Emily Dickinson
by Peter Cash
English Association Bookmarks
No. 7
English Association Bookmarks Number 7
To ‗Honest Dog‘
Hollywood Dove (Holly) 25th July 1995 - 26th November 2010
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
by
Peter Cash
BOOKS TO READ
ed. T. H. Johnson, Emily Dickinson: The Complete Poems, Faber 1970.
Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson, Harvard University Press 1974.
ed. Ted Hughes, A Choice of Emily Dickinson's Verse, Faber 1968.
ed. Helen McNeil, Emily Dickinson, Everyman‘s Poetry 1997.
ed. Jackie Moore, Emily Dickinson: Selected Poems, Oxford University Press 2006.
ed. Robert N. Linscott, Selected Poems & Letters of Emily Dickinson, Doubleday 1959.
ed. James Reeves, Emily Dickinson: Selected Poems, Heinemann Poetry Bookshelf 1959.
Neither of these editors respects Dickinson‘s unique means of punctuation; both see fit to
standardise it for her.
Joan Kirkby, Women Writers: Emily Dickinson, Macmillan 1991.
This paperback puts in perspective Emily‘s intimate relationship with her sister-in-law Susan
Gilbert and explains how it affects her poetic personality. Its bibliography is commended.
Glennis Byron, Emily Dickinson: Selected Poems, York Notes 2000.
Marnie Pomeroy, Student Guide to Emily Dickinson, Greenwich Exchange 2003.
SCOPE OF TOPIC
Death, and the problem of life after death, obsessed her. She seems to have
thought of it constantly – she died all her life, she probed death daily.
Conrad Aiken
It is in the contemplation of death that the necessity for human attitudes to
become self-supporting in the face of an indifferent universe is most poignantly
felt. Only the greatest tragic poets have achieved an equally self-reliant and
immitigable acceptance.
I. A. Richards
After her thirtieth birthday, Emily Dickinson seems to have contemplated her death on a
‗daily‘ basis: in 1862, when she was thirty-one years of age, she wrote no fewer than 366
poems – rather more than she had written in her entire career before that date. More
followed: in 1863 she wrote 141 poems; in 1864 her out-put was 174; in 1865, it was 85.
Although her period of intense creativity coincides with the American Civil War, Dickinson‘s
poetry succeeds in ignoring this cataclysmic event altogether; she writes as if it never took
place. Her theme is not political, but personal: her intensely personal fear of Death. In
Poem 1703, Dickinson herself refers to ‗the Dying Theme‘.
Given her grand total of 1,775 poems, every editor of Emily Dickinson‘s work deserves
enormous respect for the selection at which he/she finally arrives. Even Linscott and Reeves,
who both edit her texts in an unscholarly way, have had to make ‗a choice‘, excluding many
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poems of interest and power in order to arrive at the necessarily limited selection by which
Dickinson should in their views be represented.
Of the five choices/selections cited above, my strong preference is for Helen McNeil‘s
Everyman edition – not only because it honours Dickinson‘s own quirky punctuation, but also
because it uses T. H. Johnson‘s definitive numbering of her poems, completed in 1955.
Indeed, the Everyman edition would be ideal if only it made room – as Ted Hughes‘ Choice
alone does – for Poem 532 I tried to think a lonelier Thing. I say this because one phrase
from the first quatrain of this poem –
I tried to think a lonelier Thing
Than any I had seen –Some Polar Expiation –- An Omen in the Bone
Of Death‘s tremendous nearness –– is utterly indispensable to my own view of the way in which Emily Dickinson should be
approached and represented. Almost equally instructive is Poem 963 A nearness to
Tremendousness. In the edition by which I first came to Dickinson, James Reeves‘ excellent
introduction explains that thunderstorms signified for her ‗a nearness to tremendousness‘
[sic] but tantalisingly does not give the source for the quotation. Just three of the poems
which support Reeves‘ perception are Poem 258 There‘s a certain Slant of Light, Poem 414
‗Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch and Poem 824 The Wind begun to rock the Grass
(second version). In such poems, Dickinson identifies a cosmic/elemental force and
confesses herself in awe of the phenomenon.
Wider reading of her work reveals that her obsessive search is for an experience that can be
convincingly compared to the moment of Death; in Poem 1307 That short, potential stir,
she refers to ‗the éclat of Death‘. It is very much as if, by giving to this unknowable
sensation a local habitation and a name, she can prepare herself for it, even domesticate it:
for instance, Poem 280 I felt a Funeral, in my Brain and Poem 465 I heard Fly buzz –when I died. As Conrad Aiken makes clear, there is also the additional and accompanying
‗problem of life after death‘. Whereas her imaginings of the fatal moment tend to be
dramatic and physical, her conceptions of the after-life are more comforting and homely: for
instance, Poem 243 I‘ve known a Heaven, like a Tent (where Heaven is a travelling circus),
Poem 374 I went to Heaven (where it is ‗a small Town‘, not unlike Amherst) or Poem 489
We pray –- to Heaven (which asks ‗Is Heaven a Place –- a Sky –- a Tree?‘)
Whilst Ted Hughes‘ Choice gives us Poem 894 Of Consciousness, her awful Mate, Helen
McNeil‘s selection includes Poem 642 Me from Myself –- to banish –- ; both editions
inevitably contain the metaphorical elaboration of this existentialist theme, Poem 670 One
need not be a Chamber –- to be haunted –- (a great poem, but only indirectly on ‗the Dying
Theme‘). Consistently, the pain expressed in Emily Dickinson‘s poems emanates from her
consciousness of ‗Death‘s tremendous nearness‘: her vulnerability to the ‗tremendous‘ force
of Nature which threatens at any moment to whisk her away to an unknown existence
elsewhere. This feeling of intense vulnerability is responsible for the strong strain of selfdramatisation in Dickinson‘s poetry: for instance, Poem 248 Why –- do they shut Me out of
Heaven? (where she is ‗Timid as a Bird‘), Poem 328 A Bird, came down the Walk (where the
bird is not the only ‗one in danger, Cautious‘) and Poem 401 What Soft –- Cherubic
Creatures. In this latter poem, the auburn-haired poet finds for herself two epithets – a
specimen of ‗freckled Human Nature‘ and ‗Brittle Lady‘ – which define her perception of
herself. Such self-consciousness prepares us for Poem 425 Good Morning – Midnight
(where she is ‗a little Girl‘) and Poem 441:
This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me –The simple News that Nature told –With tender Majesty
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Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see –For love of Her –- Sweet –- countrymen –Judge tenderly –- of Me
In these verses, Dickinson‘s self-pity competes with her self-awareness; there is a tension
between her sorrow for herself and her wry attitude to her lot. As a ‗brittle‘ and ‗freckled‘
thing, Dickinson feels a strong sense of exclusion; to counter it, she invites ‗the World‘ to
think kindly of her for no other reason than that she remains one of Nature‘s own ‗tender‘
creatures. If they are to ‗judge‘ her, then her ‗countrymen‘, being ‗Sweet‘, should show a
reciprocal tenderness; in this way of thinking, we can see the strength of character which
distinguishes her major poems.
Radical though Dickinson‘s lyrics are, her invariable verse-form is the common metre of the
hymn-quatrain: namely, alternate lines of iambic tetrameter and trimeter (which often rhyme
alternately too). Glennis Byron points out that many of Dickinson‘s poems – such as Poem
441 – can be sung to the tune of Isaac Watts‘ hymn O God, our help in ages past; to be
exact, she has in mind the tune of St Anne, composed by William Croft in 1708. Such an
observation serves to remind us where to look: although we do not come to Dickinson for
variety of versification and fluency of syntax, we do encounter a Shakespearean range of
vocabulary. Most distinctively of all, there is both the ubiquitous recourse to capital letters
and that unique use of dashes which assist her in fitting her hundreds of surprising wordcombinations to her vision. The poems on which I have written notes below are the poems
in which Dickinson conveys her central vision [of ‗Death‘s tremendous nearness‘] with formal
accomplishment, verbal clarity and wit. In my view, these are the thirteen poems in which
she devises her most dramatic strategies for supporting herself ‗in the contemplation of
death‘ and they are the poems upon which (as Richards implies) her reputation should stand.
NOTES
It is not possible to come to a full appreciation of Emily Dickinson's poetry without a
rudimentary knowledge of Calvinist theology. Frenchman John Calvin (1509-1564) taught
that the fate of every human soul was predestined: in other words, that man‘s soul was
neither saved nor damned by his actions on earth, but saved or damned in advance and
regardless of his actions. James Reeves confirms that Amherst in Massachusetts, where
Dickinson and her family lived, was ‗theocratic to an extent difficult to realise‘ and adds
significantly that its standards of thought and conduct were those of Calvinistic Puritanism.
Dickinson‘s biographer R. B. Sewall recounts how she repeatedly rejected Calvinist doctrine;
even so, it is extremely clear that Dickinson and her fellow New Englanders did die wondering
what would happen to their immortal souls.
Poem 52 Whether my bark went down at sea (1858) illustrates this fixation. Here,
Dickinson seeks to cope with her fear of Death by distilling it into a traditional metaphor:
Whether my bark went down at sea —
Whether she met with gales —
Whether to isles enchanted —
She bent her docile sails —
By what mystic mooring
She is held today —
This is the errand of the eye
Out upon the Bay.
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It is noticeable that her fear is not so much of Death itself as of the sea-journey that her soul
(‗my bark‘) will undertake afterwards. For this reason, Dickinson – never herself a convinced
Calvinist – easily imagines that her soul is embarked upon a maritime voyage towards a
‗mystic mooring‘.
It is chilling then to realise that the poem is being composed
posthumously: that ‗the errand‘ is being run, not by her eye, but by the eye of a third person
– a friend, a relative, a fellow New Englander. Her strategy, then, has been to imagine
herself dead and to speculate from beyond the grave upon the way in which her Calvinist
contemporaries will be reacting to her death.
Poem 52 is also an example of Dickinson‘s strong tendency towards self-dramatisation: in
wondering whether her soul ‗went down at sea‘ or found its way to ‗isles enchanted‘, she is
romanticising its progress and suggesting an epic struggle. Allen Tate considers that, for all
its shortcomings, the Calvinist doctrine possessed ‗an immense, incalculable value for
literature: it dramatised the human soul‘. Shrewdly, Reeves is at pains to point out that
Calvinism casts no shadow over Dickinson's poetry: ‗there is no sense of repression or of the
gloom usually associated with Puritanism‘. This is true; on the contrary, Dickinson‘s poems
are more likely to read like resourceful attempts to cheer herself up in the face of this ‗gloom‘
– or, rather, in the face of an uncertain fate.
Poem 76 Exultation is the going (1859) is another attempt to find a ‗self-supporting‘ attitude
in these same circumstances. In the first quatrain, Dickinson seems positively to exult at the
prospect of her life-after-death:
Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea,
Past the houses –- past the headland –Into deep eternity –Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?
Hans Meyerhoff (Time in Literature, 1963) observes that there is ‗an immediate datum of
experience ... uniquely and unequivocally defining the movement of time in human life; this is
the irreversibility of the movement of time towards death‘; put more simply, he means that
our experience of life teaches us that we are moving inexorably through time towards
oblivion. Raised against a Calvinist background, Dickinson does not experience life/perceive
death in that way; instead, she conceives readily of ‗deep eternity‘ (for which the sea is again
her symbol). On first reading, it looks as if she is referring to the exhilaration which human
sailors (‗bred among the mountains‘) experience when they first sail out of sight of land; on
second reading, it becomes clear that she is extending a metaphor for life-after-death.
Crucial is the interrogative mood of the second quatrain: at once, she qualifies her opening
assertion and asks whether the mariner (who was born and bred ‗inland‘) can actually feel
exultant about being adrift upon a wide, wide sea; metaphorically, she asks whether finite
man (‗the sailor‘) can ever come to terms with an infinite existence (in ‗deep eternity‘). Can
‗inland souls‘ [= land-lubbers] ever be sanguine about being outward bound – especially since
they know not where they go? In Poem 501 This World is not Conclusion, Dickinson restates this belief in an after-life. Quite literally, her declarative statement – ‗This World is not
Conclusion‘ – is a declaration of faith.
Poem 216 Safe in their Alabaster Chambers (1859) is among the most anthologised poems
from the Dickinson canon; certainly, it is one of a dozen poems upon which both her identity
and her reputation as a poet rest. Recognising how many of these poems deal either directly
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or indirectly with Death, Conrad Aiken remarks that ‗ultimately, the obsession became
morbid‘. Here, Dickinson expresses her simple envy of the dead who are
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers —
Untouched by Morning
And untouched by Noon —
Lie the meek members of the Resurrection —
Rafter of Satin — and Roof of Stone!
She envies the dead because they are ‗safe‘ from the mental anguish and physical agony of
living in the world of time (through which she is moving irreversibly towards death). It seems
to Dickinson that the ‗meek‘' are blessed because they can lie looking upwards at the ‗satin‘
underside of a coffin-lid; it seems to her that the meek in their timeless chambers can enjoy
(if that‘s the right verb) a psychological security that no mortal in the real world can ever
hope to experience; in short, Death is the supreme form of safety. The mood is dour and
glum: in this poem, Dickinson seems genuinely to feel that peace will be hers only after she
has died.
Emily Dickinson was a meek personality who eventually lived as a recluse; as such, she
confidently expected her soul to be resurrected (see Poem 501). In this poem, she tries
four alternatives for Stanza 2 in an endeavour to find images by which the triumph of the
grateful dead can be successfully measured. For his edition, Ted Hughes prefers her second
version, this version of 1861:
Grand go the Years — in the Crescent — above them—
Worlds scoop their Arcs —
And Firmaments — row —
Diadems — drop — and Doges — surrender —
Soundless as dots — on a Disc of Snow —
Though ‗Diadems — drop — and Doges — surrender‘, the dead need not worry; only the
living need be worried by the uncomfortable feelings that the world will go on without them
and that they too will one day fall ‗Soundless as dots — on a Disc of Snow‘. Ultimately,
Dickinson becomes eloquent through the interaction of her symbols. It is as a symbolist that
she makes this final point: that cosmic occurrences are matters of complete indifference to
the dead. Safe in their alabaster chambers, the dead and buried confound the idea that
human beings remain eternally subject to ‗tremendous‘ forces; in their tombs, they refute the
very suggestion – as her fourth version of Stanza 2 (‗Midnight in Marble refutes the Suns‘)
makes explicit. As a consequence, she cannot wait to share the dead‘s enjoyment of worldoblivion ... In 1861, such an emphasis is characteristic of Dickinson‘s poetic personality: to
many, her conclusion will seem something of a pyrrhic victory, a literally cold consolation,
requiring a flexing of wit; to the poet herself, at this stage, it seems to mark a moral and
spiritual triumph.
Poem 280 I Felt a Funeral, in my Brain (1862) makes a sensational start. It is one of
several poems in the Dickinson canon to commence with a simple announcement of an
incomprehensible state of affairs; our interest is immediately engaged in discovering what, if
anything, she can possibly mean. In this case, it turns out that she is attempting by means
of metonymy (‗a Funeral, in my Brain‘) to describe a bad headache. At this literal level, her
repetition of the present participles (‗treading, treading‘ and ‗beating, beating‘) enacts for her
the persistent pounding of her head.
At another level, Dickinson‘s headache supplies her with an occasion on which she can
imagine (in her brain) that her own funeral is taking place. At this service, the treadings (of
Mourners‘ feet) and the beatings (of the mournful Drum) are literal sound-effects. The sense
that Dickinson is actively attending her own funeral (staring up at a ‗Rafter of Satin‘ on the
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underside of her coffin-lid) is heightened by her reference to ‗those same Boots of Lead‘.
Here, she manages by means of synecdoche to suggest that the Mourners – rather than
herself – exist in a disembodied state; elsewhere, the Mourners are represented only by
impersonal pronouns so that ‗they‘ (the living) remain less distinctly realised than the ‗dead‘
poet. Here, then, Dickinson takes a mundane experience (suffering from a painful headache)
and transforms it into a dramatic encounter with the after-life; in Poem 520 I started Early –
Took my Dog, a similar transformation comes about. This is a powerful strategy because it
charges a common occurrence with an uncommon significance; it invests a natural incident
with supernatural possibilities.
Dickinson‘s other strategy is to adopt a posthumous stance towards an everyday experience;
in both Poem 712 Because I could not stop for Death and Poem 827 The Only News I
know, similar tactics are used. In all cases, this strategy gives her an imaginative advantage:
if she can testify from beyond the grave that Being [= being dead?] is ‗but an ear‘, who is to
gainsay her? Death, she postulates, is an essentially auditory experience which gives a girl a
headache. Such playfulness does much to enliven Dickinson‘s vision of the human ordeal and
much to palliate it. It helps to defend her against Aiken‘s accusation that her pre-occupations
are consistently ‗morbid‘.
Dickinson‘s final quatrain imagines that the bottom has fallen out of her pine-box (‗a Plank in
Reason, broke‘) and that she has plunged into another world, entered a further dimension. It
is here that Dickinson‘s use of the dash –
And Finished knowing — then —
– ceases to seem idiosyncratic and becomes functional in the expression of her agnosticism.
Has she ‗Finished knowing‘ in the sense that only an oblivion awaits her and that there is
nothing in this dimension to know? Or ‗Finished knowing‘ in that, after having entered this
dimension, she at last knows all there is to know? The function of that final dash is to cut off
communication with the posthumous voice and tantalise us by this choice of alternatives, this
open-ended answer to the major question of our existence.
Poem 348 I dreaded that first Robin, so (1862) is another of the most celebrated poems in
the Dickinson canon. Here, she achieves two purposes: first, she devises a strategy to cope
with her personal unfitness for ‗the World‘ which ‗never wrote‘ to her; at the same time, she
finds a way of overcoming her dread of drawing too close to that ‗tremendous‘ World.
Dickinson‘s opening sentiments, coolly expressed in an iambic hymn-metre, reveal her
agoraphobic state of mind, her paranoid apprehensiveness (‗Like one in danger, Cautious‘) at
going out even into her own garden:
I dreaded that first Robin, so,
But He is mastered, now,
I‘m some accustomed to Him grown,
He hurts a little, though —
I thought if I could only live
Till that first Shout got by
Not all Pianos in the Woods
Had power to mangle me —
I dared not meet the Daffodils —
For fear their Yellow Gown
Would pierce me with a fashion
So foreign to my own —
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Dickinson ‗dreads that first Robin‘ and ‗dare not meet the Daffodils‘ because these natural
things are bright-and-beautiful and serve sharply to remind her of her own pallid appearance
and timid nature: come Spring, she goes in ‗fear‘ of ‗a fashion so foreign‘ to her own white
gown. Faced with the fierce beauties of Nature, she feels afraid and finally conjures up a
fantastic vision of herself. Here, the lilt of the common metre –
They‘re here, though; not a creature failed —
No Blossom stayed away
In gentle deference to me —
The Queen of Calvary —
Each one salutes me, as he goes,
And I, my childish Plumes,
Lift, in bereaved acknowledgement,
Of their unthinking Drums —
– conveys a proud self-assurance. Throughout, the poem is remarkable for the power of its
lyricism: in each hymn-verse, a pair of half-rhymes (now/though, by/me, Gown/own,
Plumes/Drums) guarantees the integrity of the personal feeling. In effect, Dickinson is
writing in the confessional mode: as a result, she uses fifteen first-person pronouns in an
effort to articulate her innermost fears and thereby ‗master‘ them.
These final verses are exceptionally candid and permit us to appreciate related factors: first,
the full extent of her neurosis; second, the full extent of the self-dramatisation needed to
deal with it. Dickinson‘s reference to herself as ‗Queen of Calvary‘ is richly ambiguous: first, it
may refer to the fact that in 1862 Reverend Charles Wadsworth left New England to become
Pastor of Calvary Church in San Francisco; second, it suggests that our celibate poetess had
outrageously come to regard herself as Christ‘s bride. She casts herself in a regal role; its
value to her is that it provides a pretext on which she need not be afraid of the birds and the
bees. The Queen is ‗bereaved‘: that is, her mentor has left her for the West Coast/Christ has
been crucified. In these conditions, it would be ungracious if she did not acknowledge those
creatures that come to pay their respects. Such is the fiction which must be written in order
to alter her consciousness of ‗the World‘ (which the ‗tremendous‘ forces of Nature represent).
What is more, the fiction stays dear to her: in Poem 1072 Title divine –- is mine, also 1862,
she re-styles herself ‗Empress of Calvary‘.
Poem 389 There‘s been a Death in the Opposite House (1862) is another famous poem; it is
probably her most anthologised poem and certainly her least eccentric. Its lack of
eccentricity has much to do with her subdued interest in her self: ―I had a terror –- since
September –- I could tell to none –- and so I sing as the Boy does of the Burying Ground –because I am afraid‖ (Letter to T. W. Higginson, 26th April 1862). In most poems, Dickinson
sings a song of herself: in particular, she explains how ‗afraid‘ of Death she is and wonders
aloud how she will find an attitude to cope with her acute awareness of her mortality. In this
poem, she writes for once of Death as if it is something that happens to somebody else: for
once, it has nothing to do with her. Even her perspective is that of ‗the Boy‘:
There‘s been a Death, in the Opposite House,
As lately as Today.
I know it, by the numb look
Such Houses have — alway —
The Neighbours rustle in and out —
The Doctor — drives away —
A Window opens like a Pod —
Abrupt — mechanically —
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Somebody flings a Mattress out —
The Children hurry by —
They wonder if it died — on that —
I used to — when a Boy —
Her half-rhymes (drives away/mechanically, by/boy) and her enjambments (‗that Dark Parade
— Of Tassels —and of Coaches —‘) are functional in the expression of this nonchalant
attitude to Death. By giving the casual impression that Death is a fact of everyday life, she
succeeds in objectifying it; by making it appear commonplace, she can contain her own fear
of it. In that third quatrain, Dickinson presents the town-children pruriently wondering ‗if it
died‘ on the ejected mattress: significantly, she has assumed for herself the dramatic persona
of the schoolboy and considered the corpse as an inanimate object. What is more, she
remains in character (‗And little Boys — besides —‘) in order to record other ‗mechanical‘
reactions to a death across the road.
For Dickinson, this poem is significant in that it is entirely the product of accurate
observation; that Amherst street is clinically observed. Reeves remarks upon the ‗primitive
starkness of its detail‘ and upon the ‗cool detachment of vision‘; he means that for once the
smoke of burning souls does not get in her eyes. Euphemism (‗the man of the appalling
trade‘) is there again; but this time it is used not as a playful means of controlling her
neurosis, but as an example of metonymy by which the undertaker is given his full moral
weight. Dickinson registers this death with the dispassionate air of a journalist who is writing
a column in the Amherst Record; her narrative technique is to list a series of images by which
an objective account of the event can be given. Faithfully, this poem records a death ‗in just
a country town‘; in doing so, it acquaints us closely with ‗the quiet nonchalance of death‘
(Poem 194).
Poem 510 It was not Death, for I stood up (1862) is a brave attempt to apprehend the
moment of Death and/or the immediate aftermath of Death. During the first two quatrains,
Dickinson employs three impersonal pronouns (‗It was not death‘/‗It was not Night‘/‗It was
not Frost‘) in order to suggest that she has had an insight into this moment; her difficulty is
that it is not a clear insight, for at this stage she can do no better than describe it by a series
of mysterious negatives. It is only at the end of the fourth quatrain –
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
– that Dickinson hints that the experience may be something more positive and more
tangible. Unfortunately, her impressions are still vague; her repeated recourse to simile (‗like
Midnight‘) means that the mystery is little nearer to being cleared up. Likewise, her system
of punctuation (‗like Chaos –- Stopless –- cool –- ‘) is functional in the expression of a
hesitancy, a continuing uncertainty. It is as if Dickinson feels lost in ‗some‘ metaphysical no
man‘s land (‗And Space stares all around‘) between knowing what Death isn‘t, but still not
knowing what it is. In some library, somewhere, there must be a PhD thesis which includes a chapter on Emily
Dickinson‘s coinages: adjectives with the suffix –less and abstract nouns with the suffix –ness.
In Poem 216, only oblivion awaited the dead person; by Poem 280, a possible alternative
to oblivion has presented itself. Here, in Poem 510, Dickinson is actually mounting an
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empirical inquiry into the nature of the moment, portraying it as an awfully big adventure.
Significantly, her comparison of ‗It‘ to ‗Chaos –- Stopless –- cool‘ involves a neologism: in
order to record her new experience, she requires a new adjective. What Dickinson is doing is
trying to familiarise herself with an undiscovered yonder – acclimatise herself to its frosty
mornings, as it were – and thereby obviate her anxiety about going there. Once more, the
maritime metaphor is instructive. Dickinson‘s voyage is ‗Stopless‘ because she is again sailing
‗into deep eternity‘; if there were to be a ‗Report of Land‘, then that would ‗justify –- Despair‘
because such a sighting would signify that her voyage was not infinite, not to a further
dimension, but to another circumscribed world (not unlike Earth which she has just left)
where souls are not, after all, immortal.
Poem 520 I started Early — Took my Dog (1862) is another poem that makes a sensational
start. Listening to Dickinson‘s poems, one hears a familiar contrast between the iambic
tetrameters of the odd lines and the trimeters of the even lines: that is, one hears the
metrical movement of the hymns which Dickinson sang. The sensation is caused by the
sharp conflict between this hymn-rhythm and the language that Dickinson substitutes for
hymn-language:
I started Early — Took my Dog —
And visited the Sea —
The effect of this beginning is to make us wonder what can possibly come next. For his part,
Reeves finds it ‗difficult to say exactly what experience is recorded in this extraordinary and
tantalising poem‘; he is certain merely that the sea represents ‗some overwhelming force of
great destructive power‘ and that ‗what begins in a playful vein concludes as a pursuit to the
death‘. Surely, the purpose of those three plain statements is to anchor in the real world a
dramatic flight of fancy. After ‗the mermaids in the basement‘ have come out specially ‗to
look at‘ her and the sea-birds (‗frigates‘) have mistaken this human oddity for ‗a mouse‘,
the Tide
Went past my simple Shoe —
And past my Apron — and my Belt
And past my Bodice — too —
And made as He would eat me up —
As wholly as a Dew
Upon a Dandelion's Sleeve —
This is a classic example of a drama that grows naturally out of a common occurrence: taking
Carlo for his early-morning walk, the paranoid poet becomes suddenly terrified by the
awesome might [= the ‗Tremendousness‘] of her immediate surroundings. In Yvor Winters‘
words, taking the dog for a walk turns into a terrifying encounter with the forces ‗which tend
toward the dissolution of human character and consciousness‘. The stage-by-stage
description illustrates this fear of dissolution; she is acutely aware – witness the delicate
image of the dew-drop – of her own fragility in the path of such powerful forces and is
convinced that they are about to consume her. She looks doomed to die until she performs
an ingenious trick of rhetoric to save herself:
I felt His Silver Heel
Upon my Ankle — Then my Shoes
Would overflow with Pearl,
Until We met the Solid Town —
No One He seemed to know —
And, bowing with a Mighty look —
At me — The Sea withdrew —
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If Death is analogous to a tide that is flowing inland, then it makes rhetorical sense to
conceive of the moment at which this tide will begin to ebb; it is in this fanciful way that
Dickinson here effects her escape. Of course, her escape represents another instance of
intense self-dramatisation: in order to reach salvation, she needs again to regard herself as
someone extremely special – royal, imperial. By this poetic strategy, she succeeds in
subduing her consciousness of ‗Death‘s tremendous nearness‘.
Resourcefully, Dickinson stops herself being afraid of the Grim Reaper by demystifying and
recasting him: in Poem 608, he is no more threatening than ‗the Porter of my Father‘s
Lodge‘. In Poem 712 Because I could not stop for Death (1863) he becomes an urbane
gentleman-caller. This famous poem emphasises Reeves‘ point that ‗Emily believed in
immortality both as a religious dogma and as a poetic idea‘. It is another poem in which
Dickinson finds an imaginative means of coping with the idea of Death/in which she devises a
strategy to combat this ultimate problem. Here, she imagines that Death is the perfect
gentleman, her beau:
Because I could not stop for Death —
He kindly stopped for me —
The Carriage held but just Ourselves —
And Immortality.
We slowly drove — He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labour and my leisure too,
For His Civility —
She personifies this force by means of a capital D and then writes as if he is performing a
courteous service for her. Allen Tate (who considers that this poem is ‗one of the greatest in
the English language‘) confirms that Death is ‗a gentleman taking a lady out for a drive‘. It is
nevertheless important to recognise that Death‘s horse-drawn carriage stops for the lady
because she is unwilling to stop for him: in other words, this genteel driver is being treated
ironically in that he performs for her a courtesy (a ‗Civility‘) which she could well do without.
In short, the poem is an immaculate exercise in the art of euphemism. Contrast Dickinson‘s
confidence here with her wariness in Poem 1445 Death is the supple suitor where she is
being escorted not to ‗Immortality‘, but ‗to Troth unknown‘.
En route from here to Eternity, Dickinson reviews a familiar landscape; her past flashes both
back and by. She is taken on a magical mystery tour; she returns to her school (‗where
Children strove‘), remembers her friends (personified ‗Fields of Gazing Grain‘) and even visits
her own grave (‗a House that seemed a Swelling of the Ground‘). By regarding her route in
this quaint way, Dickinson is once more able to master her deep-seated fear of her final
destination; she comes one stage nearer to perfecting a self-supporting attitude in the face of
Death. The final turn that this poem takes is surprisingly dramatic:
Since then, ‘tis Centuries — and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses‘ Heads
Were toward Eternity —
It transpires that its date of composition is ‗Centuries‘ after the poet‘s death: in other words,
it is another poem written from a posthumous point of view. Tate confirms that there is ‗a
semi-playful pretence of familiarity with the posthumous experience of eternity‘: in other
words, Dickinson‘s strategy is to challenge those who doubt the existence of ‗deep eternity‘
with the testimony of one who abides there.
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Poem 827 The Only News I know (1864) represents a similar effort to trivialise ‗Death‘s
tremendous nearness‘ and reduce its significance. Its first two verses (for once, not hymnquatrains) illustrate her boldness in associating a down-to-earth experience with a lofty
abstract:
The Only News I know
Is Bulletins all Day
From Immortality.
The Only Shows I see —
Tomorrow and Today —
Perchance Eternity —
It is this ‗congenital boldness‘ (Yvor Winters) which enables her to manage otherwise
unmanageable concepts such as ‗Immortality‘ and ‗Eternity‘: in this case, she likens any
intimations of immortality that she may have to news bulletins. Once more, Dickinson copes
with the forces that threaten to overwhelm her by reducing them to a mundane level. She
promises that, after she has ‗traversed‘ the street of everyday existence, she will let us know
whether there is ‗Other News‘ to be reported; if we extend her metaphor, then we may
presume that she will send us a wire/a telegram. Dickinson‘s poetry is a major exercise in
the art of euphemism: for ‗other side of the street‘, it is extremely easy to read ‗other side of
the grave‘.
Emily Dickinson‘s poetry (which was not written especially for an audience*) seems often to
be a supreme effort to persuade herself that Death will be all right; her mundane metaphors
(crossing the street, sending a telegram) and her colloquial cadences (‗I‘ll tell it You‘) are
designed to make more palatable this utterly unpalatable prospect. Her posthumous stances
perform a similar function: if – after Death – she can still confide in us, then the other side
cannot be Hell.
Poem 892 Who occupies this House? (1864) is an allegorical poem, an extended metonym;
it is one of Dickinson‘s finest accomplishments. Throughout the eight quatrains, Dickinson
manages to write about a settlement of houses (‗a curious Town‘) without explicitly
acknowledging that she is writing at the same time about a cemetery. She is singing of ‗the
Burying Ground‘ of which she is ‗afraid‘. Consequently, she writes in a code which permits
the subtle play of her wit and thereby keeps the sombre realities of the place at a distance.
The speaker of Poem 892 is a living person (not always so in Dickinson) who would not dare
approach a ‗House‘ [= ‗a Swelling of the Ground‘, a grave] if ‗the name and age‘ of the owner
were not ‗writ upon the Door‘: that is, inscribed on the gravestone. She observes that,
whereas some of the ‗Houses‘ [= graves] are ‗very old‘, others have been ‗newly raised this
Afternoon‘; wittily, her fourth quatrain implies that, if she were building a house, she wouldn‘t
choose to build it here (‗so still‘). How, then, did a ‗Town‘ ever grow up in this location?
Dickinson derives a grim mirth from the idea that ‗a Pioneer‘
Liking the quiet of the Place
Attracted more unto –And from a Settlement
A Capital has grown
Distinguished for the gravity
Of every Citizen.
The Owner of this House
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A Stranger He must be –Eternity‘s Acquaintances
Are mostly so –- to me.
In her euphemistic code, Dickinson explains that the graveyard grew exponentially. The
‗Pioneer‘, of course, is the first person to be interred there; the other ‗Settlers‘ are the dead
people whom ‗the quiet of the Place‘ has subsequently ‗Attracted‘ – as if, ironically, it is a
desirable place to live. Informing the end of the poem is Dickinson‘s knowledge that the
dead far out-number the living. In the penultimate quatrain, ‗every Citizen‘ of this metropolis
is ‗Distinguished‘ for his ‗gravity‘: by this ominous pun, Dickinson is referring not to the dignity
of its aldermen, but to the comprehensive burial of its dead – who have been literally brought
to earth/to their graves. In the final quatrain, she looks again at the original grave (‗this
House‘) and remarks even more portentously that ‗Eternity‘s Acquaintances‘ [her metonym
for the dead and buried] are ‗mostly‘ strangers to her – as, given the overwhelming
arithmetic, the inevitable ratio, they are certain to be.
The speaker of Poem 986 A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1865) is a countryman reflecting
upon an incident in his boyhood. Although he never uses the noun, the poem describes both
a snake and his reaction to it. It is another exercise in the defensive art of metonymy: not
unlike Poem 892, Poem 986 finds for the feared thing a number of metonyms which fend
off its actuality: ‗A narrow Fellow in the Grass‘, ‗a spotted shaft‘, ‗a Whip lash/Unbraiding in
the Sun‘ and ‗this Fellow‘. Behind any description of a snake lies the Biblical story of Eve,
tempted by a phallic creature in the Garden of Eden and committing the first sin. Dickinson‘s
adoption of a persona means that the snake can be demythologised and instead presented
solely as a venomous reptile, capable of causing instant death.
Dickinson‘s speaker is a Nature-lover whose heart ordinarily goes out to his fellow creatures;
normally, he feels for them ‗a transport of cordiality‘. It is because this bright snake is by no
means innocuous that he makes an exception of him:
But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone –Of course, Dickinson‘s final phrase is fully consistent with the first quatrain of Poem 532 in
which she is thinking likewise of ‗An Omen in the Bone‘. The grammar of that quatrain
suggests explicitly that Dickinson feels chilled to the bone by the thought ‗Of Death‘s
tremendous nearness‘ and it helps us to understand exactly why her narrator, here in his
bare feet, should catch his breath at the ‗sudden‘ sight of the snake. The memorable
expression ‗Zero at the Bone‘ is open to interpretation. Undeniably, it can suggest that the
Boy, upon encountering the deadly snake, froze: that he experienced a feeling of numbness,
a complete loss of sensation. Even more dramatically, it can imply that he felt a spinetingling terror at coming literally so close to Death and being reduced to nothingness (‗Zero‘).
Either way, the line records a shock to the system which no poetic strategy can lessen.
Poem 1100 The last Night that She lived (1866) is an example of mortuary poetry. Deathbed vigils were commonplace in the small communities of nineteenth-century America and it
is known that Dickinson herself stayed to the last by the bed of her friend Sophia Holland in
April 1844: ―I visited her often in sickness & watched over her bed‖ (Letter to Abiah Root,
15th April 1846). Poem 1100, which grows directly out of such a vigil, is a major
achievement, not least because it avoids the platitudes of the genre and establishes its own
stark perspectives:
The last Night that She lived
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It was a Common Night
Except the Dying –- this to Us
Made Nature different
We noticed smallest things –Things overlooked before
By this great light upon our Minds
Italicized –- as ‗twere.
From the pronouns, it is clear that Dickinson is one of a number of Amherst women (‗Us‘,
‗We‘) who are in attendance at this bed-side. Not without irony, she states that the ‗last
Night‘ that the anonymous person ‗lived‘ was nothing out of the ordinary – ‗except‘ that it
demonstrated to the attendant women exactly what makes ‗Nature different‘. Informing this
perspective is Dickinson‘s profound awareness that, if it were not for ‗the Dying‘, then living
would be an altogether ‗different‘ experience. For Death, she finds an instructive metonym:
‗this great light upon our Minds‘. She explains that ‗the Dying‘ shines a ‗great light‘ on the
personal possessions in the patient‘s bedroom: to be precise, it illuminates the ‗smallest
things‘ with the onlookers‘ knowledge that these things will very soon be hers no longer. For
these assembled onlookers, Death‘s nearness singles out for emphasis the keepsakes/trinkets
on the dressing-table by which this individual life has been partly defined; it italicizes them,
as it were. Accordingly, her first of use of hypallage endows the bedroom itself (‗Her final
Room‘) with an unprecedented aura.
In this poem, Dickinson‘s aim is to document in detail the moment of an individual death and
thereby characterise it. First, there spreads the sense of survivor-guilt – itself the theme of
Poem 1703 ‗Twas Comfort in her Dying Room – which the moment inspires; here, as there,
‗a Blame‘ attaches itself to the ‗Others‘ in the house who will still ‗exist‘ tomorrow. Then,
there is the precise sequence of events of which the terminal moment consists. Dickinson‘s
quatrains –
We waited while She passed
It was a narrow time –Too jostled were Our Souls to speak
At length the notice came.
She mentioned, and forgot –Then lightly as a Reed
Bent to the Water, struggled scarce –Consented, and was dead –– give both a clinical and a lyrical account of the death. The half-rhymes (‗time‘/‗came‘,
‗Reed‘/‗dead‘) are unceremonious, recognising that dying is something which happens every
day; the iambic tetrameters of the third lines rise gently, meaning that the fourth lines
(trimeters again) can subside to suitably solemn conclusions. Dickinson‘s account portrays a
tension between the anxiety of the living and the dignity of the dying. Together, the second
and the third uses of hypallage (‗narrow time‘/‗jostled ... Souls‘) indicate that the bedroom
was crowded with agitated people, possibly getting in one another‘s way; by contrast, the
simile (‗lightly as a Reed‘) suggests that the centre of their constant attention died of natural
causes and did so acquiescently and gracefully; no fly buzzes. To the women who watch
over her, ‗She‘ will be safer in an alabaster chamber.
In her letter to Thomas Higginson, Emily Dickinson wrote of her family: ―They‘re religious,
except me‖. For the purposes of the final quatrain, Dickinson elects to associate herself
closely with her fellow keepers of the vigil, sharing their search for a self-reliant/‗religious‘
attitude. After the eponymous person passes away, her attendants lay out her body and
console themselves with the conventions of the mortuary poem: because ‗She‘ has died, the
possessive adjective ‗Her‘ gives way to the definite article (‗the Hair‘, ‗the Head‘). Now that
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her soul has left her body, their reflections can begin. Dickinson presents her companions
and herself as having all the time in the world (‗an awful leisure‘) to relate what they have
witnessed in the room to their religious ‗Belief‘. Specifically, this ‗Belief‘ is in the immortality
of the soul; consequently, they speculate where her soul has gone ... Whether it has sailed
to ‗isles enchanted‘ (Poem 52) or sunk without trace is still – eight years later – a matter of
prolonged debate.
* Only seven of Emily Dickinson‘s 1,775 poems were published in her life-time.
All were edited for her.
© Peter Cash and the English Association, 2010
Peter Cash was Head of English Studies at Newcastle-under-Lyme School in Staffordshire
1985-2009. The first version of this Bookmark appeared in October 1993; this revision was
completed in November 2010.
Emily Dickinson, by Peter Cash is Number 7 in the Bookmark series, published by
The English Association
University of Leicester
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Leicester LE1 7RH
UK
Tel: 0116 229 7622
Fax: 0116 229 7623
Email: engassoc@le.ac.uk
Potential authors are invited to contact the following at the address above:
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Ian Brinton
Shakespeare Bookmarks
Kerri Corcoran-Martin
© English Association and Peter Cash, 2010
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