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12 September 2011

I hide myself within my flower

I hide myself within my flower,
That fading from your Vase—
You—unsuspecting—feel for me—
Almost—a loneliness—
                                                        - F 80 (1859)

Dickinson’s skill at compression is employed brilliantly here. The first line sketches a division between the speaker’s private, true self and outer, public self. The inner person has agency and can reveal or hide herself at will—in this case choosing to hide within the outer . The feminine petals and sweet scent disguise the presence of the real speaker within.
Then we have the image of the Vase—another feminine image (at least certainly in Freudian terms). It holds and surrounds cut flowers to showcase their beauty. This, however, necessitates the flowers’ severance from life-giving soil and their consequent ‘fading’. 
The subject of the poem, the ‘You’, knows that flowers fade and will be tossed out, but she doesn’t know there is a real consciousness hidden there that will be tossed out as well. Yet subconsciously she will become aware of an alteration, a withdrawing of the speaker, and feels ‘Almost – a loneliness –’. That ‘Almost’ is a heartbreaker.
What I find most intriguing about this short poem is the expressed intent of the speaker:  “I will withdraw myself from you, leaving only my persona, a shell that fades, so that while you won’t suspect anything you will, at a deeper level, feel the loss.” It is as if the speaker had been shunned in some way by the subject and will quietly effect her small retribution, the almost-loneliness of the subject. The speaker, hiding within the flower, will be watching. It is what today we might call a passive-aggressive choice: to fade—wither, lose vitality and reality—rather than make a more direct confrontation or leaving.

13 comments:

  1. Excellent commentary. I'm so glad to have come across your blog. Thank you for your insight!

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  2. Thanks for your detailed commentary. I have a question about this poem. I downloaded a book of Emily's poems that has written this poem differently. It has a couple of stanzas. The first stanza is this:

    "I HIDE myself within my flower,
    That wearing on your breast,
    You, unsuspecting, wear me too—
    And angels know the rest."

    I don't know whether this based on Franklin's edition or Johnson's or none of them?
    The book is published by Pennsylvania State University.

    Thank you for your help.

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    1. The version you are reading is neither Franklin nor Johnson. Is there a source date? Sometimes early editors of ED's poems had other sources than those used by Fr. or J -- and sometimes they edited words themselves!

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  3. Thanks,
    Here you can download that book:
    http://www.letras.ufrj.br/veralima/litam2/multimedia/dickinson/Dickinson-poems6x9.pdf

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  4. This is the love poem and speaker of this poem is a man who is planning to profess his hidden love through flower to his beloved one.

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    1. It won't help that he is 'fading', then. I think the speaker anticipates the vase owner's loneliness rather than a response to a profession of love.

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  5. The song written on this poem. Music of Anna Leonova (mine).
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S6AEGHWeRk

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    Replies
    1. that is haunting and so perfect. I love the soprano -- and particularly the visuals. Very much a loneliness

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  6. There are three variants of ‘I hide myself within my flower’. The first, probably composed in 1859 and stitched into Fascicle 3, seems intimate and sexually suggestive in comparison to Variant 3 (quoted above), which ED included in her final fascicle (#40) about 1864. Variant 2 omits the dashes of Variant 3, but is otherwise identical. Perhaps ED intended Variant 3 for general use and Variant 1 for Susan D:

    I hide myself within my flower
    That wearing on your breast -
    You - unsuspecting, wear me too -
    And angels know the rest!

    We can only imagine the shared memory of the final line.

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  7. Sorry, I left “Alan F” as a comment because I thought that was where I put my name. I just wanted to chime in that the version with the rhyme, “breast” with “rest,” is on Bartleby as well, and that means it’s most likely Mabel Loomis Todd’s revision of Emily Dickinson, because she wanted to make Dickinson’s poems more “regular.”

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    Replies
    1. Thank you. 'Vase' and 'loneliness' are SO much more wonderful.

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