I go to you…

I go to you as goes the sand
    Forgetful of the hour,
As carried by the wind’s left hand—
    A fragmentary flower.
I go as from the hardened limb
    For it was never ours—
To be swept beyond the Earthly rim
    Into the bowl of stars.

May 8th 2024
by me, Patrick Gillespie

My silence for the last few days has been the result of a back injury, caused by an attempt to walk. Walking—I had no idea—is a high risk activity. Do it advisedly. For the past week, it’s been a test of endurance to sit, stand, walk, or recline. Being flat on my back, it seems, is about the only way to heal without pain. This hasn’t stopped me from working, little by little, on Wistthistle: Along the Way. (The second book of my fantasy quartet, or tetralogy). The poem above is the result. Éhto recites the poem when she sees the desert for the first time, struck with awe, and sorrowful that she can’t be a peaceful traveler when her world is at war.

If it reminds a little of Dickinson, that’s deliberate. As mentioned before, Éhto borrows from Dickinson in her musings. Also: I get poets under my skin by getting under theirs. Writing like other poets to absorb their craft is a part of my art. In the current book I’m reading on Dickinson by Robert Weisbuch, he calls Dickinson an analogical poet. (Weisbuch’s book at Amazon is absurdly expensive but reasonable from ABEBooks—which is also owned by Amazon, incidentally.) If I understand him correctly, his argument is that Dickinson often doesn’t center her poems on a given subject, but around analogies. That’s part of the reason we’re often left wondering what she’s referring to. My own speculation is that the subject matter mattered less to Dickinson less than the emotions they gave rise to; and that analogies were a way for Dickinson and evoke these emotions. So, to borrow some academese: Dickinson is engaged in a different sort of “centering”—that of the emotional or psychic self in an analogical world (a world understood through analogy), rather than that of the physical self centered in an identifiable location or centered in a traditionally understood topic. An example, used by Weisbuch, is Dickinson’s famous poem, My Life had stood — a loaded gun. Each quatrain is a different analogy describing, in a sense, her emotional response to—what?—an affair?—her own poetry?—a set of beliefs? In a fascinating analysis, Weisbuch calls the poem a sort of refutation (counter to any other interpretation I’ve read). He writes: “An attitude which is portrayed elsewhere as an ennobling and self-fulfilling fidelity to an inspiring ideal here appears as a debasing servility [a destructive gun with no life of its own], a retreat from the integrity of struggle and doubt.” What’s important to Dickinson is the poetry of her emotional response (which can be applied to a great many experiences in life). Likewise, in her poem You cannot put a fire out, Dickinson never tells us what the “Flood” is that she cannot fold into a drawer. That’s not the point.

So…

In writing the poem above, my aim was to write something like an analogical poem.

Do People moulder equally in the Grave…? Hold my beer.

“When I state myself, as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person.”

“Death—so—the Hyphen of the Sea—” 1454

Do People moulder equally,
They bury, in the Grave?
I do believe a species
As positively live

As I, who testify it
Deny that I—am dead—
And fill my Lungs, for Witness—
From Tanks—above my Head—

I say to you, said Jesus—
That there be standing here—
A Sort, that shall not taste of Death—
If Jesus was sincere—

I need no further Argue—
That statement of the Lord
Is not a controvertible—
He told me, Death was dead— 

  FR391/J432

I included the quotes above because the first is Dickinson stating that she adopts personas in her poetry. The word “persona” was first used in the 17th century, but may or may not have been one Dickinson was familiar with. The second because Dickinson, in many, many of her poems, treats the sea as a kind of burial ground in and of itself. A great article at the Dickinson Electronic Archives examines just this propensity later in her career, writing:

Dickinson began writing poems that referred to the sea, and particularly to the experience or threat of drowning, with increasing frequency.

One of the poems, given as an example, begins: “Drowning is not so pitiful/As the attempt to rise.” Yothers, the author of the article, cites another poem, writing that “this capacity of the sea to engulf the human body and brain appears in another poem from 1863, Fr. 631A (MS H 90). The poem includes the lines: ““The River reaches to my Mouth – / Remember – when the Sea / Swept by my searching eyes – the last – / Themselves were quick – with Thee!”

The point is that like the earth’s surface, the sea’s surface is another division—a metaphorical and symbolic boundary—between living (above) and death (below). But undermining this nice metaphor is the diving bell and the diving suit, which Dickinson—given her love and knowledge of science and her frequent references to sailing and the sea—would certainly have been aware of. She took it as an opportunity to wryly undermine Christian theology. She starts by asking if people moulder differently:

  Do People moulder equally,
  They bury, in the Grave?
  I do believe a species
  As positively live

The initial question mischievously undermines the temptation to read this poem in the manner that some readers do. To wit, the question she asks isn’t: Do some live and some die in the Grave? No. Implicit in the question is that everyone moulders. Period. Do they moulder/rot unequally? Maybe. Possibly. But who cares? They’re dead. They’re mouldering. So there’s that. But then she goes on to say that there’s a “species” who live, but we won’t find them in the Grave, because she’s already eliminated that possibility through her mischievous rhetorical question. A “species” does live.

  As I, who testify it
  Deny that I—am dead—
  And fill my Lungs, for Witness—
  From Tanks—above my Head—

The temptation, including my own, is to treat a passage like this (as in so many of her poems) figuratively—as metaphor or metonymy. For example, does she really mean lungs? What does she mean by Tanks? What does she really mean by above my Head? And yet the quatrain is written with a straightforwardness that clearly describes a diving bell or suit. I see two possibilities. If one wants to read this figuratively, which is possible given Dickinson’s poetics, then the Lungs could be her poetry. Spoken poetry, after all, requires that the lungs be filled. The Tanks could be inspiration or even divine inspiration.

In short, Dickinson could be stating that she lives on in her poetry (a hoary old conceit, just ask Spenser and Shakespeare). Her poetry “testifies” to the denial of death. She writes, “[I] fill my lungs—[behold! or “for Witness” or look at the Tanks]—from Tanks—above my Head—” The Tanks could also mean you, the reader, though this strikes me as pushing the conceit to its limits and beyond. That said, we are, literally, above her Head (Dickinson, being buried). The second way to read this quatrain is to treat Dickinson as assuming a persona (that of the diver) and that she is straightforwardly describing a diving bell or suit. She is speaking to us as a diver who, in the next two quatrains, will use their living burial to troll scripture.

  
  I say to you, said Jesus—
  That there be standing here—
  A Sort, that shall not taste of Death—
  If Jesus was sincere—

Except that’s not quite what Jesus said. According to the King James translators, he said: “Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.” She could have written: “Some be that shall not taste of Death…” That would have kept the meter. Instead, one can read—”A Sort“—as Dickinson’s sly riposte. Remember that the poem’s opening lines flatly deny that there’s anything other than mouldering in the Grave. Option A is mouldering. Option B is mouldering. There is “a “buried Sort”, however, who don’t moulder. And they are buried at Sea. Viola!

  I need no further Argue—
  That statement of the Lord
  Is not a controvertible—
  He told me, Death was dead— 

Dickinson no longer needs to Argue with the true believers. She’s persuaded. Behold! For Witness! The statement of the Lord truly is incontrovertible. Here I stand, in my diving bell, buried and living where centuries and centuries of men lie dead and mouldering.

For witness what science and engineering have wrought!

The entirety of the poem, read this way, is Dickinson trolling Christian faith. You can almost see her in her diving suit, shrugging: See? Just like he said: Death is dead! The joke is that it isn’t faith but science and engineering that have defeated death, utterly undermining the scripture’s intent. On these terms, in other words, Dickinson will accept Jesus’s words as incontrovertible—but not on faith. (I do think there’s a lot of laughter in Dickinson’s poetry, and possibly more so than any of her 19th century peers.)

Nonetheless, one can also read the conceit as metaphor—ourselves as the “tanks” that give air and lungs to her poetry. But read this way, the deadpan “He told me, Death was dead—” loses its punch and humor. If Dickinson is declaring that she will live on in her poetry, then one wants to read the last line earnestly and devoutly. I have a hard time reading it that way (and the conceit would strike me as uncharacteristically ham-handed). Its colloquial directness suggests a dead-pan delivery. My instinct is to read Dickinson as assuming a persona (as she told Higginson she was wont to do) in order to impishly troll Christian doctrine (“I do not respect doctrines,” she once wrote a Mrs. Joseph Haven to explain her non-attendance at a church service [p. 8 Emily Dickinson’s Poetry, Weisbuch].) It’s as if someone said to her: If you don’t accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior then there will be no afterlife for you. To which she said: Hold my beer.

You cannot put a Fire out

“You can’t put a fire out,” she said so quietly that only Ímah could hear her, and she exhaled. “You can’t. A fire goes and goes, Ímah, and we endlessly give to fire the things that ignite and burn the world. You can’t fold a flood in your pocket, but the wind finds it out, tells the cedar and fells the cedar in wind and water.”

  You cannot put a Fire out—
  A Thing that can ignite
  Can go, itself, without a Fan—
  Upon the slowest night—

  You cannot fold a Flood—
  And put it in a Drawer—
  Because the Winds would find it out—
  And tell your Cedar Floor—

    [J530/FR583]

The opening paragraph above is from WistThistle: Along the Way, the second book in The Isles Quartet. In the first book and in the second book, the main character, Éhto, draws her words from a number of Dickinson’s poems, some less obviously than others. This is a different universe, where there is no Emily Dickinson, but I thought it would be fun to collaborate with her a little. I also thought I would examine the poem.

The first thing I would note are the parallels between this poem and Robert Frost’s later poem, Fire and Ice:

  Some say the world will end in fire,
  Some say in ice.
  From what I’ve tasted of desire
  I hold with those who favor fire.
  But if it had to perish twice,
  I think I know enough of hate
  To say that for destruction ice
  Is also great
  And would suffice.

Frost probably was not thinking of or inspired by Dickinson, but there is a similarity between the two. Dickinson contrasts fire and water, Frost contrasts fire and ice. There is the sense in Dickinson’s poem, that the fire and the water threaten to consume some aspect of her world. Frost makes the assertion directly.

  You cannot put a Fire out—
  A Thing that can ignite
  Can go, itself, without a Fan—
  Upon the slowest night—

[I originally tried writing text over an image—a newer feature of WordPress—but it was a complete disaster (because—Wordpress). So back to text.]

Anyway, as with so many of Dickinson’s poems, we’re given the choice to read her words literally, figuratively and/or as metonymy. For example, is she literally describing Fire and Flood, or are these figuratively referring to something else? Gossip? Grief? Jealousy? Longing? The list could go on and, frankly, any one of these might make sense of the poem. That we can read the poem in so many ways contributes to the poem’s universality. Nonetheless, some of us like to guess at what Dickinson might have actually had in mind. Interestingly, in one version of the poem she wrote “No Man can put a Fire out—”

Unlike the current day, Dickinson was seemingly untroubled by the use of “man” to refer to both men and women, and according to Dickinson scholars sometimes refers to herself (as a poet) using the masculine pronoun. I write seemingly because, according to my reading so far, there’s no record of her having bridled at the use of “Man” to signify humankind. It would probably be anachronistic to think that she would. So why did she settle on “You” rather than “Man”? I don’t really have a good theory except to nevertheless assert that “You” is more universalizing than “Man”. More revealingly, I think, her impulse to use “Man” suggests that she wasn’t addressing someone specific, but that she was using “You” the same way we do—as a sort of universal you that includes ourselves without having to specifically say “I” (which she could have).

So, what is she talking about? If it’s not literally “a fire”, then it’s something like fire. Something that’s troubling her, that won’t let her be, that doesn’t need a fan or a bellows (in the sense of fanning the flames) to keep it going, but that ignites the flammable mind even on the calmest or “slowest night”. She can’t quit thinking about it. One thought leads obsessively to the next like the leaping of a flame. In short, Emily is tossing and turning. Despite the slow night, her thoughts are a conflagration that feeds what it consumes.

  
  You cannot fold a Flood—
  And put it in a Drawer—
  Because the Winds would find it out—
  And tell your Cedar Floor—

In the second stanza she gives us a clue as to what it might be that’s driving her to madness—something that she can put in a Drawer, and that could be a letter or even a poem. If it’s a letter, then perhaps someone has written her something that she can’t set aside, and that sends us back to speculation. Is it gossip, grief, jealousy, longing?—some news or revelation as regards a relationship? Maybe because I’m a poet, and because I know that she’s written poems that seem similar to this—They shut me up in Prose—(specifically about her urge to express herself) I like to think that this poem is a further expression of her need, if not compulsion, to write. She might as well try to “fold a Flood”—referring to the flood of inspiration that drives her poetry. In other words, she could no more silence (fold away) her urge to write, putting it in a Drawer, than “you” could fold away floodwaters. The Winds (the daily knocks of living and life) would find and drive out what is hidden in that drawer. The flood must have its outlet or it will tell (or spill) on the Cedar Floor.

And what does she mean by Cedar Floor? This is very likely a metonymy for the home. In a sense, the floor is your house and your home. Go beyond the floor and you go outside. So, in that sense, if the flame of Dickinson’s relentless thought isn’t given the outlet of poetry (if she’s forced to fold and hide it in a drawer) then these thoughts and emotions will flood her home life. “You” cannot put away the flood (the sheer drama of living) in a drawer and not expect the dam (or something) to break. The “Winds”, life’s vicissitudes, will fill the dam and cause it to rupture (to flood the home) without the outlet of self-expression/poetry.

By “tell your Cedar Floor” she may mean that what remains secretive within the poem will be made stridently “public”—or family knowledge. The flame must speak, if not in poetry then by “telling” its troubles (if that’s what they are) aloud. One can read an implicit warning in the poem: Either let me write my poetry or my need to express my internal emotional state will flood the home—will be made external. It will tell itself to the Cedar Floor in all our rooms. Why cedar? Cedar can be used for flooring but was unlikely flooring in Dickinson’s Amherst. The reference is likely Biblical in origin. Cedar was considered a beautiful and fragrant wood. In that light, what Dickinson may be suggesting (with perhaps an acid tongue) is that the flood of her emotional life, without the outlet of poetry, will disrupt that beauty and fragrance (home life’s equanimity). Allow the wrong wind to move her on a given day and Dickinson will damned well tell your precious cedar equanimity a thing or two, and see how that goes. Wouldn’t you rather I write a poem? I read anger and an implicit threat in the second stanza—and also in the first.

It’s as if someone had said to her—why don’t you put aside your poem and make us some lovely and fragrant pudding? The duties of home life and womanhood will make you forget all this literary fussing of yours. Trust us. To which she dismissively and angrily says: “You cannot put a Fire out….”

But, as I wrote earlier, you can also read this poem as her reaction to a letter she has received and that she can’t stop thinking about. Folding it and putting it away won’t help. The contents threaten to disrupt home and house, her equanimity, but the poem ends without a solution. The poet is beside herself.

Women, puddings and Epictetus…

I’m now reading Rebecca Patterson’s book “Emily Dickinson’s Imagery” (published posthumously). Patterson was the first Dickinson scholar (if I’m reading the preface correctly) who, in 1951, posited Dickinson’s lesbian attachments, which was greeted just as you would expect—with shock and rejection by some and revelatory acceptance by others. As Margaret Freeman writes: “[Patterson’s] hypothesis that Emily’s ‘lover’ was female rested on just as much evidence (or lack of it) as other, ‘more acceptable’ theories that have variously identified Charles Wadsworth, George Gould, Edward Hunt, or Samuel Bowles as the (male) object of the poet’s affections…”

But it wasn’t this passage that I wanted to share, but one of the longest endnotes in the book (the best thing in the book so far, and it’s a good book if you like this sort of thing). I found it so engaging that I thought I’d share it in all its glory:

Lydia Maria Child, Letters from New York (1848), p. 106. The name of this pioneer feminist was introduced, apparently by Emily Dickinson herself, at the first of her two meetings with T.W. Higginson. The poet even essayed a little feminist joke, which wholly escaped her visitor. Higginson reported with solemn bafflement that after mentioning her domestic duties she added, “‘& people must have puddings’ this very dreamily, as if they were comets—and so she makes them” (L342a). Such a redoubtable feminist should have remembered Sarah Grimké’s scornful attack on the male dictum that “She that knoweth how to compound a pudding is more desirable than she who skillfully compounds a poem” (The Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women, 1838). Grimké must have gotten her pudding and her title from “The Equality of the Sexes” by “Constantia” (Judith Sargent Murray), who demanded (Massachusetts Magazine March-April 1790) whether it was “reasonable that a candidate for immortality, for the joys of heaven, an intelligent being, who is to spend at eternity in contemplating the works of the Deity, should at present be so degraded as to be allowed no other ideas, than those which are suggested by the mechanism of the pudding?” Royal Tyler’s Van Rough approved the general opinion “that if a woman knew how to make a pudding, and to keep herself out of fire and water, she knew enough for a wife,” (The Contrast, act 1, scene 2, a play almost certainly known to Emily Dickinson). Of course it all went back to Samuel Johnson, who saw the necessity of asserting that “My old friend, Mrs. Carter, could make a pudding as well as translate Epictetus.” Best known to Emily was Charlotte Brontë’s famous diatribe against those “more privileged fellow-creatures” who thought women should “confine themselves to making puddings” and the like trivial occupations (Jane Eyre), although she could not have read Elizabeth Barett’s attack on the “pudding-making and sock-darning theory” of women’s activities noticed earlier. There was something about making puddings that set a feminist’s teeth on edge, and Emily expected Higginson to know it.

Can you just imagine Emily reading that sarcastic little dictum that “She that knoweth how to compound a pudding is more desirable than she who skillfully compounds a poem”!

Of course, if we treat “pudding” metonymically (which Dickinson probably was), then it can mean all sorts of trivial things. (Her barb was directed at people, after all, not just men.) People must eat—granted; but a pudding is not that. A pudding is what we gobble down whilst gossiping over that little tramp, Miss Littleslip, who dared to show her ankles during Reverend Snipple’s catechism. “If you must write your little poems, Emily, then why not go to your room? Or you could make yourself useful? Why don’t you bring us a little pudding.”

It’s going to be my new motto.

“& people must have their puddings.“

The Color of the Grave is Green | Color me dead…

The Color of the Grave is Green—
The Outer Grave—I mean—
You would not know it from the Field—
Except it own a Stone—

To help the fond—to find it—
Too infinite asleep
To stop and tell them where it is—
But just a Daisy—deep—

The Color of the Grave is white—
The outer Grave—I mean—
You would not know it from the Drifts—
In Winter—till the Sun—

Has furrowed out the Aisles—
Then—higher than the Land
The little Dwelling Houses rise
Where each—has left a friend—

The Color of the Grave within—
The Duplicate—I mean—
Not all the snows c'd make it white—
Not all the Summers—Green—

You've seen the Color—maybe—
Upon a Bonnet bound—
When that you met it with before—
The Ferret—Cannot find— 

[FR424/J411]

This is actually one of Dickinson’s more straightforward poems, and another request. The mystery is less in trying to sort out “nonrecoverable deletions”—missing grammar that makes allusions a guessing game—than the more normal game of interpreting imagery (in this case colors). The one real curve ball in the poem is in sussing out the meaning of Duplicate, but we’ll get to that. The poem is six stanzas that can be divided neatly into thirds, each third reflecting on a color of the grave.

  
  The Color of the Grave is Green—
  The Outer Grave—I mean—
  You would not know it from the Field—
  Except it own a Stone—

  To help the fond—to find it—
  Too infinite asleep
  To stop and tell them where it is—
  But just a Daisy—deep—

Dickinson establishes the poem’s stake, as she often does, in the first line. Color will be the nexus round which the poem’s meaning is adjudicated. The color of the grave is green, she says, and she will devote the next seven lines giving us context for that color. It is the color of the field, presumably—the grass, the flower’s leaf, and perhaps the limb of a weeping willow. Green is the color of life. We might be inclined to forget the dead. Being green ourselves, in a sense—being alive— our understanding of death can only be of the “outer grave” and will be colored/covered by that. If not for the stone, you would not know the burial plot (or the dead) from the field. They otherwise vanish both figuratively and literally. Green is the color of spring and vigor and, in that sense, we’re not meant to be thinking of the dead. The fact of our aliveness separates us truly comprehending death. The youthful/vibrant color of green, of life and growth, is a barrier. Only the outer grave is knowable or discoverable, and that is only discoverable—by the fond—because of the Stone. The dead are too infinite asleep to be guides. In that regard, the only thing that tells where the dead is, is the daisy—alive and whose roots go deep. The suggestion, perhaps, is that the daisy’s realm is both in life and death. The daisy alone comprehends both life and death, being half above the burial ground and half among the dead—and so can tell where the dead lie. As for ourselves, what we comprehend of the daisy is the green of its stem and leaves, and the flower itself (fed by death).

  
  The Color of the Grave is white—
  The outer Grave—I mean—
  You would not know it from the Drifts—
  In Winter—till the Sun—

  Has furrowed out the Aisles—
  Then—higher than the Land
  The little Dwelling Houses rise
  Where each—has left a friend—

The next two stanzas move us from green to white, from youth to age, when the skin becomes pale and the hair gray. Now we return to graveyard in old age. As in us, so in the world. Youth and growth—green—is forever behind us. The color of the grave is white, the color of the marble stone and of bones. We begin to know it from the field. We are no longer greenly oblivious to the grave. The sun, which had been our ally in youth, a symbol of warmth, life and regeneration, becomes the teller (rather than the stone and daisy), telling us ‘where it is‘, where death lies. The sun ‘furrows the the Aisles‘, showing us the path from which cannot escape, the aisle that leads us to our own death and subsidence. We are shown the piles of dirt marking where the newly dead are buried. In each is “left a friend” in their little “Dwelling Houses”. They are “Friends” because they were of our own generation and have become the changeless generation of the dead. The piles of dirt will melt into the coffins as the coffin itself breaks and dissolves along with our bodies—all of it subsiding like the melting snow. White is the color of snow, of the grave stone, of the bones, of the life’s melting and dissolution.

  The Color of the Grave within—
  The Duplicate—I mean—
  Not all the snows c'd make it white—
  Not all the Summers—Green—

  You've seen the Color—maybe—
  Upon a Bonnet bound—
  When that you met it with before—
  The Ferret—Cannot find— 

The final stanza takes us into the dwelling houses. Dickinson doesn’t say the color of the grave is black. She calls the color “The Duplicate”. She says that we’ve maybe seen the color “upon a Bonnet bound”, such as a mourner might wear, but this is only a duplicate of the color within the grave—the color of the bonnet is in no way as final as that terrifying absolute of the grave. The living may wear the color, but the color remains a mere facsimile/duplicate. The color is unnameable. And that is the truly terrifying twist in this poem. And the genius of the poem. She cannot name it. By it’s very nature, the color has no name. To even have a name places it within our world. The color she describes is the color of absence—an absence that is no color, so unconditional in its nameless annihilation that it can only be like a color that you’ve seen elsewhere. The color even annihilates its own name. And not all the summers, now, past or future, can undo that annihilation. Not all the snows, not all the symbolism we attach to white—not the shroud, the white of the sun, poetry, the robe of Christ or the white pages of religion’s rhetoric (in other poems she has referred to her poetry as “snow”)—can undo that color, that abnegation of being, that denial and complete negation of the the world itself. Maybe you’ve seen it, she writes. That you’ve seen the color on the bonnet, in other words, is no guarantee that you’ve actually understood or comprehended that last and final “Color of the Grave”. Maybe. If you’ve understood her poem—then maybe “you’ve met with it before”. And yet, can you really? No matter how deep the ferret digs—she writes as though changing her mind—you will never find the color she’s describing. If you find it, if you think you’ve dug deeply enough, then you haven’t found it. What the ferret, or you, could find will never be the color she’s describing. This is no ride in a carriage with death personified. To see this color is to be annihilated. You may comprehend this color in a mourner’s bonnet but, to truly see this color, is to be dead.

• For a superb youtube analysis of this poem.

up in Vermont | March 4 2024

This was a Poet | This, That and Who?

This was a Poet — 
It is That
Distills amazing sense
From ordinary Meanings —
And Attar so immense

From the familiar species
That perished by the Door —
We wonder it was not Ourselves
Arrested it — before —

Of Pictures, the Discloser —
The Poet — it is He —
Entitles Us — by Contrast —
To ceaseless Poverty —

Of portion — so unconscious —
The Robbing — could not harm —
Himself — to Him — a Fortune —
Exterior — to Time —

[FR 446/J448]

So. I’ve read a second interpretation of this poem, now by Cristanne Miller (the first by Helen Vendler) and both interpretations seem to fudge the final quatrain. Both seem to muddle. The reasons for the confusion, as with many of Dickinson’s more abstruse poems, are the “nonrecoverable deletions” (as Cristanne Miller nicely describes them). Essentially, because of the constraints of form, Dickinson chooses to delete connectives and syntax that would guide a reader’s understanding.

• Aside: I know it’s peak heresy to ask this question, but I do wonder to what degree Dickinson was aware of her poetry’s frequent obscurity. I’ll make the baseline assumption that her poems made perfect sense to her. If you had asked her what she meant by the final quatrain of This was a Poet, she might have looked at you like you were daft. (She didn’t take well to Higginson’s critiques and he learned—quickly—not to offer them.) And that makes me wonder if anyone ever asked her for clarification? She did send many of her poems to friends and relations, especially Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson. Based on my own lifelong experience as a poet, I’m going to say, No. On the other hand, maybe they didn’t need clarification? They were living in the same town, the same culture, spoke over tea and exchanged letters. We might expect a reader like Susan to fill in the blanks. So the question is this: Was Dickinson knowingly obscure or was she too familiar with her own poetry to recognize its obscurity? To say that she was knowingly obscure strikes me as out and out anachronistic. Poets in the mid 19th century were writing to be understood. Full stop. The 20th century’s infatuation with “pointless obscurity”, as William Logan nicely put it, just wasn’t a thing when Dickinson was writing. Does that mean that Dickinson was too familiar with her own poetry? There’s probably an element of truth to that. Another way of putting is that she might have expected too much from readers other than friends and family. Her syntactic compression/ellipsis/metonymy is part and parcel of her poetic art, but that’s a fine line. I wouldn’t have her poetry any other way, but sometimes, we must admit that her meaning is every reader’s best guess.

  This was a Poet — 
  It is That [poetry]
  Distills amazing sense
  From ordinary Meanings —
  And Attar so immense

My impression is that most readers interpret That as referring to the Poet. This would be Miller’s interpretation and, unless I’m mistaken, Vendler’s. I actually read That as referring not to the poet but to poetry in general. Normally this would be a four line stanza. R.W. Franklin notes that these lines are made four lines in “derivative collections” and Miller prints the poem this way (in her book A Poet’s Grammar). This makes the first line read: This was a Poet — It is That. Printing the poem this way makes it more tempting to associate That with the Poet. But if we print it according to Dickinson’s own lineation, then the assertion This was a Poet stands by itself. The statement is in the past tense and I read it, in a sense, as an epitaph. I read the poem as like a scene in a play. We’re accompanying Dickinson (or the speaker) on a nice afternoon’s walk through the graveyard (actually a thing in Victorian times). As we accompany Dickinson, she pauses at a grave stone we might have overlooked. She says,”This was a Poet.” Recognizing the poet’s grave, she then is reminded of his poetry and says, almost to herself, “It is That, that distills amazing sense from Ordinary meanings”. In her book “Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them”, Miller notes that in his “Letter to a Young Contributor”, Higginson wrote, “Literature is attar of roses, one distilled drop from a million blossoms”. This was the letter that prompted Dickinson to write Higginson and suggests that Dickinson’s own imagery was inspired by Higginson.

  And Attar so immense

  From the familiar species
  That perished by the Door —
  We wonder it was not Ourselves
  Arrested it — before —

  Of Pictures, the Discloser —

That Dickinson uses the word “immense” suggests Higginson’s “million blossoms”. Also worth noting, I think, is the notion that what “perished by the Door” was made into attar. Keep that in the back of your mind. The narrator, standing by the gravestone, next expresses appreciation for the genius of poetry. The poet’s skill is such that she wonders why we don’t ourselves “arrest”/grasp/comprehend what poetry, after the fact, makes self-evident. Poetry is “Of Pictures” (possibly meaning imagery) the “Discloser”. That is, poetry is the art that reveals truth through the language of imagery, archetype, and symbol.

So far, so good. It's the last third of the poem where matters get muddled. [Note: For an interpretation I find more convincing and simpler than my own, be sure to read the comment section; then decide for yourself.]

  The Poet — it is He —
  Entitles Us — by Contrast —
  To ceaseless Poverty —

  Of portion — so unconscious —
  The Robbing — could not harm —
  Himself — to Him — a Fortune —
  Exterior — to Time —

Now, here’s my thought: If we keep in mind that Dickinson, at the very outset of the poem distinguishes between two subjects, the Poet (deceased) and “Poetry”—the That that makes the perished into attar—we have the makings of a contrast. Dickinson even spells it out. “By Contrast—” she writes. The speaker returns our attention to the deceased Poet (after describing poetry’s power). That is, unlike his or her poetry, by contrast, the Poet will not be made into attar. The Poet has perished. It’s possible to break down these lines into three separate assertions:

  The Poet — it is He —
  Entitles Us — by Contrast —
  To ceaseless Poverty —

The death of the Poet, in contrast to his poetry, is a cause of ceaseless Poverty. Ceaseless because his death is final. Dickinson isn’t referring to the The Poet, but to Death. Then she moves on to her next thought:

  Of portion — so unconscious —
  The Robbing — (!)

In a highly compressed fashion, she is accusing Death of thoughtlessness and indifference. Of portion, she says sarcastically, Death is unconscious/thoughtless/indifferent. In other words, she expresses dismay at Death’s indifference to the “portion” that is really being robbed from us—not just a man but a great artist—a Shakespeare, a Keats or a Brontë. She expresses dismay at Death’s indifference to who he robs from us.

                  — could not harm —
  Himself — to Him — a Fortune —
  Exterior — to Time —

Now she moves onto her third thought. And here, if I’m interpreting the poem correctly, Dickinson’s final lines remind me very much of the closing lines to her poem, Because I could not stop for Death:

  Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
  Feels shorter than the Day

There’s that same sense of timelessness—not the timelessness of paradise, but of awareness exiled from time’s rituals—a nothing that is both death and deathless. That is, just as with the narrator in Because I could not stop for Death, the Poet’s centuries feel shorter than the day. The conclusion just as laden with contradiction—but also consistent. According to biographers, Dickinson refused to “accept Christ” (and presumably the afterlife that went along with that) but she also seemed unwilling to accept the death of the soul. This may disappoint some metaphysical naturalists among my readers (and you know who you are) but asking Dickinson, in her era and culture, to throw the soul out with the Christian bathwater, is probably asking too much.

Though Death has robbed us of the Poet, Death cannot rob the Poet of his “Fortune”. The Poet takes what is most precious about him with him (Dickinson was untroubled, according to Vendler, by the use of He/Him in reference to herself as a poet). He takes his creative genius—his Fortune—into that deathless death that is exterior to time. Death can rob us of the poet’s creative genius, but cannot rob the Poet himself. “[Death] could not harm—Himself [the Poet]”. To Him—to himself—the poet’s Fortune is now exterior to time. Yet one is very hesitant to read this as triumphing over Death. Dickinson ends the poem, as with Because I could not stop for Death, with irreconcilable contradiction. She is both deceased and conscious. And that might be part of the point. The contradiction, the dissonance, is part of the tragedy.

• From Vendler’s Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries: “Dickinson here uses a capitalized universalized “he” in reference to the Poet; I follow her reverent practice. She assumes the ungendered nature of the Platonic Idea of the Poet. She would not have said that she meant to exclude, by the pronoun “He,” the women Poets whose works she admired: Elizabeth Barret Browning, George Eliot, and Emily Brontë.” [p. 212-213]

Edit: It’s tempting to read “Exterior — to Time” as the poet’s poetry triumphing over time. In other words, his fortune—his poetry—is exterior to death and time. The problem with this reading is that it seemingly contradicts the speaker’s earlier assertion that He entitles us to “ceaseless poverty”. One has to explain this apparent contradiction. My own way around this is to treat her final lines as a reference to the deceased Poet rather than to His or Her poetry (and Because I could not stop may give us a precedence for such a reading).

Worth mentioning is that she could be describing herself in This was a Poet—commenting on her own death. In this sense, This was a Poet and Because I could not stop for Death can be read as describing the same event—her own death. The former is from the perspective of the living, reflecting on the poet’s death, while the latter is from the perspective of the deceased poet.

I haven’t said much about Vendler or Miller’s interpretations because they’re so different from mine. I don’t know how to summarize their readings (and frankly find them somewhat scattershot and confusing). How exactly does Vendler land on plagiarism, for example? What and where does that come from? Vendler summarizes the closing couplet this way:

“Dickinson points out the degree to which the Poet’s capacity to notice, to notice everything, and then disclose His “Pictures,” makes us notice things too… And third, Dickinson points out the indifference of the Poet to us (or to anyone else), an indifference arising not from self-esteem but from His (to him unconscious) Fortune. He is so unaware of the grace bestowed on Him, of the great “Portion” of wealth He has inherited, that no robbing from his worth can harm Him (plagiarism of His work by others does not affect our recognition of the true Poet). He moves in a world (in Dickinson’s great phrase) “Exterior — to Time — “… He is as unaware of Time (and its obverse, Eternity) as He is of us. [p. 213-214]

So you can see how different our interpretations are. Vendler doesn’t even interpret the poem as being that of a deceased Poet (and this despite describing the opening line as a past-tense epitaph in the very first sentence of her analysis). According to Vendler, if I understand her correctly, Dickinson is describing the archetypal experience(?) of reading poetry. It seems to me that Vendler spends less time interpreting the poem than ‘biographizing’. Miller interprets the poem as Dickinson expressing (for lack of a better term) gender resentment(?). She reads Dickinson as addressing male poets (and not the Platonic Idea of the Poet) in her use of He, and frames the contrast as one of “difference and of strength”.

“As a younger sister of a favored son and as a consciously female poet, however, Dickinson might well differentiate herself with some resentment from the poet who creates unconsciously and with ease, the man of ceaseless, inherited cultural wealth. Evidently during this time when she wrote or at least copied “This was a Poet” for her own safekeeping, the contrast between herself as artist and the world was particularly vivid. In the fascicle where she binds this poem, Dickinson precedes it with two poems on similar differences. In the first, “It would have starved a Gnat — / To live so small as I — ” (612), the speaker brags that she can live on even less that a gnat, and without his privileges to fly to more sustaining places or to die. In the poem immediately preceding “This was a Poet,” the speaker is a “Girl” poet “shut… up in Prose — ” by uncomprehending adults, whom she escapes “easy as a Star” by willing herself to be free (613).  Later in the fascicle Dickinson includes “It was given to me by the Gods” (454), a poem about another “little Girl” far richer with her handful of “Gold” than anyone could guess and richer than anyone else is: “The Difference — made me bold —” she confides. These are poems of difference and of strength, whether these qualities stem from unique starvation or mysterious wealth.” [Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar p. 120-121]

Miller interprets Dickinson’s use of That, in reference to the Poet, as suggesting the poet’s “lack of humanity”.

“The poet’s lack of humanity is further suggested by his peculair invulnerability in the last stanza: “a Fortune — / Exterior — to Time —” is glorious as a description of immortal poems but somewhat mechanical and materialistic as a description of a man. We are poor, capable of “wonder,” within “Time,” while He is alone, “Exterior” to our world, knowable only “by Contrast.” [p. 120]

“The poet/narrator who speaks in Dickinson’s poem considers herself a part of the admiring, ordinary crowd rather than separate from it. Her stance indicates that not all poets share “His” isolation from community.” [p. 121]

So, from Miller, we have a feminist critique based on a reading of He as a specifically gendered reference; and not, as Vendler asserts, a universalized He. It could be argued, in that respect, that Miller’s reading is potentially anachronistic (giving too much weight to the pronoun). Miller’s interpretation is also, arguably, based on reading the first two lines as one (which is not how Dickinson preserved the poem).

At any rate, there’s my 2 cents. Spend it how you will.

upinVermont | March 12 2024

Emily Dickinson, The Wicked Queen of Snark

I was thinking about how often I read Dickinson’s poems as hot-blooded and sarcastic. The respectable term ‘Irony’ is applied to her poetry, but that strikes me as a high brow euphemism. Hers is not a coiffed literary irony. Hers is the raw snark of a modern troll—a sarcasm meant to bait and mock. I’m not a feminist scholar or critic, but it would seem to me that this would be fertile ground. What better way for a woman, isolated and hemmed in by societal expectations, to speak truth to power? I won’t be that critic, because I don’t have the background, but there’s a graduate thesis, if not a book, waiting to be written. I can’t think of any other female poet who compares to Dickinson until, possibly, Dorothy Parker (who generally treats sarcasm as a display of wit) rather than the often furious, despondent, and scathing sarcasm of Dickinson.

An example of one of our most renowned close-readers who seems to entirely miss Dickinson’s sarcasm, again and again, would be Helen Vendler. I have to stress my gratitude for Vendler’s writings on Dickinson, but I do think she treats Dickinson too much like just another very serious poet. When John Milton, as a young man, professed his poetic ambitions, he was thinking of Paradise Lost—a very serious epic without a shred of sarcasm. Keats would go on and on about poets’ laurels and would write the Odes and Hyperion—and there is not a shred of snark in those. Emily Brontë, who Dickinson read and favored, never once let her poet’s mask fall, but adopts the elevated, lofty and literary distancing of her peers. Christina Rossetti was sometimes so elevated as to be insufferable. In a fit of righteous pique, she figuratively sent her brother and his “merry lovers” straight to the bottom of the sea. Walt Whitman? Sarcasm? You jest. The only contemporary poet, to my knowledge, who compares to Dickinson in his unembarrassed sarcasm would be George Gordon Lord Byron. Consider Byron’s skewering of Wordsworth:

  What! can I prove "a lion" then no more?
    A ball-room bard, a foolscap, hot-press darling?
  To bear the compliments of many a bore,
    And sigh, "I can't get out," like Yorick's starling;
  Why then I'll swear, as poet Wordy swore
    (Because the world won't read him, always snarling),
  That taste is gone, that fame is but a lottery,
  Drawn by the blue-coat misses of a coterie.

Or, earlier on:

  Don Jòse and the Donna Inez led
    For some time an unhappy sort of life,
  Wishing each other, not divorced, but dead...

Which leads to Byron's beautifully snarky comments on the noble and admirable equanimity with which Donna Inez (and Spartan wives) suffer and suffered the agonies and deaths of their husbands:

  And then this best and weakest woman bore
    With such serenity her husband's woes,
  Just as the Spartan ladies did of yore,
    Who saw their spouses kill'd, and nobly chose
  Never to say a word about them more—
    Calmly she heard such calumny that rose,
  And saw his agonies with such sublimity,
  That all the world exclaim'd, "What magnanimity!"

Of lordly and aristocratic accomplishments:

  Then for accomplishments in chivalry,
    In case our lord the king should go to war again,
  He learned the arts of riding, fencing, gunnery,
  And how to scale a fortress — or nunnery.

Or

  Sermons he read, and lectures he endured,
    And homilies, and lives of all the saints;
  To Jerome and to Chrysostom inured,
    He did not take such studies for restraints;
  But how faith is acquired, and then ensured,
    So well not one of the aforesaid paints
  As Saint Augustine in his fine Confessions,
  Which makes the reader envy his transgressions. 

Dickinson’s snark isn’t as urbane. Byron was an aristocrat, a Lord, and while he left England in disgust, subjected to the proto gossip columnists of the 19th century, he could nevertheless afford to leave. Not Dickinson. Hers is the snark of the caged starling. Unlike Byron, who filters his mockery and sarcasm through the conventional literary mask of Don Juan’s narrator, Dickinson speaks with the necessity of directness, less urbane humor than a biting cry to be heard. It’s what makes Dickinson feel so much more modern than her peers—to me.

My first example of this would be a poem I’ve already discussed here, I never saw a Moor.

  I never saw a moor;
    I never saw the sea —
  Yet know I how the Heather looks
    And what a Billow be.

   I never spoke with God,
    Nor visited in Heaven.
  Yet certain am I of the spot
    As if the Checks were given —

As I wrote in my prior post, I read this little hymn as dripping with snark. It’s possible to read this as a piously conventional Victorian poem affirming Christian faith, but as I wrote previously, one must (in my view) ignore the obviously mocking colloquialism (even in her day) of “Yet certain am I of the spot…” Yes, Emily knows just where to go if you want to speak with God and visit Heaven. Yesireebob. There’s a “spot” alright, otherwise known as a plot—as in a plot in a graveyard (if we’re spelling this out). Dickinson will suffer none of that happy talk about some insubstantial and eternal paradise. It’s a spot. Checks are always available! Enjoy your trip.

The earnestly pious, Victorian Christian poet does not describe God in Heaven as, wait for it, a spot.

Another poem dripping with snark would be the recently discussed ‘Tis so appalling — it exhilarates —.

  'Tis so appalling — it exhilarates —
  So over Horror, it half Captivates —
  The Soul stares after it, secure —
  A Sepulchre, fears frost, no more —

  To scan a Ghost, is faint —
  But grappling, conquers it —
  How easy, Torment, now —
  Suspense kept sawing so —

  The Truth, is Bald, and Cold —
  But that will hold —
  If any are not sure —
  We show them — prayer —
  But we, who know,
  Stop hoping, now —

  Looking at Death, is Dying —
  Just let go the Breath —
  And not the pillow at your Cheek
  So Slumbereth —  

  Others, Can wrestle —
  Yours, is done —
  And so of Woe, bleak dreaded — come,
  It sets the Fright at liberty —
  And Terror's free —
  Gay, Ghastly, Holiday!

The entirety of the poem concerns the joy and liberation of death! Once you’re dead, no need to fear the cold! As Emily says, the “Sepulchre, fears frost, no more —”. Yay? Once you’ve turned into a ghost. Voila! No need to fear ghosts anymore! “To scan a Ghost, is [makes one] faint —” she writes, “But grappling [becoming a ghost], conquers it [that fear]—” Aside: I should think. Let others “wrestle [with their fear of death]/Yours, is done”. Death liberates you from Fright! Death frees you from Terror! And then, all but writing “/s”, she concludes, “Gay, Ghastly, Holiday!” 🥳 Whoopee! 🎉 I haven’t read all of world literature before she wrote that line but, arguably, in the entirety of the English canon, there’s nothing quite so transparently snarky. Do please correct me if I’m wrong.

For a third example, I thought I’d turn to some pages at random, lest I be accused of cherry-picking.

  Take your Heaven further on—
  This—to Heaven divine Has gone—
  Had You earlier blundered in
  Possibly, e'en You had seen
  An Eternity—put on—
  Now—to ring a Door beyond
  Is the utmost of Your Hand—
  To the Skies—apologize—
  Nearer to Your Courtesies
  Than this Sufferer polite—
  Dressed to meet You—
  See—in White!

And I landed on this. It’s—pure, undiluted snark. That doesn’t stop the website All Poetry from treating the poem as an earnest meditation on the afterlife. They write, “This poem explores themes of loss, grief, and the nature of heaven.” The analysis goes on to write, “The use of religious imagery and language suggests the speaker’s struggle to come to terms with the idea of an afterlife. The poem’s concise and direct language emphasizes the speaker’s sense of loss and pain.” Really? The analysis, like so many, casts Dickinson as the victim of life and circumstances—a woman of endless loss and pain. As with so many interpretations, we walk away thinking to ourselves — Poor Emily.

I read this poem — very differently.

The poem expresses Dickinson’s sly power and refusal to be a victim. The final line, like the final line in ‘Tis so appalling — it exhilarates — all but drips with snark. As I read it, her poem is like a missive to a suitor who missed his chance.

  Take your Heaven further on— 
[Take your propositioning, promises of love, elsewhere] 
  This—to Heaven divine Has gone—
["Heaven divine" could be poetry or the gratitude of her own company]
  Had You earlier blundered in
[If you'd had the wits to strike when the iron was hot]
  Possibly, e'en You [even a fool like you] had seen
  An Eternity [my erstwhile affections for you]—put on—
  Now—to ring a Door beyond
  Is the utmost of Your Hand—
[Now, you'll have better luck at the next house]
  To the Skies—apologize—
[Apologize to God in Heaven for all I care]
  Nearer to Your Courtesies
  Than this Sufferer polite—
 [You'll have better luck there than with me]
  Dressed to meet You—
  See—in White!

  [FR672/J388]

And then that killer pun in the final line: White is the color of the virgin and of the bride. Look what you could have had, she says, with all the hot-blooded venom of a scorpion. (Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.) I was dressed for your company—in the white of a virgin and bride but, I have news for you, White(!) is also the color of death, my dear, of the burial shroud. In other words, your chances with me are dead, dead, dead. I’m dressed to meet you, not like a virgin, but like a corpse! Exclamation point.

This is not the poetry of a victim.

Sewall is the first biographer credited with freeing Dickinson from the perception that she was a hapless and delicate violet trapped in her room like a forlorn Rapunzel. When I read so many interpretations of Dickinson’s poetry that nevertheless portray her as an earnest, perturbed and death-obsessed damsel, I have to wonder whether critical readers have caught up?

Of course, I could be completely wrong with my interpretations. You decide.

Higginson called his meeting with Dickinson—intense. I think these poems give some clue as to why he would write that.

up in Vermont | March 3 2024

I felt a funeral in my brain | Oblivion or Breakthrough?

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading - treading - till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through -

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum -
Kept beating - beating - till I thought
My mind was going numb -

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space - began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here -

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then -

[F340/J280]

This is a fascinating poem simply because so much of its weight and meaning rests entirely on how one interprets the meaning of a handful of words. Each word exists in a sort of splendid isolation that conversely affects the meaning of every other word. To begin with, how does one interpret “sense”? How does one interpret “Plank”, “World”, “Finished” or “knowing” ? How does one interpret “breaking through”. This latter phrase, fascinatingly, appears twice in an alternative draft. Rather than writing “And Finished knowing”, Dickinson wrote “And Got through — knowing”. So, in one draft at least, the conceit of breaking through and getting through appears both in the first and last stanza, arguing that this conceit of break through is something we should be paying attention to. That is, the central conceit of the poem may not be oblivion or defeat, which is understandably how the poem is universally (as far as I know) interpreted (including recently by Vendler), but the opposite. In my usual contrarian way, I read this poem as a grim triumph; and my reasons for doing so are not just internal to the poem but have to do with the poem that follows it in Dickinson’s fascicle.

  I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
  And Mourners to and fro
  Kept treading - treading - till it seemed
  That Sense [sanity] was breaking through - [in the sense of falling into a chasm]

It’s tempting to read “breaking through” in the sense that sanity was “breaking through” the imagined drama of the funeral, but based on the stanza that follows, my hunch is that this would be misreading Dickinson’s meaning and anachronistic. I looked up breakthrough in the Oxford English Dictionary and was surprised that the noun—a breakthrough—doesn’t appear. I had to go to Webster’s where they pinned the noun’s appearance at 1918 and only in the sense of a military “breakthrough”—as in there was a breakthrough of the enemy’s defenses. It wasn’t until 1968 that the modern usage of “a scientific breakthrough” appeared.

What is the “Funeral”? No one seems to be certain. Some speculate that it was dissappointment as regards a love or friendship, while others suggest a spiritual crisis (her rejection of Christian belief and dogma). (Dickinson’s biopgrahper Sewall writes, for instance, that “Reason “breaks” may be a tortured requiem on her hopes for [Samuel] Bowles both to love her and to accept her poetry… [p. 502]) Later in the poem she will describe the footfall of the funeral attendants as creaking across her soul. In that sense, her soul is the floor, the foundation upon which her existence is predicated, and it’s this floor—her soul—that her sanity is breaking through. In other words, not even her soul can support the weight of her suffering. That floor, her soul, gives out and she plunges into nothingness.

  And when they all were seated,
  A Service, like a Drum -
  Kept beating - beating - till I thought
  My mind was going numb - 

This stanza is fairly straightforward, but for modern readers, I think, it does the work of clarifying the meaning of the first stanza. Clearly, Dickinson is describing a sort of mental breakdown, first of sanity, then of awareness. I interpret her ‘mind going numb’ as her failing awareness of anything other than suffering.

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,

The reader is likely meant to interpret the ‘Box’ as a casket (within which lies her “deceased” relationship, beliefs or she herself), but in her numb (touchless) and senseless (visionless) state, the only sense left to her is hearing. Lead would be a highly unlikely metal for heels, being soft and malleable, but I was curious if metal heels, of any kind, were a thing in the 19th century. A not-exhaustive search didn’t turn up anything. Dickinson was likely describing the heavy footfall of the mourners as leaden. Additionally, those carrying a casket are likely to walk in lock-step and their steps will be made heavier by the weight of the corpse within. If the corpse is Dickinson herself—or her mind—then the floor (her soul) is the last creaking stay against her ultimate descent into nothingness—although that begs the question: What exactly is her soul—what does Dickinson consider it?—if it’s the floor on which her being exists, then what falls through? How does she distinguish her soul from her mind? If it’s not her soul tumbling into nothingness, then what is it? But it’s also possible to read too closely and too literally. Her imagery is not static but makes her soul both the floor and the essence that falls through its own being.

  Then Space [existence] - began to toll,

  As all the Heavens were a Bell,
  And Being, but an Ear, 
[All of existence was the bell and I was nothing but the Ear.]
  And I, and Silence, some strange Race
  Wrecked, solitary, here -
[Both Dickinson and silence are, in a sense, banished and alone] 

This stanza is difficult to parse. Cristanne Miller clumps this sort of syndetic writing (the repeated use of conjunctions) under parataxis (in that there are no subordinating conjunctions to guide our understanding). Is each ‘and’ meant to refer Ear, I and Silence back to ‘being’?—or is Dickinson imitating a sort of cumulative madness. My reading is that the latter is the case, but that two different states of being are described. In the first two lines she’s describing her experience consumed by the tolling bell. The second two liken that experience to being banished, wrecked and helplessly alone. She is banished. The Emily Dickinson Lexicon defines Race, among other definitions, as a “Course; journey; progression; steady movement toward a goal; [fig.] life; continued course of existence after death.” So Dickinson could be referring to her experience as a kind of ‘strange journey’. She could also be using “Race” in the sense of not belonging. If this is a spiritual crisis (a rejection of Christian theology) then she’s apt to feel as though she belongs to an altogether different “race” or society—wrecked/ostracized and solitary/alone. The same feeling may apply if her romantic overtures have been rejected. Her strangeness, her identity as an ambitious female poet, also could make her feel like an altogether ostracized “race”—and both interpretations could apply. One gets the sense that she wasn’t the kind of woman men pursued in those days.

  And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
  And I dropped down, and down -
  And hit a World, at every plunge,
  And Finished knowing - then -

And now, as usual with Dickinson’s final stanzas, things get interesting—very interesting. There are two very different ways to read this stanza. I think most, if not all, interpret this stanza as the threatened conclusion to the prior three stanzas. If Dickinson is describing the pain of a lost relationship, for example, then it makes sense to read this stanza as her descent into madness or nothingness. We interpret “plank” as a continuation of the imagery that associated the creaking floor with her soul and we might associate Reason with the Sense or sanity in the first stanza. In other words, her sanity and reason finally give way to madness. Her soul, the floor/plank upon which the funeral takes place, breaks or “breaks through”. She drops down and down. ‘World’, in this sense, might be her memories. In other words, every memory is a “world”. Once she has exhausted those memories, she is “finished knowing”. Even hearing is gone. (Interestingly, one will read that hearing is the last sense to die in a dying patient, but how scientists know this has never been explained.) The loss of her relationship, or hoped for relationship, is like a death to her. Vendler, who apparently can’t bear to kill poor Emily, describes the final lines as “leaving madness for a merciful unconsciousness”. But this poem would hardly be the first to suggest oblivion as the last word.

But let’s suppose the crisis is spiritual, then that makes an entirely different interpretation possible. A plank can also be “one of the separate articles in a declaration of the principles of a party or cause; as, a plank in the national platform.” This is not a possibility that you will find at the Dickinson Lexicon, but according to the Oxford English Dictionary, this understanding of the word plank appeared in poetry nearly a quarter century before Dickinson wrote this poem, as well as in Newspaper articles going back to 1848. That Dickinson, of all poets, would have been unaware of this meaning of “plank” is unlikely.

• In William Logan’s book Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods, wherein Logan gives I felt a funeral a close reading, he credits Cynthia Griffin with the observation that “a telling emblem from the book Religious Allegories (1848), [shows] a gentleman crossing a plank that bestrides a dark abyss. The man holds a radiant book that must be the Bible, the plank is carved with the word “FAITH” and a shining mansion awaits his crossing.” [p. 260]

If “I felt a funeral in my brain” was prompted by a spiritual crisis, and we know, according to Richard Sewall, that Dickinson was greatly troubled by her refusal to join her peers in declaring Jesus as their Lord and savior. This wasn’t just a figurative refusal. There were repeated calls for her to join the revivals at Amherst.

It is in the sixth letter, written a fortnight later (January 31, 1846), that a New Year’s meditations come to a focus on spiritual matters. Save for a gossipy postscript, the letter, a long one, is entirely given over to religion. Emily confesses to Abiah that she did not become a Christian during the revival of the previous winter in Amherst. She has seen “many who felt there was nothing in religion… melted at once,” and it has been “really wonderful to see how near heaven came to sinful mortals.” Once, “for a short time,” she had known this beatific state herself, when “I felt I had found my savior.” “I never enjoyed.” she wrote, “such perfect peace and happiness.” But “I soon forgot my morning prayer or else it was irksome to me. One by one my old habits returned and I cared less for religion than ever.” At Abiah’s recent announcement that she was close to conversion, Emily “shed many tears.” She herself longs to follow after: “I fell that I shall never by happy without I love Christ.” But midway through the letter she makes a striking admission. a real bit of self-discovery. Putting aside the revival rhetoric, she seems to be speaking her own voice (even to the misspelling):

Perhaps you will not beleive it Dear A., but I attended none of the meetings last winter. I felt that I was so easily excited that I might again be deceived and I dared not trust myself.

This revelation is followed by a long passage on the dreadful thought of Eternity… [p. 381]

Knowing this, the meaning of “plank” takes on a whole new meaning. It’s not just a reference to her soul (which she earlier compared to the creaking floor) but a punning reference to the “plank” of Christian beliefs.

  And then a Plank [an important principle on which the activities of a group... are based] in Reason [her own reasoning or the reasoning of others], broke,
  And I dropped down, and down -
  And hit a World, at every plunge,
  And Finished knowing - then -

What does she mean by “hit a World” in this case? In Dickinson’s poem Bereavement in their death to fell, Dickinson offers us some possibilities. In the line ‘’tis as if Our souls/Absconded‘, she also considers the words World, selves and Sun for souls. In other words, these were all in some sense synonymous. Interestingly, the context is also similar, arguing that this is a sort of Dickinsonian image cluster.

• Certain images seem regularly to have led Shakespeare’s mind along a train of associated ones. Walter Whiter, in his Specimen of a Commentary on Shakespeare (1794), showed that flattery suggested dogs, which suggested sweetmeats. The phenomenon was more fully discussed by E. A. Armstrong in his Shakespeare’s Imagination: A Study of the Psychology of Association and Inspiration (1946), and is used by Kenneth Muir as evidence of authorship in his Shakespeare as Collaborator (1960).

So, with that in mind, Dickinson gives us at least two alternate readings for World—soul and self. And in that light, her hitting “a World, at every plunge” might refer to previous selves, or other versions of Emily Dickinson (like the Dickinson who had found her savior) until she finally gets through (got through in one revision of the poem) her “Knowing”. And what does ‘knowing’ mean? As it turns out, ‘knowing’ has a very specific meaning in Christian contexts. Look up the meaning of know and you will read that “knowing God is not simply an intellectual apprehension, but a response of faith and an acceptance of Christ.”

It is he who has made God known ( John 1:18 ).To know Christ is to know God ( John 14:7 ). Eternal life is to know the true God and Jesus Christ ( John 17:3 ). Paul desires to know Christ in his death and resurrection ( Php 3:10 ). Failure to know Jesus as Lord and Messiah ( Acts 2:36 ) resulted in his rejection and crucifixion ( 1 Cor 2:8 ).

To know Christ is to know truth ( John 8:32 ). While this is personal, it is also propositional. Knowledge of the truth ( 1 Tim 2:4 ; 2 Tim 2:25 ; 3:7 ; Titus 1:1 ) is both enlightenment and acceptance of the cognitive aspects of faith.

This knowing, this acceptance of Christ, is precisely what Dickinson could not accept. So, read in this light, what Dickinson might be saying is that the funeral in her brain is the rhetoric of proselytizing that already condemns her as dead to God and comes or threatens to bury her. The good Christians “mourn for her” and their mourning is like an endless treading that threatens to drive Dickinson to madness. Their “service” is like a drum that keeps beating, that won’t leave her in peace or silence. The culture of Christianity surrounding her cajoles, threatens, and proselytizes until she feels her mind going numb. Their insistence is like a drumbeat. Their boots (their own beliefs) are, to Dickinson, leaden. Their step is heavy on her soul and creaks under their weight. The religious imagery continues as she describes all the Heavens as a ringing bell, so pervasive that she feels herself reduced to a tortured ear. In another of her poems, she gives tongues to the bells and, in that sense, the bell is also proselytizing.

• Isaiah 55:3

  “Incline your ear and come to Me.
  Listen, that you may live;
  And I will make an everlasting covenant with you…

• Matthew 13:16-17

  But blessed are your eyes, because they see; and your ears, because they hear.

She, and her precious silence, are wrecked and solitary. As a fascinating side note, John Keats so despised the ringing of church bells that he wrote a sonnet on the subject:

  Sonnet. Written In Disgust Of Vulgar Superstition

  The church bells toll a melancholy round,
  Calling the people to some other prayers,
  Some other gloominess, more dreadful cares,
  More hearkening to the sermon's horrid sound.
  Surely the mind of man is closely bound
  In some black spell; seeing that each one tears
  Himself from fireside joys, and Lydian airs,
  And converse high of those with glory crown'd.
  Still, still they toll, and I should feel a damp,--
  A chill as from a tomb, did I not know
  That they are dying like an outburnt lamp;
  That 'tis their sighing, wailing ere they go
    Into oblivion; -- that fresh flowers will grow,
    And many glories of immortal stamp.

This poem absolutely would have been read and known to Dickinson (note some of the interesting parallels—the drumbeat of Dickinson’s service, the horrid sound of Keats’s sermon; the melancholy round of Keats’s churchbells, the tortuous tolling of Dickinson’s bell; Keat’s damp chill, as from a tomb, and Dickinson’s funeral). Remember, from our previous discussion, that Dickinson put Keats at the top of her reading list during the same year that she wrote I felt a funeral.

  And hit a World, at every plunge,
  And Finished knowing - then -

The poem concludes with grim determination. The plank (the stated beliefs of their and/or her own reasoning) breaks under so much weight. She plunges through untold “Worlds” or selves or beliefs, her own and those of others, until she finally, as she wrote in one revision, gets or “got through”. She is finished with “knowing”—she will not accept Christ. And then the poem ends on the word then. This is where things get even more interesting. When Dickinson placed “I felt a funeral in my brain” in her fascicles, she followed it with ‘Tis so appalling — it exhilarates. Both poems were written the same year, and if we don’t know the reason Dickinson placed these poems next to each other, we know that she did. It is possible, for example to read “then” as leading directly into the next poem, such that both poems can be read as one:

  (...)
  And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
  And I dropped down, and down -
  And hit a World, at every plunge,
  And Finished knowing - then -

  'Tis so appalling — it exhilarates —
  So over Horror, it half Captivates —
  The Soul stares after it, secure —
  A Sepulchre, fears frost, no more —

  To scan a Ghost, is faint —
  But grappling, conquers it —
  How easy, Torment, now —
  Suspense kept sawing so —

  The Truth, is Bald, and Cold —
  But that will hold —
  If any are not sure —
  We show them — prayer —
  But we, who know,
  Stop hoping, now —

  Looking at Death, is Dying —
  Just let go the Breath —
  And not the pillow at your Cheek
  So Slumbereth —  

  Others, Can wrestle —
  Yours, is done —
  And so of Woe, bleak dreaded — come,
  It sets the Fright at liberty —
  And Terror's free —
  Gay, Ghastly, Holiday!

In this case, the word then is a transition to the next poem and the revelation that once the horror is past, the soul can “[stare] after it, secure”. But let’s say that Dickinson did put these two poems together meaning them to be read together. She still does the unexpected. ‘Tis so appalling (as discussed earlier) is more sarcasm, scorn and contempt, than celebration. If one reads ‘Tis so appalling as a companion poem, then I felt a Funeral, in my Brain is Dickinson refusing to accept Christ while ‘Tis so appalling — it exhilarates — is her sarcastic, darkly humorous riposte, saying, Great! “Gay, Ghastly Holiday!” Now what? She has escaped the leaden boots of Christian dogma, to believe in what?

One might object by saying that if these two poems are meant to be read as one, then why not every poem in her fascicle? That’s a fair objection but, conversely, she didn’t just roll the dice. The whole point of the fascicle, after all, was to arrange the poetry. It’s not far-fetched to assert that the reason these two poems are together is that, for Dickinson, they were associated.

Which interpretation do I prefer? If the poem is about a disappointment in love, friendship or her disappointment as an artist, then we’re greeted with a poem that conveys her suffering through analogy with the Christian rituals of burial. Her suffering is like a funeral. The persistence of the suffering and weight of it is like the leaden tread of the mourners. Heaven in her poem is not the heaven of paradise but the remorseless tongue of dogma, the church bell, ostracizing her, rejecting her, driving her to desperate madness. The service meant to offer solace and comfort is a brutal and annihilating drumbeat. Even if Emily Dickinson is not having a spiritual crisis, Emily Dickinson’s imagery is.

Lastly, Sewall credits Ruth Miller with identifying I felt a Cleaving in my Mind— as a variant poem of I felt a funeral.

  I felt a Cleaving in my mind —
    As if my Brain had split —
  I tried to match it, Seam by Seam —
    But could not make them fit —

  The thought behind, I strove to join
    Unto the thought before —
  But Sequence ravelled out of Sound —
    Like Balls — upon a Floor.

[FR867/J937,J992]

Similar themes appear, though without the oppressive Christian rituals. The poem is said to be written in 1864, two years after I felt a funeral. I know I’m treading on sacred ground with leaden heels, but compared to the former, this poem feels more like the product of a doodle taken from one of her envelope poems—as though the conceit occurred to Dickinson and she ran with it. That’s not to say that the poem doesn’t succeed, just that it reads as though it’s eight parts “art” and maybe two parts “autobiography”. The impression is made more so with the revision she later sent to Susan Dickinson:

  The Dust behind I strove to join
  Unto the Disk before —
  But Sequence ravelled out of Sound
  Like Balls upon a Floor —

What I like about the revision is what it reveals as regards Emily the artist and craftsman. She wasn’t just an instinctive genius, but a thinking and discerning artist perfecting her craft. Sure, there is a portion of her poetry that are her letters to the world—but I would argue that a portion are also the product of a craftsman, someone to whom metaphors and analogies came easily, along with the ideas usefully expressed by them. Her first version—”thought behind, I strove to join/Unto the thought before“—effectively communicates the central idea, but “a thought” is an abstract thing. Like any poet/craftsman, she knew that a poem lives or dies in its imagery, its power to evoke through figurative language and the five senses. The fragments of the poem’s thoughts don’t just roll out of reach (her first version), but ravel out of Sound. So, she added specificity to the thoughts. The thought behind becomes dust and the thought before becomes the Disk. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” explains “the dust”, but what is the Disk? Vendler interprets Disk as “the Sun of sunrise”, symbolizing a new beginning, and I think she’s right. She quotes Dickinson’s four line poem “The pattern of the sun”, as evidence for her interpretation:

  The pattern of the sun
  Can fit but him alone
  For sheen must have a Disk
  To be a sun —

So anyway, whereas I felt a funeral reads like a poem arising from a real crisis, I felt a Cleaving reads more like a work of art—to me.

Amherst MA
Amherst Manuscript # 421
Amherst – Amherst Manuscript # 421 – The pattern of the sun – asc:7785 – p. 1

I died for Beauty | On the true and beautiful death of truth and beauty…

I died for Beauty — but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb,
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining room —

He questioned softly "Why I failed"?
"For Beauty", I replied.
"And I — for Truth - Themself are one —
We Brethren are", He said —

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night —
We talked between the Rooms —
Until the Moss had reached our lips —
And covered up — Our names — 

[FR448/J449]

 O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
         Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
         Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
         When old age shall this generation waste,
                Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
         "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

From the closing stanza of Ode on a Grecian Urn

Here lies One 
Whose name was writ in Water.

Dickinson’s I died for Beauty is one of those Dickinson poems that is, relatively, straightforward. We’re not confronted with, as Cristanne Miller calls them, nonrecoverable deletions—omitted words that are otherwise essential to meaning—deletions that make Dickinson difficult to read but also interpretively flexible. They’re often what I’m trying to fill in and what none of us can agree on. Which is fine. In my post, The Tint I cannot take, I filled in those nonrecoverable deletions like this:

Their [the squirrels] Graspless [failure to grasp] manners — mock us — [belittle the poet's efforts or more generally mock/resemble all of us]
Until the Cheated [the deceived/wasted] Eye [arc of life/surmise]
Shuts arrogantly [triumphantly] — in the Grave —
Another way — to see — [our/their opportunity to see the world through Dickinson's eyes or more generally the ineffable]

The bracketed insertions in the first, second and fourth lines. Dickinson never specifies what “Their” refers to, or the “Cheated Eye”. And so we entertain alternative readings like this:

  Their [the onlookers or the squirrels?] Graspless manners — mock us —
  Until the Cheated Eye [the landscape painter’s?—the onlookers?—the squirrels?]
  Shuts arrogantly — in the Grave —
  Another way — to see — [who’s way? the landscape painter’s?—the onlookers?—the squirrels?] 

‘I died for beauty’ is less about establishing what Dickinson even is talking about and more along the lines of normal interpretive debate. What, after all, does she really mean by truth?—beauty?—and, above all, failure? Are these abstract notions? Are these the broad gestures of nebulous romantic affectation? Or might she be referring to something more specific? But before we get to that, there are a couple interesting rabbit holes I want to go down. And they’re rabbit holes because everything I’m going to write is utterly speculative and can be safely ignored by anyone demanding facts.

At the entrance to the rabbit hole is the (generally not disputed) assumption that Dickinson’s poem was inspired by (or is a reference to) Keats’s poem Ode on a Grecian Urn. And as far as I can tell, that’s about as far as responsible readers are willing to go. But there’s another possible reference in Dickinson’s poem, and that’s to the lines written on Keats’ tombstone: “Here lies One Whose name was writ in Water.” Is it coincidence that Dickinson ends her poem with the line: “Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.”? Possibly. And that sent me on a not-exhaustive-as-it-could-have-been search for what books were in Dickinson’s library, and whether she would have been familiar with Keats’s tombstone. According to this site (by one Gary Martin) the phrase appeared in the 1821 edition of Keats’s Poetic Works (if I’m reading his site correctly). I was unable to confirm that. But if Martin is correct, could Dickinson have read this early edition? Would the book have been available to readers in the States? What seems virtually indisputable is that Dickinson was exposed to Keats at a young age and that if her father didn’t have the book in his library, she almost certainly came across Keats’s poetry in the course of her Amherst education. Given what any reader quickly surmises as regards Dickinson’s interests, the story of Keats’ death, his tombstone and what is written there probably would have made a forceful impression on the poet—not something she would have forgotten.

And there are some other interesting coincidences.

The poem was written in 1862 according to Dickinson’s biographer Richard Sewall. Curiously, this is the same year that Dickinson wrote a letter to Higginson in which she answers questions pertaining to what books she’s been reading. The letter was dated April 25, 1862 and she writes:

“You inquire my Books — For Poets — I have Keats — and Mr and Mrs Browning. For Prose — Mr Ruskin — Sir Thomas Browne — and the Revelations.”

As Sewall points out, that’s an awfully odd list.

“Emily’s reading list (Keats, the Brownings, Ruskin, Browne, “the Revelations”) is as misleading, in what it says and what it omits, as anything in the letter. Ruskin and Browne seem to have been of minor importance to her; perhaps she mentioned them because Higginson did in his article. Where is Thoreau, for whom her few tantalizing references show a kinship greater than she ever acknowledged? Where is Merson, a major influence, whose Poems (1847) Ben Newton had given her in 1850? Above all, where is Shakepseare, of whom she was later to ask Higginson, “Why is any other book needed?” [The Life of Emily Dickinson p. 543]

And yes, where are all those books? But what interests me is that Keats is first on her list. It’s hard not to conclude that she must have been closely engaged with Keats at this time, hence the reason he was first on her book list. And at this point, which collection of Keats’s poetry might she have been reading? Interestingly, I found a source that lists all the books in the Dickinson estate (no doubt incomplete) here (a PDF listing all the books and magazines). Keats is nowhere to be found. However (another coincidence) a complete edition of Keats’ poems was published in 1858 by London: E Mocton, which you can read here. There’s a short memoir of John Keats included, and you can be sure Dickinson would have read the memoir if the book had been in her hands. And if she had read the memoir, she would have read this:

“In one of these mental voyages into the past, which precede death, Keats had told Severn that he thought ” the intensest pleasure he had received in life was in watching the growth of flowers,” and another time, after lying a while quite still, he murmured, ” I feel the flowers growing over me.” And there they do grow even all the winter long, — violets and daisies mingling with the fresh herbage, and in the words of Shelley ” making one in love with death, to think one should be buried in so sweet a place.” Some years ago, when the writer of this memoir was at Rome, the thick grass had nearly overgrown the humble tomb-stone, which however few strangers of our race omit to visit…”

Can you just imagine Dickinson reading these lines? The imagery could come straight from one of her own poems. And so, we know that Dickinson was reading Keats during the same year that she wrote “I died for beauty”. That, at least, is not speculation. Further, based on the fact that Keats was first on her reading list, we can guess that she was particularly engaged with Keats around this time. Is it possible that she read the memoir in Mocton’s publication? I don’t know, but the parallels in imagery are striking. Keats’ tomb is covered by vegetation and so are the tombs in Dickinson’s poem. The name of Keats disappears in water and in Dickinson the names disappear beneath moss. If she read the memoir, she surely would have remembered what was written on Keats’ tomb; and it would have been a short step for all those thoughts and images to combine into Dickinson’s now famous poem.

But, getting back to the poem, what does she mean by truth?—beauty?—and failure? Are these nebulous romantic gestures or might she be referring to something more specific? Keats tells us what they are: Each is Each. In Vendler’s interpretation, Dickinson, Selected Poems and Commentaries, they are separate but eventually ‘all distinctions are resolved’ by their mutual decay. Vendler treats the deceased as Beauty/Feminine and Truth/Masculine. That’s perfectly reasonable, and requires the reader to identify the character with their types (like a short morality play):

“When we use an expression such as “He died for God and Country,” we envisage a battle; when we say, “She died for her faith,” we envisage a martyrdom. Apparently, Beauty and Truth have died in affirmation of the values they endorse; society will not permit their continued existence. Yet there is no recrimination in these two who have been so steadfast, not any indictment of the values opposed to their own. They were not executed: they merely “died” or “failed” for Beauty or Truth.”

But strictly speaking, Dickinson never states that the deceased are actually Truth and Beauty, only that each “died” for truth and beauty. Also, stating that “society [would] not permit their continued existence” is probably overstating the case. There’s nothing in the poem to suggest that society was responsible for their deaths (as gratifying as that assertion might be). But is debating who is in the grave like driving a pin through the butterfly’s heart? Maybe. I’m fine reading it both ways. The poem is a sort of set piece symbolizing a recurring tragedy: We know that truth and beauty haven’t really died, and yet truth and beauty dies with each of us. Life is doomed to failure. (I interpret the question: “Why I failed”? or Why did you fail? not as meaning — Why did you fail in your pursuit? — but as ­— For what did you die?”) While we live though, we can decide what to live and die for. In the case of Dickinson’s denizens, one has decided to die for beauty and the other truth—ultimately for the same things. They are “bretheren” and “kinsmen”. They both pursued truth and beauty, and became Truth and Beauty in the pursuit. Dickinson drives this home by eventually making them the same, erasing not just their identities but their names. In this sense, the poem doesn’t end in tragedy, but evinces a sort of satisfied resignation—each his lived and died for something noble. Each had their turn. And that is the best any of us can hope for. Eventually, the moss, like the grasses and flowers above Keats’s grave, erase all.

• February 26th I wanted to add a further interpretation to the post based on the comments section (for those readers who don’t read comments). If we read a touch of autobiography in the poem, then Dickinson might be metaphorically placing herself next to Keats. They were brethren and kinsmen in the sense that they were both poets and therefore seekers of truth and beauty. They both wrote magnificent poetry but, perhaps in EDs judgement, failed to obtain the support and recognition they deserved. (In this sense, ‘failed’ means ‘failed’.) Their poetry went unrecognized and unappreciated. That is their failure, but also society’s. That is, society failed and will fail them by allowing the moss to cover up their names (and any memory of them or their works). Read this way, the poem is especially powerful and poignant. It’s also arguably untrue, because Dickinson was reading Keats’s poetry. He was emphatically not forgotten, and yet what did that posthumous success mean to Keats? The pain of the living poet, her pain at being overlooked and unrecognized, would be what she’s expressing here. And yet as with the earlier interpretation, the “triumph” of the poem itself, the truth and beauty of poetry remains—just as it did with Keats.

And yet, in that very erasure—the entirety of the poem enacts anew—within us—both truth and beauty. Dickinson’s poem plays the same trick on us that Keats’s poem plays. By observing the tragic evanescence of truth and beauty, they renew them both. “Here is my poem,” says Dickinson, “behold the death of Truth and Beauty. Isn’t it tragic? Oh, grieve for them! Grieve! Isn’t it truthful? Isn’t it beautiful?” The poem sneakily confirms Keats’s final lines: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

This somewhat contradicts the interpretation (worth reading) made at the following website:

“In other words, this parable about idealists ends on a note of sobering realism. No matter what people “die for,” the poem suggests, death is death. Even the highest ideals, such as beauty and truth, become irrelevant in the grave, along with any work we’ve produced or sacrifices we’ve made in their name.”

Simply by virtue of the poem itself. Truth and beauty are not irrelevant because the poetry is not irrelevant. The ideals, in other words, exist within the framework of the poem and are renewed (brought to life) by those who read the poem. Truth and beauty are not in any real grave. Those are just the masks worn by the players. The poem itself is a sly part of the morality play—is truth and beauty—and lives on.

Finally, I’ve linked an interesting article (see below) that I came across while researching this post, on the rivalry between Amherst and Harvard as concerns Dickinson’s estate. The author writes:

“Dickinson sent many manuscripts off to friends in the mail, and the enormous remainder-well over a thousand manuscripts and other items-were divided after Dickinson’s death between her sister-in-law and childhood friend, Susan, and a neighbor, Mabel Loomis Todd. There was one large complication: Mabel was deep in an affair with Austin, Emily’s brother and Susan’s husband. Ever since then, the majority of Dickinson’s manuscripts and possessions have been stuck in the middle of a war between two houses. Eventually, the manuscripts residing with Mabel were donated to Amherst College, while those in Susan’s possession ended up at Harvard. The rivalry was bequeathed with the manuscripts.”

Good grief.

• For more on Keats’s Tomb.
• On the banal rivalry of egos between Amherst and Harvard

And this post was for Gabrielle.

Dickinson and the first law of Thermodynamics: The Chemical Conviction

The Chemical conviction
That Nought be lost
Enable in Disaster
My fractured Trust —

The Faces of the Atoms
If I shall see
How more the Finished Creatures
Departed me! 

J954/FR1070

I’ve started to read Sewall’s Dickinson biography, and he quoted the poem above. The poem, he felt, was reflective of the kind of education (scientific ideas) Dickinson would have been exposed to during her time at the Amherst College. Sewall addresses the first quatrain but has nothing whatsoever to say about the second quatrain. I then went on an internet search. Every analysis/discussion of the poem (of which there are few) happily focuses on the first quatrain (which is easy) then runs to the next county when the second quatrain showed up. This seems to be a pattern in online Dickinson analysis. Alot of commentators quietly flee in terror when Dickinson’s final quatrains show up. It looks like this:

I have a theory.

Dickinson very often treats her final quatrains the way Shakespeare treated the final couplets of his sonnets. There’s a twist, and it’s compounded by the fact that her twists are mostly brilliant, packed with allusions and so elliptical/compressed that they turn syntax into diamonds (because she’s forced to fit genius into a ballad hymn quatrain). The Chemical Conviction is a beautiful example of this. The first quatrain, we can grasp (for the most part), but what in the hell is she talking about in the second quatrain?

But, not being one to resist temptation, I’ll put my neck in the noose and try to sort this out. The poem is a reference to the then, still relatively new, understanding that matter can be neither created nor destroyed. As Sewall points out, concerned Christians like Edward Hitchcock (who taught at Amherst College and who Emily certainly heard and read) were greatly troubled by the way reality kept contradicting a book written by a bunch of middle eastern/religious zealots when the Earth was still the center of the universe:

It is probably the prevailing opinion among intelligent Christians at this time and has been the opinion of many commentators, that when Peter describes the future destruction of the world, he means that its solid substance, and indeed that of the whole material universe, will be utterly consumed or annihilated by fire. This opinion rests upon the common belief  that such is the effect of combustion. But chemistry informs us, that no cause of combustion, how fiercely soever the fire may rage, annihilates the least particle of matter; and that fire only changes the form of substances. Nay, there is no reason whatever to suppose that one particle of matter has been annihilated since the world began. The chemist moreover asserts that all the solid parts of the globe have already undergone combustion, and that although heat may melt them, it cannot burn them. Nor is there any thing upon or within the earth capable of combustion, but vegetables, animals, and a few gases. Has Peter, then, made a mistake because he did not understand modern chemistry?…

Scarcely any truth seems more clearly taught in the Bible than the future resurrection of the body. Yet this doctrine has always been met by a most formidable objection. It is said that the body laid in the grave is ere long decomposed into its elements, which are scattered over the face of the earth, and enter into new combinations, even forming a part of other human bodies. Hence not even Omnipotence can raise from the grave the identical body laid there, because the particles may enter successively into a multitude of other human bodies. I am not aware that any successful reply has never been given to this objection, until chemistry and natural history taught us the true nature of bodily identity…  [p. 345-346 The Life of Emily Dickinson]

Sewall reads Dickinson’s poem as a “reduction” of Hitchcock’s words. In any event, realizing that Dickinson’s final quatrain was probably a reference to Christian theology, led me to an interpretation that, with some irony, undermines the very Christian theology she’s alluding to (as is Dickinson’s wont).

The Chemical conviction [The evidence provided through Chemistry] 
That Nought be lost [for the First Law of Thermodynamics]
Enable in Disaster [her death/or Judgement Day] 
My fractured [imperfect] Trust — [belief that I will see]

[as regards] The Faces of the Atoms [atoms likened to the faces of the resurrected]
If I shall see [My imperfect trust, as regards the atoms, that I might see...]
How more [how more→ to what degree improved] the Finished [accomplished; executed; achieved; perfected; completed] Creatures [atoms] 
Departed me! ['how improved the Finished Creatures/that Departed me'/or since my death]

[The words in italics are taken from the Dickinson Lexicon.]

Dickinson’s use of the word “if” lifts a hell of a lot of weight, and mainly because she’s only allowed four syllables and has to rhyme. It makes for difficult reading. The Dickinson Lexicon lists the many possible meanings behind Dickinson’s use of the word:

if, conj. [OE; subordinating conjunction.] (webplay: admit, affirmation, bread, chance, fact, give, God, grant, let, message, sentence, son, stones, suppose, uncertain, whether, whole).

    A. [Introduces a condition] hoping; granting; supposing; imagining; let it be that.
    B. [Introduces a possibility] whether; be it true; entertaining the possibility that.
    C. Phrase. “As if”: [see as, conj.] seemingly; hypothetically like. 

So, assuming I’m right, the demands of the final quatrain (rhymes and meter) forced Dickinson to leave out all kinds of syntactic cues/connectives that would have directed the reader’s understanding. She presents fragmentary thoughts instead, meant to convey the whole. And if I write it out in plain English, I can read two similar but differing interpretations hinging on the meaning of Disaster. If she’s referring to her own death, then this:

My imperfect (fractured) knowledge, provided by Chemistry, that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, gives me reason to believe that upon my death, I might see whether and to what degree these atoms/beings were improved/perfected by having been a part of me!

In this sense, she’s riffing on the idea of her death being a Judgement Day for the atoms and blasphemously casts herself, in a sense, as God. She judges them. She might see how more Finished (or not) these atoms/Creatures are upon departing their earthly realm (their earthly realm being Dickinson’s body). If Disaster refers to Judgement Day, then she might mean something like this:

My imperfect (fractured) knowledge, provided by Chemistry, that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, gives me reason to believe that on Judgement Day, I might see whether and to what degree these atoms/beings were improved/perfected since having departed me/my body upon my death!

In other words, Dickinson is comparing atoms to people that she will see again on resurrection day. They will be like the faces of people she once knew. The first, which is slyly hubristic, asserts that she will get to see how the atoms were improved by having been a part of her “earth/Earth”. The second asserts her supposition that she might see how the atoms have been changed/perfected (since having departed her body) by being a part of countless others. In both interpretations, Dickinson re-imagines (with some irony and humor) the atoms going through their own cycle of life, death, resurrection and “judgement”. In both interpretations, she greets them as familiar denizens that populated and were “the Earth” of her body.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got. Let me know what I’ve missed.

up in Vermont | January 16th 2024