Today is a day for looking back. When I look back to my last post, I see that it ended with these words: “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?” So when I look back to that post, from October 2015, I find myself saying “I want to explore Dickinson’s relation to grammar to a far greater extent in my next post, and I have pretty much done with Higginson and Todd.”
Well, at least I have pretty much done with Higginson and Todd. Half of my mission accomplished.
But my observation in that October post that Dickinson’s grammar was much more subtle than Higginson’s (and/or Todd’s) — well, I was prescient. As I was preparing for this post, I was directed by Amazon to the product information of an interesting book subtitled A Poet’s Grammar[i] (I say “directed,” by which I mean, of course, that some algorithm had been alerted by my previous posts to my interest in buying books about Dickinson, and pushed this one to the forefront[ii].) My copy of the book has not arrived yet, but I can share with you some idea of its scope and breadth by quoting part of the blurb for the book from Amazon:[iii]
In this inventive work on Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Cristanne Miller traces the roots of Dickinson’s unusual, compressed, ungrammatical, and richly ambiguous style, finding them in sources as different as the New Testament and the daily patterns of women’s speech[iv].
We have seen several times how Dickinson borrows from and comments on the New Testament; I’m not quite sure how Miller determines “the daily patterns of women’s speech,” unless she posits that they are unchanged from Dickinson’s day on into 1987, the year Miller published her study.[v] That’s a period of over 100 years. But the blurber soon clarifies Miller’s meaning:
Dickinson writes as she does both because she is steeped in the great patriarchal texts of her culture, from the Bible and hymns to Herbert’s poetry and Emerson’s prose, and because she is conscious of writing as a woman in an age and culture that assume great and serious poets are male.[vi]
Okay, so far I can agree with the observation, and with the conclusion that “she is conscious of writing as a woman.” I’m not sure I agree that hers was “an age and culture that assume great and serious poets are male” so much as that it was an age in which most editors, like T. W. Higginson, were male — and great and serious poets were far less common than small and trivial poets, who were the ones, like Edgar A. Guest, who got into print all the time — or like Walt Whitman, who was observed to be small and trivial and had to self-publish. Dickinson most likely knew of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s work, which stood out as much for its quality as for the singularity of its author being female. But if we grant the accuracy of the blurber’s assessment — and for all I now know, the blurb is from the book’s jacket — that lends some credence to his or her next observation:
Miller observes that Dickinson’s language deviates from normal construction along definable and consistent lines; consequently it lends itself to the categorical analysis of an interpretive “grammar” such as the one she has constructed in this book.
I would argue, without having read Miller’s book, that this language of Dickinson might be an idiolect, rather than an interpretive grammar. And at this point, I should present an example from Dickinson of what I mean when I talk of “Dickinson’s relation to grammar.” So here is number 762, from R. W. Franklin’s edition of Dickinson’s poems[vii]:
Promise This – When You be Dying –
Some shall summon Me –
Mine belong Your latest Sighing –
Mine – to Belt Your Eye –
Not with Coins – though they be Minted
From An Emperor’s Hand –
Be my Lips – the only Buckle
Your low Eyes – demand –
Mine to stay – when all have wandered –
To devise once more
If the Life be too surrendered –
Life of Mine – restore –
Poured like this – My Whole Libation –
Just that You should see
Bliss of Death – Life’s Bliss extol thro’
Imitating You –
Mine – to guard Your Narrow Precinct –
To seduce the Sun
Longest on Your South, to linger,
Largest Dews of Morn
To demand, in Your low favor –
Lest the Jealous Grass
Greener lean – Or fonder cluster
Round some other face –
Mine to supplicate Madonna –
If Madonna be
Could behold so far a Creature –
Christ – omitted – Me –
Just to follow Your dear feature –
Ne’er so far behind –
For My Heaven –
Had I not been
Most enough – denied?
In this poem, dated by Franklin from 1863, note how Dickinson wrenches grammar. “Promise This – When You be Dying – Some shall summon Me –” is grammatical enough, even to the point of employing the subjunctive “be” for an event in the future. But in the next line, “Mine belong Your latest Sighing –” I would expect either “To me belongs your latest sighing” or “Mine shall be your latest sighing” — latest sighing to be being the equivalent of “last breath.” But Dickinson conflates the two expected idioms by replacing the future “shall be” with the present plural “belong” — and then compounds that with “Mine – to Belt Your Eye –”, in which the verb belong is replaced with a dash, then the odd infinitive “to Belt.”
That is not an assertion of a right to commit domestic violence; the verb seems to be used in the sense of “A bandage or band used by surgeons for various purposes,” the third definition in Webster’s American dictionary of 1828.[viii] That is, of course, clarified by the next stanza, with the image of coins closing the eyes of the dead being replaced by the speaker’s lips as the buckle that closes the eyelids.
Notice, in the third stanza, how the subject appears to shift from the life of the dying to the life of the living: “Mine to stay – when all have wandered – To devise once more If the Life be too surrendered – Life of Mine – restore –” The speaker seems to be asking that the life surrendered by the dying person be used to restore her or his life.
To return to the blurb of Cristanne Miller’s book, I think I detect a different meaning employed for the word “grammar”:
In order to facilitate the reading of Dickinson’s poems and to reveal the values and assumptions behind the poet’s manipulations of language, Miller examines in this grammar how specific elements of the poet’s style tend to function in various contexts. Because many, especially modernist, poets use some of the same techniques, the grammar throws light on the poetic syntax of other writers as well.[ix]
But it is in the second sentence of this paragraph that my justification for inserting it appears. For the next step from Dickinson is not to her contemporaries Hardy, as a traditionalist, or Hopkins, as an experimenter with the tradition, but to the American poets Pound, Eliot and Frost, who all seem to have benefited from the Wrenching of Dickinson’s Manipulations of language. This may seem a bit out of keeping with what we have been observing in Dickinson, and I may not end my observations any too soon, because the remaining element of Miller’s analysis, according to the blurbist, is this:
In the course of her analysis, Miller draws not only on traditional historical and linguistic sources but also on current sociolinguistic studies of gender and speech and on feminist descriptions of women’s writing. Dickinson’s language, she concludes, could almost have been designed as a model for twentieth-century theories of what a women’s language might be.[x]
I had never considered Dickinson’s language to be a model “for twentieth-century theories of what a women’s language might be.” I have always considered my English to be my wife’s English, and the language of the Priesthood to be the language of the Relief Society. Now it seems I am far too naïve, so I will leave the last word to Dickinson (in number 768):
The Mountains – grow unnoticed –
Their Purple figures rise
Without attempt – Exhaustion –
Assistance – or Applause –
In Their Eternal Faces
The Sun – with just delight
Looks long – and last – and golden –
For fellowship – at night –
But hold on, I hear you saying: are you sure you won’t be popping back in to have the last word?
Your turn.
____________________
[i] Emily Dickinson : A Poet’s Grammar / Cristanne Miller. – Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1987.
[ii] — and of course Amazon does not have a spider crawling the web looking for bloggers who might need certain books; I don’t believe that for a second.
[iii] In so doing, I shall try not to violate the copyright of the blurbist (or is it blurber?) If I do not succeed, suspect me of copyleft, not of copywrong.
[iv] You can find the blurb of the book on Amazon at this URL, which I accessed on 31 December 2015.: http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/0674250362?keywords=grammar%20emily&qid=1451603099&ref_=sr_1_5&s=books&sr=1-5,
[v] That’s the substance of endnote i.
[vi] Op. cit.
[vii] The poems of Emily Dickinson / edited by R.W. Franklin. — Reading ed. — Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 340-341.
[viii] An American dictionary of the English language / by Noah Webster. — New York ; London : Johnson Reprint, 1970.
[ix] Op. cit.
[x] Ibid.
It will be interesting to see what you think of Miller’s argument once you’ve read the book.
For those of us with less familiarity with Dickinson’s prose, there would I think be value if you could describe what you see as typical patterns in Dickinson’s wrenching of grammar. You may have already started to do so here, of course; but it’s not entirely clear, since this seems to be more an interpretation of a specific poem, described only partially in what I think of as grammatical terms.
I am working on that, looking at Dickinson’s letters — but since they suffer from the same wrenching of grammar and eccentric punctuation as the poems, I may not be able to determine it before I read Miller’s study.
One of the things Dickinson does, fairly often, is collapse syntax and rely on context to provide what is elided — with the letters, that means that she is relying on her correspondent to know the context.
There’s a reason for two variorum editions within 40 years, a facsimile edition of the extant poetry mss., and 3 volumes of letters. And don’t forget that volume of _New Poems of Emily Dickinson_, edited out of her letters in 1993 by William Shurr, Anna Dunlap and Emily Grey Shurr. So I will try to provide that context of the prose versus the poetry, but it might prove nigh impossible.