Sunday Poet: Emily Dickinson

Let’s get the biographical stuff out of the way first.

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but severe homesickness led her to return home after one year. Throughout her life, she seldom left her house and visitors were scarce. The people with whom she did come in contact, however, had an enormous impact on her thoughts and poetry. She was particularly stirred by the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she met on a trip to Philadelphia. He left for the West Coast shortly after a visit to her home in 1860, and some critics believe his departure gave rise to the heartsick flow of verse from Dickinson in the years that followed. While it is certain that he was an important figure in her life, it is not certain that this was in the capacity of romantic love—she called him "my closest earthly friend." Other possibilities for the unrequited love in Dickinson’s poems include Otis P. Lord, a Massachusetts Supreme Court Judge, and Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican.

By the 1860s, Dickinson lived in almost total physical isolation from the outside world, but actively maintained many correspondences and read widely. Dickinson’s poetry reflects her loneliness and the speakers of her poems generally live in a state of want, but her poems are also marked by the intimate recollection of inspirational moments which are decidedly life-giving and suggest the possibility of happiness. Her work was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England, as well as her reading of the Book of Revelation and her upbringing in a Puritan New England town which encouraged a Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative approach to Christianity.

Upon her death, Dickinson’s family discovered 40 handbound volumes of more than 800 of her poems, or "fascicles" as they are sometimes called. These booklets were made by folding and sewing five or six sheets of stationary paper and copying what seem to be final versions of poems in an order that many critics believe to be more than chronological. The handwritten poems show a variety of dash-like marks of various sizes and directions (some are even vertical). The poems were initially unbound and published according to the aesthetics of her many early editors, removing her unusual and varied dashes and replacing them with traditional punctuation. The current standard version replaces her dashes with a standard "n-dash," which is a closer typographical approximation of her writing. Furthermore, the original order of the works was not restored until 1981, when Ralph W. Franklin used the physical evidence of the paper itself to restore her order, relying on smudge marks, needle punctures and other clues to reassemble the packets. Since then, many critics have argued for thematic unity in these small collections, believing the ordering of the poems to be more than chronological or convenient. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (Belknap Press, 1981) remains the only volume that keeps the order intact.

From The Academy of American Poets(text condensed slightly).

Emily Dickinson is, alongside Walt Whitman as father, the mother of American poetry. While Whitman is worldly and expansive in his verse ("I contain multitudes!"), Dickinson is restrained, internal, and deeply personal. She presents a mind and a soul deeply connected to nature, to interiority, and to some sense of divinity. Clearly she is a product of the religious forms of her time and place, yet she transcends these limitations and structures to experience what can only be termed a mystical oneness with God on occasion.

In college I wrote about her as a prophetic poet, having gone through every poem then in print and looking for phrases and words that indicated to me an experience of higher order spiritual states. I was reliant on older models for such definitions at the time, not yet having Ken Wilber’s books.

Lacking that resource (I seem to have lost the essay), I want to try to present a few poems with mild explication. As popular as Dickinson has been, her poems are often not discussed in terms of their actual meanings.

There’s a certain Slant of light (258)

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 –


None may teach it – Any –
’Tis the Seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air –


When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death – 

This is one her most published poems, considered one of her finest lyrics. Yet it also has presented critics with serious challenges in making sense of what appears to be an oppressive poem. There are many heavy words: oppresses, heft, hurt, scar, despair, affliction, death. Yet the poem is a not as dark as these words may indicate. The poet experiences the afternoon light as carrying the weight of holiness, an experience that leaves her feeling her distance from divinity. The word "imperial" in Dickinson’s verse often refers to God or heaven, so in the third stanza she explains that God sends this light here, reminding us of our distance from heaven. All of nature listens to this message, even shadows. For as much as it pains her to be reminded of her separation from God, the last lines reveal that the absence of the light is equivalent to death. It’s better to be reminded of God’s love and presence and not feel close to it than to not have it at all.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes (341)

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?

The Feet, mechanical, go round --
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought --
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone --

This is the Hour of Lead --
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow --
First -- Chill -- then Stupor -- then the letting go --

This has been another tough poem for readers and critics. Clearly the poet is reviewing the aftermath of some "great pain," but the sense is of an emotional pain rather than a physical wound. Knowing that a capitalized He refers either to God or Christ in her poems, the first stanza gives some hint of her intent as she equates the pain she is recalling with the pain of Christ upon the cross. This is a pain that numbs one to the point of near death experience, as the "mechanical" feet carry her forward oblivious to her location.

A formal feeling, then, is stiff, rigid, cold, conforming to patterns with no thought producing them, contented because of the absence of awareness, vitality, sensation, life. "Formal feeling" is really an oxymoron, for the feeling of no feeling. (Suzanne Juhasz)

And she feels this "no feeling" as Lead, which for her signifies the base nature of human beings, unrefined, dark and heavy. But it is in the final three lines that we get how she views this kind of intensely wounding pain. If one outlives it, it is recalled as this kind of slow numbing that if surrendered to can remove one from the pain itself. The "letting go" can be read as release into death, or it can be read as surrender into a suffering that only Christ can salve. She often leaves the reader to figure out her intent.

There is no easy answer in many of Dickinson’s poems, which creates in us an endless fascination with her words and feelings.

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain (280)

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 -

This poem is from a period in which Dickinson felt herself falling from grace, a time in which "confrontation with the abyss becomes the central metaphor for her vision of a world from which transcendent meaning has been withdrawn and in which, therefore, the speaker is free to reach any conclusion she wishes or, indeed, to reach no conclusion at all" (Paula Bennett).The poem cannot describe an actual funeral since one attends a funeral, but cannot not witness one’s own. So then we have a poem in which she is describing a metaphorical death. As she feels the funeral in her brain, which may be read as the solemn marking of a loss of consciousness, she hears the "Drum" "beating - beating," which can be read as the pounding of the heart one sometimes hears as though it were within the skull itself. The third stanza reveals the depth of the experience as Space began to ring (toll): her being has become an organ which perceives only the Heavens -- ringing as a Bell. Finally, in the last stanza, after even the ringing stops, Dickinson clarifies the loss of "reason" and the descent that she experienced in this loss, but she leaves us hanging with the final "then -", leaving us to wonder what she experienced.

Many have read this poem as an account of a fainting spell. There is some reason to believe that Dickinson did experience periodic fainting episodes. Still, the detail in which it is rendered and the theological language that she uses leads to deeper meanings, especially within this period in her life when she felt her "fall from metaphysical grace" as a kind of sickness.

Not all her poems are so tough or so dark. Here a couple of other poems for a quiet Sunday morning.

I have a Bird in spring (5)

I have a Bird in spring
Which for myself doth sing --
The spring decoys.
And as the summer nears --
And as the Rose appears,
Robin is gone.

Yet do I not repine
Knowing that Bird of mine
Though flown --
Learneth beyond the sea
Melody new for me
And will return.

Fast is a safer hand
Held in a truer Land
Are mine --
And though they now depart,
Tell I my doubting heart
They’re thine.

In a serener Bright,
In a more golden light
I see
Each little doubt and fear,
Each little discord here
Removed.

Then will I not repine,
Knowing that Bird of mine
Though flown
Shall in a distant tree
Bright melody for me
Return.

The Daisy follows soft the Sun (106)

The Daisy follows soft the Sun --
And when his golden walk is done --
Sits shyly at his feet --
He -- waking -- finds the flower there --
Wherefore -- Marauder -- art thou here?
Because, Sir, love is sweet!

We are the Flower -- Thou the Sun!
Forgive us, if as days decline --
We nearer steal to Thee!
Enamored of the parting West --
The peace -- the flight -- the Amethyst --
Night’s possibility!

These are the days when Birds come back (130)

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.

Oh fraud that cannot cheat the Bee --
Almost thy plausibility
Induces my belief.

Till ranks of seeds their witness bear --
And softly thro’ the altered air
Hurries a timid leaf.

Oh Sacrament of summer days,
Oh Last Communion in the Haze --
Permit a child to join.

Thy sacred emblems to partake --
They consecrated bread to take
And thine immortal wine!

Emily Dickinson on the web:

American Poems: Nearly all of the published poems.
Modern American Poetry: Lots of critial essays.
Academy of American Poets: Links and poems.




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