Shoestring Century

By Tom Doggett

I am enamored with a woman I have never met. She has been dead for a hundred and fifty years. She is a poet, and her name is Emily Dickinson.

Every winter, as the nights grow long, the dull hue of my walls drive me to revisit her poetry at length. I pick up her complete collection, a volume of one thousand seven hundred seventy five poems. The hard cover, stripped of its paper jacket, is blank, and its color is so dull that my walls seem snow white by comparison.

With most books, one bookmark suffices. With this, I need several. I keep ticket stubs and scratch paper jammed between important pages; right now there are three such holders of place.

I did not choose this fate. I think infatuation is dangerous, but as happens with all infatuation, I cannot help it. The winter brings grey skies of melancholy, and Emily Dickinson soothes me. She provokes me to think very deeply, but not strenuously, and the rhythm of her lines taps through my body as if it were my heartbeat. She helps me sleep soundly and dream in nascent Technicolor.

The true Emily Dickinson is not visible through the oval-shaped daguerreotypes that survive her countenance. These images show a shy, homely woman who didn’t get much sun. Her lips are slightly pursed, and her large eyes sink deep in her head. Her hair is unnaturally straight and even. But beyond these details lies something dormant, a “still – Volcano – Life –.”  Something dances behind her eyes, and her lips seem in motion mid-pout.

Her soul is only visible through her poems, and it is not just visible but perceptible – accessible through a range of senses. When I look at her picture, her poems are what make the eyes extra-dimensional. Through the poems I know her, the inner self that sighs and smiles underneath the faintly amused but stoic countenance of the picture. I will never know her manner of speaking or walking, but I understand the tone of her thoughts, the activity of her mind when her door was closed and the house quiet. For a poet to convey herself so thoroughly is rare, and Emily Dickinson does so with great and intense beauty.

I have perhaps spent too much time wandering the aisles of literature’s cultural memory. In this time, have never read someone so intimate as Emily Dickinson. This shouldn’t be a surprise to me: her biography is one of extreme intimacy, the story of a room-bound poet whose life of solitude was self-imposed and fruitful. She was disengaged from the world that bore her; her Amherst community knew her as a hermit, someone who didn’t trifle with fancies. They also knew nothing of the great depth of her mind.

Emily Dickinson was profoundly unconcerned with the mundane aspects of the world. The friendships she cultivated were intense, and evidence suggests that she was so emotionally demanding that she drove her friends away. Her romantic interests were unsustainable – she drove men away too, surely because she didn’t care to hide what burned inside of her. I imagine that to sit in her parlor, hand in hand with the eligible Ms. Dickinson, was unbearable to the 19^th century suitor who expected deference and demureness. Instead, he faced the fury of emotions laid bare.

I doubt that she would have balked if a nice young man desired her in marriage. But luckily, that man never came, because Emily Dickinson was not suited for a life of domesticity. Her mind was too vast and artful to be wasted matching curtains and aligning placemats. She needed to engage herself with the nature of her spirit and the beauty of the earth around her. She needed to consider the warm shiver that raw emotion brings, and the limitless mystery of death’s climactic return.

Where other poets generalize, Emily Dickinson specifies. She describes, in exactly the words that strike her most deeply, the verbal meaning her feelings carry. Her poems strip away the pretenses of this world, the bothersome simplifications and routines, to reveal what lies most near our centers. She has great insight into the climaxes – sexual and creative, joyful and anguished – that mark our lives. She also examines what lingers as our minds fray and distort their memories.

That she is able to do this shows not only enlightenment but also bravery. She could understand so well because rather than running away from her own emotions, she stayed with them. She let them drag her right up to the “white heat.” When the moment began to fade, when consciousness began re-patching the quilt of reality, she peered back at the moment of impact. She approached existence the way everyone should and no one does – she grasped every emotion curiously, not melodramatically, and turned it over slowly in her hand. She didn’t allow feeling, that rare human gift, to escape her full perception. So, because she was never far from her pen, her poems reach terrifying places.

Here is an example – a poem I quoted briefly above, in its entirety:

A still – Volcano – Life –
That flickered in the night –
When it was dark enough to do
Without erasing sight –

A quiet – Earthquake Style –
Too subtle to suspect
By natures this side Naples –
The North cannot detect

The Solemn – Torrid – Symbol –
The lips that never lie –
Whose hissing Corals part – and shut –
And Cities – ooze away

I am probably wrong, but I think this poem is about having an orgasm. Regardless, the ferocity of the words as they’re strung together is breathtaking: the pace and the imagery are revelatory and confounding. The poem is a riddle. But not a riddle in the traditional sense – it is guileless. We can take meaning from it as we wish. It is magnificently vivid, yet subtle enough that it can give anyone the gratification of understanding.  And despite its open-ended nature, its vast and varied significances do not preclude the possibility for true meaning. It is a riddle for people with time to spend thinking; it will never exhaust its potential. As we grow, and words like “torrid” and “hissing” gain new personal meaning, the experience of reading this poem will be reinvigorated. We may begin to understand the volcano metaphor as it relates to human experience. It is all there for the taking, put down many years ago for our deliberation.

Broadly put, the subject of this poem (#601) is the tremors that are so powerful that they must be submerged. These tremors could be sobs of grief held in for propriety’s sake. They could be the shudders of a terrible realization, swallowed by the flesh before they can betray anything. She could, of course, be talking about actual natural disasters. I can’t believe that, though, because nearly everything she wrote relates to the question of humanity.

The rhythm of the poem mimics the subject’s submerged potency. Ellipses chop up the first line of each stanza, which enforces pauses in the rhythm. The ellipses affect a stutter in the lines, a staggering rhythm that synergizes with the imagery of natural disasters. The lines without dashes are smoother in comparison. Their coasting rhythms are especially graceful because they follow the turbulent pauses of their predecessors. When read aloud, the rhythm animates the idea she intended: that calm surfaces often belie the turbulence beneath.

Meaning exists in this poem, but it isn’t very accessible. Emily Dickinson does not always try to capture the meaning. When what she is writing about is too complex to pare down to a single idea, she lets the poem embody the ambiguity. Some people might find this frustrating, but to me it is simply honest. She can’t elucidate what she can’t herself fully grasp.

When I attach a physical form to Ms. Dickinson, it takes shape jaggedly, in the dashes and fragmentary lines of her poetry. Just like the human frame, the physical shape and texture of her poems does little justice to the multitudes held within. At the same time, the grouped stanzas are themselves beautiful. They are dynamic; they demonstrate congruities and incongruities. They contain perfects rhythms and perfect rhymes, and in contrast, a clunky line and a dissonant rhythm, serving as a reminder of the relativity of beauty. An example:

A solemn thing – it was – I said –
A woman – white – to be –
And wear – if God should count me fit –
Her blameless mystery –

A hallowed thing – to drop a life
Into the purple well –
Too plummetless – that it return –
Eternity – until –

I pondered how the bliss would look –
And would it feel as big –
When I could take it in my hand –
As hovering – seen – through fog –

And then – the size of this “small” life –
The Sages – call it small –
Swelled – like Horizons – in my vest –
And I sneered – softly – “small”!

The cautious hiccups of the first two stanzas are awkward; the speaker seems unsure of her own thoughts. In the third, the hiccups dissolve into a moment when the speaker takes her bliss into her own hand. She begins to fathom her singular humanity, and she realizes that she alone possesses it. In the final two stanzas of the poem, the meter smoothes out, leading to a revelation in which the speaker’s humanity swells and exercises its full, autonomous capacity for existence. At the end, she scoffs at the “sages” who lack the clarity to acknowledge her multitudes.

And yes, in this poem the prescient Ms. Dickinson is prefiguring the feminist movement. She does so concisely, authoritatively, and elegantly – with a haughty sneer, she dismisses the expectations so unfairly placed on the women of her day. As a dismissal of the weight of cultural expectations, this moment is both lovely and tremendously potent. Most impressively, the speaker doesn’t need to assert herself to enjoy her individuality. She sneers softly, and this is the effect of the poem: a soft and private sneer. After all, the author didn’t shout her independence, she scribbled it, and she was content to leave it unread.

Emily Dickinson’s self-contentedness sometimes terrifies me. I cannot fathom such an existence, and my heart aches to think that she never received validation for her genius. The second stanza of this poem, though, makes me feel better. From it, I see that her poetry was the true validation. She cared so deeply about it that she found it sanctifying; there was honor in writing that she believed would carry her to immortality. In a way, it did. This is true art, as grave as it is beautiful.

The subject of Emily Dickinson comes up eerily often in my conversations. If I meet a woman named Emily, I can’t resist the urge to tell her that I am planning on naming my first daughter after Ms. Dickinson. Other times, she comes up more obliquely – a sight, a sound, a phrase, reminds me of something in a poem. The connection leaps from the recesses of my mind, and before I know it, I am reciting an entire six-stanza poem to my newest acquaintance.

Invariably, these displays evoke bewilderment on the part of my acquaintance. The moderately educated American mind believes Emily Dickinson to be a depressing Puritan hermit. Perhaps a particularly morbid selection from someone’s freshman year emboldens this perception. Thus, the inevitable question is: “Why? Why do you love her so much?”

I have explained myself many times, and the word I keep returning to is “grace.” Using her natural poetic inclination, Emily Dickinson manages to elucidate her experience at the end of consciousness, a place most humans avoid confronting. And although she writes about the grandest, darkest things that tug on her soul, she never wastes a word, and the words she chooses explode with meaning.

When grouped together in stanzas, the words harmonize into a rhythm that is at once elegant and loose. There is another dimension to her poetry, a strange realm where form and meaning marry to create something altogether reminiscent of ourselves. Her poems are animated and moody; they hum with the vibrations of human capriciousness. This is grace – a palpable, living sense of beauty.

In a letter to her only publisher, Emily Dickinson once said:

“If I can read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”

I don’t really think there is.