Area Of Study: Belonging
Advanced
ENGLISH
___________________________________________________________
Area of Study: Belonging
A study of
Emily Dickinson (and related texts)
Dr Selina Samuels, Ascham School
2
What is the Area of Study?
The Area of Study is the exploration of a concept that affects our perceptions of ourselves and our world. Students explore, analyse, question and articulate the ways in which perceptions of this concept are shaped in and through a variety of texts.
In the Area of Study, students explore and examine relationships between language and text, and interrelationships among texts. They examine closely the individual qualities of texts while considering the texts’ relationships to the wider context of the Area of Study. …show more content…
They synthesise ideas to clarify meaning and develop new
meanings.
They take into account whether aspects such as context, purpose and register, text structures, stylistic features, grammatical features and vocabulary are appropriate to the particular text.
(Board of Studies NSW, 1999, Stage 6 English Syllabus)
You will be looking at how: meaning is conveyed, shaped, interpreted and reflected in and through texts, the ways texts are responded to and composed, the ways perspective may reflect meaning and interpretation, there are connections between and among texts, and how texts are influenced by other texts and contexts.
In their responses and compositions students examine, question, and reflect and speculate on:
• how the concept of belonging is conveyed through the representations of people, relationships, ideas, places, events, and societies that they encounter in the prescribed text and texts of their own choosing related to the Area of Study
• assumptions underlying various representations of the concept of belonging
• how the composer’s choice of language modes, forms, features and structures shapes and is shaped by a sense of belonging
• their own experiences of belonging, in a variety of contexts
• the ways in which they perceive the world through …show more content…
texts
• the ways in which exploring the concept and significance of belonging may broaden and deepen their understanding of themselves and their world.
Texts:
•
•
Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson (ed. James Reeves)
Related Material. Texts of your own choosing relevant to Belonging. You can draw your chosen texts from a variety of sources, in a range of genres and media.
3
Belonging: Some questions to ponder
How may it be possible for an individual to both ‘belong’ and ‘not belong’ to a place, group, community, the larger world? What might be the consequences of having an ambivalent ‘sense of belonging’ to some person, thing, place, idea, etc.?
In what ways can ‘belonging’ or ‘not belonging’ shape our sense of self and identity?
How might our perception of our own identity and belonging shape our response to others?
Why is time an important notion when discussing belonging and attitudes to belonging?
Consider the movement through life and the way that we belong to different age groups, generations, etc… throughout the passage of our life.
Why and when might we choose not to belong? What influences our choice not to belong?
What barriers to belonging might we experience?
Relationship of the reader to the text –
The syllabus states: “In engaging with the texts, a responder may experience and understand the possibilities presented by a sense of belonging to, or exclusion from the text and the world it represents. This engagement may be influenced by the different ways perspectives are given voice in or are absent from a text.”
How can perceptions and ideas of belonging be constructed in texts?
How can I belong to or be excluded from a text?
How are perspectives given a voice or silenced in a text?
You need to consider your relationship with the texts you study. Do you feel a sense of belonging with the text, with the world it portrays and by extension with the composer?
This is a particularly interesting question given our prescribed text, Emily Dickinson’s poetry. COMPOSER, PERSONA and RESPONDER (or CPR)
You need to ask yourself: whose sense of belonging is relevant here?
Are we talking about the writer, a character or the reader? How might all these experiences be linked? You need to go further than consider only the experience portrayed in the plot or events of the text.
4
Emily Dickinson
This précis of her life is from The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble
(1985):
DICKINSON, Emily Elizabeth (1830-86), American poet, born in Amherst,
Massachusetts, the daughter of a successful lawyer. She was educated at Amherst
Academy (1834-47) and Mount Holyoake (1847-8); during her early years she waqs lively, witty, and sociable, but from her mid-twenties she gradually withdrew into an inner world, eventually, in her forties, refusing to leave her home, and avoiding all contact with strangers, although she maintained intimate correspondences with people she never saw face to face. Her emotional life remains mysterious, despite much speculation about a possible disappointed love affair, for which one candidate is the
Revd Charles Wadsworth, with whom she corresponded and who twice visited her; another is Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, to whom she sent
and addressed many poems, She wrote poetry from girlhood onward, but only seven poems out of nearly 2,000 are known to have been published during her lifetime, and those appeared anonymously and much edited. She at one stage actively sought publication, but her contemporaries found her work bewildering, and she appears to have accepted her lot as an unrecognized writer – her ‘Barefoot-Rank’. From c.1858 she assembled many of her poems in packets or ‘fascicles’, which were discovered after her death; a selection, arranged and edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and T.W.
Higginson, appeared in 1890. Full publication was delayed by family difficulties, but eventually other editions and volumes of letters appeared, restoring her individual punctuation and presentation. At first regarded as an eccentric minor poet, she is now considered a major writer of startling originality. Her work presents recurrent themes – a mystic apprehension of the natural world, a preoccupation with poetic vocation, fame, death, and immortality – and is expressed in a rhetoric and language of her own, cryptic, elliptical, and at times self-dramatizing and hyperbolic. Her imagery reflects an intense and painful inner struggle over many years; she refers to herself as ‘the queen of Calvary’, and her verse if full of allusions to volcanoes, shipwrecks, funerals, storms, imprisonments, and other manifestations of natural and human violence. Her simultaneous conviction of isolation and ‘election’ was dramatized in her way of life, which is vividly described in a two-volume biography by R.B. Sewall, published in
1974.
Some thoughts on Dickinson and her context –
Technically, Dickinson was a Romantic poet, and while references to nature in her poetry demonstrate some sympathy with the concerns of the time, her poetry can hardly be said to belong to the aesthetics of the period. Indeed, Dickinson’s poetry was way before its time;
Modernist in focus, intensely compressed and elliptical – occasionally more gap than content.
In her essay “Longing and Belonging: Emily Dickinson’s poetics of distance,” Dr Elizabeth
McMahon focuses on the paradoxical relationship in Dickinson’s poetry between longing and belonging. She points out the two phrases that defined Dickinson at her death: “Called back” that was carved on her tombstone and “At home” which described her occupation are contradictory and describe the tension in her poetry between estrangement and belonging. As
McMahon states:
5
The understanding of death as a process of being ‘called back’ implies that lived experience is a period of transience and expatriation. Accordingly, the human subject in this schema is always an émigré, whose experience of self and others, place and time, is of an intensity of distance. This distance is experienced as absence, insufficiency and inadequacy but it is also a space of desire: of seeking and anticipation, the distance between recognition of the desired object and its (impossible) attainment. It is death that enables the bridging of distance as the conduit for the expatriate’s return to the ‘ancient homestead’. (p.74)
We will be focusing on the paradox within Dickinson’s poetry of the representation of isolation and of unity. As McMahon puts it: “much of the energy and intensity of each poem resides in the spark of an unresolved, galvanising tension” between longing and belonging. We are interested in the paradoxical balance within Dickinson’s poetry that emphasises but never resolves the struggle between isolation and unity. The paradoxes in her poetry have been referred to by critics as parallelism – where opposite positions are compared and kept parallel, never meeting but at the same time never diverging, always equidistant but always apart.
It is easy in this investigation to be distracted by a biographical approach to Dickinson’s work.
Certainly, her life enacts a very deliberate and dramatic approach to the question of belonging versus isolation: she chose isolation. For much of her adult life she lived in seclusion with only her family for company, albeit with the rare visit from an outsider which she prized and anticipated keenly, and indeed she retreated more and more into the confines of her bedroom.
She wrote in isolation and shared her poetry only with the very few, in particular Thomas
Higginson whom she chose as her mentor.
At the same time, we must be mindful of T.S. Eliot’s instruction that the “significant emotion” of poetry “has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet.” Dickinson’s poetry – in its startling originality as well as in the recurring sense of yearning and unrequited hope – is a representation of isolation. There is the repeated sense of the individual alone in the face of the big questions of humanity (not least of which is death). At the same time, her focus on these big questions of humanity is unifying. That is, we are united in the face of hunger, passion, loneliness and death. We are isolated and yet conjoined by the simple fact of our shared humanity. That is the paradox of Dickinson’s poetry, echoed by the stylistic paradox of simplicity and complexity.
We must consider the relationship between the poet and her reader through the poetry. What is so extraordinary is the effect of Dickinson’s poetry. Poetry is, after all, a form of communication and communication is about bridging gaps, about creating community and belonging. We will look at the way in which the reader is drawn into her poetry by its apparent simplicity and tone of confession and but also kept at one remove by its complexity and opacity. Dickinson’s unique poetic sensibility includes and distances us at the same time. This is very relevant because writing became her form of communication (in addition to poetry she wrote many extraordinarily poetic letters) and a way of reaching across her self-imposed exile to remind others of their shared humanity. Dickinson was fascinated by the individual and with individual experience. She wrote to
Higginson: “To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations, thou friends are, if possible, an event more fair…A letter always feels to me like Immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend…There seems a spectral power in thought that walks alone.” She did not renounce experience – intellectual perhaps rather than physical – by isolating herself but she was aware of loneliness. Her famous lines
6
It might be lonelier
Without the loneliness articulate one of the prime paradoxes of her life.
The intensity of her experience of life is at the heart of her sense of belonging to humanity while at the same time refusing to belong in purely social terms to the conventional small-town world of Amherst and the accepted occupations of women of her day. In this context, one could see her choice of isolation as a rejection of the sometimes suffocating experience of being part of a community and, indeed, as a bid for social freedom. One is tempted to see Dickinson as seeking intellectual and emotional freedom from the restricted expectations of women’s lives, and this would perhaps be confirmed by the often brutal and unfeminine imagery of her poetry, suggesting that she was unmoved and unmodified by social expectation. Critics and biographers have speculated as to the initiating event that sent her into reclusion, and there has been much discussion about a doomed and/or unrequited love for a married Calvinist minister, Rev. Charles
Wadsworth. For our purposes, however, it is enough to consider that Dickinson chose isolation as the better position from which to contemplate the extraordinary business of being alive.
Her first letter to Higginson is telling. Reeves starts his Introduction with it, but I will quote some of it here:
Mr Higginson, – Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?...Should you think it breathed, and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude.
I think this points to the significance of Dickinson’s poetry as a means of communication between herself and the world. She speaks of it as something living and it’s interesting to consider it as an extension of herself, a way for her to interpret and live in the world while also away from it. And it has turned out to be her immortality, a concept that she refers to constantly in her poetry and which is, of course, associated with death.
Features of Dickinson’s poetry to look out for –
•
A childlike voice and a general view of the world from a naïve position.
A critic – whose essay I have a copy of but whose name is completely lost to me (in one of those filing tragedies that we have all experienced) – has said of Dickinson that in her evocation of childhood, she emphasised “weakness, fear, and the attempt to find love.”
Hunger is also an experience she associates with childhood as a “symbol of the child’s powerful but undirected demands on life.” According to this nameless critic (bless!),
Dickinson regarded herself as a “little girl” throughout her life and she made a cult of childishness in her poems. Certainly, the simplicity of diction and observation is childlike while the import is often far more complex and sophisticated. The same critic has also said something that is very relevant to our paradoxical reading of Dickinson: “The real facts of nature in the mind of a child are that it is a playful world of equally sentient creatures and that it may at any time erupt into a hostile force which devours and destroys.” •
References to nature, as befits a poet of the Romantic period although, as the point above makes clear, her attitude to nature was largely paradoxical and I think can be fitted
7 into the longing/belonging dichotomy effectively. Consider in particular “A narrow fellow in the grass”.
•
References to death – arguably existential in approach. Fred White discusses Dickinson’s existential sensibilities and its similarities with the ideas of the Danish philosopher Soren
Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard wrote, “Death in earnest gives life force as nothing else does; it makes one alert as nothing else does.” Similarly, Dickinson is fascinated by the way that the presence of death adds value to life; she is aware of the relationship between binaries that constitutes our experience of the world. (Fred D. White, “Emily Dickinson’s existential dramas”, The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson, ed. Wendy Martin,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp.91-106).
•
Biblical allusion – it is not surprising, given her background and context, that Dickinson should have used biblical imagery in her poetry. However, her use of the Bible is unorthodox and paradoxical. Her approach to Biblical imagery may well be tied to her religious scepticism and her existential sensibilities and can be traced biographically. In terms of the poems we are studying, it is most clearly seen in the complexity surrounding various Biblical allusions she uses, most obviously in “A narrow fellow in the grass.”
•
Severe compression and economy of language. This sometimes leads Dickinson to stretch and break syntax. She is interested in generating meaning that goes beyond the
“simple” meaning of a syntactically correct sentence.
•
The use of ellipsis in Dickinson’s poetry allows her to accentuate what is not said as much as what is said – this is itself a central paradox in her poetry: that we are as aware of the words that she does not include as those that she does. Silence and presence coexist and rely on one another for meaning. Note the repeated use of words such as
“may” – raising the question of the alternative, of uncertainty and doubt
•
Punctuation – Dickinson is known for her idiosyncratic use of the dash. In the edition that we are studying, many of the dashes have been replaced by more conventional punctuation such as commas and full-stops, but if you look at the versions of the poems that McMahon quotes in her article, you can see that some editors have maintained the dash even where formal rules of syntax (see the point above) would forbid them. Indeed,
McMahon makes a very useful observation about Dickinson’s use of punctuation:
“…Dickinson’s poetry confounds the reader’s ability to separate the senses of belonging and estrangement in her work: at the level of punctuation, her famous use of the dash serves to both connect and separate sense, sound and breath: her arresting lexicon and syntax force us to confront the limits and gaps in the capacity of language to meet experience and convey meaning. At the same time, they reconnect us to words in a material, bodily relation – and to the language system itself – as if for the first time.”(pp.74-5) •
Colloquial syntax – Dickinson liberally uses imperatives, exclamations and questions to create a sense of immediacy and directness. According to one critic, her colloquial techniques (use of contractions for eg) are “conspicuous signs of a poetic language that refuses to be tamed and levelled.” Her use of contractions creates a greater intimacy between the poet and her reader than more formal diction would generate, and increases the sense that her poetry is an immediate, unmediated (for, indeed, she did not edit her poetry) expression of emotion that connects her with her readers and, indeed, with all
8 people. Dickinson’s use of repetitions also increases the sense of informality and of conversation and spontaneity which forges a sense of belonging within the community of reader and writer.
•
Ambiguity – the double meaning present throughout Dickinson’s poetry which I have been considering as a paradoxical approach to belonging and exclusion can also be seen as an expression of the privacy (and therefore the intimacy) of her work. The reader has to get close to her, to read her poetry within the context of the symbols that recur, to understand the multiple layers of her often deceptively simple poems. The poems are multilayered in meaning, charged with ambiguity and opacity. It is the process of grappling with the obscurity of the poems that the reader derives most pleasure and is rewarded with a sense of belonging to the poem I the sense that it is explicable and familiar and forms part of one’s intellectual make up.
•
Oxymoron – Cindy Mackenzie says this about Dickinson’s use of the oxymoron:
“For in Dickinson’s oxymoronic constructions, the unknown can never be fully realized because the tension between the two terms is sustained by the dialogical interplay between them. Thus the oxymoron enacts the movement of desire kept alive by the fact that neither terms subsumes the other, but that each is sustained in a relationship of inclusive reciprocity…the size of the space between each term is exaggerated in a way that forces their separation, rather than encourages their union.” (Cindy Mackenzie,
‘“Heavenly Hurt”: Dickinson’s Wounded Text,’ The Emily Dickinson Journal 9.2, 55-63, quoted by McMahon)
•
The sound of Dickinson’s language is very important. Consider the use of rhyme half-rhyme non-rhyme sight-rhyme assonance alliteration
As her thoughts move from the concrete to the abstract her rhyme scheme tends to become less rigid and even disappears. It is very important to read her poetry aloud to hear her choice of words and to allow the half-rhymes to clang and draw attention to themselves. •
The relationship between the physical and the metaphysical: the way that sensual imagery in Dickinson’s poetry gives rise to meditations on metaphysical ideas or transcendent experience. This is particularly interesting given the prevalence of biblical imagery in
Dickinson’s poetry. Many critics have discussed Dickinson’s religious scepticism.
The poems themselves –
No. 66: “This is my letter to the world” (p.40)
•
Note the juxtaposition of the public declaration of the “letter to the world” and the privacy of the personal pronoun
9
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Contrast between unity – communicating with the world – and the isolation evoked by
“never wrote to me”
Dickinson evokes an enormous spatial movement between the world and “me”
“Tender majesty”: what is the effect of this oxymoron?
“Her message is committed / To hands I cannot see”: consider the tension here between faith and lack of faith
How is the speaker separated from her “fellow countrymen” – what effect does this have? How does the final line raise the question of a lack of tenderness and how does this effect your reading of the poem as a whole?
How does the poem oscillate between a sense of isolation and connection, between the universal and the individual? Is there resolution or intensification of this paradox?
No. 67: “I died for beauty, but was scarce” (p.41)
•
Compare this poem with Keats’ famous Romantic poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
ODE ON A GRECIAN URN (1820)
By John Keats
Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loath?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit dities of no tone.
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal---yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unweari-ed,
Forever piping songs forever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,
Forever panting, and forever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
10
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead 'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e 'er return.
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.
•
•
•
•
Dickinson clearly picks up the metaphor from Keats of Truth and Beauty being kinsmen, indeed, being one.
Like Keats, Dickinson represents death as the ultimate image of estrangement in physical/earthly terms but also as the possibility of unity – brethren and kinsmen, talking between the rooms // Keats’ “She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss / Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” With her fascination with longing, it is not surprising that
Dickinson would have been interested in this image
However, in typical form, she reverses the sense of unity and hope in the final lines of the poem, in which the identity of Truth and Beauty is erased. They are not, as Keats would have them, free from death and rendered immortal in art, but eroded in death – all things are obliterated by moss which is, in yet another reversal, the agent of nature.
Again, we have paradox: unity and disintegration; hope and erasure.
Death, as Dickinson reminds us over and over, is the great leveller and great unifier.
No. 82: “I had been hungry all the years.” (p.52)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
This poem opens as a moment of consummation and consumption after a long period of denial – itself a moment of paradox and tension
Time is distorted: years give way to a particular moment, “my noon” to dine.
This poem relies on very physical imagery – immediately, of hunger but there is also a sense of hunger to belong inside the dining room, to be gratified in other ways
(McMahon suggests sexual hunger…?)
Note the repeated images of unfamiliarity and of fear
Note the recurring imagery of isolation, of being shut out, through the image of the window and looking in from outside
At the point of consummation and satisfaction, Dickinson dwells on images of pain and illness, of strangeness and out-of-placeness
Ultimately, the speaker chooses desire rather than freedom from desire – she recognises the need to maintain her longing rather than eat her fill. Consequently, she is returned to
11
•
•
•
outside, looking in the windows but unable to enter. The distance between the speaker and the world inside is reinstated (as it is in “This is my letter to the world”).
While on one hand this reinforces the sense of estrangement, on another it reinforces her self-sufficiency, her “self-belonging” as McMahon terms it. She doesn’t need to enter the room and drink “the curious wine” – she is better off alone, outside, with her desire intact and the energy of longing to keep her warm.
Consider the links of this poem to Keats’ “Ode on a Crecian Urn” – like Keats,
Dickinson recognises that contact with the physical and satiation of bodily appetites
(food and sex) leads to decay.
Consider the biblical imagery of this poem.
No. 83: “I gave myself to him” (p.52)
•
•
•
•
•
•
At first this seems to be a conventional statement of romantic surrender, but this is immediately modified in the second line. What is the nature of the contract that
Dickinson refers to? “The solemn contract of a life”?
Dickinson seems to be articulating the tension between the material and the emotional: belonging and exploitation.
Who is “him” – do you want to read it as “I gave myself to Him” (it is capitalised in many editions, albeit not in the one we are using) – a comment on religious faith, perhaps, with Dickinson’s context as a member of a Massachusetts religious community?
There seems to be a fear of the depreciation of love contained in its dailiness – that consummation and satisfaction can wear out the lover, depreciate the prize, erode the value of the contract.
Note the paradoxes contained in the final stanza: risk and gain, debt and insolvency.
What about the oxymoron “Sweet debt”?
Read as a romantic or a religious poem, either way Dickinson is concerned with the difficulty of consummation, of complete possession. True and happy belonging is impossible. There is always the gap between “myself” and “himself” – the contract gives rise to debt, insolvency, dissatisfaction, isolation.
No.127: “A narrow fellow in the grass” (p.77)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Like the previous poem, this one certainly contains sexual imagery at some level as well as biblical references to Genesis and the snake as tempter and manifestation of evil.
There is a tension surrounding the meeting with the snake, the “narrow fellow in the grass” – “you may have met him” raises the sense of possibility, of uncertainty.
The grass dividing is slightly sinister and creates a sense of things going on around us of which we are only partly aware
It is unusual for Dickinson to adopt a male voice. Here “I” remembers being a “boy and barefoot” – why do you think she made such a choice given the subject matter of the poem? There is the sense of the elusive nature of contact – he stooped to pick up the whiplash and it “was gone” – there is no contact with the snake, but it moves around “him”
Who or what are “nature’s people”?
Is there something slightly discordant about a “transport / Of cordiality”? Oxymoron, perhaps? Just when you thought this poem might be lauding nature in an unproblematic way, we are faced with “tighter breathing / And zero at the bone.”
12
•
•
Comment on the effect of this final image. Do we feel a sense of unity or isolation? What sense of the speaker’s relationship to the world at large are you left with here?
Do you think Dickinson is threatened by the snake and its suggestion of intimacy, or is she certain such intimacy is impossible?
No.154: “A word dropped careless on a page” (p.90)
•
•
•
•
•
•
Here Dickinson seems to despair at the possibility of communicating to others through her poetry.
There is the relationship between writing – the word on the page – and disease, contagion. Who is the “maker” and why do you think she describes the maker as “wrinkled” and as lying? What is the effect of the association of the sentence with “infection”?
Like “This is my letter to the world”, Dickinson here moves rapidly through time and space. The infection generated by the careless word on the page can infect through the centuries. Note that the attempt to communicate is akin to “inhal[ing] despair”.
No.161: “What mystery pervades a well!” (p.92)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Just as “A narrow fellow in the grass” relies on phallic imagery, here we have the well, the feminine counterpart.
The well here seems an image of containment rather than freedom, of the abyss rather than an opportunity for water and therefore for life.
The poem begins with the juxtaposition of the abstract and the physical – the “mystery” and the “well”.
There is also the contrast between the remote – “mystery” and “another world” – and a
“neighbour” and a “jar”, the most mundane of domestic imagery.
As McMahon states so succinctly: “…the repetition and realignment of these oppositional qualities in each stanza of the poem reveal that it is the dynamic of the movement between abstraction and the ordinary that is, in fact, the mystery”.
Dickinson compares the calm approach to life of the non-human – grass, the sedge – with her own acute sense of awe.
Note the recurring sense of what is impossible to understand, what is awful (in the true sense of the word, as in inspiring awe) and what is strange.
Far from being a Romantic assertion of the wonder and redemptive agency of nature, here Dickinson talks about nature as “a stranger”, with a “haunted house”. We are reminded of the threat of the snake in “A narrow fellow in the grass”.
We are left with no sense of the possibility of knowledge or connection. The nearer one gets to nature (something that is anyway fraught with danger and with fear), the less one knows. No.181: “The saddest noise, the sweetest noise” (p.101)
•
Note the opening paradox – “saddest and sweetest” – followed later in the first stanza with the oxymoron “delicious close” – these paradoxical emotions co-exist and are not cancelled by one another
13
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
The juxtaposition with spring, traditionally considered a time of renewal and replenishment, etc…with death is a typically Dickinsonian combination. In this poem, spring is a frontier beyond which “summer hesitates” – she is not doing the conventionally poetic thing of looking forward to and praising summer. After all,
“heavenly near” is preceded with “[a]lmost too”. There is a none of anxiety or concern.
The “magical frontier” of spring is compared with the “sorcery” of death – birth is juxtaposed with death.
“cruelly more dear” – another oxymoronic statement combining a reference to the pain and cruelty of losing someone to death with the fond emotions evoked by recollections of the dead.
Dickinson is speaking of the memories evoked by a new season, a new beginning – “It makes us think of all the dead”.
Therefore, the sweet sounds of the birds signaling the approach of summer are also the sounds that remind us of what we have lost and, indeed, sirenlike summon us to our own deaths – that is, remind us of our own mortality
Dickinson therefore suggests that in contemplating the future, we remember the past, and that in the most positive moments are also the saddest ones. While traditionally, poets associate winter with death, by associating spring and summer with death,
Dickinson reminds us of the sadness in happiness, the coldness in warmth, the presence of death in life.
Consider the metaphor in the concluding stanza of the poem. What imagery does
Dickinson evoke and what effect does it have?
What is your relationship with Emily Dickinson’s poetry?
It is very important that you consider the effect of Dickinson’s poetry on the reader – your own relationship with the poems – and, indeed, the extent to which you feel you belong to the world she creates. One might argue that while the apparent simplicity of Dickinson’s language and emphasis on physical, sensual imagery engage and draw the reader in, the multiple layers and ambiguity encountered on second or third reading serve to alienate and even isolate the reader.
Similarly, Dickinson’s use of paradox and oxymoron strand the reader between the two contrary positions presented. Without the comfort of resolution, trapped within the two parallel points of view, one is left not knowing quite what to think. One may, indeed, feel very strongly the sentiment contained in the final stanza of “What mystery pervades a well!”: “…those who know her know her less / The nearer her they get.”
Bibliography
Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. James Reeves, Harlow, Essex: Heinemann
Educational, 1959.
Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, Boston: Back
Bay Books/Little, Brown and Co.)
Wendy Martin, The Cambridge Introduction to Emily Dickinson, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007.
Elizabeth McMahon, “Longing and Belonging: Emily Dickinson’s poetics of distance,” New
Directions: Papers from the English Teachers’ Conference 2008, Sydney: English Association,
2008, pp.74-84.
14
Josef Raab, “The Metapoetic Element in Dickinson,” The Emily Dickinson Handbook, ed.
Gudrun Grabher, Roland Hagenbüchle & Cristanne Miller, Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1998, pp.273-295.
Fred D. White, “Emily Dickinson’s existential dramas,” The Cambridge Companion to Emily
Dickinson, ed. Wendy Martin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp.91-106.
ENGLISH
___________________________________________________________
Area of Study: Belonging
A study of
Emily Dickinson (and related texts)
Dr Selina Samuels, Ascham School
2
What is the Area of Study?
The Area of Study is the exploration of a concept that affects our perceptions of ourselves and our world. Students explore, analyse, question and articulate the ways in which perceptions of this concept are shaped in and through a variety of texts.
In the Area of Study, students explore and examine relationships between language and text, and interrelationships among texts. They examine closely the individual qualities of texts while considering the texts’ relationships to the wider context of the Area of Study. …show more content…
They synthesise ideas to clarify meaning and develop new
meanings.
They take into account whether aspects such as context, purpose and register, text structures, stylistic features, grammatical features and vocabulary are appropriate to the particular text.
(Board of Studies NSW, 1999, Stage 6 English Syllabus)
You will be looking at how: meaning is conveyed, shaped, interpreted and reflected in and through texts, the ways texts are responded to and composed, the ways perspective may reflect meaning and interpretation, there are connections between and among texts, and how texts are influenced by other texts and contexts.
In their responses and compositions students examine, question, and reflect and speculate on:
• how the concept of belonging is conveyed through the representations of people, relationships, ideas, places, events, and societies that they encounter in the prescribed text and texts of their own choosing related to the Area of Study
• assumptions underlying various representations of the concept of belonging
• how the composer’s choice of language modes, forms, features and structures shapes and is shaped by a sense of belonging
• their own experiences of belonging, in a variety of contexts
• the ways in which they perceive the world through …show more content…
texts
• the ways in which exploring the concept and significance of belonging may broaden and deepen their understanding of themselves and their world.
Texts:
•
•
Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson (ed. James Reeves)
Related Material. Texts of your own choosing relevant to Belonging. You can draw your chosen texts from a variety of sources, in a range of genres and media.
3
Belonging: Some questions to ponder
How may it be possible for an individual to both ‘belong’ and ‘not belong’ to a place, group, community, the larger world? What might be the consequences of having an ambivalent ‘sense of belonging’ to some person, thing, place, idea, etc.?
In what ways can ‘belonging’ or ‘not belonging’ shape our sense of self and identity?
How might our perception of our own identity and belonging shape our response to others?
Why is time an important notion when discussing belonging and attitudes to belonging?
Consider the movement through life and the way that we belong to different age groups, generations, etc… throughout the passage of our life.
Why and when might we choose not to belong? What influences our choice not to belong?
What barriers to belonging might we experience?
Relationship of the reader to the text –
The syllabus states: “In engaging with the texts, a responder may experience and understand the possibilities presented by a sense of belonging to, or exclusion from the text and the world it represents. This engagement may be influenced by the different ways perspectives are given voice in or are absent from a text.”
How can perceptions and ideas of belonging be constructed in texts?
How can I belong to or be excluded from a text?
How are perspectives given a voice or silenced in a text?
You need to consider your relationship with the texts you study. Do you feel a sense of belonging with the text, with the world it portrays and by extension with the composer?
This is a particularly interesting question given our prescribed text, Emily Dickinson’s poetry. COMPOSER, PERSONA and RESPONDER (or CPR)
You need to ask yourself: whose sense of belonging is relevant here?
Are we talking about the writer, a character or the reader? How might all these experiences be linked? You need to go further than consider only the experience portrayed in the plot or events of the text.
4
Emily Dickinson
This précis of her life is from The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble
(1985):
DICKINSON, Emily Elizabeth (1830-86), American poet, born in Amherst,
Massachusetts, the daughter of a successful lawyer. She was educated at Amherst
Academy (1834-47) and Mount Holyoake (1847-8); during her early years she waqs lively, witty, and sociable, but from her mid-twenties she gradually withdrew into an inner world, eventually, in her forties, refusing to leave her home, and avoiding all contact with strangers, although she maintained intimate correspondences with people she never saw face to face. Her emotional life remains mysterious, despite much speculation about a possible disappointed love affair, for which one candidate is the
Revd Charles Wadsworth, with whom she corresponded and who twice visited her; another is Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, to whom she sent
and addressed many poems, She wrote poetry from girlhood onward, but only seven poems out of nearly 2,000 are known to have been published during her lifetime, and those appeared anonymously and much edited. She at one stage actively sought publication, but her contemporaries found her work bewildering, and she appears to have accepted her lot as an unrecognized writer – her ‘Barefoot-Rank’. From c.1858 she assembled many of her poems in packets or ‘fascicles’, which were discovered after her death; a selection, arranged and edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and T.W.
Higginson, appeared in 1890. Full publication was delayed by family difficulties, but eventually other editions and volumes of letters appeared, restoring her individual punctuation and presentation. At first regarded as an eccentric minor poet, she is now considered a major writer of startling originality. Her work presents recurrent themes – a mystic apprehension of the natural world, a preoccupation with poetic vocation, fame, death, and immortality – and is expressed in a rhetoric and language of her own, cryptic, elliptical, and at times self-dramatizing and hyperbolic. Her imagery reflects an intense and painful inner struggle over many years; she refers to herself as ‘the queen of Calvary’, and her verse if full of allusions to volcanoes, shipwrecks, funerals, storms, imprisonments, and other manifestations of natural and human violence. Her simultaneous conviction of isolation and ‘election’ was dramatized in her way of life, which is vividly described in a two-volume biography by R.B. Sewall, published in
1974.
Some thoughts on Dickinson and her context –
Technically, Dickinson was a Romantic poet, and while references to nature in her poetry demonstrate some sympathy with the concerns of the time, her poetry can hardly be said to belong to the aesthetics of the period. Indeed, Dickinson’s poetry was way before its time;
Modernist in focus, intensely compressed and elliptical – occasionally more gap than content.
In her essay “Longing and Belonging: Emily Dickinson’s poetics of distance,” Dr Elizabeth
McMahon focuses on the paradoxical relationship in Dickinson’s poetry between longing and belonging. She points out the two phrases that defined Dickinson at her death: “Called back” that was carved on her tombstone and “At home” which described her occupation are contradictory and describe the tension in her poetry between estrangement and belonging. As
McMahon states:
5
The understanding of death as a process of being ‘called back’ implies that lived experience is a period of transience and expatriation. Accordingly, the human subject in this schema is always an émigré, whose experience of self and others, place and time, is of an intensity of distance. This distance is experienced as absence, insufficiency and inadequacy but it is also a space of desire: of seeking and anticipation, the distance between recognition of the desired object and its (impossible) attainment. It is death that enables the bridging of distance as the conduit for the expatriate’s return to the ‘ancient homestead’. (p.74)
We will be focusing on the paradox within Dickinson’s poetry of the representation of isolation and of unity. As McMahon puts it: “much of the energy and intensity of each poem resides in the spark of an unresolved, galvanising tension” between longing and belonging. We are interested in the paradoxical balance within Dickinson’s poetry that emphasises but never resolves the struggle between isolation and unity. The paradoxes in her poetry have been referred to by critics as parallelism – where opposite positions are compared and kept parallel, never meeting but at the same time never diverging, always equidistant but always apart.
It is easy in this investigation to be distracted by a biographical approach to Dickinson’s work.
Certainly, her life enacts a very deliberate and dramatic approach to the question of belonging versus isolation: she chose isolation. For much of her adult life she lived in seclusion with only her family for company, albeit with the rare visit from an outsider which she prized and anticipated keenly, and indeed she retreated more and more into the confines of her bedroom.
She wrote in isolation and shared her poetry only with the very few, in particular Thomas
Higginson whom she chose as her mentor.
At the same time, we must be mindful of T.S. Eliot’s instruction that the “significant emotion” of poetry “has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet.” Dickinson’s poetry – in its startling originality as well as in the recurring sense of yearning and unrequited hope – is a representation of isolation. There is the repeated sense of the individual alone in the face of the big questions of humanity (not least of which is death). At the same time, her focus on these big questions of humanity is unifying. That is, we are united in the face of hunger, passion, loneliness and death. We are isolated and yet conjoined by the simple fact of our shared humanity. That is the paradox of Dickinson’s poetry, echoed by the stylistic paradox of simplicity and complexity.
We must consider the relationship between the poet and her reader through the poetry. What is so extraordinary is the effect of Dickinson’s poetry. Poetry is, after all, a form of communication and communication is about bridging gaps, about creating community and belonging. We will look at the way in which the reader is drawn into her poetry by its apparent simplicity and tone of confession and but also kept at one remove by its complexity and opacity. Dickinson’s unique poetic sensibility includes and distances us at the same time. This is very relevant because writing became her form of communication (in addition to poetry she wrote many extraordinarily poetic letters) and a way of reaching across her self-imposed exile to remind others of their shared humanity. Dickinson was fascinated by the individual and with individual experience. She wrote to
Higginson: “To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations, thou friends are, if possible, an event more fair…A letter always feels to me like Immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend…There seems a spectral power in thought that walks alone.” She did not renounce experience – intellectual perhaps rather than physical – by isolating herself but she was aware of loneliness. Her famous lines
6
It might be lonelier
Without the loneliness articulate one of the prime paradoxes of her life.
The intensity of her experience of life is at the heart of her sense of belonging to humanity while at the same time refusing to belong in purely social terms to the conventional small-town world of Amherst and the accepted occupations of women of her day. In this context, one could see her choice of isolation as a rejection of the sometimes suffocating experience of being part of a community and, indeed, as a bid for social freedom. One is tempted to see Dickinson as seeking intellectual and emotional freedom from the restricted expectations of women’s lives, and this would perhaps be confirmed by the often brutal and unfeminine imagery of her poetry, suggesting that she was unmoved and unmodified by social expectation. Critics and biographers have speculated as to the initiating event that sent her into reclusion, and there has been much discussion about a doomed and/or unrequited love for a married Calvinist minister, Rev. Charles
Wadsworth. For our purposes, however, it is enough to consider that Dickinson chose isolation as the better position from which to contemplate the extraordinary business of being alive.
Her first letter to Higginson is telling. Reeves starts his Introduction with it, but I will quote some of it here:
Mr Higginson, – Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?...Should you think it breathed, and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude.
I think this points to the significance of Dickinson’s poetry as a means of communication between herself and the world. She speaks of it as something living and it’s interesting to consider it as an extension of herself, a way for her to interpret and live in the world while also away from it. And it has turned out to be her immortality, a concept that she refers to constantly in her poetry and which is, of course, associated with death.
Features of Dickinson’s poetry to look out for –
•
A childlike voice and a general view of the world from a naïve position.
A critic – whose essay I have a copy of but whose name is completely lost to me (in one of those filing tragedies that we have all experienced) – has said of Dickinson that in her evocation of childhood, she emphasised “weakness, fear, and the attempt to find love.”
Hunger is also an experience she associates with childhood as a “symbol of the child’s powerful but undirected demands on life.” According to this nameless critic (bless!),
Dickinson regarded herself as a “little girl” throughout her life and she made a cult of childishness in her poems. Certainly, the simplicity of diction and observation is childlike while the import is often far more complex and sophisticated. The same critic has also said something that is very relevant to our paradoxical reading of Dickinson: “The real facts of nature in the mind of a child are that it is a playful world of equally sentient creatures and that it may at any time erupt into a hostile force which devours and destroys.” •
References to nature, as befits a poet of the Romantic period although, as the point above makes clear, her attitude to nature was largely paradoxical and I think can be fitted
7 into the longing/belonging dichotomy effectively. Consider in particular “A narrow fellow in the grass”.
•
References to death – arguably existential in approach. Fred White discusses Dickinson’s existential sensibilities and its similarities with the ideas of the Danish philosopher Soren
Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard wrote, “Death in earnest gives life force as nothing else does; it makes one alert as nothing else does.” Similarly, Dickinson is fascinated by the way that the presence of death adds value to life; she is aware of the relationship between binaries that constitutes our experience of the world. (Fred D. White, “Emily Dickinson’s existential dramas”, The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson, ed. Wendy Martin,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp.91-106).
•
Biblical allusion – it is not surprising, given her background and context, that Dickinson should have used biblical imagery in her poetry. However, her use of the Bible is unorthodox and paradoxical. Her approach to Biblical imagery may well be tied to her religious scepticism and her existential sensibilities and can be traced biographically. In terms of the poems we are studying, it is most clearly seen in the complexity surrounding various Biblical allusions she uses, most obviously in “A narrow fellow in the grass.”
•
Severe compression and economy of language. This sometimes leads Dickinson to stretch and break syntax. She is interested in generating meaning that goes beyond the
“simple” meaning of a syntactically correct sentence.
•
The use of ellipsis in Dickinson’s poetry allows her to accentuate what is not said as much as what is said – this is itself a central paradox in her poetry: that we are as aware of the words that she does not include as those that she does. Silence and presence coexist and rely on one another for meaning. Note the repeated use of words such as
“may” – raising the question of the alternative, of uncertainty and doubt
•
Punctuation – Dickinson is known for her idiosyncratic use of the dash. In the edition that we are studying, many of the dashes have been replaced by more conventional punctuation such as commas and full-stops, but if you look at the versions of the poems that McMahon quotes in her article, you can see that some editors have maintained the dash even where formal rules of syntax (see the point above) would forbid them. Indeed,
McMahon makes a very useful observation about Dickinson’s use of punctuation:
“…Dickinson’s poetry confounds the reader’s ability to separate the senses of belonging and estrangement in her work: at the level of punctuation, her famous use of the dash serves to both connect and separate sense, sound and breath: her arresting lexicon and syntax force us to confront the limits and gaps in the capacity of language to meet experience and convey meaning. At the same time, they reconnect us to words in a material, bodily relation – and to the language system itself – as if for the first time.”(pp.74-5) •
Colloquial syntax – Dickinson liberally uses imperatives, exclamations and questions to create a sense of immediacy and directness. According to one critic, her colloquial techniques (use of contractions for eg) are “conspicuous signs of a poetic language that refuses to be tamed and levelled.” Her use of contractions creates a greater intimacy between the poet and her reader than more formal diction would generate, and increases the sense that her poetry is an immediate, unmediated (for, indeed, she did not edit her poetry) expression of emotion that connects her with her readers and, indeed, with all
8 people. Dickinson’s use of repetitions also increases the sense of informality and of conversation and spontaneity which forges a sense of belonging within the community of reader and writer.
•
Ambiguity – the double meaning present throughout Dickinson’s poetry which I have been considering as a paradoxical approach to belonging and exclusion can also be seen as an expression of the privacy (and therefore the intimacy) of her work. The reader has to get close to her, to read her poetry within the context of the symbols that recur, to understand the multiple layers of her often deceptively simple poems. The poems are multilayered in meaning, charged with ambiguity and opacity. It is the process of grappling with the obscurity of the poems that the reader derives most pleasure and is rewarded with a sense of belonging to the poem I the sense that it is explicable and familiar and forms part of one’s intellectual make up.
•
Oxymoron – Cindy Mackenzie says this about Dickinson’s use of the oxymoron:
“For in Dickinson’s oxymoronic constructions, the unknown can never be fully realized because the tension between the two terms is sustained by the dialogical interplay between them. Thus the oxymoron enacts the movement of desire kept alive by the fact that neither terms subsumes the other, but that each is sustained in a relationship of inclusive reciprocity…the size of the space between each term is exaggerated in a way that forces their separation, rather than encourages their union.” (Cindy Mackenzie,
‘“Heavenly Hurt”: Dickinson’s Wounded Text,’ The Emily Dickinson Journal 9.2, 55-63, quoted by McMahon)
•
The sound of Dickinson’s language is very important. Consider the use of rhyme half-rhyme non-rhyme sight-rhyme assonance alliteration
As her thoughts move from the concrete to the abstract her rhyme scheme tends to become less rigid and even disappears. It is very important to read her poetry aloud to hear her choice of words and to allow the half-rhymes to clang and draw attention to themselves. •
The relationship between the physical and the metaphysical: the way that sensual imagery in Dickinson’s poetry gives rise to meditations on metaphysical ideas or transcendent experience. This is particularly interesting given the prevalence of biblical imagery in
Dickinson’s poetry. Many critics have discussed Dickinson’s religious scepticism.
The poems themselves –
No. 66: “This is my letter to the world” (p.40)
•
Note the juxtaposition of the public declaration of the “letter to the world” and the privacy of the personal pronoun
9
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Contrast between unity – communicating with the world – and the isolation evoked by
“never wrote to me”
Dickinson evokes an enormous spatial movement between the world and “me”
“Tender majesty”: what is the effect of this oxymoron?
“Her message is committed / To hands I cannot see”: consider the tension here between faith and lack of faith
How is the speaker separated from her “fellow countrymen” – what effect does this have? How does the final line raise the question of a lack of tenderness and how does this effect your reading of the poem as a whole?
How does the poem oscillate between a sense of isolation and connection, between the universal and the individual? Is there resolution or intensification of this paradox?
No. 67: “I died for beauty, but was scarce” (p.41)
•
Compare this poem with Keats’ famous Romantic poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
ODE ON A GRECIAN URN (1820)
By John Keats
Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loath?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit dities of no tone.
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal---yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unweari-ed,
Forever piping songs forever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,
Forever panting, and forever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
10
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead 'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e 'er return.
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.
•
•
•
•
Dickinson clearly picks up the metaphor from Keats of Truth and Beauty being kinsmen, indeed, being one.
Like Keats, Dickinson represents death as the ultimate image of estrangement in physical/earthly terms but also as the possibility of unity – brethren and kinsmen, talking between the rooms // Keats’ “She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss / Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” With her fascination with longing, it is not surprising that
Dickinson would have been interested in this image
However, in typical form, she reverses the sense of unity and hope in the final lines of the poem, in which the identity of Truth and Beauty is erased. They are not, as Keats would have them, free from death and rendered immortal in art, but eroded in death – all things are obliterated by moss which is, in yet another reversal, the agent of nature.
Again, we have paradox: unity and disintegration; hope and erasure.
Death, as Dickinson reminds us over and over, is the great leveller and great unifier.
No. 82: “I had been hungry all the years.” (p.52)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
This poem opens as a moment of consummation and consumption after a long period of denial – itself a moment of paradox and tension
Time is distorted: years give way to a particular moment, “my noon” to dine.
This poem relies on very physical imagery – immediately, of hunger but there is also a sense of hunger to belong inside the dining room, to be gratified in other ways
(McMahon suggests sexual hunger…?)
Note the repeated images of unfamiliarity and of fear
Note the recurring imagery of isolation, of being shut out, through the image of the window and looking in from outside
At the point of consummation and satisfaction, Dickinson dwells on images of pain and illness, of strangeness and out-of-placeness
Ultimately, the speaker chooses desire rather than freedom from desire – she recognises the need to maintain her longing rather than eat her fill. Consequently, she is returned to
11
•
•
•
outside, looking in the windows but unable to enter. The distance between the speaker and the world inside is reinstated (as it is in “This is my letter to the world”).
While on one hand this reinforces the sense of estrangement, on another it reinforces her self-sufficiency, her “self-belonging” as McMahon terms it. She doesn’t need to enter the room and drink “the curious wine” – she is better off alone, outside, with her desire intact and the energy of longing to keep her warm.
Consider the links of this poem to Keats’ “Ode on a Crecian Urn” – like Keats,
Dickinson recognises that contact with the physical and satiation of bodily appetites
(food and sex) leads to decay.
Consider the biblical imagery of this poem.
No. 83: “I gave myself to him” (p.52)
•
•
•
•
•
•
At first this seems to be a conventional statement of romantic surrender, but this is immediately modified in the second line. What is the nature of the contract that
Dickinson refers to? “The solemn contract of a life”?
Dickinson seems to be articulating the tension between the material and the emotional: belonging and exploitation.
Who is “him” – do you want to read it as “I gave myself to Him” (it is capitalised in many editions, albeit not in the one we are using) – a comment on religious faith, perhaps, with Dickinson’s context as a member of a Massachusetts religious community?
There seems to be a fear of the depreciation of love contained in its dailiness – that consummation and satisfaction can wear out the lover, depreciate the prize, erode the value of the contract.
Note the paradoxes contained in the final stanza: risk and gain, debt and insolvency.
What about the oxymoron “Sweet debt”?
Read as a romantic or a religious poem, either way Dickinson is concerned with the difficulty of consummation, of complete possession. True and happy belonging is impossible. There is always the gap between “myself” and “himself” – the contract gives rise to debt, insolvency, dissatisfaction, isolation.
No.127: “A narrow fellow in the grass” (p.77)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Like the previous poem, this one certainly contains sexual imagery at some level as well as biblical references to Genesis and the snake as tempter and manifestation of evil.
There is a tension surrounding the meeting with the snake, the “narrow fellow in the grass” – “you may have met him” raises the sense of possibility, of uncertainty.
The grass dividing is slightly sinister and creates a sense of things going on around us of which we are only partly aware
It is unusual for Dickinson to adopt a male voice. Here “I” remembers being a “boy and barefoot” – why do you think she made such a choice given the subject matter of the poem? There is the sense of the elusive nature of contact – he stooped to pick up the whiplash and it “was gone” – there is no contact with the snake, but it moves around “him”
Who or what are “nature’s people”?
Is there something slightly discordant about a “transport / Of cordiality”? Oxymoron, perhaps? Just when you thought this poem might be lauding nature in an unproblematic way, we are faced with “tighter breathing / And zero at the bone.”
12
•
•
Comment on the effect of this final image. Do we feel a sense of unity or isolation? What sense of the speaker’s relationship to the world at large are you left with here?
Do you think Dickinson is threatened by the snake and its suggestion of intimacy, or is she certain such intimacy is impossible?
No.154: “A word dropped careless on a page” (p.90)
•
•
•
•
•
•
Here Dickinson seems to despair at the possibility of communicating to others through her poetry.
There is the relationship between writing – the word on the page – and disease, contagion. Who is the “maker” and why do you think she describes the maker as “wrinkled” and as lying? What is the effect of the association of the sentence with “infection”?
Like “This is my letter to the world”, Dickinson here moves rapidly through time and space. The infection generated by the careless word on the page can infect through the centuries. Note that the attempt to communicate is akin to “inhal[ing] despair”.
No.161: “What mystery pervades a well!” (p.92)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Just as “A narrow fellow in the grass” relies on phallic imagery, here we have the well, the feminine counterpart.
The well here seems an image of containment rather than freedom, of the abyss rather than an opportunity for water and therefore for life.
The poem begins with the juxtaposition of the abstract and the physical – the “mystery” and the “well”.
There is also the contrast between the remote – “mystery” and “another world” – and a
“neighbour” and a “jar”, the most mundane of domestic imagery.
As McMahon states so succinctly: “…the repetition and realignment of these oppositional qualities in each stanza of the poem reveal that it is the dynamic of the movement between abstraction and the ordinary that is, in fact, the mystery”.
Dickinson compares the calm approach to life of the non-human – grass, the sedge – with her own acute sense of awe.
Note the recurring sense of what is impossible to understand, what is awful (in the true sense of the word, as in inspiring awe) and what is strange.
Far from being a Romantic assertion of the wonder and redemptive agency of nature, here Dickinson talks about nature as “a stranger”, with a “haunted house”. We are reminded of the threat of the snake in “A narrow fellow in the grass”.
We are left with no sense of the possibility of knowledge or connection. The nearer one gets to nature (something that is anyway fraught with danger and with fear), the less one knows. No.181: “The saddest noise, the sweetest noise” (p.101)
•
Note the opening paradox – “saddest and sweetest” – followed later in the first stanza with the oxymoron “delicious close” – these paradoxical emotions co-exist and are not cancelled by one another
13
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
The juxtaposition with spring, traditionally considered a time of renewal and replenishment, etc…with death is a typically Dickinsonian combination. In this poem, spring is a frontier beyond which “summer hesitates” – she is not doing the conventionally poetic thing of looking forward to and praising summer. After all,
“heavenly near” is preceded with “[a]lmost too”. There is a none of anxiety or concern.
The “magical frontier” of spring is compared with the “sorcery” of death – birth is juxtaposed with death.
“cruelly more dear” – another oxymoronic statement combining a reference to the pain and cruelty of losing someone to death with the fond emotions evoked by recollections of the dead.
Dickinson is speaking of the memories evoked by a new season, a new beginning – “It makes us think of all the dead”.
Therefore, the sweet sounds of the birds signaling the approach of summer are also the sounds that remind us of what we have lost and, indeed, sirenlike summon us to our own deaths – that is, remind us of our own mortality
Dickinson therefore suggests that in contemplating the future, we remember the past, and that in the most positive moments are also the saddest ones. While traditionally, poets associate winter with death, by associating spring and summer with death,
Dickinson reminds us of the sadness in happiness, the coldness in warmth, the presence of death in life.
Consider the metaphor in the concluding stanza of the poem. What imagery does
Dickinson evoke and what effect does it have?
What is your relationship with Emily Dickinson’s poetry?
It is very important that you consider the effect of Dickinson’s poetry on the reader – your own relationship with the poems – and, indeed, the extent to which you feel you belong to the world she creates. One might argue that while the apparent simplicity of Dickinson’s language and emphasis on physical, sensual imagery engage and draw the reader in, the multiple layers and ambiguity encountered on second or third reading serve to alienate and even isolate the reader.
Similarly, Dickinson’s use of paradox and oxymoron strand the reader between the two contrary positions presented. Without the comfort of resolution, trapped within the two parallel points of view, one is left not knowing quite what to think. One may, indeed, feel very strongly the sentiment contained in the final stanza of “What mystery pervades a well!”: “…those who know her know her less / The nearer her they get.”
Bibliography
Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. James Reeves, Harlow, Essex: Heinemann
Educational, 1959.
Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, Boston: Back
Bay Books/Little, Brown and Co.)
Wendy Martin, The Cambridge Introduction to Emily Dickinson, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007.
Elizabeth McMahon, “Longing and Belonging: Emily Dickinson’s poetics of distance,” New
Directions: Papers from the English Teachers’ Conference 2008, Sydney: English Association,
2008, pp.74-84.
14
Josef Raab, “The Metapoetic Element in Dickinson,” The Emily Dickinson Handbook, ed.
Gudrun Grabher, Roland Hagenbüchle & Cristanne Miller, Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1998, pp.273-295.
Fred D. White, “Emily Dickinson’s existential dramas,” The Cambridge Companion to Emily
Dickinson, ed. Wendy Martin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp.91-106.