I was remotely acquainted with Emily Dickinson before reading for this assignment. I had to memorize “I never saw a moor” in fourth grade, and I met up with her poetry in various other classes.
As a child, her poetry did not exactly thrill me. I find her punctuation to be distracting. It is a minor point, but for someone who is even mildly dyslexic, the abundance of em dashes play merry havoc with the reading process, which may explain why I spent over two hours reading a 60 page assignment. By slowing down to take in the actual poem, without litching up my swetters or reading of “A made not road by man,” I actually connected with the material.
I found much to enjoy, admire, and contemplate in reading Emily Dickinson. In particular, her imagination, her sense of longing, and her clear expressions of suffering resonated with me. What I know about Emily Dickinson’s personal life could fit comfortably into a thimble with plenty of room to spare, but I suspect that she lived through some fairly intense experiences.
Hints of these difficulties can be seen in such poems as “They say that time assuages” and “Pain has an Element of Blank.” In the first, Dickinson observes that,
“Time is a test of trouble,
But not a Remedy.”
Dickinson is quick to acknowledge the gain achieved through the combined agency of time and suffering, saying that,
“An actual suffering strengthens,
As sinews do, with age,”
but she is wary of the popular adage that “Time heals all wounds.” Instead, she puts forward the theory that if time heals, the wound was imagined.
In some ways this can seem over the top, but it also expresses a very real emotion present in times of distress.
A similar belief is more realistically expressed in “Pain has an Element of Blank.” Instead of exclaiming that time cannot assuage pain, Dickinson separates herself from the situation and expresses a more moderate opinion.
“Pain—has an Element of Blank—
It cannot recollect
When it began—or if there were
A time when it was not—”
In this second example, Dickinson just as clearly defines the feelings of someone suffering intensely, but she expresses them as feelings experienced within the period of suffering. While we suffer, while we struggle in a time of intense pain, it is difficult to remember a time before or imagine a time after the pain. But Dickinson also shows that these feelings are not eternal, they are a product of the suffering itself.
Emily Dickinson’s writing is not confined to the time in which she lived. Her common themes of death and suffering are valid today. Many of her poems express her longing for something beyond humanity and life on earth. Several poems also affirm a belief in God’s final judgment and a life after death.
In “Because I could not stop for death,” Dickinson portrays Death as a suitor escorting her on a carriage ride:
“The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.”
In the end, Dickinson sees death as leading ultimately to an afterlife:
“I first surmised the horses’s heads
Were to Eternity.”
In this and other poems dealing with a similar topic, Dickinson presents an interesting, personal view of death and eternity.
Emily Dickinson wrote passionately about her opinions of death, suffering, and human existence after death. For me, her poetry conveys a longing for something beyond the short life of a human on earth. I find the honesty and imagination expressed in her poetry compelling. Though I cannot understand all of her poetry, it is likely that I will continue to explore her perspective, through both her personal life and her poetry. I might even have to buy a bigger thimble.
As I mentioned on Dave's blog, poetry in general is tough for us today because it requires us to slow down in ways we're not used to. ED's poems are deceptive because of their simple meter and rhyme scheme, but reading slowly and rereading usually reveals strange things happening.
ReplyDeleteI found it curious to think of her "longing" for something beyond life as opposed, perhaps, to imaginatively playing and flirting with death as a way to make something so pervasive less scary. It'd be interesting to flesh out that idea.
Kelley, I agree that the em dashes are used over abundantly and can be pretty distracting.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that Dickinson has a lot of good elements to her poetry. Before reading this and after having just a slight preview of her work in high school, I was not looking forward to reading what I thought was going to be depressing poetry. I found however that like you said, she relays emotions that we can relate to and that makes it much easier to read. Although they are about death and suffering, I found that the ways she looked at both things were intriguing.
I love the way she uses punctuation myself. The structure and the layout of the text immediately shows it to be a poem, and the scheme and rhythm fit perfectly if you read line by line - but the moment you focus on the punctuation then the same lines will read like a conversation. I think it was really ingenious of her, it provides several equally edifying ways in which a poem can be read.
ReplyDeleteIt does leave me curious though as to how much of that punctuation was included by editors for the sake of turning prose into poetry like Prof.F mentioned in class today.
I am a big of unconventional but controlled uses of form, punctuation, and grammer in poetry (or occasionally prose, which may be more honest to the original form of these words?), so that aspect of Dickinson's work was a lot of fun for me. But it took me a while before I began to see something that resembled a cohesive picture of the personality of the author.
ReplyDeleteI found what you wrote here and what you said in class on Tuesday very helpful. Just because someone is addressing the issue of death does not mean they are necessarily morbid. I also like that throughout these poems we can see glimpses of differing and changing opinions, but that does present us with some unique challenges in understanding her work. I wonder if there are any poems not in this collection that would contradict the sort of image we have of her from this one short volume...
I agree with you Jake and Kelley, just because there is a discussion of death does not make it inherently morbid. Touching on the longing for death in a non-morbid way: this is actually a theme throughout some Christian Contemporary music. I can think of several songs that talk about being "homesick" and just wanting to go to heaven to be with love ones or with God. Obviously in order to go to heaven one must die. It is these times when we desire our real home in heaven more than the life we have on earth that longing for death can actually be a form of worship. However, is this what Dickinson had meant? Possibly, but I would guess not entirely. Yet, that does not mean it is something that cannot be pulled from the text and used for our edification.
ReplyDeleteSorry, I guess I should clarify! Though I initially found it very distracting, I finished by appreciating Dickinson’s punctuation because it helped me to slow down and thoroughly read the poems.
ReplyDeleteI do see the playfulness towards death, and I understand that part of Dickinson’s attitude. “Laughing at the dark” is a common theme in plenty of other great works of literature.
However, I also see her attitude as longing in several other poems. In “So proud she was to die,” Dickinson expresses a brief flicker of envy towards a woman she observes who is secure and serene as she approaches death. In other poems she describes herself as “twice lost” and often on the outside of things, longing to reach something she cannot have. This is especially obvious in the poem where she states, “Heaven is what I cannot reach.” I suppose (surprisingly enough!) that I have interpreted this differently than most. In class it seemed to me that people found this depressing and wrong, but I think Dickinson is exactly right. She can’t reach heaven, and neither can we. We are unable to reach the “apple” through our own striving. Christ alone makes it possible for us to go to heaven. So I see her awareness of the fallen state of man, combined with her musings on death and heaven, as an expression of desire for the sanctification and redemption that Christians experience in death.
Some of these latter comments really get after my own growing interest in the ED's relationship to doctrines of heaven and hell. Cyndi's final thought on "edification" may be another approach to this. What do we mean by "edification"? Just that something confirms what we already think and feel, or what we want to think and feel? The word means "building up" (as in "edifice"). But sometimes you need to tear down or out to build up. Literature, I believe, is great not when it makes us feel better but when it makes us feel more alive.
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