Wrecked, Solitary, Here: Dickinson’s Room of Her Own
Attentiveness without an aim is the supreme form of prayer.
SIMONE WEIL, Notebooks
“I think I could write a poem to be called Concord,” Thoreau wrote in his journal for 1841. “For argument I should have the River, the Woods, the Ponds, the Hills, the Fields, the Swamps and Meadows, the Streets and Buildings, and the Villagers.”
The Villagers were the afterthought. Virtually every item in the list lacks a specific name. Walden is a hymn to salvation achieved. It is so beautifully arranged, made and remade, finished and stylized in every part, that its particular triumph is to put you into harmony with it. But the style is too deliberate and always exclusive of what does not suit Thoreau’s fable of man totally at home with nature and himself. Hell, as Jean-Paul Sartre was to say in No Exit, is “other people.” Thoreau called them “visitors.” They interrupted his perfect solitude.
Thoreau did think that people were always too much. Like his epigrams, they were separate pronouncements, not necessary to his world. He stood at a sharp angle to every foreign object in his specimen book of nature. Man in nature must lead to Perfection, which is the aim of existence. This is understood only as man feels himself under the eye of God. Nature is another name for God’s purpose. To this, other human beings can be an obstruction. In the “Village” chapter of Walden Thoreau explains:
Every day or two I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs. As I walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, so I walked in the village to see the men and boys; instead of the wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle. In one direction from my house there was a colony of muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of elms and button woods in the other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prairie-dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighbor’s to gossip.
Where in the world except transcendental New England—and this when the United States was exploding on the world scene—did solitude so contentedly approve of itself at the expense of the human species? Where else would so total a visionary have been content to write, “Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations”? In Walden, the fish, the muskrats, the ants, and the fox are more generously characterized than the unfortunate “James Collins, an Irishman who worked on the Fitchburg Railroad.” The vibrations binding us to phenomenal nature feature no one but Henry Thoreau.
Of course Thoreau’s abiding solitariness is “religious.” He is a perfect demonstration of Alfred North Whitehead’s “religion is what we do with our solitariness.” Thoreau’s ideal was sainthood exerted on the emptiness around Concord. The altar was Nature, but Henry Thoreau’s God was one of those faint radio signals that can still be detected from a stellar explosion that ceased millions of years ago. Emerson’s God finally came to rest in “the infinitude of the private mind”; this God was a last-ditch personal claim without the church, despite the church, against the church. Thoreau’s whole life depended on his preserving it through a style that was really the practice of happiness. There could be no doubts, no obvious anxiety, above all no opening to contradiction. His life in nature—his God—gave Thoreau a sense of importance he never had in Concord.
It was natural for Thoreau to idealize his experience; he earnestly believed that writing follows experience and can be an exact substitute for it. The writer is a fixed, self-fulfilling entity who makes an ideal version of his life; this becomes the authorized version.
Emily Dickinson, no romantic about an existence that was as endlessly various as it was difficult, was fascinated by words as starting points. Words were not transcriptions of experience; they often invented it. Words were roles. She demonstrated in almost 1,800 poems—and successive drafts of poems—that she was able to live by the incessant shift of roles that mind and nature, subject and object, life and death, “soul” and self, “woman” and “me,” play—often at each other. Her aim is not Thoreau’s conversion of Nature into her own mind; it is the minuteness, the exact shading, of an actual human cycle forever reenacting itself within a domestic setting. Everything in her life is in her poems—especially when she has to make it up. “Amherst,” her outside world, receives the slightest physical detail in the cycle. The Civil War is not named, although in 1862–63 it led to her writing more than a poem a day—and some of her fiercest poems. But everything is there, including the people she loved and the family she saw most. She lives in the village, and it is her village. She is its great reflector, perhaps because she never intended to “do” Amherst itself. Amherst was the whole of America and the cycle of life.
Some things that stay there be—
Grief—Hills—Eternity—
Nor this behooveth me.
There are that resting, rise.
Can I expound the skies?
How still the Riddle lies!
We get the daily round as we do not get it from the symbolic use of the seasons in Walden or from Whitman’s catalogues of Americans at work. The daily round was also the daily urgency to write poems (and hundreds of letters that are as antic in mood and swift in thought as her poems). They include some open hysteria, a ready sense of farce, deathbeds, sexual entreaty, playing the little girl or “Majesty,” mockery of male pomp, “what soft cherubic creatures these gentlewomen are,” the Connecticut Valley weather at play, plants and animals that positively imitate Victorian society. In many poems she says that she springs to the page from being pressed down. Thoreau, who found his life in words, believed that they replace an experience exactly. Emily Dickinson did not feel that she had replaced a day or an hour—and certainly not the people she loved—by writing. Poetry was not the equivalent of experience and certainly never a solution to anything. Least of all was poetry a sanctification of experience. Like God, whom she pleasantly missed, poetry was something else.
Emily Dickinson did not idealize the self; she was too close to it. She was well acquainted with idleness, reverie, blankness, despair.
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—Too?
Least of all did she believe that the human soul was needed to complete the universe. Saturated in a theological tradition that still provided the language for everyday experience, she made this tradition her daily resource. Religion was the background of her life, but her quest for a living God was often humorous. She must have recognized herself (in addition to her other troubles) as a reluctant sceptic ahead of her time. She was the first modern writer to come out of New England.
Even in secluded little Amherst, the harsh Puritan vision of an all-seeing God had evaporated into propriety. The supernatural had been replaced by exemplary behavior. No one was allowed to forget that New England was still the American evangel—of reform movements. Yet Dickinson somehow managed to live the dialectic of the old religion—the minutely observing self under God’s all-seeing eye. Every instant of life was morally of supreme importance. This made her incessantly expressive, a Puritan trait. But she never affirmed faith where there was only a longing for faith. Her view of life remained strenuous, problematic, a contest. Writing was a trial of strength. God, whatever else He was not, was still the greatest weight on her life. Death was the next stage of life but was such a break with everything known that it could just as easily be called Immortality as not. Thus she lived a more complex consciousness than most American writers knew anything of. The “eternities” for Dickinson, as for Melville, are not to be doubted. But where Melville gave them extended physical properties—the sea, the ominous whiteness of the whale, limitlessness, landlessness, frightfulness—for Dickinson they are names for her mental states. She alone supports them. Frail but persistent, as Freud said of the intelligence, she will prod and rotate them endlessly in her great cycle of 1,775 poems, 1,049 letters, 124 prose fragments.
The pressure of mind against circumambient “reality” left so persistent and even tumultuous a record of battle that Dickinson is above all unsettling. She unsettles, most obviously, by not being easily locatable. She initiates the terms on which her intimate universe is founded, then shifts without warning into recesses of privacy. Her most difficult poems are held together by an idiosyncrasy, her characteristic “slant,” that is sharp to the point of violence:
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
Dickinson’s style is private exclamation. When it is not experienced in its own terms, “wrecked, solitary, here,” it bombards us without effect. The contractedness of her “breathing,” phrasing, the undisclosed territory between her capitalized nouns, between the dashes as her abrupt punctuation—all this seems to mock the anxious expressiveness of Victorian America. The abstractions with which she orients herself are homemade. Emerson sought “dry light and hard expressions.” Thoreau could never resist epigrams, puns, scornful little pellets of Yankee wit. They were practicing “economy.” Dickinson respected Emerson but must have laughed at so much conscious rhetoric. She wrote out of turbulence, feeling now like “nobody,” now like a “queen”; she wrote as a person bargaining for her life, line after line, not as an “infinite” soul. She often rushes at a poem, takes an immediate gulp of the situation in the first line—“There came a Day at Summer’s full”; “ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.” Sometimes she positively hurls the opening at us—“Heart! We will forget him!”; “Just lost, when I was saved!” There are great silences within her poems that are not withholdings from the reader but contractions of feeling (“a zero at the bone”) that tighten sense almost to inaudibility in the pell-mell rush of her thinking to herself.
Above all, what is unsettling is her closeness to every emotion and event rather than the “littleness” of her world. The keenness is witty:
The Grass divides as with a Comb—
A spotted shaft is seen—
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on—
full of foreboding:
There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons—
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes—
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us—
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are—
She can press her special names into a poem without indicating their connection; she certainly wrote more for herself than she did for strangers. But her many remarkable effects come from her suddenly veering off to look at what she has presented. Drawing to the seen object, she wraps herself up closely, as if she were hiding. Her famous terseness and breathless brevity derive from her persistence in seeing the world now on one surface, now on another; folding and refolding the object in her hands. Poetry is not always “the past that breaks out in our hearts” (Rilke). In Dickinson the present is entirely present. It makes a phenomenology of pure being.
Almost every woman described to you by a woman presents a tragic idea, and not an idea of well-being.
EMERSON, Journal, 1838
No one has ever drawn Emily Dickinson’s real character except herself. We must accept her saying that the “I” in her poems is not herself but her “representative.” But the “Years and Hours” recorded in her work present us with an overwhelming record of one person’s most minute reactions to existence. Whatever the woman’s actual relationship to the poet—obviously this poet is this woman thinking—we cannot help reading the tumultuous cycle as one of the fullest records ever left of a life, a life whose outlet more and more became poetry.
The poetry seems to come directly out of her saying “I”: “I am afraid to own a Body—”; “I am alive—I guess—”; “I can wade Grief—”; “I cautious, scanned my little life—”; “I dwell in Possibility—.” Almost one hundred fifty poems begin as intensely personal reaction to the seasons, to meticulous changes in the weather and the light, to the slightest leap and ebb in her morale, to the arrivals and departures of people, to death in a neighbor’s house. There are poems of pure observation, poems so dominated by her zeal for capitalized abstractions that the freshest images turn into more “ideas,” poems that read as if she had just run up to her corner room to write down something she could laugh at. She often wrote to exorcise black depression. Her life was not so regular as it looked, since two moments of thought were never the same for her. But living her life is what she dwelled on, and she was so conscious of what was missing, of what need not be said, that a sense of absence serves not only to condense her poems but as her best punctuation.
“I would eat evanescence slowly,” she wrote in a letter. Nothing became so real as instances of change. These finally coalesced into the departures of people, life passing, the possible unreality of her favorite counters—Heart, Sky, Eternity, God. She moved them as if they were chess pieces. The sense of change formed her style, dictated its terseness. The spread of “moods,” reactions, fantasies, impersonations, is very wide. The cycle contains so much elation, transfiguration through nature, desolation; her emotions represent so many marriages, death scenes, crises in the life of her family, friends, neighbors, that we become entangled in her life. This recluse involves us more than most poets do.
No one can read these poems over and again without experiencing the unrelieved pitch of crisis that sent them forth. To read her three volumes of letters is to learn how often she sent a poem with a letter; a letter in its abrupt use of images as absolutes served her as another “offering.” Single lines and phrases show the same urgent sense of contraction—“A letter always feels to me like Immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.” The letters are astonishing; she starts in the middle of the most private thought, sends a friend her most arcane images, with the same confidence that she brings to the gnomic self-sufficiency of a poem. She trusted her mind even when she had little confidence in her life. The act of writing was the excitement of entering a body of thought, of keeping in sight the “circumference” of her farthest idea. Writing was a “leap,” following a trajectory different in kind from the self-consuming that threatened her.
I can wade Grief—
Whole Pools of it—
I’m used to that—
But the least push of Joy
Breaks up my feet—
And I tip—drunken—
The reader is startled first by her immediacy, the hurtling directness of her attack. One is even more startled by her ability to present separate words as physical sensations. Her lexicon replenished itself from dictionaries, farmers’ almanacs, maps, and especially Shakespeare, her favorite. He had such a large vocabulary. She had a whole cupboard of place names, nature names, chemical names. Yellow Sea, cochineal, mazarin, Caspian Choirs, Broadcloth Hearts, Saxon finally belong to her alone, sit up in “Majesty,” as she liked to say. There is a rushing eagerness about her appropriations that makes us remember Conrad Aiken’s reference to “The Kid.” She was skilled at posing, as brother Austin laughingly reminded people when her banter was taken seriously. She could play the “coquette,” as her “dear preceptor,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson, noticed to his alarm when that virtuous man called on her.
Higginson, an advanced liberal for his time and place, a courageous, decent, limited man, noticed the furtive surface of her personality.* Her “nervous force” exhausted him. One of his more objective biographers, Tilden Edelstein, notes that he was
accustomed to confront aspiring woman writers directly and to bring such relationships down to the level of simple truth and everyday comradeship—as he had done with Harriet Prescott Spofford, Rose Terry and Helen Jackson.… He found [Dickinson’s] views about poetic sensibility and the state of mankind “the very wantonness of over-statement.” “I never was with anyone who drained my nerve power so much.”
Higginson did not see that provocativeness had become necessary to her surprised contact with anyone. The range of impersonation in her poetry is so wide that it is easy to believe that she once made “a spectacle of herself,” as they long remembered in Amherst, then closed herself up again after hearing from the sisterhood.
Dickinson’s poetry must be taken, initially, as a young woman’s rebellion. There are obvious cries of frustration, a sexual kittenishness and bravado, from the round corner room (her first image of “circumference”) in the house on Main Street. She was very late in accepting restrictions on her destiny; it was a game to make restrictions on herself when her brother, Austin, and Susan Gilbert were married and lived next door. Amherst was “old,” sedate, churchly, assured. The Dickinsons were important people. The life of an unmarried young woman in the family setting was traditional. Whatever her often self-mocking cries of protest, she accepted the setting and the life that came with it. Amherst was a habit, like being a woman. But the narrowness of her outer experience shows in the repetition of her themes, her images of struggle, “her” seasons and birds. The deeper she sank into an altogether private destiny—to violate the “circumference” of a surrounding mind that had no room for hers—the more she depended on other people. Some she made up.
Of course there were great loves in her life and behind her poetry; there were almost too many. She loved by turning the arbitrary choice into the necessary predicament. Some of her letters and poems emit wild shrieks: connection must be kept up with someone. Her “Master,” as she addressed one still unknown to us, was probably not just another broken link. She conferred authority on more than one man—ministers like Charles Wadsworth, editors like Samuel Bowles. Men of professional distinction were as much shadows of divinity as her favorite ideas. That was another Amherst tradition, like the Dickinsons themselves. But since she never harped even on this, her wit turned to banter—of her longing for some intercession.
She played the ingenue, the gamine, what Amherst called the “coquette.” She is so light and springy in the cycle of her moods—so much the tease, acrobat, and willing clown of her many emotions—that even apart from the fact that she resembles no other writer, she is especially unlike the earnest souls who dominated writing by women soon after the Civil War. Her own intense admirations were for Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot. Helen Hunt Jackson, the author of Ramona and Mercy Philbrick’s Choice, a stilted novel supposedly about Dickinson herself, was a loyal friend.† It would be interesting to know what Dickinson made of such evangelical fiction of the early industrial scene as Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills,” which we know she read in the Atlantic Monthly for April 1861. But how much did she attribute her reluctance to publish to her being a woman? How much did she feel hampered, restricted, and even denied as a writer in her time because she was not a man?
Being a “woman writer” likened rebels otherwise as different as the prodigious George Sand and the perkily brilliant but self-symbolizing Margaret Fuller. They dramatized their rebellion in society; Hawthorne’s enduring dislike of Fuller and Emerson’s embarrassed efforts to accept her aggressive declarations of “friendship” show that provincial little Concord was rocked by Fuller’s independence and incessant expressiveness.
Hawthorne, treated as the lord of creation by his Sophia, expressed himself violently about the “damned lot of scribbling women.… I wish they were forbidden to write on pain of having their faces deeply scarified with an oyster shell.” What bothered him was the “lot,” the club, the tribe of indistinguishably genteel and sentimental magazine writers of the period. After the Civil War, the popularity of fiction in the new “age of the magazine,” when the dominating audience was one of women,‡ helped to launch so many women writers that Henry James, supposedly writing an appreciation of the novels of his friend Constance Fenimore Woolson (Harper’s Weekly, 1887), confessed that “in America, at least, one feels tempted at moments to explain that they are in themselves the world of literature.” His “feeling” about women writers was certainly complicated.
The work of Miss Woolson is an excellent example of the way the door stands open between the personal life of American women and the immeasurable world of print, and what makes it so is the particular quality that this work happens to possess. It breathes a spirit singularly and essentially conservative—the sort of spirit which, but for a special indication pointing the other way, would in advance seem most to oppose itself to the introduction into the lot of new and complicating elements.
James was relieved that poor Constance Woolson (who among her other troubles was in love with him) was not one for new and complicating elements. Even if James had been open to poetry (he was not) and the posthumous Dickinson had come his way, he would have been embarrassed by her. She was not in the “real” world, society. For James literature was a demonstration of society, while the heroic pathos of an Isabel Archer and the spunkiness of a Maggie Verver represented virtues missing in a society dominated by men. It was easy for him to feel the greatest sympathy for women; their quiet resistance and even martyrdom exposed the nature of the society, European as well as American, that fascinated him. But could rigid little Amherst be thought of as “society” when he had such contempt for Boston? “I don’t even dislike it!” he wrote. Dickinson in all her privacy would have seemed to James as ineffectual as everything else he condescended to in the New England he had long put behind him.
Yet to be a “woman writer” was in nineteenth-century New England to be distinguished. In a Maine inn there long hung a group picture of “Our Female Authors.” Some of them had not been photographed with the others but had been painted in. Standing together in their heavy black dresses and fencelike bustles, they clearly strengthened each other against anything one of them might disapprove of. There were Harriet Beecher Stowe and Julia Ward Howe, Louisa May Alcott and Louise Chandler Moulton, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Helen Hunt Jackson, Rebecca Harding Davis and Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Rose Terry Cooke. Looking at that solid phalanx of “authoresses,” most of them ministers’ daughters and ministers’ wives, one silently protested that Harriet Beecher Stowe was a big talent, Sarah Orne Jewett at least a genuine one, and that it was wrong to club them in with women who were merely earnest or merely clever—or merely women.
Henry Adams, who was married to the brightest woman in Washington, had no greater praise for a woman than that she was brighter than her husband. Why were the leading men in America—men in general—so lacking in color? Henry James was stirred to write The Bostonians by the “decline in the sentiment of sex.” The men in his book are generally ineffectual, but woman’s representative figure, Olive Chancellor, is positively military in her resistance to men. This did not save Olive from defeat at the hands of a reactionary ex-Confederate, no believer in women’s equality with men, who took helpless Verena Tarrant away from Olive. Woman’s brightness, as James could never forget about his old friend Marian Adams, somehow lent itself to tragedy. But was a “bright” woman more tragic than the “pure” woman—the wives of Mark Twain, Howells, Lincoln, McKinley, who were all neurasthenic in the fashion of the time and some of them erratic, like Mary Lincoln and Ida McKinley? “Bright” or not, all such suffering women—passive women—were left so by the absence from their lives of the great American drive for success. Dickinson in the midst of the Civil War:
What Soft—Cherubic Creatures—
These Gentlewomen are—
One would as soon assault a Plush—
Or violate a Star—
Meanwhile, the business class sacrificed itself to what William James would call the “bitch goddess.” No wonder Henry Adams and Henry James thought American men usually less interesting than their women. Emily Dickinson’s knowledge of men did not include the business class. The Dickinson men—grandfather, father, brother—were by profession trustees of a clerical tradition transferred to the education of young men, embodied in Amherst College. Thanks to the invaluable biography of Emily Dickinson by Richard B. Sewall, we know that brother Austin, though Amherst College’s treasurer like his father before him, lacked his father’s iron character. (He had an affair with the wife of the college astronomer, Mabel Loomis Todd.) The father was “Squire Dickinson,” a natural leader, the college treasurer for thirty-eight years, a Whig congressman. His daughter said that on Sunday her father read only “lonely and rigorous books.” Courting his future wife, Edward Dickinson told her that he looked forward not to pleasure but to a life of “rational happiness.” When he died, his daughter wrote that “his heart is pure and terrible and I think no other like it exists.”
New England after the Civil War was out of the running, which helps to account for the terrible purity of most Dickinsons—whose type of mind was still clinging to considerations of Immortality in the hoggish times of President Grant. Her being an anachronism was good for Emily Dickinson’s poetry, if not for her rational happiness. The good New England writers left were the last leaves on the Puritan tree. Harriet Beecher Stowe was established as an eccentric; Sarah Orne Jewett was an exquisite but ultimately too fragile miniaturist of Maine villages and farms, of totally ignorable lives that did not seem to be part of the Age of Enterprise. The more New England became a tradition, like Cornwall and Brittany, the more its heavy sense of its own past, of its intellectual virtue and moral fractiousness, lent itself to subtle historical novels like Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing. And this before the Civil War; after it, as James satirized it all in The Bostonians, the great tradition had become a cameo, a photograph album. The Yankee who founded the country’s religious tradition had become a curiosity.
Emily Dickinson, however, had no other world to write about or to write from. The voice of her poetry is peculiarly immediate, exclamatory, anguished, and antic in its concern; it is the most concentrated cry for life we are to hear from an American in her time.
Not in this World to see his face—
Papa above!
Regard a Mouse
O’erpowered by the Cat!
For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy.
After great pain, a formal feeling comes—
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?
Then crouch within the door—
Red—is the Fire’s common tint—
But when the vivid Ore
Has vanquished Flame’s conditions,
It quivers from the Forge
Without a color, but the light
Of unanointed Blaze.
The concentration of person is “naked,” forceful, goes straight to the issue, which is solitary existence in all its pain and illusion. But even the poems that begin as unrestrained exclamations proceed in a line of minute thought. They operate as syllogisms, riddles, dialectic exercises: the “I” and its enclosures, opposites, extensions, frightenings, fight each other for ascendency. There is a constant battle with unreality as with “reality,” a need to lay the ghost.
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—
The problem of life for the modern artist (and ultimately for everyone else) is that consciousness may exist for its own sake. To be “attentive,” to be endlessly aware, even with no object or purpose in view, is in Emily Dickinson’s view to be alive, to live a life fraught with danger. To be alive is to be alone with consciousness, and the only resolution is to “see” this to the end. This was a favorite thought of Henry James and, he liked to add, was all his religion. He was to write that the business of the artist was to carry “the field of consciousness further and further, making it lose itself in the ineffable …; that is all my revelation or secret.” Emerson, for whom the revolution of the times was to bring “man to consciousness,” did not think that the business of consciousness was to struggle against death. Not even in the vicinity of death. “As for death, it has nothing to do with me.” Dickinson’s greatest poem, “Because I could not stop for Death,” would carry consciousness to the very sight of the grave. Earlier she had not been afraid to record the slightest intimations of death in all their queerness, unexpectedness, marginal terror.
There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons—
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes—
She was not afraid to write “Heavenly Hurt, it gives us”—“Heavenly” had to do with distance, not grace; this particular poem is in fact an exploration of “Hurt,” the impact from afar, the shudder of awe in itself. Even more than is usual with her, who is metaphysical and sceptical, she plainly says about what “oppresses” that
None may teach it—Any—
’Tis the Seal Despair—
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air—
Of course this poem can be taken as just another moment of depression, or as a meticulous rendering of how winter twilight in the Connecticut Valley can sink the heart. But Dickinson never became depressed without raising an issue: “Heavenly Hurt, it gives us.” There is no scar (a certain slight terror just passed us by), “But internal difference, / Where the Meanings, are.” Everything is interior, personal, and just possibly of not the slightest reverberation for anyone else. The whole poem is so closeted in the deepest intimacy that it is also about anonymity. It is the projected “Landscape” that “listens”; it is “Shadows” that “hold their breath.” And when that certain Slant of light finally goes, “ ’tis like the Distance / On the look of Death”—the dead person is visually alone and apart. The us struck by “Heavenly Hurt” has been all alone, but this poem of meticulous consciousness shows the “distance” indeed between us and death.
Whitman “praised” Death. Dickinson took on the last passage of life and thought before nullity took over. Victorian America made a ceremony of what has been called “the snug sofa”—the weepy, crowded, Victorian business of dying in company; this was supposed to provide consolation. There was a vast “consolation literature” that rose to expected heights in describing the serenity with which the faithful faced death: the dying had to do it right so as to assure the survivors. This was not always possible. Walt Whitman’s brother Andrew was reported in the family to be “very desirous of having us around him when he died. The poor boy seemed to think that that would take nearly all the horror of it away.” A violent death, such as Melville delighted to put into Moby-Dick, seemed hostile to the spirit of consolation so natural to the Christian Republic. The almost one million casualties in the Civil War could be treated sacramentally by noncombatants like Walt Whitman, but survivors like Ambrose Bierce and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., were sardonic on the subject. The real view of soldiers, which young Stephen Crane absorbed thoroughly, is the lesson of The Red Badge of Courage: “He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death—for others.”
Deathbeds were the peak of social experience in Amherst, just ahead of weddings and the college commencement. They afforded a break not entirely unwelcome in such a drowsy town.
There’s been a Death, in the Opposite House,
As lately as Today—
I know it, by the numb look
Such Houses have—alway—
The Neighbors rustle in and out—
The Doctor—drives away—
A Window opens like a Pod—
Abrupt—mechanically—
Somebody flings a Mattress out—
The Children hurry by—
They wonder if it died—on that—
I used to—when a Boy—
The Minister—goes stiffly in—
As if the House were His—
And He owned all the Mourners—now—
And little Boys—besides—
And then the Milliner—and the Man
Of the Appalling Trade—
To take the measure of the House—
There’ll be that Dark Parade—
Of Tassels—and of Coaches—soon—
It’s easy as a Sign—
The Intuition of the News—
In just a Country Town—
Dickinson was to lose a particular friend, Frazar Stearns, in the war; in a letter to her cousin Louise Norcross about the deaths of two Amherst brothers, she wrote an apprehensive elegy over Stearns before his death.
I hope that ruddy face won’t be brought home frozen.
Poor little widow’s boy, riding tonight in the mad wind,
back to the village burying-ground where he never
dreamed of sleeping! Ah! the dreamless sleep!
Death was a public event. It was awful but an occasion. What fascinated Dickinson was the ebbing away that nothing could conceal, the private doubts and open terror that piety could not absorb. Something like amusement shows in Dickinson’s ability to make death the worst possible shock. But in the day-to-day struggle that made up her life and became her text, death was the great weakening, the most intimate diminution of the strength necessary to her frail body and uncertain morale. It raised every possible question about our destiny while providing minute omens of future dissolution. Death, starting with every thought of her own death, became her favorite topic as well as her chief connection to Eternity. For a woman always hanging on some precipice of consciousness, transfixed by the incessant eventfulness outside her door,
These are the days when Birds come back—
A very few—a Bird or two—
To take a backward look.
These are the days when skies resume
The old—old sophistries of June—
A blue and gold mistake.
Death was virtually “irresistible.” No novelist could have been so fascinated with the ultimate scene as the poet who began,
I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air—
Between the Heaves of Storm—
The dying person and our attentiveness become one and the same. The minute observation so long practiced on birds, snakes, the drift of clouds, now sees, in an ecstasy of plainness, whatever there is to see.
The Eyes around—had wrung them dry—
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset—when the King
Be witnessed—in the Room—
Who else, thinking as if from the deathbed, would have thought “last Onset”—and have made it “King” while granting Death nothing but effect? Death, the supreme power, makes the dying small indeed and even “cute.”
I willed my Keepsakes—Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable—
But in the end consciousness, struggling with itself (as always) to endure, to keep some victory for itself against the superior universe, has its say, its last say.
With Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—
Between the light—and me—
And then the Windows failed—and then
I could not see to see—
The Romantic transcendentalists found death no trouble. Thoreau was wonderfully haughty about its lack of connection with him. “How plain,” he once wrote to Emerson, “that death is only the phenomenon of the individual or class. Nature does not recognize it, she finds her own again under new forms without loss. Yet death is beautiful when seen to be a law, & not an accident—It is as common as life.”
When it finally came Thoreau’s turn, the Concord sheriff Sam Staples said of Thoreau that he had never seen a man dying in such perfect peace. Even Melville’s Ishmael could jauntily boast: “here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost.” Thoreau ended his beautiful prose poem, the book of total aspiration that he identified with his life, on Spring and one other symbol of resurrection:
Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterwards in Massachusetts,—from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still.… Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this?
So Walden ends in rapture: “such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn.” Dickinson could never have written “mere lapse of time.” Since “time” was something more to her than her one possession, it was not something to be “eclipsed.” God, she wrote to Higginson, was an eclipse; she alone in her family was not in the habit of asking Him for anything. God was idea, not a person. He was the greatest longing. “God is the name of my desire,” Tolstoy told Gorky. And if He was not always real, death was. Death turned life itself into an idea—it became the final idea as well as our idea of everything final.
Dickinson could not limit death to a “law”—or “praise” it, as Whitman did, because it was “fathomless.” Living with death as a great event in her life, hearing of death every day in that Civil War year that saw her write more poems than there were days, she lived intimately with death, as people used to do in the nineteenth century. It was not something you could omit from the day’s register. But neither was it with any claim to certainty the bridge to a “higher realm.” But it was certainly a bridge. How, when you came to it, to approach and seize it for what it had to say to you as the next stage of consciousness that was still the task of life?
What fascinated Dickinson the poet was each detail of the dying consciousness. Her lifetime investment in the poem as miniature made her see that only the barest lyric could render so much finality, the purest personal fantasy of travelling into death with the mind radiantly poised for novelty. Prose fiction can include such a theme but soon passes over it. The poem and the journey into death would have to be identical in order to make the humility of the human state the real feature of the work.
There is nothing of its time and place so charming as the poem that begins
Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
yet by the time we come to the end,
Since then—’tis Centuries—and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity—
we can experience the shudder of awe that Goethe described as man’s highest tribute to the universe. The great decorum of this courtly poem—on the surface so ironically demure—is that, binding us to that final “shudder,” it leaves us with the perfect enigma, terse, irrefutable, incommunicable. The horses’ heads were toward Eternity; there is no going back. The effect of the poem is “dying”—stanza by stanza we see less and less of what we are passing through, what is soon behind us.
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess—in the Ring—
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—
We passed the Setting Sun—
What that famous Eternity is we cannot say.
So much in Dickinson is “symbol,” but the key word in the fourth line of the first stanza, Immortality, does not symbolize anything. It is a state of mind. She describes the journey into death (nothing was more familiar by 1863, with the news from the front). She suggests to the uttermost the dying of the light, the lengthening strangeness, then the stricken awareness of the irrevocable.
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground—
The Roof was scarcely visible—
The Cornice—in the Ground—
The shock may be our strongest sense of death as long as we can be shocked. The frail Dickinson gives us a sudden sense of the most that we can know. We are with it, all the way. There is no blinking anything. We see the human soul stretched to the furthest, valor encompassing the total end of things. And she was alone with this. But “I would eat evanescence slowly.”
* Higginson, colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first black regiment in the Union army, was of course an ex-minister, an abolitionist, an early supporter of women’s rights. He was the only one of Brown’s secret backers who did not disown him after Harper’s Ferry. He even procured a lawyer for Brown; after Brown was hanged, Higginson attempted to save his followers.
Higginson, representative conscience of his time and place, was for all his good deeds in war and peace as conventional a mind as the moral courage of New England put on the American stage. He was a popular lecturer in the Mark Twain era on “The Natural Aristocracy of the Dollar.”
Higginson had the curiosity to seek Dickinson out (after she had responded to his “Letter to a Young Contributor” in the Atlantic Monthly). But his incomprehension of Dickinson’s originality is clear in the rewriting perpetrated in the first edition of Dickinson’s poems (1890), edited with Mabel Loomis Todd. It is amusing to read Higginson’s smug little tract, Common Sense About Women (1881), which Higginson probably considered the bravest word on the subject:
“… If [woman] has traits of her own, absolutely distinct from his, then [man] cannot represent her, and she must have a voice and a vote of her own.
“To this last body of believers I belong. I think that all legal or conventional obstacles should be removed, which debar woman from determining for herself, as freely as man determines, what the real limitations of sex are, and what the merely conventional restriction.
“… It is better not to base any plea for woman on the ground of her angelic superiority. The argument proves too much. If she is already so perfect, there is every inducement to let well enough alone.”
†If not a comprehending one. From Mercy Philbrick’s Choice (1876): “Mrs. Hunter had showed him several of Mercy’s poems, which had surprised him much by their beauty, and still more by their condensation of thought. They seemed to him almost more masculine than feminine; and he had unconsciously anticipated that in seeing Mercy he would not see a feminine type. He was greatly astonished. He could not associate this slight, fair girl, with a child’s honesty and appeal in her eyes, with the forceful words he had read from her pen. He pursued his conversation with her eagerly, seeking to discover the secret of her style, to trace back the poetry from its flower to its root.”
‡The (majority) female reading audience was described by a contemporary as “the Iron Madonna who strangles in her fond embrace the American novelist.”