in verse #61 : they must speak

There are many theories of Emily Dickinson. For a woman who wrote, at latest count, 1789 poems[i] and 1045 letters,[ii] she remains a riddle wrapped in an enigma and shrouded in mystery. Though it might seem a cheap theft by a desperate blogger approaching deadline, the political allusion is apt: in her book Emily Dickinson : a poet’s grammar, Cristanne Miller argues that Dickinson’s whole world is present in her poems. Miller presents a cogent argument for deep reading of these poems, and offers an appropriate warning of what we should expect: “The poet’s metaphors and extended analogies, her peculiar brevity, lack of normal punctuation, irregular manipulation of grammar, syntax, and word combination all invite multiple, non-referential interpretations of what she means.” [iii] Her poems, Miller urges, cannot be understood as purely verbal acts.

“Non-referential” is the operative word here. Miller argues that you cannot interpret one of Dickinson’s poems without reference to the matrix in which it grew, and that includes an understanding of “the poet’s life and the language theories and practice available to her.”[iv] You might argue that this is true of any great poet. It is certainly true of Milton: if you don’t understand Milton’s political work as a Puritan, and his linguistic virtuosity in languages living and dead, and the peril he faced when Charles II came to the throne, you miss much of the richness of Paradise Lost. It is certainly true of Shakespeare: if you don’t understand the politics around Devereux and the Irish wars, if you can’t compare Shakespeare to his contemporaries, you have an impoverished view of Hamlet. Miller says that this is no less true of Dickinson. She is thought of as an introverted eccentric, a hothouse flower with no thought for the issues of the day. Miller says this is thin gruel to cook up from Dickinson. “This book” she says “follows the act of interpretation from unrestricted play with language to play within the overlapping and clarifying spheres of interpretive linguistic, structural, historical, and biographical analysis.”[v] To give you an idea of why such extensive exegesis is necessary, this is the poem Miller uses to introduce her method:

Essential Oils – are wrung –
The Attar from the Rose
Be not expressed by Suns – alone –
It is the gift of screws –

The General Rose – decay –
But this – in Lady’s Drawer
Make Summer – when the Lady lie
In Ceaseless Rosemary – [vi]

If you read this poem aloud, you will be a little closer to understanding it. But not much. When Miller says, in her lead-in to this poem, “For the syllables and words of her poems to live, they must speak,” [vii] she is writing metaphorically. But you should literally hear the poem speak, to be able to follow her analysis. She begins that multi-variant examination with a simple paraphrase: “Attar (essence of roses) is expressed by ‘Screws,’ that is, a process involving screws, not by natural growth in the sun. The natural or general rose decays, while the rose of perfume outlasts even its maker (or wearer).”[viii] You probably feel that paraphrase is inadequate; but Miller is just getting started.

Before continuing our walk through the poem, I should point out that this poem exemplifies another of Miller’s preliminary assertions. She had suggested something not every reader finds in Dickinson’s best known poems:

One of the primary difficulties for the modern reader of Dickinson’s poetry is to understand this tension between the poet’s partially articulated desire to speak to an audience, to move her reader, and her largely unarticulated decision to write the riddling, elliptical poetry she does. This tension, however, is at the root of the peculiar urgency in Dickinson’s poems. Dickinson writes as she does because of a combination of factors: her belief in the extraordinary power of language, her responses to the language she reads in mid-nineteenth-century America, and her sense of herself as woman and poet.[ix]

If you go back and read the poem again, you may feel the tension a little more. It is generated both by Dickinson’s imagery and by her grammar. First, let’s briefly look at the imagery with Miller: “The pun in express makes it difficult to separate pain (‘Screws’ of experience) from articulate realization (verbal expression); pain and consciousness may be one. The rose or life that lies only in the sun, unexpressed, does not put forth essence.”[x] She goes much more deeply into the literal level of the words of the poem. An example of that:

On the literal level, expressed essence or perfume is the property of women; they wear it. The poem then places this essence “in Lady’s drawer” — where, as sachet, it scents her clothing, and by metonymy her body. Reading “Drawer” as a pun on “drawers” further makes “essence” the Lady’s own, perhaps even the scent or power of her sexuality.[xi]

Then she discusses the grammar of the poem, pointing out that “four of the poem’s verbs are without inflection, that is, unmarked for person, function or tense: Be, decay, Make, and lie” and observes that “this ungrammatical form helps create a sense of timeless essence.”[xii] She ends this part of her analysis by saying that

All of these transformations or disruptions of what is normally expected in language work toward creating multiplicity of meaning and an indeterminate reference, two characteristics that open questions of meaning but frustrate the referential or informative communication most language provides. Like the rose, language is crushed into essence in this poem.[xiii]

She then shows how Dickinson employs a contrast to clarify part of the meaning of the poem: “immortal ‘Attar’ mingles with the scent symbolizing mortality (rosemary was used to scent corpses as well as being a common herb in the kitchen).”[xiv] That is the kind of information one could not bring to the reading of the poem without a fairly wide reading in the history of Dickinson’s culture.

In all, Miller’s analysis of this single short poem runs to 4 pages. She then turns to the letters, telling us that “In letters as well as in poems, Dickinson’s language is densely compressed, metaphorical, disjunctive; syntax is inverted; words are coined and used ungrammatically.”[xv]  So these are not characteristics of Dickinson’s verse; they are, Miller urges, part of her grammar.

That’s the example Miller offers us of how Dickinson’s poetry functions. Why it functions is the essence of the grammar Dickinson constructed for herself, and the subject of the rest of the book. But hold on, I hear you say: is one critic’s analysis really so important to our enjoyment of the poems?

Your turn.

____________________

[i] The poems of Emily Dickinson / edited by R.W. Franklin. — Reading ed. — Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999; p. 635.

[ii] Selected letters / Emily Dickinson; edited by Thomas H. Johnson — Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, p. v.

[iii] Emily Dickinson : A Poet’s Grammar / Cristanne Miller. – Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1987; p. 2.

[iv] Ibid., p. 2.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Poems of Emily Dickinson, p. 345, no. 772 in Franklin, and no. 675 in The poems of Emily Dickinson : including variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts / edited by Thomas H. Johnson. — Cambridge, Massachusetts : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955. This is the source Miller cites, since she was writing before Franklin’s edition was published.

[vii] Op. cit. p. 1.

[viii] Ibid., p. 2.

[ix] Ibid., p. 1.

[x] Ibid., p. 2.-3

[xi] Ibid., p. 4.

[xii] Ibid.

[xiii] Ibid., p. 4-5.

[xiv] Ibid., p. 5.

[xv] Ibid., p. 5.