Today is a day for giving thanks. Rather than burden you with much prose, I propose to share with you some of the delights to be found in the rather large box that is the one thousand, seven hundred and eighty-nine poems identified by R. W. Franklin as The poems of Emily Dickinson.[i] These I have thrilled in encountering as I have been puzzling out Dickinson. You may know some of them already — in which case, enjoy them again. The dates of composition are Franklin’s, and he includes 104 poems which he has not dated — or had not in 1999. The first poem I offer he dated to 1863, one of her most productive years:
My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –
In Corners – till a Day
The Owner passed – identified –
And carried Me away –
And now We roam in Sovreign Woods –
And now We hunt the Doe –
And every time I speak for Him
The Mountains straight reply –
And do I smile, such cordial light
Opon the Valley glow –
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through –
And when at Night – Our good Day done –
I guard My Master’s Head –
’Tis better than the Eider Duck’s
Deep Pillow – to have shared –
To foe of His – I’m deadly foe –
None stir the second time –
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye –
Or an emphatic Thumb –
Though I than He – may longer live
He longer must – than I –
For I have but the power to kill,
Without – the power to die –[ii]
It’s hard to know what to make of this poem — there’s a very complex play of emotions here, one fitting for Lyndall Gordon’s use of the poem. Gordon derives from it the title of her investigation into the family rift caused by Emily’s brother Austin’s adulterous affair with Mabel Loomis Todd. Begun 26 years after Austin married Emily’s dear friend Susan Gilbert, the affair split the family.[iii] It resulted in the mess of copyrights I waded through in that post, and in the scattering of what should have been gathered. Susan knew Dickinson’s poetry, for Emily had shared much of it with her. Here the last dated poem in Franklin’s edition seems appropriate; it is one of but two he dates to 1886, the year of her death:
Of Glory not a Beam is left
But her Eternal House –
The Asterisk is for the Dead,
The Living, for the Stars –[iv]
The play on “beam” is so typical of Dickinson that the inversion of the last two lines, and the play on asterisk and star, might be overlooked. As might the poem just before this one, number 1684:
The immortality she gave
We borrowed at her Grave –
For just one Plaudit famishing,
The Might of Human Love –[v]
This poem seems more incomplete than its successor, although both could be stanzas in a larger poem. They share an air of incompletion with this undated poem, about the imagery of which I will have somewhat to say:
In Winter in my Room
I came upon a Worm
Pink lank and warm
But as he was a worm
And worms presume
Not quite with him at home
Secured him by a string
To something neighboring
And went along –
A Trifle afterward
A thing occurred
I’d not believe it if I heard
But state with creeping blood
A snake with mottles rare
Surveyed my chamber floor
In feature as the worm before
But ringed with power
The very string with which
I tied him – too
When he was mean and new
That string was there –
I shrank – “How fair you are”!
Propitiation’s Claw –
“Afraid he hissed
Of me”?
“No Cordiality” –
He fathomed me –
Then to a Rhythm Slim
Secreted in his Form
As Patterns swim
Projected him.
That time I flew
Both eyes his way
Lest he pursue
Nor ever ceased to run
Till in a distant Town
Towns on from mine
I set me down
This was a dream –[vi]
I’m going to let a poem a little further on comment on the imagery. After typing it in, I’ve concluded that this is a poem I wish Dickinson had punctuated more. For example, the line “But state with creeping blood” would be a little easier to read as “But state – with Creeping Blood -”; or “Not quite with him at home” would trip my tongue less as “Not quite – with Him – at Home.”
I would not presume to add punctuation, as Todd and Higginson did. There is too much in that poem to discover, and each reader should discover it for himself. In this next poem, there is, it seems to me, a far less cryptic consideration, though still clearly in Dickinson’s voice:
A word made Flesh is seldom
And tremblingly partook
Nor then perhaps reported
But have I not mistook
Each one of us has tasted
With ecstasies of stealth
The very food debated
To our specific strength –
A word that breathes distinctly
Has not the power to die
Cohesive as the Spirit
It may expire if He –
“Made Flesh and dwelt among us”
Could condescension be
Like this consent of Language
This loved Philology[vii]
Dickinson’s “loved Philology” is beloved the world over, and we should be grateful that we have it at all. If we didn’t, we couldn’t invent it. This final poem (for today) should stand as a warning, however:
Sweet is the swamp with it’s secrets,
Until we meet a snake;
’Tis then we sigh for houses,
And our departure take
At that enthralling gallop
That only childhood knows.
A snake is nature’s treason,
And awe is where it goes.
Dickinson is somewhat ambivalent about snakes (I refer you to “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” with which I began these posts on Dickinson), expressing both fear and delight. So if I refer to both parties in the publication as snakes, perhaps it will not be wholly lost on you that I am grateful that someone cared enough to publish Dickinson. Alfred Habegger ends his biography of her this way:
When Austin and Vinnie [ED’s younger sister] died in 1895 and 1899, the two deadly rivals and their daughters — Sue and Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Mabel and Millicent Todd Bingham — ended up with large quantities of manuscripts, which were brought out in a series of publications extending past the middle of the twentieth century. Bianchi had the more stifling effect on publication and interpretation, but Todd and Bingham also did their part to manage the legacy. The consequences of the poet’s refusal to disseminate her work in a faithful and orderly fashion are still very much with us.
Something with an unheard-of brilliance and purity had come to an end, and something public, derivative and dependent on a world of stumbling readers had begun. We may suspect the poet would have seen her lasting fame as a contemptible substitute for the limitlessness and perfection she had spent her life thinking about. But it doesn’t look as if we are going to find out.[viii]
Whether this judgment is hyperbolical or merely bolical will be the subject of my next post. But hold on, I hear you say: didn’t you promise in your last post that you wanted “to explore Dickinson’s relation to grammar to a far greater extent in my next post”? When do we get to the grammar?
Your turn.
__________
[i] The poems of Emily Dickinson / edited by R.W. Franklin. — Reading ed. — Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.
[ii] Ibid., pp. 341-2, number 764.
[iii] I am just now beginning to read this account, Lives like loaded guns : Emily Dickinson and her family’s feuds / Lyndall Gordon. – New York : Viking, 2010, which is one reason for my resorting to poems in this post.
[iv] Op. cit., p. 607, number 1685.
[v] Ibid., number 1684.
[vi] Ibid., p. 623, number 1742.
[vii] Ibid., p. 616, number 1715.
[viii] My wars are laid away in books : the life of Emily Dickinson / Alfred Habegger. — New York : Random House, c2001, pp. 628-9.