No Crowd that has
occurred
Exhibit — I suppose
That General Attendance
That Resurrection — does —
Circumference be full —
The long restricted Grave [long]
subjected
Assert her Vital Privilege — [Assert]
His Primogeniture
The Dust — connect — and live —
On Atoms — features place —
All Multitudes that were
Efface in the Comparison —
As Suns — dissolve a star — [Suns
-] annul
Solemnity — prevail —
Its Individual Doom
Possess each separate Consciousness —
August — Absorbed — Numb — [August-] Resistless– dumb
What Duplicate — exist — [What]
scenery
What Parallel can be —
Of the Significance of This — [the]
stupendousness
To Universe — and Me?
J515,
Fr 653 (1863)
This poem describes a slice of Judgment Day
(from the Bible's Rev
20:1-15) . It begins in a rather droll way, the tone conversational as if
the speaker were making an offhand remark on the topic of large gatherings. She
ultimately concludes, unremarkably, that Judgment Day will be the largest and
most significant gathering ever in the whole Universe -- and also – but with a question mark – the most significant event to herself.
It is that question mark paired with the
droll opening tone that may expose the poem to the If of faith and doubt.
The second stanza flatly depicts what Revelations
describes. The Grave, long portrayed (by many, including Dickinson herself) as
a passive receptacle for the deceased to wait, "safe in their alabaster
chambers" (Fr124),
until the final Resurrection, here asserts "her Vital Privilege": to
reassemble the scattered 'dust' and atoms of the dead into their recognizable former
bodies.
Although there is no wailing or
gnashing of teeth, neither is it a happy crowd. We see no joyful reunions, no reconstituted
flesh revelling in the touch of a breeze, or bird song (should there be enough
atoms left for birds). Instead, Dickinson paints a picture of the numb
solemnity of a solid mass of humanity just before the moment of judgment.
She
ends the poem rhetorically asking if there could every be anything like such an
event, anything comparable to its significance both to the Universe and to
herself. While the questions are simple they just don't reflect, for me, the tone of someone truly contemplating their doom.
Judgment Day feels far-fetched, the scene too dispassionate. It is like Eliot's
Prufrock squeezing "the universe into a ball" and rolling it "towards
some overwhelming question" only to have the listener shrug.
This
may be exactly the effect Dickinson intended. It may well have been a reaction
against a religion she was never quite comfortable with
Puritan/Calvinist Christianity emphasized
the afterlife: the threat of hell and a hope of heaven. The threat was never
made more clear than in Jonathan Edwards' 1741 sermon "Sinners in the
Hands of an Angry God." Throughout
the (very long) sermon, Edwards paints a fearsome picture of damnation – and even
of God: "The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a
Spider, or some loathsome Insect, over the Fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully
provoked; his Wrath towards you burns like Fire; he looks upon you as worthy of
nothing else, but to be cast into the Fire."
 |
| William Blake's "Judgment Day", 1808 |
Echoes of this famous and fiery sermon
reverberated in Dickinson's life whether at home, away at school, or in her
local church. She experienced a
wave of revival that made similar calls for parishioners to stand and make a
clear declaration of conversion. Although her family and most of her friends
did so, Emily Dickinson did not.
Her letters contain a
few mentions of fiery sermons. One was disturbing:
The minister today …
preached about death and judgment, and what would become of those, meaning
Austin and me, who behaved improperly – and somehow the sermon scared me, and
father and Vinnie looked very solemn as if the whole was true, and I would not
for worlds have them know that it troubled me … . He preached such an awful
sermon though, that I didn't much think I should ever see you again until the
Judgment Day, and then you would not speak to me, according to his story. The
subject of perdition seemed to please him, somehow. (Letter 175 to Dr. and Mrs.
J.G. Holland, Nov. 1854; Emily Dickinson:
Selected Letters, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, pg. 124)
Another sermon, no
doubt intended to scare the devil out of parishioners, was laughed at by the
whole family, including Dickinson's conservative and dignified father:
The
rest have gone to meeting, to hear Rev Martin Leland. I listened to him this
forenoon in a state of mind very near frenzy, and feared the effect too much to
go out this afternoon. The morning exercises were perfectly ridiculous, and we spent the intermission in mimicking the
Preacher, and reciting extracts from his most memorable sermon. I never heard
father so funny. … He said he ran out of
meeting for fear somebody would ask him what he tho't of the preaching. He says
if anyone asks him, he shall put his hand to his mouth, and his mouth in the
dust, and cry, Unclean – Unclean!! ( Letter 125 to Austin Dickinson, June 1854;
Emily Dickinson:
Selected Letters, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, pg. 104-5).
In this poem, Dickinson does not describe
salvation, damnation, God's mood, nor how humanity and the Universe came to
this pass. Instead there's a sort of latent eeriness, certainly a lack of
affect, in her depiction of corpse dust – and there would be countless tons of
it –reconfiguring into a mass of long-ago bodies. The underlying question is, I
think, Why? Why the big production? Why at all?
I
realize this poem can also be read as a stately and somber depiction of
Judgment Day. Christanne Miller discusses how the uninflected verbs (verbs
without tense, here used ungrammatically) such as "Exhibit," "be
full," and "Solemnity – prevail," "undercuts any clear sense of time or of
number. … Those crowds do still exist, and resurrection is … ongoing,
universal, like the poem's verbs" (Emily
Dickinson: A Poet's Gramnmar, p.68-9).
Yet
to me, even the meter works against the solemnity. There is an over-regularity,
an over-stressing of iambic trimeter, that affects a reader's mood. The first
stanza in this poem, with its strong meter, it's rhyme of "suppose"
and "does", it's dry "Exhibit" and "General
Attendance" all establish a wry mood. "Resurrection" appears anticlimactically
in the last line of the stanza.
So, Reader, what do you think? A subtle
undercutting of Judgment Day? Or a carefully-crafted serious treatment of it?
