Dickinson’s poetic language…

“Write about the use of metaphors and similes in Emily Dickinson’s work; talk about the techniques Emily Dickinson uses in shaping her highly metaphorical poetic language.“

This was the request for an upcoming post. The correspondent added the following quote by Nabokov:

”The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays. With Shakespeare it’s the metaphor that is the thing, and not the play.”

Since Shakespeare and Dickinson were thrown together, that made me wonder how much Dickinson learned from Shakespeare. Higginson reported of Dickinson (during a meeting with her) that “After long disuse of her eyes she read Shakespeare & thought why is any other book needed.” So, Dickinson, as one might expect, was well acquainted with Shakespeare—more as a reader than playgoer based on her statement; so much so that she asked the question nearly every English language poet asks themselves at some point: What is there to possibly say after Shakespeare?

And yet we babble on.

Yet Shakspeare and Dickinson’s art are so different that one wonders what Dickinson could have absorbed from Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote dramas. Dickinson wrote fleeting lyrics. Shakespeare wrote blank verse. Dickinson wrote ballad meter—never once writing blank verse. Shakespeare’s art gave him all the latitude he needed to build similes and metaphors into whole conceits—sometimes whole plays within plays. Dickinson’s chosen vehicle, the ballad hymn, forcefully compressed her thought and language into gnomic ellipsis. In truth, and from a purely mechanical perspective, I’m not sure Dickinson learned all that much from Shakespeare (that she couldn’t have learned from other poets). If Shakespeare was an example to Dickinson then it was, as Nabokov wrote, for the genius of thought—his gift for figurative language. He shows all poets what poetry is and is capable of.

And yet there are some similarities between the two poets. I doubt that’s because Dickinson closely studied Shakespeare. I speculate that it’s simply because she shared the same trait that all great poets (in my opinion) share—a gift for the figurative language, for metaphor and analogy. It’s not just the ability to rhyme or lineate that demarcates the great poet, but the ability to present common ideas in new and unforeseen contexts. Dickinson possessed this latter gift to a greater degree than any other American poet with the exclusion, possibly, of Robert Frost. But the changes in poetic expectations between the early 20th century and the mid 19th century (and the kinds of poems they were writing) are so marked that a comparison between the two is difficult.

Dickinson’s poetic aesthetics were, in many ways, closer to the 16th century, two hundred and fifty years before, than to the 20th century, as little as fifteen years away! The use of long obsolete pronouns like thee and thou were still available, just as they were to Shakespeare (already more of a poetic convention even in Shakespeare’s time). So too was grammatical inversion, meter, rhyme, personification, extended metaphor, compression, disjunctive and conjunctive syntax, parallelism, nominal sentence structurea, etc… All the tricks of figurative language available to the poets of the 16th and 17th century were still available to Dickinson. Nonetheless, her intellectual sensibility was ostensibly like our own, which gives her 17th century poetic conventions a modern sensibility (which, in my view, is part of her appeal). Christanne MIller, Emily Dickinson, A Poet’s Grammar, gives examples of poems by George Herbert that she copied out. Additionally, she writes that:

…the resemblance between Dickinson’s and Herbert’s poetry was so strong that Millicent Todd Bingham published two stanzas of [Herbert’s] “Matin Hymn” that Dickinson had copied out and stored with her verses as Dickinson’s own. [p. 138]

She goes on to compare Dickinson’s fragmentary sentence structure to Herbert’s:

An even more extreme example of curt baroque prose is Herbert’s “Prayer. I.” which consists of numerous fragmentary representations of prayer, beginning:

           Prayer, the Church's banquet, Angel's age,
           God's breath in man returning to his birth,
           The soul in paraphrase...

                      and ending:

           Church-bells beyond the stars heart, the soul's blood.
           The land of spices, something understood.

The poem contains no complete predicate. Much of Dickinson’s poetry, like baroque poetry and prose, moves by a sequence of “points” and paradoxes reveal[ing] the energy of a single apprehension in the writer’s mind”. [p. 139]

And yet Miller will add:

“Because Dickinson’s poetic mode anticipates that of twentieth century poets, particularly the Modernists with their revived interest in the metaphysical poets, her poetry sounds less strange to the twentieth century ear than it did to her century’s. A glance at Longfellow’s verse, which Dickinson greatly admired and referred to frequently, illuminates the gulf she created between her own and her contemporaries’ work.” [p 140]

So, the point of all this is to say that writing about Dickinson’s use of metaphors and similes, and the techniques she uses to shape her highly metaphorical poetic language, is essentially to describe the poetry and prose of the two hundred fifty years preceding her. The antecedents to her idiosyncratic art can be found in other poets. She didn’t invent a new and unforeseen poetics. What she did was to absorb and synthesize her literary inheritance, creating a wholly unique voice.

One could easily write a book on this subject but I’ll stay out of the weeds and limit myself to explicitly answering the questions asked. I’ll limit myself to half a dozen, or so, poems which, one hopes, are nevertheless representative. I know that this post will too brief.

  Dickinson's Use of Similes

All the best poets grow out of similes, even Shakespeare. The continued use of them is the surest sign of mediocrity. Here’s why: Wordnet defines a simile as “a figure of speech that expresses a resemblance between things of different kinds (usually formed with `like’ or`as’)”. It’s the last part of the definition that’s the problem. Those butlers “like” and “as”, having to introduce every guest, get damned tiresome. And if one is Emily Dickinson writing exceedingly compressed ballad hymns, they burn real estate. And as regards similes, I’ve quoted this passage before, but will do so again:

“Shakespeare’s style, as everyone knows, is metaphorical to excess. His imagination is always active, but he seldom pauses to indulge it by lengthened description. I shall hereafter have occasion to direct your observation to the sobriety with which he preserves imagination in its proper station, as only the minister and interpreter of thought; but what I wish now to say is, that in him the two powers operate simultaneously. He goes on thinking vigorously, while his imagination scatters her inexhaustible treasures like flowers on the current of his meditations, His constant aim is the expression of facts, passions, or opinions; and his intellect is constantly occupied in the investigation of such; but the mind acts with ease in its lofty vocation, and the beautiful and the grand rise up voluntarily to do him homage. he never indeed consents to express those poetical ideas by themselves; but he shows that he felt their import and their legitimate use, by wedding them to the thoughts in which they originated. The truths which he taught, received magnificence and amenity from the illustrative forms; and the poetical images were elevated into a higher sphere of associations by the dignity of the principles which they were applied to adorn. Something like this is always the true function of the imagination in poetry, and dramatic poetry in particular; and it is also the test which tries the presence of the faculty; metaphor indicates its strength, and simile its weakness. Nothing can be more different from this, or farther inferior to it, than the style of the poet who turns aside in search of description, and indulges in simile preferably to the brevity of metaphor, to whom perhaps a poetical picture originally suggested itself as the decoration of a striking thought, but who allowed himself to be captivated by the beauty of the suggested image, till he forgot the thought which had given it birth, and on its connexion with which its highest excellence depended. Such was Fletcher, whose style is poor in metaphor. [The New Shakespeare Society Publications, Series VIII Miscellanies Nos. 1-4 A Letter on Shakespeare’s Authorship of the drama entitled THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN, by William Spalding p. 16-17]

Spalding was a 19th century Shakespeare scholar (a generation before Dickinson) whose style of writing is long winded, but the point he is making is that rather than use a simile, Shakespeare absorbed the simile into metaphor. For example, Shakespeare, later in his career, would write in Antony and Cleopatra:

  O sun, thy uprise shall I see no more:
  Fortune and Antony part here; even here
  Do we shake hands. All come to this? The hearts
  That spaniel'd me at heels, to whom I gave
  Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets
  On blossoming Caesar

The portion in italics is a masterpiece of metaphorical writing and compression. This is what Spalding means when he writes, at the outset, “His imagination is always active, but he seldom pauses to indulge it by lengthened description.” Italics are mine. Shakespeare in his earlier verse (and his later collaborator John Fletcher) would have relied on similes, writing:

  O sun, thy uprise shall I see no more:
  Fortune and Antony part here; even here
  Do we shake hands. All come to this? The hearts
  That were like spaniels at my heels, to whom
  I gave their wishes, melt like sweets and candy
  On Ceasar, who doth blossom like a flower. 

Which do you prefer? Writing through the metaphor? Or writing similes? Which is more powerful and immediate? They’re both blank verse. I even threw in the auxiliary do form for authenticity. This is not to say that Shakespeare never used similes, but that his mind, with ever more experience, wrote through the metaphor. Dickinson has this in common with Shakespeare. She seldom, surprisingly, “turns aside in search of description—indulging in simile“.

• After making that assertion, I was curious to test what I’d written. I took out my concordance and added up her uses of like to introduce a simile. Roughly, and I do mean roughly, I counted some 240 uses. But let’s say I can’t count (and not all her uses of like introduce a simile). Call it 275. If she wrote almost 1800 poems, that means that the use of like to initiate a simile occurs in just over 15% of them (and probably less because like often appears more than once in the same poem). But there’s more. Emily Dickinson’s Poems by Christanne Miller averages 30 lines of poetry per page. Let’s call it 25 to be conservative. There are 736 pages which means that—ballparking—Dickinson wrote around 18,000-plusish lines of poetry. Let’s stick with 275 as being close to the number of lines featuring like as a simile. That means that similes with like represent merely 1½% of all the lines she wrote. If we include “as”, then maybe 3% percent? At most? Dickinson’s use of similes, perhaps surprisingly, is not a salient feature of her verse. It may seem more prevalent because when she does use them, they are striking and doubly so for being so sparing.

By way of comparison, I did a quick read through Elizabeth Barret Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese (a contemporary of Dickinson). 44 Sonnets. 616 lines. Only one line: “Thou dovelike soul!” is arguably a simile using like. That means that Browning’s usage of like represents around one tenth of one percent of all the lines in her sonnet sequence. Still curious, I read Dickinson’s Fascicle 17 and 18, which represented close to the same number of lines as Browning’s Sonnet Sequence, and found 3 appearances of like that seemed indisputably similes. That represents five tenths of one percent. Almost the same as Browning. Both poets are exceedingly sparing in their use of like.. When Dickinson does use similes, they are either brief, or comprise the entirety of the poem. Anything in between is exceedingly rare. They are, after all, little analogies (and Dickinson’s poems are often “analogical poems”) and she seems to revel in the far-flung analogy (perhaps the most striking feature of her imagination). As an example:

  Rehearsal to Ourselves
  Of a Withdrawn Delight—
  Afford a Bliss like Murder
  Omnipotent — Acute —

  We will not drop the Dirk
  Because We love the Wound
  The Dirk Commemorate — Itself
  Remind Us that We died —

Who but Dickinson would write: “a Bliss like Murder”! This, in a nutshell, is the heart of her genius. One thinks that the analogy/simile occurred to her first, and that then she built the poem around it. She often loves to startle with her similes. Another example might be:

The Leaves unhooked themselves from Trees—
And started all abroad—
The Dust did scoop itself like Hands—
And throw away the Road—

One of the loveliest images she wrote, in which the dust, itself the road, paradoxically scoops itself up and throws its road away. Less startlingly but with just as much originality she will write:

  Nature rarer uses Yellow
  Than another hue—
  Saves she all of that for Sunsets
  Prodigal of Blue

  Spending Scarlet, like a Woman
  Yellow she affords
  Only scantly and selectly
  Like a Lover's Words—

In which she compares the rarity of the color yellow to the lover’s words spoken by a woman; or from Fascicle Eighteen:

  The Feet mechanical, go round—
  A wooden way
  Of Ground, or Air, or Ought—
  Regardless grown,
  A Quartz contentment, like stone—

Dickinson is not content to describe contentment as Quartz, but she doubly emphasizes the deadening “contentment” writing “like stone”—a paradoxical contentment. More of her startling similes:

• The clouds — like listless elephants…
• She went as quiet as the dew…
• Her pretty speech — like drunken men…
• I’ve rubies — like the evening blood….
• Leaping like leopards to the sky…

        The only ghost I ever saw
        Was dressed in mechlin, --so;
        He wore no sandal on his foot,
        And stepped like flakes of snow.

• The orchard sparkled like a jew…
• As cautiously as glass…
• The news, like squirrels, ran…
• She dealt her pretty words like blades…
• A music numerous as space…
• She dances like a bomb, abroad…
• The claws that clung, like lifeless gloves…

        Your thoughts don't have words every day,
        They come a single time
        Like signal esoteric sips
        Of sacramental wine...

If one is reminded of Shakespeare, then possibly it’s for the sheer originality of her similes. On the other end of the spectrum, so inclined was Emily toward the drawing of analogies, that she would construct whole poems, like riddles, predicated on similes.

  Like Flowers, that heard the news of Dews,
  But never deemed the dripping prize
  Awaited their—low Brows—

  Or Bees—that thought the Summer’s name
  Some rumor of Delirium,
  No Summer—could—for Them—

  Or Arctic Creatures, dimly stirred—
  By Tropic Hint—some Travelled Bird
  Imported to the Wood—

  Or Wind’s bright signal to the Ear—
  Making that homely, and severe,
  Contented, known, before—

  The Heaven—unexpected come,
  To Lives that thought the Worshipping
  A too presumptuous Psalm— 

Each stanza until the last, is a simile, as if Dickinson were delighting in her mind’s ability to deftly make metaphorical and analogical leaps. The poem is almost a kind of showing-off. She will write another one in which each line is a simile leading the reader to the revelation of the final lines, in which what is being described is finally revealed.

  As far from pity, as complaint —
  As cool to speech — as stone —
  As numb to Revelation
  As if my Trade were Bone —

  As far from time — as History —
  As near yourself — Today —
  As Children, to the Rainbow's scarf —
  Or Sunset's Yellow play

  To eyelids in the Sepulchre —
  How dumb the Dancer lies —
  While Color's Revelations break —
  And blaze — the Butterflies!

Dickinson’s Use of Metaphors

In general though, Dickinson prefers the immediacy, compression and impact of writing through metaphor (something only a handful of modern poets grasp). The entirety of the poem, one of her loveliest, is a single metaphor. It can be summarized by the unstated simile: Dusk is like a woman sweeping with a broom.

She sweeps with many-colored Brooms —
And leaves the Shreds behind —
Oh Housewife in the Evening West —
Come back, and dust the Pond!

You dropped a Purple Ravelling in —
You dropped an Amber thread —
And how you’ve littered all the East
With duds of Emerald!

And still, she plies her spotted Brooms,
And still the Aprons fly,
Till Brooms fade softly into stars —
And then I come away —

Not once does she use the word like or as, and yet the colors are like ravellings, threads and duds. The sunset is like a woman. The sky is like a many colored broom. She maintains a single conceit from beginning to end. More commonly, Dickinson will rely on standard/primary/absolute, implied, mixed and extended metaphors (among others). As with her similes, her genius for metaphor is the kind that often startles, is original and remains in the memory.

  Standard/Primary Metaphor

     An Hour is a Sea
     Between a few, and me—
     With them would Harbor be—

In which the hour is a sea.

     Hope is the thing with feathers
     That perches in the soul,
     And sings the tune without the words,
     And never stops at all.

These famous lines begin with a standard/primary/absolute (I don’t know which to call it but one sees all these names applied to the same type of metaphor), then becomes an extended metaphor elaborating on the initial absolute metaphor.

Implied Metaphor

       There interposed a fly.
       With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz.

The famous image with the implied metaphor of the sound itself being the stumbling fly.

        When I hoped, I recollect
        Just the place I stood—
        At a Window facing West
        Roughest Air — was good —

        Not a Sleet could bite me —

In which the Sleet is construed to be something like a biting animal. This implied metaphor reminds me of Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

        HAMLET 
        The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold.
        HORATIO 
        It is a nipping and an eager air.

I’ve always meant to write a post on just these lines because, to me, they encapsulate everything about Shakespeare’s genius. The air doesn’t just bite, but bite’s shrewdly (suggesting the places where the cold shrewdly finds bare skin and thin layers). Shakespeare’s personification, his eye for motive and intention (drama) in all things animate and inanimate, is at the heart of his genius, and it is something which Dickinson’s own poetry is rich with. Shakespeare is so delighted with his first implied metaphor, of the shrewdly biting cold, that he elaborates: It is a nipping and an eager air. Eager gives to the wind intention, as does shrewdly. If there’s anything that’s going to remind readers of Shakespeare, when reading Dickinson, it’s their penchant for personifying nature as found in their gardens. Each seemed passionately attentive to its seasons. (Several books are available that collect Shakespeare’s passages drawn from flowers and gardening.) Both Dickinson and Shakespeare show a great sensitivity to the lives and deaths (the drama) of the animals that populate their gardens. Dickinson will also discover motive and intention in nature’s displays:

        The Tint I cannot take — is best —
        That Color too remote
        That I could show it in Bazaar —

        That fine — impalpable Array —
        That swaggers on the eye...

While examples of implied metaphor are not as frequent as one might expect in Dickinson’s poetry (if one doesn’t include personification), they are nevertheless startling and original when they do appear:

      Under the Light, yet under,
      Under the Grass and the Dirt,
      Under the Beetle's Cellar
      Under the Clover's Root,

      Further than Arm could stretch
      Were it Giant long,
      Further than Sunshine could
      Were the Day Year long,

      Over the Light, yet over,
      Over the Arc of the Bird—
      Over the Comet's chimney—
      Over the Cubit's Head,

      Further than Guess can gallop
      Further than Riddle ride—
      Oh for a Disc to the Distance
      Between Ourselves and the Dead!

I printed the whole poem just for the implied metaphor, “Comet’s chimney”. What a beautiful way to describe the comet. The implied metaphor is possibly that of the comet being like a ship traveling the stars, the tail its smoke from the chimney. Dickinson would have seen many such boats. She might also have been comparing the comet to a locomotive and the tail to the locomotive’s chuffing chimney smoke.

Extended Metaphor

The ballad hymn doesn’t give Dickinson space for extended metaphors. Although I haven’t read 1800 poems, in those I’ve read to date (about half) she doesn’t indulge in them as much as one might expect, her imagination seemingly more eager to leap to the next association, rather than dwell. The clear exception is when the extended metaphor is the point.

       Summer begins to have the look
       Peruser of enchanting Book
       Reluctantly but sure perceives
       A gain upon the backward leaves—
       
       Autumn begins to be inferred
       By millinery of the cloud
       Or deeper color in the shawl
       That wraps the everlasting hill.
       
       The eye begins its avarice
       A meditation chastens speech
       Some Dyer of a distant tree
       Resumes his gaudy industry.
       
       Conclusion is the course of All
       At most to be perennial
       And then elude stability
       Recalls to immortality.

The first three three stanzas are all examples of extended metaphor. The third is possibly debatable. Summer is made a “peruser” and plays out a whole metaphorical drama in which he/she peruses the enchanting brook, then with a reluctant certainty observes the changing color of the leaves. Then Autumn arrives, a metaphorical woman whose hat is a cloud and whose shawl is like the mist shrouding the hills. With the changing color of the leaves—Autumn is next described as the dyer who has resumed her gaudy—tastelessly showy—work of dying summer’s outfit (loosely continuing the metaphor of autumn in hat and shawl). Here is another:

       Grief is a Mouse—
       And chooses Wainscot in the Breast
       For His Shy House—
       And baffles quest—

       Grief is a Thief—quick startled—
       Pricks His Ear—report to hear
       Of that Vast Dark—
       That swept His Being—back—

       Grief is a Juggler—boldest at the Play—
       Lest if He flinch—the eye that way
       Pounce on His Bruises—One—say—or Three—
       Grief is a Gourmand—spare His luxury—

       Best Grief is Tongueless—before He’ll tell—
       Burn Him in the Public Square—
       His Ashes—will
       Possibly—if they refuse—How then know—
       Since a Rack couldn’t coax a syllable—now

Dickinson begins each stanza with an absolute metaphor—”Grief is”—and then extends the metaphor from there. From poems like these, one speculates as to what it might have been like to converse with her—given her deft associative leaps. One subject probably reminded her of another, and to follow her in conversation might have been like sitting behind a speeding taxi driver as she darted through traffic. You’d have to cling to your seat (for dear life) as she commented on every last landmark, one of which reminded her of a place she stayed in Italy with a view of Mount Vesuvius, just as unstable as her love life. That’s my own extended metaphor. Maybe we have something in common.

Dickinson’s Associative Leaps

I would argue that that’s what most characterizes Dickinson’s poetry and technique—her associative leaps. Take the following poem, Let us play Yesterday. She wants to be a child again. She wants to go back to yesterday when she was a child and all eternity seemed to lay before them. That’s followed by a wild associative leap that we can can only guess at. Her next stanza reads like an aside, as if she were commenting on the poem even as she wrote it. Here I am, she seems to say, easing my famine (my lack of play as an adult) with my poetry. She then makes the joke that logarithm (which the Dickinson lexicon suggests is word play on “logos” + “rhythm” or “rhyme”) makes for a “dry wine”. So she’s joking that the discipline of writing poetry is an awfully dry wine (a drink for adult’s at play). Can’t be poetry, she writes as she writes poetry. What about dreams? Can I play in my dreams? They tint sleep (an implied metaphor). True enough, she writes, their “cunning reds” (their vividness, perhaps), makes the blind (those morning sleepers with eyes closed) leap (in their dreams) so real do they seem. From there she makes the associative leap to eggs, associating childhood with being “at the egg-life”.

Another metaphor: Childhood is egg-life.

The child must eventually ‘trouble the ellipse”—a metonym—break the shell of their childhood to fall from the nest like a fledgling. Then follows another associative leap, very much like a haiku renga. Manacles. We’re not sure where those came from except that Emily, perhaps, associates her adult responsibilities and restrictions with manacles. It’s said that the newly freed quickly forget the manacle but, turning this proverb on its head, she writes that she can’t forget the erstwhile liberty of her childhood. (The manacles she can remember.) Her childhood liberty was her evening gratitude and morning miracle. She then rhetorically asks if the Lark (Shakespeare’s songbird and likely Dickinson’s metonym for ‘the Poet’) can return to her shell (be the innocent Girl at school again). Yet she knows the answer. Wouldn’t bonds/bondage hurt more than her memory of that playful childhood? Then amplifying her rhetorical comparison, she asks: Wouldn’t the dungeon make a man more miserable who has briefly tasted freedom? There is a parallel here. After the imagery of the Lark returning to the shell (a desirable thing), she turns that on its head, presenting the negative image: A man returning to the “shell” of his dungeon. One can see Dickinson’s associative leap in this comparison. She turns the first image inside out and invites the reader to compare the shell with the dungeon. But God is lord of both manacle and freedom. It is in God’s power to bequeath to her either fate. “Take not my Liberty/ Away from Me”, she writes. The poets hopes that her child’s experience of the world will never be lost to her, and yet embedded in the rhetoric of her questions (her argument) is the suggestion of its impossibility.

Let Us play Yesterday—
I—the Girl at school—
You—and Eternity—the
Untold Tale—

Easing my famine
At my Lexicon—
Logarithm—had I—for Drink—
'Twas a dry Wine—

Somewhat different—must be—
Dreams tint the Sleep—
Cunning Reds of Morning
Make the Blind—leap—

Still at the Egg-life—
Chafing the Shell—
When you troubled the Ellipse—
And the Bird fell—

Manacles be dim—they say—
To the new Free—
Liberty—Commoner—
Never could—to me—

'Twas my last gratitude
When I slept—at night—
'Twas the first Miracle
Let in—with Light—

Can the Lark resume the Shell—
Easier—for the Sky—
Wouldn't Bonds hurt more
Than Yesterday?

Wouldn't Dungeons sorer grate
On the Man—free—
Just long enough to taste—
Then—doomed new—

God of the Manacle
As of the Free—
Take not my Liberty
Away from Me—

     (FR754,J728)

This argumentation, this rhetorical engagement through her poetry is, in my opinion, what most typifies her art. This is her “technique” (a huge word), perhaps, and it is strikingly similar to Shakespeare’s sonnets. Both he and she are engaged with a real, imagined (or both) epistolary correspondent whose arguments are echoed in the rhetoric of their rebuttals. She herself refers to her poetry as “her letter to the world”. I often find myself asking the question: What exactly was said to her when she wrote this poem? She often strikes me as passionately responding to something read, said or overheard. In the case of the poem above, one can imagine, perhaps, her father having scolded her, having told her that it was time she grow up and assumed adult responsibilities—those of a housewife, for example, and not a poet.

Poetry, you know, is a childish occupation.