The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (4 page)

In “I heard a fly buzz when I died,” Dickinson again assumes the role of a dead person and imagines the “stillness” of the scene around her, then brings the poem to a crashing halt with the following lines, horrifying for their utter absence of comfort or conclusion : “And then the windows failed, and then / I could not see to see” (p. 253).

Point of view in Dickinson’s hands is an unstable thing, too. The majority of her poems feature an “I” who tells stories, describes nature, or dissects belief (142 of them even begin with “I”), and her use of first-person perspective is every bit as innovative as is her handling of form, language, and structure. Writing to Higginson in July 1862, Dickinson remarked, “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse—it does not mean—me—but a supposed person”
(Selected Letters,
p. 176). Thus, in the two poems described above, Dickinson’s narrators are not actual people who lived and died in a specific time and place, but emblematic figures whose deaths might just as well be ours. She also occasionally employs a “we” to narrate, as in the poem “Our journey had advanced” (p. 200).

Perhaps Dickinson’s most radical departures from convention occur in her use of paradox to unsettle our most firmly held opinions and beliefs. As the critic Alfred Kazin writes, “She unsettles, most obviously, by not being easily locatable” (Kazin, “Wrecked, Solitary, Here: Dickinson’s Room of Her Own,” p. 164). To enter Dickinson’s world is to step into a scary but electrifying funhouse where paradoxes serve like distorting mirrors to show us new ways of seeing just about everything: love, death, solitude, the soul. Throughout her work, opposites change places: Distance is nearness in disguise; absence is the most vital form of presence; alone-ness is the greatest company. In several painful but illuminating poems, for example, she argues in favor of hunger and longing, maintaining that the lack that occasions desire makes the object of desire all the more precious:

Elsewhere Dickinson uses paradox to destroy and reassemble our notions of other states of being, as when she writes, “Much madness is divinest sense / To a discerning eye” (p. 11), or asserts, “A death-blow is a life-blow to some” (p. 210), or describes just how deep still waters can run:

But for all the paradoxes, a wonderfully direct and opinionated personality emerges from Dickinson’s poems; the more of them we read, the more familiar we become with all her cranky, passionate likes and dislikes. Often she wears her disapproval on her sleeve, as in the following poem:

The poem’s opening lines prepare us for a hymn of praise to these delicate ladies. But Dickinson’s descriptions are double-edged: “Soft” connotes flimsy as well as feminine, and even though “cherubic” likens the women to angels, it also reveals their infantile, diminutive status. As the poem goes on, Dickinson’s mocking scorn becomes more evident: The women are compared to “plush”—the filling of a sofa!—and their “star”-like nature may make them celestial, but it also puts them miserably out of touch with the real world. Their beliefs are as fragile as “dimity,” a sheer cotton fabric; they are so “refined” that they cannot appreciate the rich complexity of “freckled human nature.” As the poem reaches its close, Dickinson grows even harsher, calling the women “brittle” —a far cry from the first stanza’s “soft”—and claiming that “Redemption” is “ashamed” of, and therefore unavailable to, these “creatures” in all their superficiality and passiveness.

Dickinson also disapproves of people who are incapable of feeling or showing emotions:

If soft flimsiness is a fault in the previous poem, here it is stone-like hardness that Dickinson cannot abide; the face may be a conventionally “successful” one, but Dickinson is outraged by the idea that nothing deeper or richer lurks beneath it. Like the “gentlewomen” poem, with its references to “assaulting” and “violating,” this poem contains hints of violence that reveal the depth of Dickinson’s dislike: The last line conjures an almost wittily surreal image of the face and the stone being recklessly “thrown” at each other.

In two single-stanza poems, Dickinson expresses her strong distaste for still other personality types. She simply cannot understand how people can look at the world and not be fascinated by it:

She denounces people who don’t know how to keep secrets:

While many appreciate directness, for Dickinson—who writes elsewhere in praise of indirection, claiming that “Success in Circuit lies”
(Complete Poems,
poem 1129)—directness creates a false sense of comfort, an overly perfumed “Myrrh” and a sickeningly sweet “Mocha.”

In rich contrast to these poems, however, are moments in other poems when Dickinson lavishes praise on the types of people and behavior she does like. Pain, in her opinion, reveals people’s depths more than any intrusive “candor”:

Dickinson also heartily approves of those who are willing to put themselves in danger, since it puts them in touch with their own deepest “creases”:

She likes people who respect privacy:

And she is utterly smitten with the transporting power of books, a love she reveals in poem after poem:

Even though Dickinson is one of the most difficult poets to interpret, she is also, as these poems reveal, one of the most refreshingly straightforward.

In Dickinson’s work, apparent opposites—hunger and fulfillment, the self and God, death and life—turn out to have more in common than we’d thought. In her more explicitly religious poems, she violently overturns traditional Christian beliefs in order to create her own homespun theology. Despite her revisionary zeal, Dickinson never completely abandons her faith in God: “I know that he exists,” she writes, “Somewhere, in silence” (p. 49). Rather, she is determined to explore new forms that God’s “existence” might take. She is achingly up-front about her desire to know what God is really like:

But she also admits the possibility that we have invented the concept of life after death:

She is capable of considerable anger about the rift between humans and God:

Still, faced with this “unavailable” comfort, Dickinson responds not by giving up faith, but rather by constructing new versions of it. In several poems she asserts that the self’s depths bring us as close to God as we can hope to come, and allow us a glimpse of what she calls “Finite Infinity” (p. 272):

Other poems locate divinity in nature:

Whether looking inward or out her window, Dickinson radically replaces the traditional image of a distant, all-powerful God with a local divinity residing right by her side. Although “Some keep the Sabbath going to church,” she writes, “I keep it staying at home.... / So instead of getting to heaven at last, / I’m going all along!” (p. 116). Dickinson never becomes complacent—she remains one of the greatest poets of loss—but she does find great solace in her bravely domestic cosmology:

Because of her many poems about death—some of which happen to be among her most famous—Dickinson has been unfairly labeled a morbid poet. In fact, her interest in death makes perfect sense for a number of reasons. For one thing, Dickinson’s subject matter is so varied that it would be stranger if she
didn’t
write about death. Furthermore, as her biographer Cynthia Griffin Wolff has pointed out, Dickinson grew up in a culture highly preoccupied with death. Nineteenth-century children were taught to read with the
New England Primer,
which contained prayers that, as Wolff writes, “served to initiate even the youngest into an acknowledgment of death” (Wolff,
Emily Dickinson,
p. 69). Deaths from childbirth were extraordinarily common; New England grave-stones frequently represented death with vivid and memorable icons; and deathbed vigils—so eerily described in “I heard a fly buzz” (p. 252)—were practically social events. Not surprisingly, this cultural saturation influenced Dickinson’s poetry. This does not make her morbid; it merely shows how she transformed cultural preoccupations into poetic concerns. If Dickinson is obsessed with death, she is also capable of writing the most life-affirming of poems, as the following poem not included in this edition demonstrates :

Here, adding her bracing contribution to the
carpe diem
genre, Dickinson argues that an awareness of death can fill us with an intoxicating, almost crazy joy in being alive. It is one of the least morbid poems ever written.

 

The long, involved story of the posthumous fate of Dickinson’s poems could fill its own volume. Only seven of her poems were published in her lifetime, five of them in the Springfield
Republican.
But after her death, her sister Lavinia discovered almost two thousand poems in her desk drawer, many written on scraps of paper or the back of grocery lists, others bound into what were later called “fascicles,” or sewn paper booklets. Lavinia resolved to see them into print. Soon she had persuaded Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Higginson to help her edit the poems, and the three of them approached Robert Brothers, a publishing house in Boston. The first volume of
Poems
appeared in 1890 and became a bestseller. Already, however, the long history of modifying Dickinson’s poems had begun, with some of her best and strangest lines omitted or changed, sentimental titles attached, rhymes regularized, and syntax standardized. Later editions, including
The Single Hound: Poems of a Lifetime
(1914), edited by Dickinson’s niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi, also distorted the poems. In her acute short poem “Emily Dickinson,” the contemporary British poet Wendy Cope wryly comments on this unfortunate trend:

Finally, in 1955, Thomas H. Johnson’s
The Poems of Emily Dickinson
offered readers access to all of Dickinson’s poems, arranged in estimated chronological order and with her idiosyncrasies—slant rhymes, dashes, capitals—intact. Johnson’s restored text went a long way toward undoing the follies of earlier editors. (To take just one example, Todd and Higginson had changed “Because I could not stop for Death” (p. 200) so that the line “Cornice—in the Ground” read “The cornice but a mound,” thereby reducing an eerily sinking grave to a simple pile of dirt.)