and metamorphosis between the poet and the
world which stands before her. In this interaction, the absence is felt as most
intense presence. In the language of paradox, however, the presence is presence
only insofar as it is absence, because it is beyond scientific verification." 7
What Kher calls the poetic mind is also, undoubtedly, the Calvinist mind and the transcendence
of the merely spatio-temporal dimension of things is the Calvinist's approach to exchanging a
limited and temporal sense of reality for the eternal and true perspective. The Calvinist’s quest
for truth and the poet’s interaction with reality are both based on a strategy of making presence
out of absence. This similarity in strategy suggests a unity of purpose. It is possible that
Dickinson based her poetic strategy of absence on the Calvinist strategy of absence, and that the
purpose of the first was, like that of the second, to discover truth or reality. As a means by which
to discover truth and reality, Dickinson’s poetry is certainly not mere word play, nor even solely
exquisite and meaningful artistry, but a metaphysical inquiry into truth and reality.
To reach some kind of truth through the paradoxical presence of absence which is a
presence in thought suggests the central point of Dickinson's metaphysics, that truth, or reality,
exists in thought. To put it another way, thought is more real than physical, so-called reality. It
is the real reality. Yet, this metaphysics doesn't devalue or leave behind even the physical which
is subordinate to the conceptual, but essential to the poetic process of her metaphysics by which
she gains access to the real reality. Without the sense of so-called physical reality, there could be
no absence of the real reality. Nor could there be referents for her metaphors and symbols, in
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short, no language and no medium in which to work and through which to create thought.
Dickinson's metaphysics makes it possible for her to live with an inherited Calvinist perspective
as well as a love for life and the immediate world. What unites the two, what makes the
Calvinist duality of place tolerable and useful to Dickinson is the reality of thought which
redeems the physical world and allows her to not only reach truth or heaven eventually, but to be
getting there all along:
Some keep the Sabbath going to Church I keep it, staying at Home With a Bobolink for a Chorister And an Orchard, for a Dome Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice I just wear my Wings And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton - sings.
God preaches, a noted Clergyman And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last I'm going, all along.
(P 324)
It is significant that heaven remains the destination. Despite her mocking of church and
clergymen and doctrine, and despite poems in which God is distant, absent, ambivalent, even
malevolent (357, 1719,376, 576, 690) she still seeks the truth of another, future reality, here
represented by heaven. She even finds that the real reality is not limited inaccessibly to the
future, but paradoxically present in a way that allows her to be getting to heaven all the time.
The way that she does this is through Kher’s transcendent vision that turns bobolinks into
choristers and replaces the absence of a physical God with the imagined presence of a
clergyman. Though the clergyman is imagined, he is no less real than the heaven Dickinson is
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going to all along. It is important to note that this heaven is the same heaven that others get to at
last. This heaven is the real reality of Christians and it is accessible in and through thought.
The extremes of fear and hope which the doctrine of the elect could inspire also inspired
a great concern, perhaps obsession, with this future reality for which the present reality was
lived. Though this real reality was not physically present, it was powerfully present in thought,
perhaps in a way more powerful than had it existed physically. The power of the absent
Calvinist reality is reminiscent of the power of Dickinson’s absence at home that made her so
missed and made her so happy. One might even speculate that, given Dickinson's appreciation
for the power of an imaginative presence made possible by physical absence, her failure to be
converted during the Second Great Awakening with all the pressures of such a failure, was a
strategy by which Dickinson could make God, heaven, truth, and reality more real to herself by
keeping them at a distance which conversion would have precluded. This would speak to the
great importance that these ultimate questions had for her that she would, like a lover, renounce
them so that she might always have them, unmitigated by the stagnancy of satiety. Surely,
Dickinson’s continued use of religious vocabulary and themes, including, and, especially,
revelation of God, eternity, infinity, paradise, or heaven, bespeak more than just a penchant to
appropriate words and concerns of her surrounding culture. Clearly, Dickinson was fascinated
and driven by these ultimate questions and found that poetry was a medium for imaginative,
transcendent thought, for creating absences, and thus a means by which she could think about
these questions and access truth.
David Reynolds’s discussion of the New Religious Style of the nineteenth century, “a
widespread shift in the style of popular religious discourse from the doctrinal to the
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imaginative”, also gives a rationale for believing that Dickinson conceived of her poetry as a
metaphysical practice. He writes:
Between 1800 and 1860, popular sermon style, which had in Puritan times been
characterized primarily by theological rigor and restraint of the imagination, came
to be dominated by diverting narrative, extensive illustrations, and even colloquial
humor. In addition, the mainstream churches, knowing they had to compete with
novels for the public’s attention, began issuing thousands of tracts which
increasingly featured moral stories. At the same time, a spirit of piety permeated
much secular fiction and poetry. What was once the province of theologians
became largely the business of creative writers.8
Reynolds documents Dickinson’s preference for and enthusiastic response to this new style of
preaching which made use of creative and imaginative language to affect moral and religious
goals.9 He even speculates that the New Style preacher, Wadsworth, may have been that
important figure Dickinson called Master. He concludes that this speculation is “far less relevant
than the fact that in the mid-1850s, just at the moment when she was beginning to write serious
poetry, she was deeply moved by a preacher who must be regarded as one of the antebellum
period’s foremost innovators in American sermon style.”10 In addition to an innovation in
language, this shift in style redefined the province of writers as including religious subjects and
goals. It is thus easy to see how Dickinson could have thought of and used her poetry as a means
for practicing metaphysics, including the search for truth and reality. It would have been natural
for her to appropriate creative religious language as a medium for investigating metaphysics,
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joining the ranks of “the religionists she praised warmly (who) possessed both the modern
stylistic adventurousness and the old concern for ultimate questions such as Time, Death, the
Other World, and so forth.”11 The parallels between Dickinson’s poetic style and strategy and
the Calvinist perspective and the New Religious Style suggest that Dickinson’s poetic style and
lifestyle of absence had its origin in religion. This, in turn, suggests that the purpose of
Dickinson’s poetry was religious or metaphysical at heart.
In addition to the parallels between Dickinson’s poetry and religion, the appearance of a
strategy of absence in both her poetry and lifestyle suggests a seriousness and unity of purpose
which bespeaks a metaphysical concern and practice. Known as “the myth” of Amherst,
Dickinson, like her poetry, is rife with the mystery of absence which unifies her life and work.
The most notable absence regarding her life is the absence she created in the public world by
retreating to her private lifestyle. While critics assert that Dickinson most likely retreated from
the world in order to write poetry, she also cultivated a mysterious self-image through this
retreat. Her absence in the public world, indeed, in any place but her own home, became a
presence in other people’s thoughts and lives as it elicited talk and speculation that created “the
myth”. Dressed in white and haunting her house like an elusive ghost, as when Mabel Loomis
Todd came to play the piano, made for romantic stories which added to the mystery about “the
myth”. In this way, Dickinson achieved a presence in people’s thought which was much more
powerful and enduring than a mere physical presence which can be overlooked and taken for
granted, and limited by gender, appearance, age, and time.
It is certainly ironic and fitting that we, also, should remain so ignorant about Dickinson
and her poetry because of destroyed letters and puzzling fascicles. This has made Dickinson a
giant in some critics’ conceptual worlds, as she was in those of her New England neighbors. It
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has also given her a powerful presence in the world of literature, academics, and Western culture.
The Emily Dickinson Handbook even celebrates the poet’s international, world-wide presence.12
In short, the mystery surrounding Emily Dickinson has given her a strong presence in people’s
imaginative thought and the accompanying more tangible manifestations of this presence in
books and classes about her.
The flip side of Dickinson’s absence in the world is the absence of nearly all of the public
world in her experience. As feminist critics have shown, however, this retreat does not diminish,
but enhances Dickinson’s experience of reality through thought:
Emily Dickinson does not evince any posture of escape from the world....Absence
as withdrawal embodies a special type of retreat from the world, a retreat in
which the artist cultivates his or her own mode of encountering the world.
ThisWithdrawal is not a running away from reality, but a process by which the
artist ripens to a deeper perception of reality....In the solitude of her Amherst
room, she inscapes the vast horizons of human experience, some eighteen
thousand years of human woe and bliss. The world becomes more present to her
in her withdrawal from it.13
By limiting her experience of the public world, Dickinson was able to devote herself more
completely to deep and creative thought which probed reality, and which was manifested in her
poetry. Thus, we find that both of the absences created by Dickinson’s retreat from the public
world created presence in thought. She became present as a figure of mystery in the thought of
her contemporaries as well as those who study her. Likewise, Dickinson’s dedication to thought
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and poetry created the presence of ideas in her thought. Furthermore, it made thought more
present to her. It was the world in which she lived. Ultimately, her retreat from the world
created absences which taught and practiced the metaphysical principle of the reality of thought.
Another notable absence in Dickinson’s life is the absence of a lover. We know that the
person she referred to as “Master” held the significance of a lover to her. But he never had the
presence of a lover in her life. Yet, we know from the “Master Letters” that his absence in her
life as her lover made him a very powerful presence in her thought. Neither did Judge Lord take
on the role of lover, though we know from Dickinson’s letters of their mutual regard. Dickinson
denied Lord, suggesting that she had come to appreciate the uses of absence and the paradoxical
presence it creates so much as to be willing to sacrifice a traditional relationship with Lord. This
suggests, again, the primacy of thought to Dickinson. We might guess that Dickinson denied
herself a traditional relationship with Lord because she was afraid of it, not up to it emotionally.
We might also conclude that this denial and the resulting absence fueled her poetic energies. But
the value of this is not limited to the accretion of a life’s work unintended for publication.
Rather, the poetry was a vehicle for and the expression of intense thought. The recurrence of
absence in her lifestyle suggests that this denial was part of that strategy which allowed her to
live more in thought, and appreciate the reality of the realm of thought. In fact, her systematic
choice of the world of thought over the public world which she loved so much suggests that she
found the world of thought to hold a value which the public world did not. Is it possible that the
value of the world of thought was not merely that it was more comfortable to a sensitive soul and
more conducive to poetic creation, but that it was more real and true to the Christian whose God
dwelt in an intangible realm, who at death would return to paradise?
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As cryptically mysterious as her life, many of Dickinson’s poems are essentially riddles
which afford access to truth and reality through absences which demand both writer and reader
to enter the real reality of thought and encounter the presence of God, heaven, thoughts, and
feelings there.
Dickinson creates absences of information and coherence in her poetry, thereby forcing
her reader to put forth an effort at hard thinking to discover meaning. This mimics the way in
which the absence of God and the Calvinist’s need to understand and see him causes him to think
about God all the more. The absences of information and coherence in Dickinson’s poems come
in the forms of missing subjects (which are nonetheless present), unusual word choices,
paradoxes, metaphors, symbolism, and analogies which comprise a strategy of indirection.
Through these forms, Dickinson seduces the reader into searching for an answer or coherent
meaning that is not always there. When it is there, the absence ultimately creates a thought, the
revelation of an idea, or meaning. For example, the use of an unusual word may cause the reader
to look up the definition of that word. Or, a challenging aphorism stated at the beginning of the
poem might be understood by interpreting the rest of the poem. When the reader experiences this
dawning in thought she is aware of the creation of a thought or idea and this awareness brings
home the realness of thought. When the promised meaning is not there, it creates the awareness
of an abiding absence of meaning, or the presence of confusion, usually complex confusion.
This too brings home the realness of thought. Dickinson creates two extremes in her reader’s
thought, and in either case, the original absences in the poem are sure to create a search for
meaning, a process of thought, and a sense of the realness of thought. Thus, Dickinson’s poetic
absences not only create meaning and invoke the thought processes involved in searching for this
meaning, but they also create an awareness of the process and creation of thought. The net result
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is that her poems cause the reader to enter the realm of thought and begin to experience and
recognize it as a realm of reality.
Dickinson’s interest in and use of riddles is blatant in poems such as #8 which starts
“There is a word/ Which bears a sword/ Can pierce an armed man –“ and ends with the answer to
the riddle, the word “’forgot!’”. This and other poems like it (25, 357, 892) offer the solutions
which the riddle form promises and anticipates. An extended personification of the word makes
up the rest of the poem and provides clues as to what the word is. The personification suggests
that the word is powerful and capable of inflicting great pain and injury as it “pierces” with a
“sword” and “hurls” “barbed syllables”. Specifically, it pierces an “armed man”, representing
someone capable of protecting himself and thereby suggesting the word’s power that it can
pierce such an adversary. The “barbed syllables” and “sword” are suggestive of both the sound
and appearance of the word with its hard consonants, and dagger-shaped “t” at the end of the
word. Its muteness and the noiselessness of its onset hint at the negative value of the word, the
state of non-existence of that which is forgotten. In the second stanza, the personification
becomes a metaphor indicating that “Time” inflicts the injury caused by the piercing word. All
of these clues suggest that the word is “forgot”, but the reader is not likely to be able to figure
this out simply from the clues. The value of these clues is not that they allow the reader to make
meaning and discover the answer, though technically, they may do so. Rather, they are meant to
be solved and appreciated for their cleverness in hind-sight, once the reader is given the answer
at the end. This indicates Dickinson’s interest in the thinking involved in solving the
metaphorical and symbolic clues. The search for meaning and the revelation of an idea are the
true subject of this poem that initiates the reader, by way of the riddle form, into the realm of
thought.
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Finally, the poem also demonstrates the role of language in Dickinson’s metaphysics. It
suggests the great power of a single word and its ability to generate a great amount and depth of
thought. As the writer, Dickinson presumably had to think long and hard about the word
“forgot”, its shades and depth of meaning, as well as its spoken sound and written appearance, in
order to think of and write the metaphorical and symbolic clues. Likewise, to understand and
appreciate the clues, the reader must think hard about the word. Dickinson uses the thought
provoking properties of language to invoke thought in her own and her readers’ minds. At the
same time, she uses the riddle form to make her reader aware of the presence and realness of this
thought. In this way, Dickinson’s poetry was a practical metaphysics for both writer and reader
that revealed the reality of thought if not always the reality of metaphysical intangibles such as
God, heaven, thoughts and feelings.
One sees Dickinson’s enjoyment of the cleverness needed to write and read such a riddle
ripen into a more serious interest in the thought process, expressed again and again in riddling
poems that create more mental gymnastics than answers and solutions. In poem #510, Dickinson
still gives her reader the solution to the riddle, but it is more ambiguous and de-emphasized.
It was not Death, for I stood up,
And all the Dead, lie down –
It was not Night, for all the Bells
Put out their Tongues, for Noon.
It was not Frost, for on my Flesh
I felt Siroccos – crawl –
Nor Fire – for just my Marble feet
Could keep a Chancel, cool –
And yet, it tasted, like them all,
The Figures I have seen
Set orderly, for Burial,
Reminded me, of mine –
As if my life were shaven,
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And fitted to a frame,
And could not breathe without a key,
And ‘twas like Midnight, some –
When everything that ticked – has stopped –
And Space stares all around –
Or Grisly frosts – first Autumn morns,
Repeal the Beating Ground –
But, most, like Chaos – Stopless – cool –
Without a Chance, or Spar –
Or even a Report of Land –
To justify – Despair.
(P 510)
The poem begins with what Dobson calls an “omission of subject identification”.14 The subject
of the poem is represented by a nondescript “It” repeated in the first three stanzas of the poem.
Dickinson indicates that there is a subject, but refuses to identify it, creating the presence of an
absence, or what we could also call mystery. At the same time, she begins to describe the
subject, seducing the reader into reading the poem and engaging with its metaphors, analogy, and
symbolism. Describing, even just eluding to the existence of an unidentified subject promises
that meaning can be made from the mystery.
The missing subject in the first line of the poem only initiates a strategy of indirection by
which Dickinson describes the subject. The indirection continues with what Juhasz calls
“negative reference”.15 The speaker of the poem tells us that “It “ was neither “Death” nor
“Night”. In doing so, she suggests that it was, nonetheless, like both. She tells us that it was
neither “Frost” nor “Fire”, though it felt like both, suggested by the Siroccos which are hot
winds, and by the metaphor of cool marble. The “rapid succession of denials and assertions”16 in
the first three stanzas cause the reader to begin working out a problem of similarities and
differences which add up to the state of being described. However, the sum appears to be more
of a string of numbers rather than a single figure. Again, we see Dickinson concerned with
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involving her reader with a complex thought process which is complex enough to make the
reader aware of this process and the realness of an idea as it is either created or denied.
Dickinson further complicates the riddle through her choice of words. The reader who
encounters the word “Siroccos” is likely to have to look it up in a dictionary. Like many of her
other words, such as obviate, chrysalis, abdication, or remand, Siroccos has a strong sound to it
that is suggestive of associative meaning, while its true and exact meaning is vague and
inaccessible because of the abstract, foreign, specialized, or otherwise distanced nature of the
word’s meaning. Often, to understand a poem, one must understand the exact meaning and
concrete application of such words. To do so, a look in the dictionary or some very deep
thinking is required. In either case, Dickinson’s word choice often demands effort on the part of
the reader, as it does here. Her use of the word “taste” in stanza three also complicates the
riddle. It suggests that “It” tastes like “Death”, “Night”, “Frost”, and “Fire”. Yet, one does not
taste these things, but rather feels or experiences them. Her choice of words defies the reader’s
expectations and the way he or she conceives of experiencing the world through the senses.
This, like her “negative references” suggests that Dickinson is not concerned with giving a clear
answer to her riddle, but, rather, with suggesting meaning while also drawing attention to a lack
thereof in order to seduce her reader into a conscious search for meaning. The effects of her
word choice also suggest that thought and meaning are often associative, sometimes illogical and
inseparable from confusion and ignorance. Thus, Dickinson tells us something about the nature
of the realm of thought.
Stanza four introduces a metaphor whose vehicle is a life which is shaven and fitted to a
frame. It is unclear whether the tenor of the metaphor is the “It” of the first line, or the speaker’s
“figure” eluded to in stanza three. The “figure” represents the unnamed “It”, so, in a sense, it
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does not matter that the tenor is unclear. However, it does further obscure the subject and creates
more confusion. The metaphor itself is strange, objectifying the speaker’s life by likening it to
something that could be shaven and framed tightly. It is unclear how a key would allow one to
breathe or how it could relate literally to the shaving and the frame. The meaning here is
associative. The imagery suggests that the speaker’s life has been the object of exacting
diminishment, limitation, and control, that she has been stifled. The metaphor is strange and
imperfect, not holding together on a literal level. It indicates not only Dickinson’s interest in
how words and images create associative meaning, but an interest in drawing attention to this
process as well. Finally, this stanza gives the reader a sense of the state of being which the poem
seeks to describe and define.
The fifth stanza is almost purely associative. The first two lines describe Midnight, but it
is not a literal description. The associative language requires the reader to consider what it means
for everything that ticked to have stopped. It also requires her to grapple with the paradox of and
personification of Space staring all around. The imagery suggests a vacuous state in which all
noise and time have stopped and Space stares beyond itself to an infinity beyond human
conception. Again, the absences of coherence in the form of paradox and associative analogy
force an intimacy between reader and the thought process. They also give the reader a sense,
however incoherent and illogical, of the state of being which the poem seeks to describe and
define.
The sixth stanza continues the use of metaphor and word choice, but is more notable for
its contradictions and paradox. The first line of the stanza contradicts the preceding stanza,
making the poem itself paradoxical. The first line of the sixth stanza compares the state of being
in question to “Chaos – Stopless – cool –“, whereas the preceding stanza compares it to a state of
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stillness and quiet, the opposite of stopless chaos. The rhythm created by the dashes in this first
line are paradoxical because they create pauses, especially around the word stopless, book-ended
by two dashes. Thus, the rhythm of this first line and its effect upon the reader contradict its
meaning. Furthermore, the word “cool” is more associative of the emptiness and stillness of
“Space” in the preceding stanza, than the frenetic stoplessness of chaos. Even the use of the
word “Stopless” counteracts the meaning of the line, in that one cannot help but think of
stopping and stillness when one contemplates the meaning of the word “stopless”. The poem
thus portrays the complexity of despair and the way in which it can feel like two opposite things
at the same time.
The sixth and final stanza also contains the ambiguous solution to the riddle, “Despair”.
The dash appearing after the word “justify” makes for an ambiguous ending with two possible
readings. In the first reading, the dash separates “justify” and “Despair”. “Report” would be the
object of the infinitive “to justify”, and “Despair” would be clearly separated from the rest of the
poem and identified as the solution to the riddle, much like “forgot” of poem #8, lacking only the
quotation marks to further set it apart. The problem with this reading is that the meaning of
justifying a report of land is extremely cryptic. In the second reading, the dash separates but
relates “justify” and “Despair”. Here, “Despair” is the object of the infinitive “to justify”, but it
is also the answer to the riddle, marked as such by the preceding dash whose only other purpose
would be to undermine the verb-object relationship. However, this reading also contradicts the
idea that despair is the answer to the riddle even as it proposes it. For, the sixth stanza compares
the state of being in question to “Chaos”, without a “Report of Land --/ To justify – Despair.” In
this analogy, the state of being is parallel to “Chaos”, lacking a justification for despair, but not
parallel to despair, itself. Nevertheless, it is possible that this state of being which is like
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“Chaos” is also despair, and that it lacks a justification for itself. Despair is the only
metaphysical feeling named in the poem and this makes it difficult to read the poem without
reading “Despair” as the solution to the riddle. However, the ending is ambiguous and remains
unclear. The dash and rhythm and uniqueness of the word, not a clear articulation of the word’s
relationship to the rest of the poem, its metaphors, symbolism, and analogy, set it apart as the
solution.
Eberwein suggests that Dickinson uses indirection because the nature of her quest is
religious, and the reality of infinity which she wishes to express is “unreachable until the
expansive processes of growth impel the quester beyond mortal boundaries”.17 Through
indirection, Dickinson can describe what approaches the reality of infinity, its circumference, but
not the reality itself which lies at the center. Similarly, Josef Raab suggests that “because of the
alleged inadequacies of poetry and language to express what she sought to convey, Dickinson
decided to choose indeterminacy”.18 I agree with both conclusions. Dickinson uses indirection
because she wants to explore metaphysical realities such as ideas and feelings which are best
conveyed associatively (as well as connotatively) through word choice, metaphor, and analogy,
and which may never be satisfactorily expressed in language at all.
Indirection is also the means by which she attenuates the presence of absence initiated in
the missing and mysterious subject. The reader can only seek to discover what the subject is
because its identity is absent. Similarly, the reader engages with the metaphors, symbolism, and
analogy because, like the present but unidentified subject, they promise and withhold coherent
meaning. The structures of metaphors, symbolism, and analogy are logical, promising
associations of similarity between two words or ideas, just as the riddle form promises that
meaning can be made through the application of logic and association. At the same time, the
19
metaphors, symbolism, and analogies defy logic and sensory experience, thereby making it
impossible, to an extent, to discover the meaning promised by the semblance of logical,
associative structures. Thus, indirection creates an absence of coherent and apparent meaning,
and it also makes it impossible for the reader to acquire the solution they are searching for. The
net result is an awareness on the reader’s part, that she is engaged in searching for meaning, and
a consciousness of her own thoughts which must be tallied to come up with the total which is
supposed to be the riddle’s solution. In short, the reader is forced into an awareness of her
thought process and the relative enlightenment created by it.
Finally, the poem also gives the reader a complex sense of the meaning of despair. It
does so through highly associative imagery that makes the reader create a very personalized
sense and concept of what turns out to be despair. This sense of despair is very personalized
because associative language makes use of an individual’s unique thoughts and experiences, and
because it was the result of the reader’s thoughtful struggle to create meaning. Thus, the poem
creates a personal sense of the reality of despair in the reader’s thought by expressing nuances of
the meaning of despair in multiple and various ways. By making a metaphysical concept such as
despair more real in the writer and readers’ thought, this poem is part of a metaphysical practice.
In poem #280, the growth of Dickinson’s riddle form into her cryptic style of absences
and indirection is complete; her metaphysical strategy of absence is subtle and refined and
effective.
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
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My Mind was going numb –
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space – began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here –
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then -(P 280)
Here, the riddle form is subtle. Closely related to a missing subject, an omission of “narrative
detail”19 initiates the search for meaning. Dickinson seems to be describing a state of being or a
psychic event, but there is no narrative detail or any other apparent clue as to what that event
might be or what external events might have caused it. Yet, a progression of “And when” and
“And then” throughout the poem provides a semblance of narration and a promise of logical,
linear relationships which seduce the reader into searching the poem for an answer as to what
internal and external events are being described. Intriguing metaphors representing the brain and
consciousness with a spatial vocabulary also seduce the reader with the promise of logical
relationships inherent in metaphors and the clarity and concreteness of spatial representations.
However, paradox, confusion, ambiguity, and missing information have their day again, and the
reader fails to identify the mysterious subject of the poem. In fact, the overall effect of the poem
is to destroy any sense of coherence and logic, and replace it with a sense of utter confusion and
chaos. This confused thought and feeling is the solution to the riddle. At the same time,
however, Dickinson probes the notion and reality of consciousness and being, voicing questions
21
and propositions about consciousness and reality which are gems of coherent thought mixed up
with the confusion and chaos.
The greatest source of confusion in this poem is the fact that it is entirely symbolic and
metaphorical. The entire poem is an extended, narrative metaphor for a state of being or psychic
event which, like the missing subject, is not identified. The state of being is, for the speaker, like
the feeling of a funeral in her brain, with mourners treading. This metaphor is suggestive of
death, deep sadness, heaviness, formality, ceremony, repetition, and intensity. It is suggestive of
many qualities, but no narrative elements. We don’t know what died, nor who or what the
mourners are, except thoughts, perhaps, as they are resident in the brain. Furthermore, the last
line of the first stanza is ambiguous. It tells us that “Sense was breaking through”, but it is
unclear whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. “Sense breaking through” is a familiar
metaphor with positive value, signifying that something is becoming clear to someone.
However, as the brain is being represented as a space where a funeral is being held, the phrase
“breaking through” takes on spatial implications. “Sense” may be breaking through the exterior
of the brain, into its interior space in a destructive way.
Confusion continues with the continuation of the funeral service in the next two stanzas,
suggesting a progression of internal events, a change of thought and feeling. The funeral is
interrupted by the tolling of space and the shipwreck and isolation of the speaker and of
“Silence”. This suggests some kind of climax of alienation and separation, followed by an
ambiguous ending. The speaker loses her faculty of reason, resulting in a dramatic and violent
demise represented by a downward drop and collisions with worlds. The death is suggested by
the line “And Finished knowing – then –“. This ending can be read in two ways. It can mean
that after hitting a world at every plunge, the speaker finished knowing, that is, being conscious.
22
Or, one can read it, pausing between the words “Finished” and “knowing”. In this reading, the
speaker finishes her plunge and only then begins to know. Ultimately, the reader can get no
more than an intuitive and associative, albeit powerful, sense of the psychic event. It is clearly
negative, likened to a funeral, and involves various disturbances in perception. Nothing more
specific or concrete than this can be known. Even the progression of one state of being to
another which might have provided an outline of the psychic event is disturbed by an ambiguous,
indeterminate ending.
The other main source of confusion in the poem is the representation space. In the first
stanza the brain is likened to a space in which a funeral is taking place. We think of a room,
perhaps a church. “Mourners” sit and tread in this space, suggesting a room with a floor and
chairs. The image of this space is becoming more specific and concrete in the reader’s mind. In
the third stanza, however, the floor suddenly becomes the floor of the “Soul”, and not the brain,
as the mourners creak across it with the box. Just as suddenly, Dickinson redirects her reader’s
imagination from the interior of the mind and soul, to the external and limitless space of “all the
Heavens”, or a capitalized “Space”. Then, the reader is directed to focus in on an indeterminate
“here –“ at the end of the fourth stanza. “Here –“ marks the place where the speaker and
“Silence” are wrecked. Yet, it also seems to be referring back to the infinite space of the
heavens. However, this space is characterized by sound, likened to a tolling bell. It thus does
not make sense that silence would be found in that space. Yet, it does make sense that silence
would be "Wrecked” in a space which is also infinite sound. The dash following the word
“here” emphasizes the paradoxical indeterminacy of that normally determinate word. Finally,
the reader joins the speaker in a free-fall drop through an unnamed space filled with worlds, and
ends not with a cessation to the falling, but to knowing. Whereas, at the beginning of the poem,
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spatial terms were used to represent consciousness, a term of consciousness is used to represent
the end of movement and of space. At the beginning of the poem, it seems like the spatial
vocabulary will help the reader to decode the poem and understand and identify the psychic
event. However, the spatial representations become less concrete and clear. The representation
of infinite, indeterminate space creates and reflects the incoherence of the poem in general.
Moreover, the reader’s progression toward incoherence parallels that of the poem and its
speaker.
Dickinson’s representation of space in this poem has metaphysical implications. First of
all, that Dickinson chooses to represent the consciousness through a spatial vocabulary in the
first place suggests that she seeks to represent it as real. Furthermore, she represents the space of
consciousness as being infinite and formless, where here is indeterminate. This suggests that
consciousness and thought have a reality unlike so-called physical reality, without limits or
boundaries. The space of thought and consciousness is a lot like heaven in this way,
transcending the limitations of temporality. Additionally, Dickinson blurs the boundaries
between the space of the brain and the space of the soul, suggesting that the distinction between
the two, and the very words and concepts, themselves, are false. Finally, the ambiguous ending
poses the question as to whether knowing, consciousness, itself, is dependent upon the faculty of
reason, or comes only when one is freed of it.
In addition to the use of spatial vocabulary, Dickinson also interchanges vocabulary of
sense and cognition to blur the boundaries between brain, body, and soul, and otherwise probe
the notion and reality of consciousness. In the first line of the poem, Dickinson juxtaposes the
faculty of feeling with the faculty of thinking, represented by the brain. Usually, one thinks of
the brain as something which thinks, but not feels. However, because the funeral is in the brain,
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this suggests that the brain feels, not only in an emotional sense of the word, but in a physical,
bodily sense as well. For, a funeral is not something one thinks or even feels, so much as
experiences. It is an event in time and space. Dickinson proposes that a thought is like an event.
It takes on the properties of space, time, and concreteness. She essentially gives thought the
properties of physical reality, suggesting that thought is comparably real, dynamic, and complex.
At the end of the first stanza, the use of the phrase, “Sense was breaking through”, further
complicates the picture of consciousness. “Sense” has the dual meaning of both wisdom, as in
common sense, and physical perception, as in the five senses. The word, itself, expresses the
complex nature of being which includes both conceptual and physical perception. While the fact
that repetitious treading causes the breakthrough suggests that sense is physical, the fact that it is
breaking through to the brain suggests that it is conceptual. Furthermore, as noted above, it is
difficult to tell if the breaking through of sense is a positive or negative thing. Dickinson’s use
of the phrase suggests that the boundary between conceptual and physical perception is as
uncertain as the meaning which she intended.
Dickinson blurs boundaries between the conceptual and physical aspects of being through
other word choices. Dickinson’s use of both the word “Brain” and “Mind” may suggest that the
consciousness and the brain are not one and the same, reminding her reader that a supersensible
consciousness is not the same as muscle. Or, it may suggest that the distinction between the two
is purely linguistic and false. Similarly, he way in which the space of the “Brain” becomes the
space of the “Soul” suggests a blurred or false boundary between the body and soul. In stanza
two, the “Mind”, not even the more physical “Brain”, here, undergoes the physical phenomenon
of going numb. In the third stanza, “Being” is likened to “an Ear”, reducing existence to
25
physical sense perception. In general, the poem blurs boundaries between feeling, sense, and
thought, between mind, brain, soul, being, reason, body.
Dickinson probes the nature of being and reality, asking, is it physical or spiritual?
sensible or supersensible? She also suggests that words and the concepts they express are not
sufficient to express the complexity of reality, but only break up being into false components. It
is the complexity of these metaphysical realities that makes the first line so pregnant with
paradox, and the ending so ambiguous and that makes the poem such a headache for the reader.
Whether the reader takes the time to carefully inspect what’s going on in these metaphors,
symbolism, and spatial representations, or whether he simply responds to the paradox and
complexity inherent in the language, he is grappling with metaphysics in a more or less
conscious way. Whether he runs into the stumbling blocks of omitted narrative detail and
disintegrating spatial representations, or delves into maxims of boundaryless being, the reader is
likely to feel something of a funeral in his brain. The reader, like the speaker of the poem,
experiences something of the intense inquiry into metaphysical realities from the brain, the soul,
and the self, outward to infinity and consciousness, that results in a mental plunge.
In this poem, the reader’s consciousness of his own thoughts is pushed to a new level.
The process of summarizing metaphorical and analogic similarities and differences in poem #510
becomes an acute awareness of one’s inability to comprehend, to create clear and logical
meaning from not entirely illogical and nonsensical metaphors and imagery. Dickinson
maintains enough logic to maintain the mirage of promised meaning, while denying enough
logic, creating enough confusion, to deny the meaning promised. It is a masterful manipulation
of her reader and simulation of an experience or feeling we may do an injustice to name at all,
but which most have decided to call madness. The point of the poem is that there is no sufficient
26
name. Dickinson expresses an idea by attempting to recreate it in her reader’s own
consciousness. She creates instead of naming or describing this metaphysical reality. The
solution of the riddle is not named because the solution is the experiencing of the riddle itself.
To name it would reduce its reality.
The poem defies understanding, as do Poems 754 and 640, the first of which Dobson
chalks up to “an exercise in futility”.20 Far from futile, these poems are mental exercises which
make the reader experience the thoughts or feelings, the psychic event which is the present but
unidentified subject of the poem. All three of these poems create, to some degree, that feeling
that the top of one’s head has been taken off, which Dickinson considered the pinnacle of
poetry.21 Far from a clear communication or aesthetic artifact, a poem, to Dickinson, is an
experience in thought and feeling.
Through this poem and others like it (and others to the extent that they are like it),
Dickinson is practicing a metaphysics. She is not only exploring metaphysical realities, such as
thoughts, ideas, and feelings, she is creating them. They are created in the thought of the writer
and reader who go through the thinking exacted by the poem’s absences of coherent meaning
and indirection. Thus, Dickinson is not only exploring the reality of thought, she is exploring
the reality that is thought. Her dedication to the activity of poetry writing, the metaphysical
nature of much of her poetry, the systematic use of absences in both her life and work, and the
systematic use of indirection and riddles in her poetry suggest as much, as does her use of spatial
terms to describe the real reality of thought, such as “the undiscovered continent” referring to the
mind, and the statement “My Country is Truth.”
Metaphysical practice, as much as poetic professionalism and feminist politics, was at the
heart of Dickinson’s life and work. Given the unity of Dickinson’s life and work, it is not
27
surprising that critics such as Joanne Dobson and Jane Donahue Eberwein have championed
Dickinson as a feminist of sorts. They see her as a woman who felt oppressed by a patriarchal
society and who asserted her independence and power by withdrawing from this society to create
her own world. They aptly identify this withdrawal as a strategy. Suzanne Juhasz writes, in The
Undiscovered Continent, about feminist critics of Dickinson:
They assume that Dickinson’s actions make sense and that her actions and her
poetry are related in a way that also makes sense as well as art. These writers
do not separate woman from poet, and they assume that the woman poet can
assert control over herself, her life, her work....’strategy’ means that Dickinson
chose to keep to her house, to her room, to live in her mind rather than in the
external world, in order to achieve certain goals and to circumvent or overcome
certain forces in her environment and experience that were in opposition to
those goals—particularly, the expectations and norms that a patriarchal society
creates for women, especially problematic when a woman wants to be a poet.22
If these critics do not separate woman from poet, they do separate the philosophical and
religious thinker, the Christian, from the woman poet. While they assert that it was a strategy
rather than a retreat for her to have lived in her mind, they don't recognize the central role that
Dickinson’s thoughts and feelings about religion and metaphysics played in this strategy.
Dickinson’s strategy gave her entrance to a world which was much more than a mere alternative
to a patriarchal society. It was more than a world where a woman poet might be protected within
the power and control of dictatorship. The world which could tempt Dickinson away from the
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public world which held so “predominant (a) place in (her) affections” would have to have been
nothing less than a world which included all that existed in the public world and more than that.
It included access to, or at least a closer look at, truth and reality itself. For this reason, I call her
poetry not a strategy, though it is that, but a metaphysical practice.
In Strategies of Limitation, Eberwein writes:
She connected “I” with infinity by a process of exclusion, ruthlessly eliminating
whatever incident, imagery, or syntax might push them apart and carefully
selecting the few words that fused them.23
Critics of Dickinson pay a certain homage to the poet by using poetic metaphors themselves.
While they are often beautiful, they also often make the argument as unclear as some of
Dickinson’s poems. It is unclear, here, if Eberwein is using Dickinson’s poetic (and life) style of
elimination as a metaphor for a linguistic strategy and effect, or a metaphysical process by which
she sought a real-life revelation of truth and reality. It is likely that she intends the latter, but her
penchant for using metaphor to say as much hides the significance and even the nature of such an
endeavor behind a shroud of symbolic language. Is this merely a poetic strategy or a bold
experiment in metaphysics?
Critics emphasize Dickinson’s belief in the futility of trying to express the important and
true things through language24, but doesn’t this undermine her poetic activity? Doesn’t her
commitment to poetic exploration and articulation of the inscrutable speak as loudly as her
recognition of the difficulty of the endeavor? Doesn’t her commitment, in the end, bespeak an
abiding conviction that discovering the real reality was a possible, and the most important
endeavor?
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One can explore the relative reality of feelings, thoughts, and material things. But to
explore the reality of God, or a transcendent truth and reality is not a reckoning of relativity but
is daring to believe that something which is not physical or even sensible is as real as, in fact,
more real, than the physical -- that what we take to be life is but a shadow of something else, a
dream state from which one may awaken to the really real. By writing poetry, Dickinson was
not only dedicating herself to an artistic enterprise, but attempting to discover another state of
reality itself, by teaching herself and others to live there.
1
John Robinson, Emily Dickinson Looking to Canaan (London: Faber and Faber, 1986) 34.
2
Sewall, 336
Sewall, 336
4
Robinson, 37
3
5
Robinson, 36
Robinson, 36
7
Kher 47-48
8
Reynolds, 15
9
Reynolds,
10
Reynolds, 32
11
Reynolds, 35
12
Handbook
13
LOA, 62
14
SOR 100
15
TUC 66
16
TUC 67
17
Eberwein 17-18
18
Handbook 277
19
SOL 139
20
SOR 123
21
? – head off
22
Juhasz - ?
23
SOL - ?
24
Handbook – futility of language
6
30