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08 September 2022

Sweet – safe – Houses –

 Sweet — safe — Houses —
Glad — gay — Houses —
Sealed so stately tight —
Lids of Steel — on Lids of Marble —
Locking Bare feet out —

Brooks of Plush — in Banks of Satin
Not so softly fall
As the laughter — and the whisper —
From their People Pearl —

No Bald Death — affront their Parlors —
No Bold Sickness come
To deface their Stately Treasures —
Anguish — and the Tomb —

Hum by — in Muffled Coaches —
Lest they — wonder Why —
Any — for the Press of Smiling —
Interrupt — to die —

Fr684 (1863)  J457


Dickinson’s family home might well be considered one of the houses described by this poem: ‘safe’ and ‘Sealed’; quiet and luxurious; and undisturbed by Death, Sickness, Anguish, and the barefoot poor. Ironically, the houses, a metonymy for the wealthy inhabitants, might be ‘safe’, but that includes being safe from the human condition. 

They might be Sweet and Glad and gay, but that requires being sealed off from all unpleasantness. Their laughter might be softer than “Brooks of Plush – in Banks of Satin”, but they live in an oyster’s world – as “People Pearl”. They really don’t know life at all. (‘Pearl’ should probably be read as ‘Purl’: According to the ED Lexicon and other sources, ‘Purl’ means ‘to flow with a murmuring sound’. I hate to lose the image, though, of the oyster shell which, for pearls, really is Plush and Satiny. I suspect Dickinson wanted both meanings: both Pearl and Purl.)

Of course, no house, and particularly one that housed Emily Dickinson is going to be entirely sealed or safe. Nor would it be free of anguish and death, but that’s not for want of trying

from Aftering website
Victorian metal grave covers
I like to read ‘Houses’ here as caskets. Fancier and much more expensive than the simple wooden coffin, steel caskets were introduced in the 1840s. Their ‘Lids of Steel’ were designed to permanently seal in the corpse – whose [eye]Lids of Marble” are equally sealed shut.

It’s easy to switch focus back and forth throughout the poem: rich houses, luxurious caskets, nice neighborhood, quiet necropolis. Both exclusive. No Shoes No Service. There is an important difference between the two milieus, however. While the rich are warding off exposure to and admittance of suffering and death, the dead are really dead. They couldn’t step outside their cushy oyster even if they wanted to. On the bright side, they no longer need to worry about Death entering their Parlors or even any ‘Bold Sickness’. 

The poem starts to get a bit difficult in the last line of the third stanza. I track the rest of the poem this way: ‘Anguish – and the Tomb –‘ begins a new sentence (although preceded by a dash and not a period) and is a compound subject for ‘Hum by – in Muffled Coaches’. So you have Muffled Coaches with their grim occupants humming by the houses or caskets of the well-to-do (the poor were buried in simple winding cloth or else in a simple wooden coffin). 

Why are the Coaches muffled? So that the Sweet, safe, Glad, gay Houses do not have to wonder at life being interrupted by death – or rather, why someone in a gay and smiling house party would interrupt the festivities to die. It is a bit difficult to parse this if the ‘they’ is the casket denizens rather than the wealthy in their Houses, but I take the muffling of noise as a courtesy to the dead who are softly whispering and laughing. They, too, ironically, would not appreciate the interruption.

Are ‘Houses’ meant to be seen as caskets? Would Emily Dickinson have pictured life in an important Victorian house as so restricted? I think she did, although, in another irony, she came to embrace the comfortable privacy of a stately but sealed house. And I picture her at the little desk in her room, listening to the ghostly Purl. 

Poetically, the poem has a lot of energy. The initial spondees (two accented syllables) followed by a third accented syllable (in ‘Houses’) and coupled with the alliterations in Sweet / Safe and Glad / Gay give a sprightly emphasis to the first stanza. There are then the tumble-forward trochaic feet (first syllable accented) that dominate the rest of the poem. Dickinson uses a quite a bit of alliteration and this provides a lightness to balance the rather serious social commentary. Even ‘Death’ is softened by ‘Bald’ and Sickness by ‘Bold’. No gruesome or pitying images here.

The poem maintains this balance between a happy meter adorned with charming alliteration until the last five lines. ‘Anguish’ is coupled with ‘the Tomb’, the harsh word signaling a change of mood. And although they ‘Hum’ by, Muffled, they bring the reader up short with the biggest interruption to a soiree possible: dying. It seems a bummer to both the living and the already dead.

 

13 comments:

  1. The imagery here is reminiscent of "Safe in their alabaster chambers". However, that poem imagines death from the point of view of the dead. This poem does as well -- imaging the dead as untouched by death or sickness. But I think you are correct that there is a second meaning that views the comfortable life of living without memento mori -- the "Press of Smiling" -- as being a type of insulation that is like death.

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    1. Thank you. Interesting to compare the two. Here's the link for anyone who'd like (and the Search bar near the top of the blog works, too): https://bloggingdickinson.blogspot.com/2011/11/f124-1859-261.html

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  2. Hi, Susan. I'm new here; I stumbled across this page due to a Google search of a specific poem from Emily Dickinson. I am curious, how long has this blog series been going on? I'm not familiar with this site and I do not know how to navigate it well yet.

    Hope you're well.

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    1. Welcome El Rey! I started in, I think, 2012. I pretty much have quit writing new explications a couple of years ago -- had to increase work, burn-out, etc. But I love keeping up with comments.

      There is a search box under the header. Use it to find poems by title, phrases or words, or numbers.

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  3. Great, I will look into the poems you have covered. I am new to poetry (at least from the perspective of a deep Diver) and I would like to understand more of the nuances.

    Do you have any of your own works that you share on here as well?

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  4. `and particularly one that housed Emily Dickinson' - hahaha. generally it's useful forensics whenever she sounds straightforwardly peaceful to ask whether the poem might be about either a corpse or a coffin.

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  5. Do you have any of your own works here;)

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  6. I'm going to write up this poem at my own blog—because it's one of those poems that almost defies explanation. For what it's worth, I looked up "Purl" in my Dickinson concordance and saw that she *did* use the word, but only once. That would seem to argue against her meaning "purl" (implying that she didn't think of the spelling as interchangeable) and never uses pearl, for purl, elsewhere. She does use pearl to mean white, however. I'm of the mind that she may have meant pearl in two senses here: As an adjective meaning white (as in the white of bones) and sardonically in the sense of wealthy. In other words "people pearl" meaning people turned to the white of bone. The "press of smiling" might refer to the grinning of the skulls.

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  7. Well, alas. After a little investigation I discovered that these graves were an almost exclusively southern phenomena and that, more problematically, they were patented and first used in the early 1870s. Dickinson's poem was written in the latter half of 1863, which means that even if these graves were appearing before the patent, that's a full decade and it's probably very unlikely that Dickinson would have known of them when the geographic distance is added in.

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    1. Well, ... dang. But thanks for the research! Love your blog, which I just discovered after your comment, btw!

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    2. And I love *your* blog. I wish I'd known about it sooner. The work you've done is really remarkable. If you ever want to collaborate on a Dickinson poem, let me know. A little teamwork can be motivating. :)

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  8. ED’s previous poem said her soul can scribble only second-rate poems during winter when she’s depressed. Judging by ‘Sweet – safe – Houses –’, she’s right.

    An interpretation:

    Sweet, safe coffins, sealed tight, lids of steel on lids of stone. Shoes required in these tombs.

    Linings of Plush and Satin make more noise than these Pearl People in steel oyster shells.

    No Bald Death, No Bold Sickness happens in these sealed Parlors to deface their owners. However, new pain and new caskets . . .

    Pass nearby in coaches muffled so their passengers can avoid embalmer-pressed smiles on the buried dead or interrupt the funeral march to die.

    It's Miller Time in this house . . . .

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