That Emily Girl is Legit

Dave Eisinger offers some musings on Emily Dickinson:

It’s been a while since I’ve read any Dickinson poems—high school, I think. I remember liking her well enough, although she’s no T.S. Eliot or Byron. The piece that I can immediately cite as being hers is the classic “I could not stop for Death.” I was strangely pleased to find it wasn’t included in this first section of our assigned reading.

So, what did I find upon my reintroduction to Emily Dickinson after five years or so? Here’s an unordered list: sentimentalism, whimsy, confusion (on my part), morbidity, humor/playfulness, darkness, and a sense of natural religiosity somewhere between romanticism and transcendentalism…with a looming specter of death, of course.

Dickinson’s style, content, and emotions seem to go all over the place in this collection (the Dover Thrift edition containing 109 selected poems), but on reflection, that’s not so surprising. Granted, the editors chose which poems would go where, but even were that not the case, the variety demonstrates that Dickinson was writing expressively. Over her lifetime she penned between seventeen and eighteen hundred pieces, each of them obviously capturing her thoughts and mood at the time.

This is markedly different from many other poets—since I’ve mentioned Eliot already, consider that his style and tone are generally consistent throughout his works, with only a few exceptions (Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats being the major one, but let’s attribute that to his British-i-zation). Byron is always witty, sarcastic, or Romantically profound. But Dickinson is…well, see the list above.

Her sentimentalism and whimsy is evident in such works as “Wild nights!” (p. 5), “A Day” (p. 11), or “The Letter” (p. 21), with her sense of humor coming to light as well. “Wild nights!” in particular seems like one of those poems that, were it written now, would be met with a response of, “Really? Is this mushy crap all you’ve got?”

The answer, of course, is a solid no—Dickinson has much more to offer. Her darker works are interesting, because when reading them I don’t always realize her shadowy undertones until I’m a good way in. Here’s an example (p. 24):

The heart asks pleasure first,
And then, excuse from pain;
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;

And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor
The liberty to die.

The image that comes to mind here is one of self-destruction, of eagerly pursuing something that eventually leads to a downfall or despair of some type. If you’ll indulge my reference to pop culture, it actually reminds me a bit of Tony Stark in Iron Man 2. But that’s beside the point.

In other places Dickinson is more straightforward in her melancholy: “Heaven is what I cannot reach!”, “In Shadow,” “The Battlefield,” and “There’s been a death in the opposite house” all make for prime examples. The last is particularly poignant, probably because it describes an event that could happen in any time and any place, making it relevant to any reader. It also wonderfully captures the shock and emotional whirlwind of such times, using words like “numb,” “mechanically,” and “stiffly” before she reaches “the dark parade” (p. 16).

This poet is obviously in a different place than the one writing “Wild nights!” In my mind, this is how I know Dickinson is genuine. She wrote for herself, and she meant what she wrote. She wasn’t trying to appeal to a market, woo anyone (*cough* Byron *cough*), contribute to the literary canon, or anything else. Mushy as it is, I can believe that Emily must have been feeling some sort of rapture, thrill, or contentment when she wrote “Wild nights!” And I can believe she was numbed by a neighbor’s death when I read “There’s been a death”, because she writes so freely and without inhibition whether she’s musing on hope or on death.

I should note that at points, Dickinson simply confused me with her rapid-fire metaphors (if that’s what they are). Take these first six lines of “Memorials,” for instance:

Death sets a thing significant
The eye had hurried by,
Except a perished creature
Entreat us tenderly

To ponder little workmanships
In crayon or in wool…

The first three lines? Took me forever to figure them out. The rest of the poem makes sense and deals very nicely with dead people’s last creations. I couldn’t reconcile those lines with the rest of the poem—they seemed so disjointed. Turns out she just had weird syntax and was messing with conjugation, and therefore my mind.

In other poems, she simply throws so many images at me that it’s hard to find much cohesion in them: “I know a place where summer strives,” for example (p. 13). Or maybe it’s just that in reading twenty-five pages of poetry, I didn’t let them simmer for long enough. Appreciation of poetry certainly does require simmering. As a sidenote, she also seems to have a thing for noon—it keeps coming up in poem after poem.

In sum, though, I found my revisiting of Emily Dickinson to be a very enjoyable exercise, and although I wouldn’t put her in my personal book of Greats, she’s definitely an American poet worthy of careful study, simmering reflection, and respect.

Favorite poems thus far: “Hope,” “In The Garden,” “There’s been a death,” “The Battlefield,” “The Wind’s Visit,” and “I died for beauty.”