10 July 23 Poetic Spirits #01 – The Blank Page in the Blank Room

Poetic Spirits: Emily of Amherst

Heroes. Nature. Time. War. These are the themes we have written about in recent months. We sincerely hope you have enjoyed the selections and commentary. We now turn our horses’ heads in a new direction: Poetic Spirits. What does this mean, you may rightly ask. In the context of this post and its explorations (and the rest of the posts in the series), we have selected several well-known poets with one criterion for selection: their interest in both the physical-emotional in the theme, augmented by the spiritual – thus “Poetic Spirits.”

Going out on an appendage, we could suggest that all poets (ala, all artists, all sentient beings are poetic spirits, or have a spirit, a word that has its origins in Latin spirare/spiritus (breathe, breath); then winding its way through Anglo-Norman French and on to Middle English’s spirit. With current meanings relating to deep feelings, beliefs (especially religious beliefs) and also to the inner character of a person—a difficult-to-define “something” that we know when we see and feel it, but that goes beyond words – most of the time.

Where is language to go when an experience can no longer reliably use its units of expressive units – words? Our best poetic spirits of all types, which may well be all of us, have come up with some worthy answers. Poetic spirits chew on the great matters of death and life. This leads to unusual, yet mundane places, for example, poetry! Our bravest (or most ecstatic) poets put their creative capacities into overdrive, and across the centuries have come up with devices that are quite useful for going beyond “just” language. 

Before a rabbit hole yawns before us, let’s home in on our first poetic spirit, Emily Dickinson, who arguably participated in the wider physical world less than 90%+ of humankind, played with poetic tricks of her own meaning, as well as entrenched methods from the past. One of her fortes happens to be symbolism, one of the places expression goes. With exquisite precision, she uses symbols like an infant, fields of growing crops, and a sunset to establish the circle of life and its stages. Another example is death symbolism, and as with the first selection below, sometimes a narrative – a good ol’ story – to kick her themes into high gear.

Another hallmark of her work is the sparseness of virtually all her poems. In addition, she has a fine time with line breaks and punctuation, dashes in particular.

Well, enough of reading my comments. Please enjoy our first Poet’s Poetic Spirit with the selections below.

POEMS By Emily Dickinson

“Hope” is the thing with feathers (314)

by Emily Dickinson

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet - never - in Extremity,

It asked a crumb - of me.

Because I could not stop for Death – (479)

by Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –

The Carriage held but just Ourselves –

And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labor and my leisure too,

For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess – in the Ring –

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –

We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed Us –

The Dews drew quivering and Chill –

For only Gossamer, my Gown –

My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground –

The Roof was scarcely visible –

The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses' Heads

Were toward Eternity –

I heard a Fly buzz - when I died - (591)

by Emily Dickinson

I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -

The Stillness in the Room

Was like the Stillness in the Air -

Between the Heaves of Storm -

The Eyes around - had wrung them dry -

And Breaths were gathering firm

For that last Onset - when the King

Be witnessed - in the Room -

I willed my Keepsakes - Signed away

What portion of me be

Assignable - and then it was

There interposed a Fly -

With Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz -

Between the light - and me -

And then the Windows failed - and then

I could not see to see -

The Poets light but Lamps — (930)

by Emily Dickinson

The Poets light but Lamps —

Themselves — go out —

The Wicks they stimulate

If vital Light

Inhere as do the Suns —

Each Age a Lens

Disseminating their

Circumference —

Tell all the truth but tell it slant — (1263)

by Emily Dickinson

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – (236)

by Emily Dickson

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –

I keep it, staying at Home –

With a Bobolink for a Chorister –

And an Orchard, for a Dome –

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice –

I, just wear my Wings –

And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,

Our little Sexton – sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman –

And the sermon is never long,

So instead of getting to Heaven, at last –

I’m going, all along.

BACKGROUND  (from Poetry Foundation and Wikipedia)

Emily Dickinson is one of America’s greatest and most original poets of all time. She took definition as her province and challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work. She experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints. 

When the first volume of her poetry was published in 1890, four years after her death, it met with stunning success. Going through 11 editions in less than two years, the poems eventually extended far beyond their first household audiences. Dickinson is now known as one of the most important American poets, and her poetry is widely read among people of all ages and interests.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830 to Edward and Emily (Norcross) Dickinson. By the time of Emily’s early childhood, there were three children in the household. Her brother, William Austin Dickinson, had preceded her by a year and a half. Her sister, Lavinia Norcross Dickinson, was born in 1833. All three children attended the one-room primary school in Amherst and then moved on to Amherst Academy, the school out of which Amherst College had grown, and where the curriculum emphasized science. That emphasis reappeared in Dickinson’s poems and letters through her fascination with naming, her skilled observation and cultivation of flowers, her carefully wrought descriptions of plants, and her interest in “chemic force.” Those interests, however, rarely celebrated science in the same spirit as the teachers advocated. In an early poem, she chastised science for its prying interests. Its system interfered with the observer’s preferences; its study took the life out of living things. In “‘Arcturus’ is his other name” she writes, “I pull a flower from the woods - / A monster with a glass / Computes the stamens in a breath - / And has her in a ‘class!’” 

While the strength of Amherst Academy lay in its emphasis on science, it also contributed to Dickinson’s development as a poet. The seven years at the academy provided her with her first “Master,” Leonard Humphrey, who served as principal of the academy from 1846 to 1848. Although Dickinson undoubtedly esteemed him while she was a student, her response to his unexpected death in 1850 clearly suggests her growing poetic interest. She wrote that her only tribute was her tears. 

Dickinson’s last term at Amherst Academy, however, did not mark the end of her formal schooling. As was common, Dickinson left the academy at the age of 15 in order to pursue a higher, and for women, final, level of education. In the fall of 1847 Dickinson entered Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Under the guidance of Mary Lyon, the school was known for its religious predilection. Part and parcel of the curriculum were weekly sessions with Lyon in which religious questions were examined and the state of the students’ faith assessed. The young women were divided into three categories: those who were “established Christians,” those who “expressed hope,” and those who were “without hope.” Much has been made of Emily’s place in this latter category and of the widely circulated story that she was the only member of that group. The school records indicate that the solitary rebel as not alone in the “without hope” category. In fact, 30 students finished the school year with that designation.

Dickinson’s departure from Mount Holyoke marked the end of her formal schooling. It also prompted the dissatisfaction common among young women in the early 19th century. Upon their return, unmarried daughters were indeed expected to demonstrate their dutiful nature by setting aside their own interests in order to meet the needs of the home. For Dickinson the change was hardly welcome. Her letters from the early 1850s register dislike of domestic work and frustration with the time constraints created by the work that was never done. “God keep me from what they call households,” she exclaimed in a letter in 1850.

Particularly annoying were the number of calls expected of the women in the Homestead. Emily Norcross Dickinson’s retreat into poor health in the 1850s may well be understood as one response to such a routine.

For Dickinson, the pace of such visits was mind-numbing, and she began limiting the number of visits she made or received. She baked bread and tended the garden, but she would neither dust nor visit. 

To gauge the extent of Dickinson’s rebellion, consideration must be taken of the nature of church membership at the time as well as the attitudes toward revivalist fervor. As shown by Edward Dickinson’s and Susan Gilbert’s decisions to join the church in 1850, church membership was not tied to any particular stage of a person’s life. To be enrolled as a member was not a matter of age but of “conviction.” The individuals had first to be convinced of a true conversion experience, had to believe themselves chosen by God, of his “elect.” In keeping with the old-style Calvinism, the world was divided among the regenerate, the unregenerate, and those in between. 

As Dickinson wrote in a poem dated to 1875, “Escape is such a thankful Word.” In fact, her references to “escape” occur primarily in reference to the soul. In these “moments of escape,” the soul will not be confined; nor will its explosive power be contained: “The soul has moments of escape - / When bursting all the doors - / She dances like a Bomb, abroad, / And swings opon the Hours” Like the soul of her description, Dickinson refused to be confined by the elements expected of her. The demands of her father’s, her mother’s, and her dear friends’ religion invariably prompted such “moments of escape.” 

As early as 1850 her letters suggest that her mind was turning over the possibility of her own work. Extending the contrast between herself and her friends, she described but did not specify an “aim” to her life. She announced its novelty (“I have dared to do strange things—bold things”), asserted her independence (“and have asked no advice from any”), and couched it in the language of temptation (“I have heeded beautiful tempters”). She described the winter as one long dream from which she had not yet awakened. That winter began with the gift of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Poems for New Year’s. Her letters of the period are frequent and long. Their heightened language provided working space for herself as writer. In these passionate letters to her female friends, she tried out different voices. At times she sounded like the female protagonist from a contemporary novel; at times, she was the narrator who chastises her characters for their failure to see beyond complicated circumstances. She played the wit and sounded the divine, exploring the possibility of the new converts’ religious faith only to come up short against its distinct unreality in her own experience. And finally, she confronted the difference imposed by that challenging change of state from daughter/sister to wife.

Dickinson’s own ambivalence toward marriage—an ambivalence so common as to be ubiquitous in the journals of young women—was clearly grounded in her perception of what the role of “wife” required. From her own housework as dutiful daughter, she had seen how secondary her own work became. In her observation of married women, her mother not excluded, she saw the failing health, the unmet demands, the absenting of self that was part of the husband-wife relationship. The “wife” poems of the 1860s reflect this ambivalence. 

At the same time that Dickinson was celebrating friendship, she was also limiting the amount of daily time she spent with other people. By 1858, when she solicited a visit from her cousin Louise Norcross, Dickinson reminded Norcross that she was “one of the ones from whom I do not run away.” Much, and in all likelihood too much, has been made of Dickinson’s decision to restrict her visits with other people. She has been termed “recluse” and “hermit.” Both terms sensationalize a decision that has come to be seen as eminently practical. As Dickinson’s experience taught her, household duties were anathema to other activities. The visiting alone was so time-consuming as to be prohibitive in itself. As she turned her attention to writing, she gradually eased out of the countless rounds of social calls. Sometime in 1858 she began organizing her poems into distinct groupings. These “fascicles,” as Mabel Loomis Todd, Dickinson’s first editor, termed them, comprised fair copies of the poems, several written on a page, the pages sewn together. By 1860 Dickinson had written more than 150 poems. 

By the late 1850s the poems as well as the letters begin to speak with their own distinct voice. They shift from the early lush language of the 1850s valentines to their signature economy of expression. The poems dated to 1858 already carry the familiar metric pattern of the hymn. The alternating four-beat/three-beat lines are marked by a brevity in turn reinforced by Dickinson’s syntax. Her poems followed both the cadence and the rhythm of the hymn form she adopted. This form was fertile ground for her poetic exploration. Through its faithful predictability, she could play content off against form. While certain lines accord with their place in the hymn—either leading the reader to the next line or drawing a thought to its conclusion—the poems are as likely to upend the structure so that the expected moment of cadence includes the words that speak the greatest ambiguity. 

The late 1850s marked the beginning of Dickinson’s greatest poetic period. By 1865 she had written nearly 1,100 poems. Bounded on one side by Austin and Susan Dickinson’s marriage and on the other by severe difficulty with her eyesight, the years between held an explosion of expression in both poems and letters. Her own stated ambitions are cryptic and contradictory. Later critics have read the epistolary comments about her own “wickedness” as a tacit acknowledgment of her poetic ambition. In contrast to joining the church, she joined the ranks of the writers, a potentially suspect group. If she aspired toward Pope or Shakespeare, she crossed into the ranks of the “libertine.” Dickinson’s poems themselves suggest she made no such distinctions—she blended the form of Watts with the content of Shakespeare. She described personae of her poems as disobedient children and youthful “debauchees.”

The only evidence is the few poems published in the 1850s and 1860s and a single poem published in the 1870s. This minimal publication, however, was not a retreat to a completely private expression. Her poems circulated widely among her friends, and this audience was part and parcel of women’s literary culture in the 19th century. She sent poems to nearly all her correspondents; they in turn may well have read those poems with their friends. Dickinson’s poems were rarely restricted to her eyes alone. She continued to collect her poems into distinct packets. The practice has been seen as her own trope on domestic work: she sewed the pages together. 

Dickinson’s comments on herself as poet invariably implied a widespread audience. As she commented to Higginson in 1862, “My Business is Circumference.” She adapted that phrase to two other endings, both of which reinforced the expansiveness she envisioned for her work. To the Hollands she wrote, “My business is to love. … My Business is to Sing.” In all versions of that phrase, the guiding image evokes boundlessness. In song the sound of the voice extends across space, and the ear cannot accurately measure its dissipating tones. Love is idealized as a condition without end. Even the “circumference”—the image that Dickinson returned to many times in her poetry—is a boundary that suggests boundlessness. As Emerson’s essay “Circles” may well have taught Dickinson, another circle can always be drawn around any circumference. When, in Dickinson’s terms, individuals go “out upon Circumference,” they stand on the edge of an unbounded space. 

In her poetry Dickinson set herself the double-edged task of definition. Her poems frequently identify themselves as definitions: “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” “Renunciation—is a piercing Virtue,” “Remorse—is Memory—awake,” or “Eden is that old fashioned House.” As these examples illustrate, Dickinsonian definition is inseparable from metaphor. In the world of her poetry, definition proceeds via comparison. One cannot say directly what is; essence remains unnamed and unnameable. In its place the poet articulates connections created out of correspondence. In some cases the abstract noun is matched with a concrete object—hope figures as a bird, its appearances and disappearances signaled by the defining element of flight. In other cases, one abstract concept is connected with another, remorse described as wakeful memory; renunciation, as the “piercing virtue.”

While the emphasis on the outer limits of emotion may well be the most familiar form of the Dickinsonian extreme, it is not the only one. Dickinson’s use of synecdoche is yet another version. The part that is taken for the whole functions by way of contrast. The specific detail speaks for the thing itself, but in its speaking, it reminds the reader of the difference between the minute particular and what it represents. 

Emily Dickinson died in Amherst in 1886. After her death her family members found her hand-sewn books, or “fascicles.” These fascicles contained nearly 1,800 poems. Though Mabel Loomis Todd and Higginson published the first selection of her poems in 1890, a complete volume did not appear until 1955. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson, the poems still bore the editorial hand of Todd and Higginson. It was not until R.W. Franklin’s version of Dickinson’s poems appeared in 1998 that her order, unusual punctuation and spelling choices were completely restored.

Because Emily Dickinson titled few of her poems, they are generally known by their first lines or by numbers assigned to them by editors. Franklin, like his predecessor Thomas Johnson, arranged Dickinson's poems chronologically and then assigned each one a number.

EXPLORATION

Just one big exploration this week: Read the comments below from participants at The Ikeda Center for Peace, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which hosts dialogues on the power of poetry to reconnect a divided world. Then consider if/how the poetic spirit expresses in your life. Remember please – you don’t have to be a versifier to say something worthwhile in your response.

Ikeda Center Founder Daisaku Ikeda: “The poetic spirit can be found in any human endeavor. … When the spirit of poetry lives within us, … we intuit the unfathomable bonds that link us to the world” (The Wisdom for Creating Happiness and Peace, vol. 3, p. 321).

Sarah Wider—who co-authored with Ikeda The Art of True Relations: Conversations on the Poetic Heart of Human Possibility—said that Ikeda’s poetic spirit communicates “a sense that there is this energy that’s connecting us … that the air and earth itself, and the sky, this profound planet that we live on, is always feeding us with amazing energy.”

For Valentina Frasisti, the poetic spirit means “when I feel powerless and desperate,” I can “make space for new words, new perspectives, and start working not against my struggles but with them, as if they were the words of the poem I can write today.”