Emily Dickinson's Poetic Covenant
The study of Emily Dickinson’s poetic oeuvre is a lesson in literary and cultural
history. Trying to appreciate her poems means to try and understand the cultural
roots from which she emerged and to appreciate the cultural milieu in which she
lived. The late Karl Keller’s wide-ranging study The Only Kangaroo Among the
Beauty: Emily Dickinson and America that locates Dickinson’s work in its
overall American literary context is as indispensable to the reader of her poems
as is Barton Levi St. Armand’s admirably detailed research into Dickinson’s
background of New England popular culture. The same holds true for a number
of feminist studies like those by Gilbert/Gubar, Homans, Mossberg, Pollak and
Dobson that all help us understand the poet’s specific situation as a woman
writer in mid-nineteenth century Victorian America. Among the many excellent
books now available, no critic seriously interested in Dickinson’s lyric
achievement can bypass the seminal works of Brita Lindberg-Seyersted, Robert
Weisbuch and Sharon Cameron. Nor can the reader do without Richard B.
Sewall’s magisterial biography of the poet and - more recently - the lively and
astute account of Dickinson’s life and work by Cynthia Griffin Wolff.
At the same time, the European reader is astonished to note that Dickinson’s
work functions like a sounding board of much that is central to his or her own
culture: medieval texts (in particular Dante), Shakespeare, English Metaphysical
and pre-Romantic poetry as well as the Romantic and Victorian writers. He is
amazed, moreover, to discover that - the problematic case of Poe and his French
admirers apart - the symbolist mode first achieved its full-fledged realization in
New England, not in France. In a very real sense, Dickinson is a deeply
provincial writer, yet her modernist techniques as well as the universality of her
themes establish this poet as a transatlantic, even cosmopolitan, author ranking
with the classics of the Western tradition.
Thinking in Alternatives
Dickinson’s rich heritage makes the study of her poetry an adventure; however,
it also raises the vexing problem of interpretative indeterminacy (Hagenbüchle,
“Precision and Indeterminacy” 33-56). Not only does the reader find it hard to
disentangle the cultural layers and to decide their relative weight, but the literary
voices themselves rarely come through clear and unambiguous. In fact, they
often seem to compete with each other, as if the author herself had been
unwilling to take a final stand. Despite its careful annotation of textual variants,
Thomas H. Johnson’s standard edition creates a false impression since his
editorial decisions - Smith speaks of “mutilations” (16-22) - tend to erase what is
a crucial feature of Dickinson’s poetry: its processual and dialectical quality
(Hagenbüchle, “Aesthetik” 245-46, 253; “Sign and Process” 147-48).
To some of her poems Dickinson has added alternative endings that flatly
contradict each other. Although such cases are relatively rare, her verse invites
(and sometimes even enforces) seemingly irreconcilable readings, not least
because textual variants tend to branch off into conflicting versions. Differences
in exegesis between critics like E. Miller Budick and Greg Johnson, who both
offer attractive but mutually exclusive readings of the poem "Before I got my
eye put out" (327), serve to illustrate this point. What we are confronted with
here is a hermeneutic problem that far exceeds the more technical question of
semotactic ambivalence. The very possibility for alternative interpretations
underscores the poet’s deep-rooted antipathy to thinking in clear-cut oppositions.
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For Dickinson, faith is not faith because it has overcome doubt, rather “Faith is
Doubt.” (L912) Similarly, “Earth” cannot be opposed to “Heaven;” “Earth”
rightly understood is “Heaven” (PF114) and “Reality itself [. . .] a Dream.”
(PF2) Since we have all been educated in systematic either-or reasoning, it is
hardly surprising that Dickinson’s poetic language tends to throw us into utter
confusion.
Dickinson’s title-less verse displays no “what,” no overt subject matter, so that
our search for a poem’s underlying theme, its experiential center, frequently ends
in puzzlement. An especially troublesome problem is the lack of a stabilizing
frame. Tone and perspective tend to switch abruptly, often within a single poem.
In many cases, the rhetorical mode remains irritatingly ambivalent so that the
reader is left wondering whether a poem’s ostensible statement can really be
trusted or whether it is covertly ironic, creating what Wayne C. Booth has
termed “unstable irony.” As a result, it remains frequently doubtful whether the
emotional tenor of a given poem is one of hope or despair or both.
The poet’s adamant refusal to choose between opposing possibilities - in
individual poems as well as in her poetic sequence as a whole - is itself an allimportant decision. The strategy of holding alternatives in dialectical tension
reflects Dickinson’s choice of a poetic existence, an existence which in various
ways resembles that of Keats or Hölderlin. What makes Dickinson’s a
characteristically American variant is its radically experimental quality. As she
puts it tersely in one of her last poems: “Experiment escorts us last -” (1770).
Her poetic experiment is as intensely American as is, in the words of Lyman
Beecher, “the great experiment” of America itself. Beecher (though in many
ways her antipode) would have shared the poet’s conviction: “Faith - the
Experiment - of Our Lord -” (300).
Possibly the most intriguing as well as the most disturbing feature for the reader
of Dickinson’s oeuvre is her tendency to collapse the real and the symbolic into
one. To this poet, only the symbolic is real, and reality is real only in so far as it is
symbolic. Like the Transcendentalists, Dickinson categorically resists the pull of
her culture to split off the realm of meaning from the world of phenomena. All
facts filtered through the mind become fiction: “are not all Facts Dreams as soon
as we put them behind us?” (PF22) That is why her poems tend to appear
Janus-faced, looking two ways at once so that the borderline between the real
and the fictional becomes blurred: “the fiction - real - / The real - fictitious seems
-” (646). The ordinary concept of reality (her father’s concept in fact) is rejected
in Dickinson’s poetry. Unlike Edward Dickinson, who has “made up his mind
that its [sic] pretty much all real life” (L65), the daughter decides not to make
up her mind. She opts for “poetry” against “prose,” i.e. for a poetic language of
open possibilities. Sharon Cameron’s recent study of the fascicles, Choosing not
Choosing, explores this aspect in depth.
Bearing Eliot’s criticism of “a dissociation of sensibility” (64) in mind, we may
interpret Dickinson’s oeuvre as her defensive gesture against a momentous and
in many ways disruptive development of nineteenth-century civilization: the
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breaking asunder of what was up to then a relatively unified discourse into
different sub-discourses such as the theological, the political and the scientific
discourse. The modern bifurcation into two competing discourses - the exact
discourse of natural science and the plurisemantic discourse of art (Geyer) - was
already well under way in Dickinson’s lifetime. In her poetic work she boldly set
out to create a counter-language in which “thought” - as for Donne - could once
again be “an experience” (Eliot 64).
Reader Response: a Test Case
From the standpoint of reader response theory, Dickinson’s insistence on the
symbolic potential of poetic language is beset by considerable problems. “There
came a Day at Summer’s full,” (322) is an especially challenging example that
serves to demonstrate the difficulty of creating ‘significance’ (in Hirsch’s sense)
from a text whose ‘meaning’ seems rather elusive. The poem has proved
recalcitrant to exegesis, and its interest lies not least in the strongly divergent
interpretations that the verse has elicited from a number of Dickinson scholars.
Both Chase (158-59, 243) and Anderson (168) find the verse too “intangible”
and too “obscure” for the reader “to share in the anguish.” Biographical,
theological, psychological, existentialist and cultural readings compete with each
other, and even a fine scholar such as Robert Weisbuch censures Dickinson’s
“too easy denial of death's terrifying finality” (90). Not until Franz H. Link’s
superb article ”Emily Dickinson: Kunst als Sakramant” do we come across an
interpretation that does full justice to this exquisite poem (163-65). For Link, the
poem enacts a sacramental sacrifice that in poetic language anticipates the future
experience of a transcendental reality. Apart from Link and with the exception of
Budick (212-23, 227-28), Harris (23-34) and St. Armand, who links this poem to
“the Mystic Day (Nature) and to Transcendental Liturgy” and who detects in it
“many High Anglican and Oxford Movement resonances” (132 et passim), the
poem has found relatively few interpreters after 1976 (Duchac and Dandurand,
vide index). A reappraisal will therefore be in order.
There came a Day at Summer’s full,
Entirely for me I thought that such were for the Saints,
Where Resurrections - be - (variant: Revelations)
The Sun, as common, went abroad,
The flowers, accustomed, blew,
As if no soul the solstice passed (variant: While our two Souls that)
That maketh all things new - (variant: which)
The time was scarce profaned, by speech The symbol of a word (variants: falling, figure, symbol; the last is underlined)
Was needless, as at Sacrament,
The Wardrobe - of our Lord Each was to each The Sealed Church,
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Permitted to commune this - time Lest we too awkward show
At Supper of the Lamb.
The Hours slid fast - as Hours will,
Clutched tight, by greedy hands So faces on two Decks, look back,
Bound to opposing lands And so when all the Time had leaked,
Without external sound
Each bound the Other’s Crucifix We gave no other Bond -
(variant: failed)
Sufficient troth, that we shall rise Deposed - at length, the Grave To that new Marriage,
Justified - through Calvaries of Love - (322)
The poem’s thematic kernel is admittedly hard to grasp. There is no stabilizing semantic or
tonal center, and the reader remains perplexed as to the envisaged situation. Does the verse deal
with a biographical experience? With a lovers’ tryst, perhaps? If it does, is the “Other” a man
or a woman? Rebecca Patterson opts for Kate Scott (175-78, 359) whereas Robert L. Lair
prefers Charles Wadsworth (61-62). But why not Samuel Bowles or - as Smith has plausibly
argued (38) - Sue? Other critics interpret the meeting as an entirely imaginary event. Richard B.
Sewall, as always, gives a balanced account stating that the experience - whether real or fictitious
- is “in essence” Dickinson’s (552-53). The superimposition of lover, self, soul, death and
Christ makes disambiguation difficult; the various layers uneasily coexist in the poem, all
contributing to its total effect.
Several thematic signposts hint at an inner experience of extraordinary intensity, an experience
for the sake of the lyrical self alone: “Entirely for me -”. The cyclical processes of nature are
contrasted to the soul’s atemporal ecstatic moment. In the two fair copies, Dickinson has
replaced “our two souls” with the hypothetical phrase “as if no soul” - a change that removes
the poem’s setting even further from a real-life event. In fact, the expression “our two souls”
would have given the poem a different direction altogether. The poet’s use of synecdoche and
metonymy (“greedy hands,” “faces on two decks”) intensifies the symbolic quality of the
dramatic encounter, emphasizing its spiritual significance. As in many other poems, Dickinson
employs a concrete situation (the meeting of two boats) as a springboard to enter the realm of
the symbolic. It is on the plane of symbolism, then, that the associative potential of words comes
into full play, although the anchor to concrete reality is never fully cut.
On the syntactic level, the verse exhibits a marked preference for juxtaposition and parallelism
with the logical and temporal connectives omitted. This fact alone should make us hesitate to
contrive a chronological scenario of narrative events. The expression "Summer’s full" evokes a
moment of fulfilled presence. However, this climactic moment is at the same time a turning
point; although the sun appears to stand still at the "solstice" (lat. sol-sistere/stare), it is
about to start its retrograde movement into winter. The passing of the solstice
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(with a pun on “soul”) “which maketh all things new” throws into relief the
apocalyptic quality of the experience. The poem, we note, renders a liminal
moment by crossing spatio-temporal as well as semantic boundaries. The lyrical
self’s passage from life through death into an existence of renewed meaning
bears comparison with Eliot’s “point of intersection of the timeless / With time”
in Dry Salvages.
The subtext of Revelations and other biblical passages has always been remarked
on by critics, though few have bothered to address the change of meaning
implied by Dickinson’s use, namely the turn from a historical millennial
expectation to an experience that describes the soul’s inner potential for selftranscendence in terms oscillating between time and timelessness. John F.
Lynen’s insight into Dickinson’s manner of collapsing presence and eternity
(133) is helpful here. “Eternity” for Dickinson as for Blake is “obtained - in
Time” (800), it is achieved now or never, and yet, as an experience of the
numinous this ‘now’ is itself part of eternity. Finite life is our unique chance to
experience the eternal and in that sense life is eternal. As I shall argue below, this
idiosyncratic feature of Dickinson’s poetry is based on her tactics of
semanticizing temporal typology into atemporal poetic inference.
The overall tone of the poem is one of profound ambivalence. The verse starts
out in rapturous exultation and continues through a sense of ecstatic fulfilment,
only to end in feelings of intense agony - itself the precondition for the lyrical
self’s trust in love’s final victory over death. In its emphatic end-position, the
oxymoronic phrase “Calvaries of Love -” not only keeps the emotional tenor in
suspense, but the plural form - besides stressing the ceaselessness of pain - also
hints at the fact that Calvary is understood here as a universal human experience.
Reinforced through a reversal of perspective, the meeting proves at the same
time to be a parting, a counter-theme that brackets the emotion of ecstasy with
its opposite: “despair.” Indeed, paradox (time/timelessness, death/resurrection,
Eros/Thanatos) governs the poem throughout. The dialectical yoking of ecstasy
and despair is, of course, fundamental to Dickinson’s work, which often focuses
on what one poem calls “a perfect - paralyzing Bliss - / Contented as Despair -”
(756). It is this strangely self-contradictory experience that the poet repeatedly
praises as the “One” supreme “Blessing” (756) of her life. The latter part of this
essay, it is hoped, will help to clarify this crux.
Although the verse exploits symbolical language to the full, the focal moment is
one of wordlessness. “The symbol of a word” is deemed a superfluous dress,
useless as vestments worn during the Lord’s Supper. Indeed, words would
“profane” the sacramental event. Concomitantly, language admits to its own
impotence; the silent center hints at the poet’s self-defeating attempt to express
something that cannot be expressed in words (except “slant”-wise). We are faced
here with what Jay Leyda has circumscribed as Dickinson’s “omitted” center (I,
xxi), Sharon Cameron as the poetry’s “ineffable” and unrepresentable center (4,
26-29), and Gary L. Stonum as its unrecoverable deep structure (30). The
Romantics have of course always been aware that there is no direct analogon for
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innerness. Paradoxically enough, in order to give form to such innerness words
are needed, but what the words try to convey is out of reach. In A Defense of
Poetry Shelley mourns the paradox that the process of wording (which is an act
of objectification and reflexion) ineluctably implies the loss of the experiential
moment (443). This is at once the perennial problem and the challenge of all lyric
poetry.
The experience itself may be characterized as a ‘rite of passage’: death and
rebirth in one. In this context it is worth remembering that Dickinson adapted
“the final stanza to honor the memory of Mrs. Dwight who had died the
preceding September” (Johnson I, 252), thus distancing the poem from a specific
biographical experience. The intensity and uniqueness of feeling is rendered in
religious language; in fact, what is expressed in this poem is a religious
experience (Link 164). Terms like “Saints” (possibly an allusion to the Puritan
‘saints’ as opposed to the lyrical self, a ‘stranger?’) and “Resurrections” (variant:
“revelations”) are appropriated by Dickinson to express the soul’s ecstatic
“Transport” (a ‘conversion experience’ of sorts). The motif of the seal is
borrowed mostly from Canticles and Revelations where - in conspicuous
contrast to the poem’s ambiguities - it denotes a mark that guarantees man’s
eventual recognition by God and his acceptance into heaven.
The collocation “Sealed Church,” for which there is no exact biblical parallel, has
always puzzled readers. On a strictly psychological level, Cody variously
understands it as “a symbol for a woman who is taboo as a sexual object,” as an
expression of the need for a “mothering” male, and possibly as a biographical
hint that the other person was a woman (147). From a theological angle, J. V.
Cunningham points out the element of self-justification through love and
suffering and he notes the striking absence of Christ’s mediation. Cynthia Chaliff,
by contrast, stresses the important role of the Imitatio Christi motif in this and
other love poems (101-02), and St. Armand, finally, interprets “The Sealed
Church” as “an extreme expression of Calvinist exclusionism,” pointing to
affinities with American Perfectionist movements. Furthermore, the expression
evokes Emerson’s “inner church,” but Dickinson also plays on the multiple
meanings of “sealed” in the sense of ‘self-enclosed,’ ‘secret’ and ‘designated by’
(or ‘dedicated to’) God. The act of communion takes place in a moment of
timeless time, a nunc stans (“Permitted to commune this - time -”); it is at the
same time a moment of self-transcendence and as such a preparatory lesson for
“the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Link 164). These and other biblical
passages are all radically interiorized by the poet and thus wrenched from their
original meaning. Nonetheless, the theological content of these elements is not
destroyed; it is rather subsumed into the larger significance of poetic thought.
There is a brief effort in stanza five to arrest the ecstatic moment (“clutched
tight”), but in stanza six the inevitable is accepted: “Each bound the Other’s
crucifix.” In addition to a variety of biblical subtexts, there are several literary
and painterly models for Dickinson’s image (some with an erotic content), but
the crucial point in these verses is the covenant of love between the mortal self
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and the spiritual Other. The element of reciprocity is intensified by a cluster of
words expressing bonding. The symbol of the cross (“Each bound the Other’s
crucifix -”) embodies the poem’s central paradox. The word “crucifix” refers
back to “Calvary,” but it also evokes ‘crucifixion’ and - owing to the line’s
mirror-like structure - indirectly hints at the persona’s self-crucifixion. On the
basis of the poem’s religious quality (and neglecting the element of selfreflexivity), it could be argued - as some critics have done - that the dramatic
encounter takes place between Christ and the soul; even from such a perspective,
however, it cannot be denied that we are witnessing a spiritual drama that
emphatically recenters the exemplary Christian paradox within the lyrical self - at
once a radically ‘protestant’ and a poetic gesture (Hagenbüchle, Emily Dickinson
207-310).
The final stanza once again reverses the perspective in that the pledge of love
appears now strong enough to overcome death and separation. The expression
“that new Marriage” has biblical - even mystic - resonances, deflating the
conventional social ceremony (nor should one forget that in protestant theology
marriage is not a sacrament). The word “troth,” in turn, displays a wealth of
connotations. Besides alluding to ‘faith’ and ‘truth’ (Shakespeare), it also evokes
‘betrothal’ and - most importantly - ‘betrothed’: “Betrothed - without the
Swoon” (“Title divine - is mine!” [1072]). There is, finally, a clear reference to
the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (“I plight/give thee my troth”), but Dickinson
typically suppresses the subsequent element of corporality as found in the
Anglican marriage vow.
The element of eventual justification through suffering is a pervasive theme in
Dickinson’s work. Accordingly, the resurrection mentioned in the final stanza is
seen as the divine gift expected in exchange (even as payment) for the lyrical
self’s suffering of pain and death. However, “the troth, that we shall rise -”
remains unspecified: it is here and nowhere, now and never. In other words, this
eschatological event is situated in the realm of “Possibility” alone (Hagenbüchle,
“Precision and Indeterminacy” 49-50, “Sign and Process” 152-53). The
expected fulfilment of the promise is one of poetic inference, and to that extent
the future is already incorporated in the present. What we discover in the poem,
then, is neither an “omitted” nor an empty center. It is rather a deliberately
created emptiness, a semantically open interspace implying potential fullness:
“not yet a voice, but a vision.” (L 1035) The question remains, as it always does
with Dickinson, in how far the movement of poetic language is capable of taking
over the burden of the biblical word. The poem is the locus for selftranscendence but no transcendence in a metaphysical sense is forthcoming.
The poem’s dominant motif of meeting as departure is of course a topos in
Romantic (and Victorian) poetry, Goethe’s “Willkommen und Abschied,”
Byron’s “When We Two Parted” or Tennyson’s “Love and Duty” being wellknown examples. In Dickinson’s verse, the Romantic motif has not only acquired
a sacramental quality (Link 129-189, esp. 164), but the expectation of an ultimate
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union is firmly rooted in the Puritan ‘covenant’ principle, though the lyrical self’s
pact is now with the divine alter Ego. The soul’s act of entering into a solemn
“Compact” with itself is the very basis of Dickinson’s poetic faith, but it is also a
source of unending pain: “Because the Cause was Mine - / The Misery a
Compact / As hopeless - as divine -” (458). Whereas the original ‘covenant’
relied on the promise of a transcendent fulfilment, the poet’s “Compact” seems
to have lost its scriptural basis as divine guarantor: it is now a self-reflexive and
truly ‘self-consuming’ act of the mind.
The Search for Self
What the reader encounters in the above text is clearly not the real-world
Dickinson; rather, it is the poet’s experiencing self and her inquisitive (often
puzzled) mind that speculates on these experiences and tries to come to terms
with them. It is this speculative quality that leaves the question of a biographical
experience unanswered and unanswerable, thus rendering it largely irrelevant.
Following Dickinson’s own hints, critics have repeatedly suggested that her
“Flood subject” is “Immortality,” but it would probably be more accurate to
claim that it is the poet’s effort to (re)create herself as a subject in her work since
the social world allowed her creative mind and her hunger for self-exploration no
viable alternative. What we discover in her poetry is a lyrical “I” in search of a
“self.” Heiskanen-Mäkelä was among the first to interpret Dickinson’s
experience of “terror” as a conversion to herself (17-18), as an act of poetic
rebirth: “To live, and die, and mount again in triumphant body, and next time,
try the upper air - is no schoolboy’s theme!” (L184) It is through the poems,
then, that Dickinson attempts to find a place in her culture.
As the poems and letters tell us, young Dickinson tried out various alternatives,
such as the Romantic or the Transcendentalist self, and her Byronic role-playing
proves
that she experimented with all these options. However, the frame in which
Dickinson first sought to understand herself was the Christian narrative. Claudia
Yukman has demonstrated how the poet at once employs and breaks the
“eschatological frame” that she invokes (92). This is done both in anger and in
sadness: in anger because the orthodox Christian framework restricts the creative
freedom of her quest, in sadness because the rejection results in bleak “liberty”
(281), in the loss of a metaphysical home, in what from today’s view might be
called a ‘decentered’ existence. No wonder, the lyric persona feels “homeless at
home” (1573).
In some of the early poems Dickinson still seems to accept an eschatological
view. “On this wondrous sea” (4), for example, ends with the exultant lines:
“Land Ho! Eternity! / Ashore at last!” This piece, along with “Sleep is supposed
to be” (13), ranks among the most striking examples of the poet’s chiliastic
optimism. But even in these verses one feels the tug away from an emblematic
style towards a symbolic mode. To claim that Dickinson could not accept the
“Christian narrative” is insufficient, however; what she could not accept is the
consequence that this view would have entailed for her language.
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Biblical literalism (in the Calvinist-Puritan strain), as Dickinson recognized, would
rigorously foreclose the open-endedness of her poetic faith: “to believe [. . . ]
would foreclose Faith -” (912). Images and symbols, as Emerson repeatedly
criticized, suffer from becoming fixed in theological doctrine. To Dickinson,
ideological frames of any sort - those of practical life no less than those of
scientific discourse - fatally block the free play of the mind and along with it the
exploratory movement of poetic language. The poetic discourse alone is
resourceful enough to power her quest for self-transcendence.
Although the poet could not find her home in a Puritan self, she might have
found it in Romanticism or in Transcendentalism - and to a degree she did. What
she could not accept was Emerson’s hermetic notion of a correspondence
between the Me and the Not-Me. Nor could she assent to Wordsworth’s
(however precarious) balance between self and world, and his serene sense of
continuity was alien to Dickinson for whom the discontinuities of experience
privileged difference over identity (910). It is symptomatic that the returning self
in one of her poems (609) no longer finds the earlier self at home. Self-alienation
and self-transcendence came to make an uneasy but inevitable pact in her
oeuvre. Still, the Romantic self did have its attractions for her, especially the
notion of a poetic existence along with a sense of infinite surmise. And in
Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry she encountered a concept of language and of
poetry with which she could largely identify: the poetic word as the incarnation
of spirit (444).
At Home in Language
Nowhere in Romanticism or Transcendentalism, however, do we find anything
approaching the intensely symbolic power that Dickinson accords the word. The
poet’s ‘linguistic turn’ is not merely a consequence of the Romantic movement,
it is in some profound way a return to the very sources of her own culture.
Without the central position of the biblical ‘Word’ in Puritan New England, the
poet’s religious conception of poetic language would have been unthinkable. It is
in the very act of ‘bearing the word’ that she finds her truly feminine self - and
what a powerful self. In her symbolic language Dickinson could enjoy the
creative liberty of mind that transcends all ideology and all stereotype, not least
stereotyped gender restrictions. Whenever she exploits conventional Victorian
imagery it is plainly to put pressure on social clichés.
It is in poetry, then, that Dickinson found her home at last. Both in the letters
and the poems one may follow the poet’s attempt to constitute her self in
language. Unlike Whitman’s self, as Agnieszka Salska has masterfully shown,
Dickinson’s is a remembering self (35-64), though it is also a self of grand
expectations. That is precisely why it is a very precarious self in need of
continuous re-creation, based as it is on the symbolic movement of poetic
language. To Whitman the word is a living thing: self, word and world fuse in a
process of endless concrescence. For Dickinson, no such concrescence occurs.
With her, by contrast, the poetic word assumes an autonomy that anticipates
Mallarmé’s symbolist concept of language by more than a generation. In fact (as
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I shall demonstrate elsewhere), Mallarmé exhibits neither the metaphysical
boldness nor the epistemological lucidity of Dickinson’s poetic method (cf.
Cambon 33; St. Armand 283-84).
Dickinson herself has emphasized the equal - if elevated - status of words: “I lift
my hat when I see them sit princelike among their peers on the page.” And they
really do sit on the page in their full individuality. In the poem “There’s been a
death in the opposite house” (389), the line: “There’ll be that dark parade” is
spatially separated from the other lines with the black words actually parading
before the reader on the white sheet. Looking at an individual word, Dickinson
comments on its shape: “I look at its outline til [sic] he glows as no sapphire”
(qtd. by Sewall, Lyman Letters 78). Words with Dickinson not only possess a
transcendent quality (the gates of Zion are made of sapphire), but they are also
gendered masculine: words are as much in her power, as she is in theirs.
Explicitly or implicitly, most poems by Dickinson are concerned with the testing
of language. Romantic poetry in general is intensely self-reflexive, but the
Romantics do not exploit language to its breaking point the way Dickinson does.
Her testing has a remarkably modern quality, although it stops short of the
metapoetic explicitness of a Wallace Stevens, Conrad Aiken, and T. S. Eliot.
What Dickinson is particularly interested in is the liminal or threshold quality of
language, a quality in which the modernist poets have little or no trust.
Writerly Style
Critical consensus has grown recently that Whitman’s stylistic devices look tame
- even conservative - in comparison with Dickinson’s Modern Idiom (Porter).
Unlike Whitman’s expansive syntax, her tightly structured poetry forces readers
to radically change their reading habits. Instead of passively enjoying Dickinson’s
verse, we are called upon to actively cooperate. The poet’s handling of
compression and juxtaposition (occasionally approaching surrealist montage)
radically increases semotactic indeterminacy, thwarting the reader’s desire for
univocal meanings; in "Four Trees - upon a solitary Acre -" (742) juxtaposition and with it the question of relation - is raised onto the level of ontological
uncertainty. Further difficulties arise from Dickinson’s idiosyncratic punctuation,
from her technique of semantic and phonic slant as well as from her method of
inference. The poet’s use of paradox, her hypothetical mode and her predilection
for non-finite forms present additional hurdles. Undoubtedly, Dickinson’s is a
writerly, not a readerly, style.
As to the modernity of Dickinson’s poetic strategies, much has been made of her
sophisticated handling of prosodic and phonic devices, a field in which Judy Joe
Small’s As Positive as Sound has broken fresh ground. The hymn measure
along with a relative lack of rhythmic and stanzaic experiments is responsible for
the surprisingly musical quality of her poetry, a quality largely lost to modernist
writers. Nonetheless, it is on the levels of syntax and semantics, as David Porter
and Cristanne Miller have persuasively argued, that the poet’s most daring
innovations are to be found.
11
Critics have repeatedly claimed that Dickinson is a non-mimetic writer. This
needs some qualification, however. Although the poet makes almost no use of
real-world (descriptive or first-level) mimesis, she does employ two other mimetic
modes extensively: situational and semantic mimesis. Instead of representing the
outer world as such, secondary mimesis supports formal and thematic levels
within the poem itself.
Situational (or second-level) mimesis renders the innerness of experiential and
mental processes in situational form. With Dickinson, such situations are from the
start raised onto a symbolic level. They do not function in an allegorical manner,
however, since they lack the autonomy peculiar to the allegorical mode. Instead
of coherent real world settings, we are offered diagrammatic situations, that is,
situations reduced to bare essentials. Like other Romantics (Keats, for example),
Dickinson tends to use analoga in negated form. Indeed, her poetic style is as
emphatically anti-analogical as it is radically anti-allegorical (Weisbuch 40-58).
From this perspective at least, her oeuvre stands outside the mainstream tradition
of nineteenth-century American literature whose principal mode is insistently
allegorical (Hansen 195-235).
Semantic (or third-level) mimesis supports on the phonic, prosodic and iconic
levels what the poem expresses on the semantic level. Unlike rhyme, metre and
rhythm, Dickinson’s use of iconicity (the spatial positioning of words on the
sheet) has not yet found the attention it deserves, one reason being that it is all
too often lost in Thomas H. Johnson’s transcription (Smith 19-20, 67-69, 82-85).
What presents the most serious problems to the reader is neither first- nor thirdlevel mimesis; it is rather the poet’s preference for diagrammatic mimesis to the
virtual exclusion of real-world (or descriptive) mimesis. As St. Armand and
Monteiro have amply documented, real-world elements (often in the form of
emblems) are always strongly present in the poems, but they rarely constitute a
consistent real-world setting. Remaining for the most part “sceneless” (Weisbuch
15-19, 23-39), the poems rather defy the reader’s wish for visualization.
Dickinson’s diagrammatic mode (minus its symbolic quality) points forward to
imagistic techniques of twentieth-century poets. In many ways, as HeiskanenMäkelä has perceptively observed, Dickinson’s style (especially her late style)
resembles “the calligraphic hands of the old masters of Chinese and Japanese
art” (186). Most of all, it resembles the Koans and the paintings of the great
artists of Zen Buddhism (Hagenbüchle, “Sign and Process” 152). In these
artworks Charles Anderson could have discovered parallels more congenial to
Dickinson’s verse than in American abstract impressionism or in expressionism
and cubism (36).
Semantic Shift
Dickinson is a great leaver-outer, but the reader - as Suzanne Juhasz rightly
warns (93) - should not yield to the temptation simply to fill in the gaps. The real
challenge of Dickinson’s style is for us to co-create the poem by actively
12
pursuing the semantic processes instigated by the text, to make explicit what is
only implicit in her verse, to deliver “the undeveloped freight” (1409) of
Dickinson’s words. This is more easily said than done.
A number of contributors to the impressive collection of essays Teaching the
Poetry of Emily Dickinson are at pains to point out that the poet’s metaphors
are not ordinary metaphors. One could even go a step further and argue (as I
have done) that most of her metaphors are metonymically constructed.
Unfortunately, the Jakobsonian distinction between metaphor and metonymy has
turned out to be a dubious one. The biaxial analysis - overly formal as it is - has
recently been challenged by Ohnuki-Tierney (159-62). Genette has shown
conclusively that all verbal figuration of necessity partakes of both modes:
metaphors rely on metonymic processes just as much as metonyms depend on
metaphoric operations. What is now in the center of scholarly interest is the
interaction, the play between the tropes. In his seminal essay on “polytropy,”
Paul Friedrich convincingly argues that there is no clear-cut hierarchy among the
tropes. None of the macrotropes (ten in his view) is a subtype of or can be
derived from any other: “Their categories constitute a theoretically open-ended
and constantly changing set” (23).
Dickinson’s poetry displays a variety of tropes, metaphor and metonymy among
them. One of her metaphoric practices is synaesthesia, a favorite device with
Romantic poets. However, as Schullenberger has contended, synaesthetic tropes
with this poet tend to be displaced and “discordant” (100). Indeed, Dickinson’s
poetic style seems to incline towards metonymy rather than metaphor
(Hagenbüchle, “Precision and Indeterminacy” 33-45). Instead of relying on
Jakobson’s binary scheme, I now want to focus on what I consider to be one of
Dickinson’s most intriguing semantic procedures: ‘semantic shift.’ By semantic
shift (which includes traditional metonymy) I mean the poet’s tendency to select
elements that as clues point to other elements as further clues, a method of
reasoning called “abduction” by the American philosopher Charles Sanders
Peirce, the founder of Pragmatism and of the science of semiotics (Kent 176-79).
Peirce’s definition of “abduction” is ideally suited to clarify Dickinson’s method
of
semantic shift. As Weisbuch has noted in his chapter on the poet’s “Quest
Fiction,” one of her key words is “guessing” (1518). Guessing is an integral part
of Dickinson’s hypothetical mode of “inference” and “conjecture,” concepts
which are in turn related in many of her poems to the notion of “risk.”
Guessing, conjecture and risk are all attributes that Peirce uses to define
“abduction” (Bonfantini 128-33). Unlike (habitual) induction and (logical)
deduction, “abduction,” we are told, is “after all, nothing but guessing" (qtd. by
Sebeok 49). But the kind of guessing Peirce means has a holistic quality; it is like
a felt thought. As such it is already present at the lowest level of creativity,
namely at the level of sense impression (Sebeok 19). The act of attribution,
Peirce explains, has the function of a hypothesis that is determined “by the
constitution of our nature” (qtd. by Bonfantini 129), and it is man’s nature that
makes this type of guessing “not altogether hopeless” (qtd. by Sebeok 17).
13
Peirce’s concept of “abduction,” we may provisionally conclude, is a type of
inference that implies a high degree of risk. Such risk is a quality fundamental to
all heuristic processes. And what is the nature of Dickinson’s poetry if not
heuristic?
In The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce the term “abduction” is used to
explain certain semantic procedures characteristic of the detective story, a genre
exemplified in this collection by the narrative practice of Edgar Allan Poe and
Arthur Conan Doyle. As the preface states, it is the purpose of the contributors
to elucidate the scientific and poetic method of inferential discovery (ix). Much
like a detective (Bonfantini 127), the reader of a Dickinson text acts as a solver of
riddles. Dolores Lucas has applied the riddle model to Dickinson’s poetry in
general and to the definition poem in particular in which the act of inference (as
“abductive suggestion”) plays a crucial role.
Let me now briefly exemplify Dickinson’s use of semantic shift. How can we
define the wind? By means of metaphors, for instance: “the bawdy wind that
kisses all it meets” (Othello). Further: the wind as heavenly babe (Der Wind, der
Wind, das himmlische Kind), the wind as messenger, as warrior, and so forth.
But Dickinson tends to prefer another strategy. To her it is “the vane” (the
device that points the way the wind comes from) that “defines the wind.”
(L830) The vane does not function as a metaphor with two poles; instead it
operates as a semantic pointer inviting the reader to go in search of what is being
pointed at. Again, “And a Suspicion, like a Finger / Touches my Forehead now
and then” (959) is not so much a simile as a pointer hinting at the source of what
creates the suspicion in the first place.
One might speak with Juhasz of “metaphors [. . .] as action” (87) or of
performative metaphors in that the “finger” at once points out and enacts the
semantic process going on. In much the same way, the “horses’ heads” (712) in
Dickinson’s ‘last ride poem’ point towards eternity. While the horses in their
substantiality appear to be carrying the speaker towards the grave, it is their
heads that (synecdochically) point a different way. And so the poem ends on the
paradox of death and immortality, both sitting simultaneously at the speaker’s
side.
In an early letter to her “Dearest of all dear Uncles,” Dickinson humorously
complains: “people will get hit with stones that I throw at my neighbor’s dog - [.
. .] but they insist upon blaming me instead of the stones [. . .] such things should
not be permitted. [. . .] Life isn’t what it purports to be.” (L29) The same
semantic relation - although in inverse form - can be found in the verse “I love
the Cause that slew Me” (925) and again in the lines “We will not drop the Dirk
- / Because We love the Wound” (379). The “Dirk” seems at first sight to
function as a metaphor for the painful memory of loss; but on closer inspection it
is not the dirk qua dirk that is essential to our understanding but the causal nexus
between “Dirk” and “Wound” with the wound as a reminder of the dirk’s
power to hurt and give pain.
14
Types of Semantic Shift
The eminent rhetorician Heinrich Lausberg in Elemente der literarischen
Rhetorik distinguishes two types of tropes: the Grenzverschiebungs-Trope and
the Sprungtrope (64). Unlike the Sprungtrope that finds its vehicle in an
unrelated semantic field (‘jumping from one to the other’), the
Grenzverschiebungs-Trope (which includes the synecdoche) is a figure of speech
that by Lausberg’s definition shifts the boundary, moving the meaning from one
semantic field to an adjoining field. It is easy to see that Lausberg’s Sprungtrope
is by and large identical with the traditional ‘metaphor,’ whereas the
Grenzverschiebungs-Trope resembles Jakobson’s term ‘metonymy’ and its
principle of contiguity. The latter, Lausberg suggests, functions essentially on the
basis of relations that hold in reality; the former (the Sprungtrope) is primarily but not exclusively - a semantic relation. The boundary between the two terms is
therefore a fuzzy one. Lausberg’s definition is attractive for two reasons: it
undercuts Jakobson’s binary opposition between metaphor and metonymy and,
most importantly, the Grenzverschiebungs-Trope lends itself to a historical
perspective.
Extending the rhetorical Grenzverschiebungs-Trope into the historical dimension
allows us to distinguish between two types of semantic shift: the synchronic type
on the one hand and the diachronic type on the other. The synchronic type not
only comprehends Dickinson’s use of metonymy proper but also her
idiosyncratic shifts between different kinds of discourse. Theological, political,
legal, commercial, scientific and everyday discourses are all turned against
themselves in that the poems move the systematic terms into the realm of the
symbolic. In this way, the poet counters instrumental thought, undermines
socially sanctioned preconceptions, lays bare their pretension to truth and
criticizes their underlying value systems. In the poem “Arcturus is his other
name” (70) poetic discourse is played off against scientific discourse. This is an
obvious example, admittedly, but it illustrates the fact that scientific discourse (in
competition with religious and political discourse) is about to gain a dominant
position in mid-nineteenth century American culture - an ominous development
in Dickinson’s eyes.
In poems like “I never lost as much but twice -” (49) or “I asked no other thing
-” (621) social, theological, legal and commercial terms are all marked
pejoratively to express the poet’s anger at her existential plight. Theological
discourse, in particular, is counterpointed to poetic discourse in the poem “The
Lilac is an ancient shrub”: “But let not Revelation / By theses be detained -”
(1241). The true “Scientist of Faith” is in fact the poet who has only begun “His
research.” The tension between theological, legal and poetic discourse is also
manifest in the letters, particularly in Dickinson’s value-laden correspondence
with Otis P. Lord. In a note to her nephew “Ned” the poet clowns: “Deity will
guide you - I do not mean Jehova -” (L1000). And on the occasion of Miss
Mather’s engagement she sends her a letter of congratulation, teasing: “May it
have occurred to my sweet neighbor that the words ‘found peace in believing’
had other than a theological import?” (L1032) Unquestionably, the poet’s
15
semantic shifts reveal an intense awareness of what Michel Foucault in Les mots
et les choses has unmasked as the struggle for social hegemony and the claim to
power among a culture’s rivalling discourse modes (373 et passim). Nor should
it finally be overlooked that Dickinson’s critique is also directed against the dead
conventions of poetic discourse itself, in particular against ideologically motivated
“symbolic reduction” (Budick 100-162).
It is the type of diachronic shift, however, that most deserves our scrutiny. From
the beginning, critics have recognized Dickinson’s way of maneuvering historical
vocabularies for subversive purposes. Calvinist-Puritan terms (“immortality,”
“crucifixion,” “state,” “election”), Romantic terms (“nature,” “myth,”
“surmise”), social terms (“father,” “bride,” “wife,” “gentlewoman”), political
terms (“majority,” “rebel,” “mutiny,” “revolution”) are all tested against the
touchstone of poetic discourse. Not infrequently, the critique is pressed home
through the revitalization of a given term’s etymological meaning as in “grace”
(theological ‘grace’ versus poetic gratia as the transcendent call of beauty),
“philology,” “crisis,” “civilization” and the like. Dickinson’s adaptation of the
New England notion of “a waste howling wilderness” to her own sense of
spiritual waste, of “Blank - and steady Wilderness -” (458), is an especially
striking example that mirrors the shift from Puritanism to mid-nineteenth century
American culture and, more particularly, exposes the poet’s loss of a
metaphysical basis. Dickinson’s appropriation of the religious term “soul,” more
perhaps than any other, highlights her choice of existential and poetic autonomy,
but it also betrays her acute sense of alienation as the price to pay for her
insistence on the self’s independence.
Besides the Puritan conversion experience, beautifully instanced by “I’ve heard
an Organ talk sometimes” (183), it is the Romantic (and Transcendentalist)
experience of the sublime that displays subtle but profound mutations in
Dickinson’s work (as we can learn from Dihl, Stonum and Loeffelholz). The
frequently anthologized “There’s a certain slant of light” (258) is a case in point.
The poem documents the silencing of the biblical voice along with the loss in the
traditional sense of a religious calling. The expression “Seal Despair” not only
questions the literal promise in Revelations pledged to all those who carry the
seal of God on their foreheads, but it also manifests the infinite distance between
man and God. Along with the oxymora “heavenly hurt” and “imperial
affliction” it underscores the poet’s estrangement from her Puritan heritage. The
self-contradictory quality of the experience stresses the painfully transient
encounter between the generic “we” (lyrical self and implicated reader in one)
and an unspecified divine presence, and at the same time subverts the religious
basis of the numinous. As a result, the poem removes ‘the Dickinson sublime’
from Wordsworth’s “egotistical sublime” no less than from Poe’s “negative
sublime” (Weiskel). Although the epiphanic moment still occurs, it can now only
be grasped in terms of loss and pain.
It is not least Dickinson’s method of semantic shift - both synchronic and
diachronic - that throws into relief the intensely dialogic quality of her poetry.
The dialogue may be carried on in the form of dispassionate inquiries, but the
16
debate can also turn angry, especially if social and ideological presumptions are
under attack. Through her technique of semantic shift the poet manages to
question the value system of her own society and to subvert the very basis of
Victorian culture.
The Arrow of Meaning
Metaphors can be defined as semantic processes that function in terms of
mapping, that is, of a semantic exchange between closed fields of meaning.
Dickinson’s semantic shifts, by contrast, display an element of directiveness
missing in metaphoric tropes. Although the poet sends the reader forth into the
realm of the unknown, she invariably sets the direction. Such directiveness is
central to her work: it generates meaning without delimiting the meaning. Poe,
too, is well aware that all thinking is processual, that it stops when settling down
on ‘terms’ (Poe 488, 498-500), but with him the movement seems to have lost
its vectorial quality. Not so with Dickinson. The inferential gestures are energized
by the poet’s double stimulus of love and death, the one challenging the other:
finitude as the spur of self-transcendence.
Starting out from real-world facts, the directional arrow moves the reader
towards a symbolic realm with an attendant increase in meaning. Even the
simplest poem testifies to this movement from facts to living symbols. In her
poem “By my window have I for scenery / Just a Sea - with a Stem -” (797) the
word ‘Pine’ is insufficient to the lyrical self because it refers (through an act of
classification) to the kind of tree that the commonsensical farmer views as a
practical thing at hand. To the perceiving mind, however, the tree’s meaning
does not stop there. As an object, the tree is bracketed in a kind of
“phenomenological reduction” (Hagenbüchle, “Precision and Indeterminacy”
38). What is focused on is its effect on the perceiving mind. From this angle, the
tree in front of her window reveals its true significance as “a ‘Fellow / Of the
Royal’ Infinity?” (‘academically’ unnamable!), hinting at God’s creative power.
The synecdoche “Stem” and the synaesthetic use of “Sea” for sky (along with
the understatement “Just a”) combine to defamiliarize - and devalue - referential
language. In a second epoche, sense impressions are reduced to bare, but
semantically rich, essentials with the words “Stem” and “Sea” functioning as
semantic pointers, referring the reader to poetry and eternity, respectively.
Dickinson’s raids on the inarticulate remain indeterminate and in their result
uncertain, but the directive potential is powerful enough to create meaning out of
absence. The inferential method of these raids is not based on referential
presupposition but - that is their secret - on semantic entailment. With the
possible exception of Hopkins, Dickinson’s oeuvre presents a higher degree of
semantic implication than that of any other nineteenth-century writer. Implication
also accounts for the fact that semantic inference and the temporal dimension of
the future can no longer be clearly distinguished. Meaning in terms of semantic
implication is both atemporal and future-oriented, in one word: directional.
Feidelson was right in claiming that the American variant of nineteenth-century
17
symbolism cannot be understood without its grounding in Puritan typology (8889, 100-01). With Dickinson, in particular, the temporal dimension of the original
antitype (as God’s millennial promise) can still be sensed, although it is now
interiorized, subsumed in the poetic principle of inferential thought (Hagenbüchle,
“Sign and Process” 142). The utopian quality of her poetry fuses past, present
and future into what might be called Dickinson’s ‘apocalyptic present.’ This is
not a grammatic tense, of course, but a fictional mode of time; time not as an
aspect of the spatio-temporal world but as a state of consciousness coextensive
with the movement of poetic language.
Crossing Boundaries
Critics rightly claim that the essence of Dickinson’s work is quest. More
precisely, it is a linguistic quest that focuses intensely on semantic boundaries.
Indeed, one of the allurements (but also one of the difficulties) of her poetry is its
liminal or threshold quality. What I wish to draw attention to here is the
intriguing fact that spatio-temporal boundaries tend to function both as semantic
blockers and as stimulants. In the poem “Our lives are Swiss” (80), for example,
“Italy stands the other side!” while God’s “siren Alps / Forever intervene!” so
that the land of southern warmth - the object of desire - comes to denote to the
lyrical self all that is forbidden. Yet the very fact that it is forbidden transforms
the unattainable land (with Moses as biblical prototype) into the ‘Promised
Land.’ Using a Hegelian terminology, we might distinguish between Grenze as
stressing human finitude and Schranke (‘crossing-gates’ or ‘gateways’) as
emphasizing the act of crossing and transcending boundary lines.
As all readers know, Dickinson’s crossings do not always succeed, in fact, they
often fail, but they invariably bring into play symbolic language as the sphere of
the possible. Let us briefly examine what happens at these boundaries. Broadly
speaking, we may signal out three types of semantic processes: boundaries
generate meaning, they cause meaning to break down and, third, meaning is left
suspended in paradoxical oscillation. In the first case, the boundary line provokes
the mind to cross and transcend it, to project itself into the yet unknown. Though
we know nothing certain about the realm called “Paradise” (except its loss), we
can “infer” its “vicinity” “By it’s [sic!] Bisecting / Messenger -” (1411), namely
death: the ultimate frontier (marked here iconically). From a strictly theological
point of view, however, such crossings appear as acts of irreverence, even as
sinful transgression. No wonder they are often accompanied by feelings of guilt.
One of the “Eastern Exiles” who “strayed beyond the Amber line / Some
madder Holiday -” (262) is plainly the poet herself.
The second type is found in poems like “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” (280), in
which the safety plank of rational thought breaks down so that the speaker falls
into the abyss of meaninglessness - a mise en abîme of sorts (Deringer and
Hagenbüchle 196-99). The third type is of special interest to us since Dickinson
uses a method that exploits the age-old device of paradox but in its
epistemological explicitness anticipates modern systems theory (Schwanitz 2731). In such cases, the speaker appears to straddle the line so that it belongs
simultaneously to both sides (like the figural contour of a picture puzzle). In the
18
much-admired poem “The Admirations - and Contempts - of time -” (906) we
simultaneously look back at mortal life and forward towards eternity, the
dividing line being the “Open Tomb” from which both poet and reader seem to
gaze. From this view, man’s existence appears paradoxical: “Finite Infinity.”
Dickinson’s “Compound Vision” (as it is called here) is not based on
philosophical or metaphysical assumptions, it is based on the structure of poetic
language itself.
The above typology, abridged as it is, helps us to understand why Dickinson’s
poetry always tends to bifurcate into ecstasy and despair with the paradox (or
biform) bracketing the alternatives. In the last analysis, however, the poet’s
semantic crossings must be understood as her symbolic enactment in language of
the nation’s ceaseless drive into the yet unmapped West, rushing - as Lyman
Beecher exulted - “like a comet into infinite space” (qtd. by Franklin 11).
Errand into the Wilderness
For this poet, the testing of semantic boundaries is a method of thought
indispensable to the testing of life’s meaning (or lack of secure meanings). Like
Keats she has the courage to live in uncertainties without an irritable reaching
out for absolute truth. The seemingly paradoxical choice of keeping choices open
in her poetry is itself a profoundly ethical act: it defends the liberty of the self
against the cultural constraints of her time and, conversely, offers a last stand
against the threat of nihilism, a threat increasingly visible in a culture that - as the
work of Hawthorne and Melville testifies - is about to lose a reliable standpoint.
Dickinson’s insistence on sheer potentiality - “The Possible’s slow fuse” (1687) accounts for much of her poetry’s semantic, perspectival and tonal ambivalence
with which the reader has to cope. From this angle, Dickinson’s aesthetics
proclaims itself as an aesthetics of provocation: she provoked the reader of her
time, Higginson among them; she provoked language to cross frontiers and open
up the realm of poetic possibility; she provokes today’s audience to pursue the
complex semantic processes that her texts instigate; but most of all she provoked
herself into entering terra incognita, a venture charged with existential and
aesthetic risk. In fact, with Dickinson the two were one.
Critics have repeatedly commented on the skeptical core of Dickinson’s art.
Although skepticism is viewed by her as an alternative, both metaphysically and
epistemologically, it is not her last word. Her final attitude is one of faith, faith in
the creative power of poetic language. Unlike Melville, who despaired of
language as a Nietzschean mask of lies and self-deceptions, Dickinson kept her
faith not least because her creativity - her animus (Gelpi 299) - remained virtually
undiminished to the end of her life.
Nonetheless, the choice of poetry as a battlefield to test the essence of life and of
selfhood - “If it contain a Kernel?” (1073) - entails its own perils. No one can
guarantee that the conjectures stimulated by symbolic language will eventually be
answered by something in reality. The inferential thought processes that
19
Dickinson’s poetic discourse engenders might just as well be mere fictions, the
poet’s own creations - a suspicion that occasionally crosses her mind. If such
turned out to be the case, the very ground of her poetry would crumble. “A
word that breathes distinctly / Has not the power to die / Cohesive as the Spirit /
It may expire if He -” (1651), but if the mythic “He” does not exist, her palaces
will “drop tenantless;” her poetry would lack a vital center and the poetic word
turn out to be a “woid” (Joyce). In other words, if the movement of symbolic
language (that in turn sustains the mythic “He”) comes to nothing, all fails, and
the poet’s “Vision” vanishes like a treacherous “ignis fatuus” (1551).
Dickinson was painfully conscious that her home in language was far from being
secure. It is this acute awareness that documents the historical turning point at
which the poet is situated: the “Great Divide” between the RomanticTranscendentalist movement on the one hand and the emergence of Modernism
on the other. Indeed, Dickinson resisted Modernism as much as she inaugurated
it. To feel the lack of significance without a sense of sadness and of loss came to
be the attitude of many a modernist and postmodernist writer, but it surely was
not Dickinson’s stance.
Moments of ecstasy alternate with moments when “the meaning goes out of
things” and no signal comes. Such moments are moments of expansion only if
outlived. (PF 49) And yet the poet was determined to keep her faith in the
creative word even if the spirit she served should fail her: “So when the Hills
decay - / My Faith must take the Purple Wheel / To show the Sun the way -”
(766). Such a faith is unthinkable without the Puritan notion of a ‘covenant.’ In
keeping her part of the “Compact” (458) with her alter ego - Eros and
Thanatos in one - Dickinson achieved a measure of self-assurance that finally
allowed her to cope successfully with life’s “Abyss.”
It is in her poetic oeuvre, then, that the seventeenth-century vision of an “Errand
into the Wilderness” (as Samuel Danforth unforgettably phrased it) has found its
nineteenth-century poetic fulfilment. Without the ‘covenant’ thought and without
the historic “Errand,” those prototypical New England myths, neither the poet’s
boldness to confront life’s “Wilderness” nor her unflagging courage to pursue
her quest would seem to have been possible. From that perspective (and as
Richard Sewall pointed out long ago) the image of Emily Dickinson as a spinster
trapped in a garret turns out to be totally ludicrous. Is it not amazing that the
same woman who deliberately withdrew from social life had the courage to
pioneer into realms we all shy back from: our mortality and the divine gift within
us? To have embodied in her verse America’s westering spirit in a deeper sense
than any other nineteenth-century poet is Dickinson’s crowning achievement.
Authors and Works Cited:
20
Anderson, Charles. “The Modernism of Emily Dickinson.” Emily Dickinson:
Letter to the World. Centenary Conference 1986. Washington: The Folger
Shakespeare Library, 1986.
Bonfantini, Massimo A. and Proni, Giampaolo. “To Guess or not to Guess.” The
Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce. Ed. Umberto Eco and Thomas A.
Sebeok. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983.
Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P,
1974.
Budick, E. Miller. Emily Dickinson and the Life of Language: A Study in Poetic
Symbolics. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State UP, 1985.
Cambon, Glauco. The Inclusive Flame: Studies in Modern American Poetry.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1965.
Cameron, Sharon. Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre. Baltimore
and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.
---. Choosing not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1992 (unfortunately this facinating study was not available to me at the time of
writing).
Chaliff, Cynthia. “The Bees, the Flowers, and Emily Dickinson.” Research
Studies (Washington State U) 42, no. 2 (June 1974): 93-103.
Cody, John. After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard UP, 1971.
Cunningham, J. V. “Sorting Out: The Case of Dickinson.” Southern Review 5,
no. 2 (Spring/April, 1969): 436-56.
Dandurand, Karen. Dickinson Scholarship: An Annotated Bibliography 19691985. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 636. New York and
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