“Researching” Emily Dickinson

She is at once amongst the most known and most mysterious of American cultural figures. Emily Dickinson was a constant summons to me to think about language and its preciousness. And not only its preciousness but its power. For many years one of the most fascinating mysteries of American literature has been the personal life of Emily Dickinson.

The first time when I read Emily, I was astonished with the kind of lifestyle she had. The themes in her poetry were something beyond its reach to her readers back then. The major poets of her day wrote epics, long pieces that tell a story. While these poets looked outward writing about history and culture, Dickinson wrote lyrics, and poems about the inner life of thoughts and feelings. Her themes and messages were considered too dark and gloomy at first but as of today, she is one of the most read and researched poets in the world.

I always wanted to write something about Dickinson. During my college days, I hardly gave a thought to it and after graduation, the shift from English to Mass Communication played a role of detachment with me and Dickinson. Now that I have determined to pen down something on her, I wonder to what extent I can do justice to it. Nevertheless, let’s briefly try to analyze who was Emily Dickinson?

Almost unknown as a poet in her lifetime, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) is now recognized as one of the greatest. Dickinson was the only American poet of her century who treated the great lyric theme of love with candor and sincerity. Although she wrote eloquently and passionately about affairs of the heart, Dickinson never married, and after age 30 she rarely saw anyone outside of her immediate family. Some believe this seclusion was her response to the patriarchal literary establishment of her time, which limited female writers to domestic and domesticated topics. Others believe that her withdrawal gave her both the space and time to write by freeing her from women's duties. Few of her writings were published during her lifetime, and it was only after her death that almost 1700 poems were discovered.

Dickinson was a witty and popular student at Amherst Academy but was viewed as somewhat unconventional. Throughout her life, and even more so since she died in 1886, Emily Dickinson was shrouded in paradox and mystery. From her late thirties onwards she rarely left her father’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts. This reclusion seems at odds with the expansive range of her poems and their passionate engagement with the agonies and joys of life. Though known to her fellow townsfolk as ‘the Myth’ and seldom seen by even some of her close relatives, Dickinson built strong friendships through the exchange of letters. More recent attempts to explain her solitude and understand her character, often guided by clues in her poems, have shifted our perception of her as a disappointed spinster towards that of a spirited and determined woman whose life turned upon the channeling of her extraordinary imagination.

The complexities of Dickinson's poems reflect the nature of the emotions and feelings that were the subjects of her life's work. Romantic love, unconditional compassion, pure empathy, and their respective antithesis often defy rationalization, let alone full understanding of its crescendo ebbs and trickling flows. According to many scholars, Dickinson was a master in capturing the pure essence of emotions--to her, love exists before life and exists after death. But, we might want to ask Dickinson, can love really exist unaltered by the experiences of life?

She broke the glass ceiling in poetry. Emily is like a beacon of verbal power that can never be silenced. The powerful voice of Dickinson is best heard and seen in her original manuscripts. The unusual line breaks, alternative word choices, and poems of virtual works of art. Ultimately she leads us to the fundamental mystery of all poetry which is the relation between the ear and the eye. Every paper mark is an acoustic mark. Dickinson breaks down the barriers between poetry, prose, and ear and eye.

The first editions of Dickinson’s poetry came out only after she died in 1886. And from the beginning editors ignored her idiosyncrasies and formatted her writings into a more conventional style. She wrote some 1800 poems, but only 10 were published in newspapers during her lifetime.

Dickinson’s Poems

Her poems are basically about everyday subjects. A dream she had, something she saw in the garden, and an emotion she felt. But once you dig a little, there is a world of meaning waiting in those lines. Let’s analyze a poem for our better understanding-

A Bird came down the Walk

A Bird, came down the Walk -

He did not know I saw -

He bit an Angle Worm in halves

And ate the fellow, raw,

And then, he drank a Dew

From a convenient Grass -

And then hopped sidewise to the Wall

To let a Beetle pass –

This poem’s meter or rhythm is really strong. It follows the iambic meter where it sounds like a bird hopping or maybe it depicts the bird’s nervous heartbeat.

He glanced with rapid eyes,

That hurried all abroad -

They looked like frightened Beads, I thought,

He stirred his Velvet Head. –

There is nothing cute about this bird here;

it’s a killer who devours a worm and then washes it down with a drink and the image of eyes like frightened beads, which is a simile, a poetic comparison that uses like or as. It’s also a personification giving human qualities to an object. Beads aren’t something we would normally think of as frightened but we can totally imagine those creepy little eyes.

Like one in danger, Cautious,

I offered him a Crumb,

And he unrolled his feathers,

And rowed him softer Home –

Here, it’s not actually clear who feels more in danger. The speaker or the bird? But the tension is broken when it escapes into the sky. Also, notice how this stanza ends- ‘he rode him softer home’. Dickinson here prepares us for another simile and she spends the entire last stanza making it.

Than Oars divide the Ocean,

Too silver for a seam,

Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,

Leap, plashless as they swim.

We can spend an hour unpacking this stanza. Let’s start with a straight-up comparison. Flying is like rowing in a silvery sea only softer. Then it’s almost like the speaker gets carried away with the whole water idea. The sky transforms into a river or pond with butterflies diving into it. The edges of this pond are made of time itself, banks of noon it’s like a dream image, it does not quite make sense but it’s so vivid. The last two lines are a metaphor, a more direct comparison than a simile. Flying isn’t like swimming, it is swimming through time or existence. Once the bird’s off the ground, the meter smooths out. It’s still iambic but it flows more like conversation, more like water.

Dickinson very often used slant rhymes in her poetry. With slant rhymes words only have to share similar sounds. It led Dickinson to experiment with language and it calls our attention to her choices, she wants us to notice those words. So they might hold clues to what is going on with this poem? According to my understanding, it might be about a person’s spiritual journey, his time on earth is filled with suffering and fear. When he takes off maybe that is about dying. He leaves the pain of life behind as he travels to his spiritual home. We can also notice the absence of the bird in the last stanza; it’s been replaced by a butterfly, a clue that some change is taken place and the language is all about the stuff that leaves no trace an ore that makes no crease in the water and a dive that makes no splash.  Dickinson leaves us with a big mystery, what happens when we die? Those kinds of questions run through her work. Maybe writing poetry was her way of getting closer to an answer. It’s also true that she spends most of her adulthood all alone. She was a recluse rarely leaving her simple bedroom.

Dickinson used that space to let her imagination run free. Many of her poems are based on things she saw in her family’s garden. She published just a handful of poems in local papers. We’re really lucky to have the rest of them. Before she died Dickinson made her sister promise to burn her letters. So in 1886, her sister Lavinia Dickinson did exactly what she was asked to. But Lavinia also found a locked chest in her sister’s room. Inside were 40 handmade booklets filled with poetry. Lavinia became obsessed with publishing them. The first volume came out four years later and was an instant success. It went through eleven paintings and critics loved it. She was immediately recognized as a major American poet and her voice feels just as fresh today as it did back in 1890.