Reader’s Note: It will be helpful for you to have access to the complete poems I’ve discussed in this Post:
#359 “A Bird came down the Walk”
#314 “Hope is the thing with feathers”
#764 “My life had stood – a Loaded Gun”
#466 “I Dwell In Possibility”
#905 Split the Lark – and you’ll find the Music”
#372, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes”
Emily Dickinson lived all but a few weeks of her adult life in one house. She spent years as a caretaker for her bedridden mother. She suffered from debilitating migraines, difficulties with her eyes, probably epilepsy, high blood pressure and kidney disease as well. In spite of all these afflictions, one of her biographer’s believes that she lived “a visionary life [which was] an exultant life.”
In Poem #359, “A Bird Came Down the Walk”, she writes about a hierarchy of threat and of relief. Unobserved, she watches a bird devour a worm, but then sees the same bird “with rapid eyes, /that [hurry] all abroad” and that “[look] like frightened beads,” eyes that roll like doll’s eyes, involuntary, inhuman. The bird stirs “Like one in danger” when the speaker approaches, but then unrolls his wings and flies off to a “softer Home.”
Above everything else, Dickinson is a watcher, a quiet, very still, observer who understands danger and fear and the desire for escape, for release. In #359, she shows us the progression from hunting and killing to fear of being hunted to flight into a form of an ecstatic landscape “off Banks of Noon.” In #314, when she writes of “Hope,” it arrives unbidden, a grace, and this must have been terribly important to one so limited in her movements and in her physical experience of the world. She lived a circumscribed adult life and would never visit “the chillest land” or sail “on the strangest sea.”
There is a dangerous quality to her. In #764, “My life had stood – a Loaded Gun” she compares herself to a gun that hunts, kills, protects, and that takes pleasure in doing so. Her “smile,” the discharge of the weapon, is “Vesuvian” and a “pleasure.” A slight young woman, often ill and isolated, possessed of a potent imagination, who writes of being possessed, of doing the bidding of an “Owner,” of watching over him – the mystery becomes one of tone. What shifting ironies does Dickinson bring to bear in her poems? How are we to discern when her voice is earnest, sly, mischievous, searching, preaching, or transparent and disappearing?
How is one to measure that voice in #905, Split the Lark – and you’ll find the Music?” A poem about betrayal, about killing something beautiful to resolve the “Sceptic Thomas” within whomever the poem addresses. She writes “Gush after Gush, reserved for you.” Let the blood wash out upon you? Imagine Dickinson imagining her hands bathed in blood. How does one make sense of that? Dickinson delights in enigmas not only of voice but also of personas. This is one who wrote in a letter that “a voice inside her head commanded her to write. She called it her ‘faithful monitor’ and she could not keep it quiet for long.”*
Dickinson writes about wordless states of being. She wants to explore the enigmatic but also court it. In #314, “Hope is the thing with feathers,” she does not name the “thing” as a bird. Why not name it. Nothing else has feathers. Perhaps because she was after a quality of life beyond a naming. Naming quantifies. It pins meanings and associations in place, and in that sense is also blinding because something exists beyond the name. Often, she seems to be after the life that exists independent of language, a kind of liminal space of reality that she can sense and see but that language keeps her from reaching.
In “I Dwell in Possibility,” she declares herself to be a watcher and, very consciously, a poet of “possibility,” of a poetic opening up as opposed to the narrowing of prose, a form with fewer “windows” on the world. “Possibility” is freeing and less given to others’ busy watching. The poem reads both like a declaration of poetic intent and an admission into the ‘state of Dickinson’, in this case, her happiness in spreading wide [her] narrow hands/To gather Paradise,” both the world of nature and the inner world of her compositions of words, lines, and poems that become her version of life and the world.
Her punctuation gives depth to her ideas. They are signals to the reader for how her speaker thinks. Her dashes are more than a pause, more than a comma. They are breathing spaces, consideration spaces. They are thought-filled intermissions as contrasted with thoughtful. They feel active. Her voice is inextricably tied up with her punctuation.
The experience of suffering, and its meaning, is never far from her mind. In #372, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” she writes of loss or grief as a primal force, a kind of freezing sleep, a creator and magnifier of doubt. Her religious questions, also never far from her mind, often come into play when she examines suffering. Who also “bore” such “pain” … “Centuries before,” the same “Hour of Lead,” as the speaker bears. Who can “He” be but Christ? And yet, here it exists in me, right now, she writes. The unasked question of ‘why’ permeates the poem.
However, “pain” is not the end. After the passage of grief, after the pain has receded, something more than relief comes forth after the “Stupor,” a “letting go,” – a passage to the other side of loss. She does not tell us what that might be.
Her poems reveal an intelligence never at rest, never satisfied; a penetrating, fearless eye; and the deepest understanding of how a mind reveals itself over the space and time it takes to read a poem. Along with Wallace Stevens, Dickinson might be the great American poet of uncertainty and metaphysical mystery.
After close reading several dozen of her poems, I am left with thinking about her happiness, and I feel a sorrow for her circumscribed life scourged by illness and loss, but also a great sense of wonder at how she lived so completely and courageously in the vast territory of her imagination.
*from These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson by Martha Ackerman. Page 6.
