More than even Whitman, Dickinson killed the line of verse in poetry.
But it was dying. And, as I hope I have shown, even more than that mercy killing, the strongest influence Dickinson has had on succeeding generations of poets shows in her practice of extreme compression, in her willingness to pare away most of the syntax of her sentences. She is able to do that by keeping to fairly strict meters. “Basically” writes Thomas H. Johnson “all her poems employ meters derived from English hymnology.”[i] Here is one of them, one of the ten published in her lifetime (the 5th, in fact):
Blazing in Gold – and
Quenching – in Purple!
Leaping – like Leopards to the sky –
Then – at the feet of the old Horizon –
Laying its spotted face – to die!
Stooping as low as the kitchen window –
Touching the Roof –
And tinting the Barn –
Kissing its Bonnet to the Meadow –
And the juggler of Day – is gone![ii]
[First published in Drum Beat, Brooklyn, NY (February 29, 1864)]
Johnson continues his analysis thus: her meters “are usually iambic or trochaic, but occasionally dactylic.”[iii] As a reminder, here are the stress patterns in English corresponding to those meters, and a few others, in four-stress lines:
Iambic: da DUM | da DUM | da DUM | da DUM
Trochaic: DUM da | DUM da | DUM da | DUM da
Dactylic: DUM da da | DUM da da | DUM da da | DUM da da
Anapestic: da da DUM | da da DUM | da da DUM | da da DUM
Cretic foot[iv]: DUM da DUM
Spondee[v]: DUM DUM
Before we continue, a word of caution: these putative English meters are drawn from Greek and Latin prosody. As Wikipedia notes, “In classical meter spondees are easily identified because the distinction between long and short syllables is unambiguous. In English meter indisputable examples are harder to find because metrical feet are identified by stress, and stress is a matter of interpretation.”[vi] I have noted this before, but in Dickinson’s case it is worth repeating: “stress is a matter of interpretation.”
Lest you wonder whether Dickinson could have known anything about such matters, Johnson lays out his reasons for concluding that she knew them: “They were the metric forms familiar to her from childhood as the measures in which Watts’s hymns were composed. Copies of Watts’s Christian Psalmody or his collection of The Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs were fixtures in every New England household. Both were owned by Edward Dickinson,”[vii] Emily’s father.
This was not a passing familiarity, Johnson believes. Before continuing with his analysis, let’s see how the poem above complies with his statement that her meters “are usually iambic or trochaic”, using italics to indicate stressed syllables:
Blazing in Gold – and {dactyl, followed by trochee}
Quenching – in Purple! {dactyl, followed by trochee}
Leaping – like Leopards to the sky – {dactyl, followed by trochee, then a cretic foot}
Then – at the feet of the old Horizon – {dactyl, followed by dactyl, followed by two trochees}
Laying its spotted face – to die! {dactyl, followed by trochee, then a cretic foot}
Stooping as low as the kitchen window – {dactyl, followed by two trochees}
Touching the Roof – {trochee, followed by iamb}
And tinting the Barn – {iamb, followed by anapest}
Kissing its Bonnet to the Meadow – {dactyl, followed by three trochees}
And the juggler of Day – is gone! {two anapests, followed by an iamb}
Now I realize that it is difficult to parse these feet — in fact I had to drag in the cretic foot to do the job. That is my point, with apologies to Johnson. He devotes four pages to Dickinson’s “professional interest” in poetic techniques, and makes a convincing case that “she did not have to step outside her father’s library to receive a beginner’s lesson in metrics” from Watts’s books. But to me, he is so ensconced in the mid-century aesthetic of his time that he is trying to fit Dickinson’s feet into glass slippers.
“Blazing in Gold” was the first of three poems published in Drum Beat, which “was a fund-raising publication for the Union army, edited by a friend of the Dickinson family”[viii] — and I have ambivalent feelings about poems being sold to raise funds for an army — and seems like later Dickinson. The second poem to appear in Drum Beat was this one, and it seems far gentler, if not more genteel:
Flowers – Well – if anybody
Can the extasy define –
Half a transport – half a trouble –
With which flowers humble men:
Anybody find the fountain
From which floods so contra flow –
I will give him all the Daisies
Which upon the hillside blow.
Too much pathos in their faces
For a simple breast like mine –
Butterflies from St Domingo
Cruising round the purple line –
Have a system of aesthetics –
Far superior to mine.[ix]
[First published in Drum Beat, Brooklyn, NY (March 2, 1864); reprinted in the Springfield Daily Republican (9 March 1864), Springfield Weekly Republican (12 March 1864) and the Boston Post (16 March 1864).]
I leave it to you to scan the poem, should you so desire; to me, it seems far more regular than its predecessor, which I would venture to guess is why it was reprinted so much. It exemplifies Johnson’s conclusion that “It is significant that every poem she composed before 1861 — during the years she was learning her craft — is fashioned in one or another of the hymn meters,” this one being the trochaic Eights and Sevens. Miller dates it to 1859.
The third of her poems to be published in Drum Beat appears to be in Common Particular Meter (with syllable counts of 8, 8, 6) in a three-line stanza. Miller dates it to 1859 as well, to late 1859 in fact. Unlike the first two, you will probably recognize this one:
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 –
Thy consecrated bread to take
And thine immortal wine![x]
[First published in Drum Beat, Brooklyn, NY (March 11, 1864).] I discussed this poem in my post number 56, in the context of the publication of Dickinson’s poems by other people. Here it seems appropriate in the company of the next of her poems to be published, on the next day in fact:
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.
[First published in Round Table, New York (March 12, 1864).] I like the juxtaposition of the two poems appearing on successive days, and even more the religious imagery appearing in the imagery of the out-of-doors. But even more than that, I like what Dickinson is doing with rhyme here. Now is the time to return to my earlier assertion that, more than even Whitman, Dickinson killed the line of verse in poetry. Notice how, in the next few sentences, Johnson ties himself in knots trying to square her use of rhyme with his categories:
Custom decreed exact patterns and exact rhymes in English poetry, with concessions to a spare use of eye rhymes (come–home). Her grounding in French and in classical literature, however elementary or imperfect, must have assured her that English custom had no preëmptive sanction. She enormously extended the range of variation within controlled limits by adding to exact and eye rhymes four types that poets writing in English had never learned to use expertly enough to gain for them a general acceptance: identical rhymes (move–remove), vowel rhymes (see–buy) imperfect rhymes [identical vowels followed by different consonants] (time–thine), and suspended rhyme [different vowels followed by identical consonants] (thing–along). These rhymes she selected at will, singly or in combination, and she carried her freedom to the utmost limit by feeling no compulsion to use one rhyming pattern in a poem any more than she felt constrained to use a single metric form. Thus in a poem of three quatrains the rhyme in the first stanza may be exact for the second and fourth lines, suspended in the second stanza for lines three and four, and conclude in the third stanza with imperfect rhymes for the first and fourth lines. The wheel horses of her stanzas are always the final lines, whether the poem is written as a series of quatrains or as a combination of stanza patterns.[xi]
So, besides exact rhymes (pissed–missed), we have eye-rhymes (come–home), identical rhymes (move–remove), vowel rhymes (see–buy), imperfect rhymes, (time–thine), and suspended rhymes (thing–along). Those of you who have suffered this blog in silence may recall that, way back in the dawn of time, I dwelt at length on Welsh verse forms as adumbrated by Rolfe Humphries in his Green armor on green ground. One of the features of Welsh verse is its strictly syllabic nature, and in this it seems more akin to the kind of hymn structures we’ve been looking at here; another is its variations on rhyming, a feature of LDS hymns I commented on. So what Dickinson did was subvert the steady meters and customary rhymes of her contemporaries, especially Longfellow.
I will come back to this matter in my next post, which will possibly be the last one centered on Emily Dickinson, and lead into a series of blogs focused on the 20th century. But hold on, I hear you say: What of those remaining poems published in Dickinson’s lifetime?
Your turn.
[i] Emily Dickinson : an interpretive biography / by Thomas H. Johnson. Cambridge, Mass. : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955; p. 84.
[ii] Emily Dickinson’s poems, as she preserved them / edited by Cristanne Miller. Cambridge, Mass. : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016; pp. 153-4.
[iii] Op. cit., p. 84.
[iv] From the table “Metrical feet” in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spondee, accessed 27 July 2016. Yeah, I’d never heard of it either.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Op. cit.,, pp. 84-5.
[viii] Miller, p. 745, n. 33.
[ix] Ibid., p. 62.
[x] Ibid., pp. 81-2.
[xi] Op. cit.,, p. 87.
In “Blazing in Gold,” third line, my initial impulse is NOT to stress “to.” This leaves us with a dactyl, followed by a trochee, followed by an anapest (rather than a cretic foot). As you say, matters of interpretation.
Basically, it sounds to me like you’re saying that increasingly in her later poetry, Dickinson felt no need for consistency in the elements she used to generate a sense of poetry, so long as she got there in the end. That, plus her compression — and I think a kind of iron insistence that poetry serve the ends of meaning: hence not only her careful word selection but her stripping away of anything that might distract attention from those words. In all this, she reminds me of Hopkins, though the specifics seem different (keeping in mind that I am not expert as an analyst of verse). I don’t know if there’s any evidence that Hopkins read Dickinson (though I know he did read Whitman); for that matter, given that her work was mostly now known until after her death, when do we really start to say that Dickinson started to have an important influence on the course of poetry?
So perhaps it’s not so accurate to say that Dickinson killed the line of verse, at least as far as the general ground of poetry goes (private assassinations aside), as that she was the among the first to arrive at the funeral?