in verse #62 : “No” is the wildest word

Emily Dickinson’s poetry is deceptive in many ways. One of those ways is its sheer fecundity. There may be 10 poems with which the general reader of poetry is familiar — 10 out of 1789. But the feeling many readers get, once they know “Because I could not stop for Death” or “To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee” or “A narrow Fellow in the Grass,” is that they know Dickinson. Her best poems, in a way, deceive the reader into thinking that he or she can ignore the lesser poems. For this blog, I am going deep into poems I have never encountered, and deeper into poems I felt familiar with. In accepting Cristanne Miller as my expedition leader into the wilds of lower Dickinson, I do not abandon my own sense of the poems. I seek to enhance it.

Miller introduces in her second chapter five poems that she intends to examine in depth. These “sample poems” she intends to subject to “a prolonged analysis” of their language. [i]   They are by no means the only poems she looks at, but she finds them characteristic of Dickinson’s poetic grammar. The first one I introduced in my last post, along with a report on Miller’s exhaustive analysis. It is this:

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 – ^[ii]

This serves to introduce the first quality Miller, in her grammar of Dickinson, examines: compression, which “increases the ambiguity and multiplicity of meaning in a poem,” which also “may convey the impression of withheld power,” and which “may suggest untold profundity. As in the sibyls’ oracles, cryptic revelation seems to hold great meaning.”[iii] This compression is by no means unique to Dickinson, but is rather a primary attribute of her poetry, in a way that is not in the poetry of her contemporaries Emerson, Longfellow and Lowell — and especially not Whitman. It is also her most impressive gift to the next generation of American poets.

So that’s where I was headed with this post. But several pages after Miller ends her first analysis of “Essential Oils”, she quotes a letter from Dickinson to Otis P. Lord. I’d never encountered it before, I had no idea who this Lord was, and I was not content to see it as offering just another example of the kind of compression that so often startles me as I read Dickinson’s poems. It reads: “Dont you know you are happiest while I withhold and not confer – dont you know that ‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to Language?” I couldn’t gainsay that. So despite the restraint and self-sacrifice hinted at in that sentence, I wanted to look at the entire letter. Luckily, I found it in her Selected letters, where that first paragraph is followed immediately by this, also punctuated as a paragraph: “You do, for you know all things – [top of sheet cut off] …”[iv]  I confess I was more intrigued by this mutilation than I was by Dickinson’s testimony that Lord knows all things; Johnson, the editor of my Selected letters, offers no further information on whether Dickinson made the cut.  More on that in a moment.  She continues the epistle thus:

… to lie so near your longing – to touch it as I passed, for I am but a restive sleeper and often should journey from your Arms through the happy night, but you will lift me back, wont you, for only there I ask to be – I say, if I felt the longing nearer – than in our dear past, perhaps I could not resist to bless it, but must, because it would be right
*****The “Stile” is God’s – My Sweet One – for your great sake – not mine – I will not let you cross – but it is all your’s, and when it is right I will lift the Bars, and lay you in the Moss – You showed me the word.
*****I hope it has no different guise when my fingers make it. It is anguish I long conceal from you to let you leave me, hungry, but you ask the divine Crust and that would doom the Bread.[v]

There is no indication that Otis P. Lord ever received the letter, or that Dickinson ever sent it. He was 18 years her elder, and widowed. We have the letters — five in all to Lord — because Austin Dickinson, Emily’s older brother, gave “the letters, and drafts and fragments of letters” to Mabel Loomis Todd (his mistress) after Emily’s death.[vi] The letters suffered the same fate as the poems, and are scattered among six repositories. But this letter shows how carefully Emily phrased her affection for Lord {and no, I don’t know which word he showed her — but if I had to guess, it would be “lay.”} And Cristanne Miller did not quote most of these paragraphs (just that last sentence), but she did end her chapter with a summary that seems to me to describe this letter, or draft of a letter, in terms of Dickinson’s poetry:

Perhaps in attempting to communicate intimately without giving herself away — again both literally and metaphorically — Dickinson has created a language as meaningful and as free of determined meaning as any English can be.[vii]

That statement argues that Dickinson is playing a game with, to her, great stakes. The evidence, since her death, is that many people want in to the game.

Had Dickinson’s influence not been so great, had she truly been a harmless eccentric, we could safely ignore her; I want to know why she has been so influential. That requires, to me, a fluency in her language. Here’s a minor illustration of the way the matter obsesses me. Recall that Franklin’s edition has 1789 poems — and that number, the date of the Constitution coming into force, serves as a perfect objective correlative to my feeling that Dickinson is the most assertively American poet — more so than Whitman. He is more like the Revolution, Dickinson like the implementation of the Constitution. Whitman comes on, not even sure he’s a poet, tearing up the conventions of poetry, publishing a new model — that was the easy part. Building from those scraps an enduring edifice that could sustain the kind of introspection native to Dickinson — that took real labor. The tension between the two methods informs the entirety of American poetry for the 20^th Century.

If I seem to have strayed from my investigation of Dickinson’s verse, it is no worse than she herself does in the following lines (which is Miller’s next “sample poem.”) Because Franklin’s transcript differs from Johnson’s, as printed in Miller’s book, I have made this transcript comply with her text:

He fumbles at your Soul
As Players at the Keys
Before they drop full Music on –
He stuns you by degrees –
Prepares your brittle nature
For the Ethereal Blow
By fainter Hammers – further heard –
Then nearer – Then so slow
Your Breath has time to straighten –
Your Brain – to bubble Cool –
Deals – One – imperial – Thunderbolt –
That scalps your naked soul –

When Winds take Forests in their Paws –
The Universe – is still – ^[viii]

So, I hear you saying, “Where did those last two lines come from? Weren’t we sitting at the pianoforte, exploring yet another extended metaphor? Then Zeus comes storming in, and next thing you know, the winds are pawing the forest.”

I’m going to let you revel in that question, because the deadline is near.  Just read the poem again.

But hold on, I hear you say: didn’t you just sidestep a clichè by not talking about stews and juices?

Your turn.

[i] Emily Dickinson : A Poet’s Grammar / Cristanne Miller. – Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1987; p. 21.

[ii] I use the text from The poems of Emily Dickinson / edited by R.W. Franklin. — Reading ed. — Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999; 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. The latter is the source Cristanne Miller cites, since she was writing before Franklin’s edition was published; she includes Johnson’s variant readings as footnotes; these I omit.

[iii] Op. cit. pp. 26-7.

[iv] Selected letters / Emily Dickinson; edited by Thomas H. Johnson — Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, p. 246, no. 562.

[v] Ibid. pp. 246-7.

[vi] Ibid. pp. 245, note to letter 559.

[vii] Op. cit. p. 19.

[viii] Page 218-9, no. 477 in Franklin, and no. 315 in Johnson. Johnson is the source Cristanne Miller cites, since she was writing before Franklin’s edition was published. Franklin prints three four-line stanzas, and has “holds” instead of “take” in the penultimate line.