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28 October 2012

The Soul has Bandaged moments—


The Soul has Bandaged moments—
When too appalled to stir—
She feels some ghastly Fright come up
And stop to look at her—

Salute her, with long fingers—
Caress her freezing hair—
Sip, Goblin, from the very lips
The Lover—hovered—o'er—
Unworthy, that a thought so mean
Accost a Theme—so—fair—

The soul has moments of Escape—
When bursting all the doors—
She dances like a Bomb, abroad,
And swings upon the Hours,

As do the Bee—delirious borne—
Long Dungeoned from his Rose—
Touch Liberty—then know no more,
But Noon, and Paradise—

The Soul's retaken moments—
When, Felon led along,
With shackles on the plumed feet,
And staples, in the Song,

The Horror welcomes her, again,
These, are not brayed of Tongue—
                                                                                          F360 (1862)  512         

More should be made of Emily Dickinson as a Gothic poet. Writing here in the Gothic romantic mood she enjoyed in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Dickinson describes the dramatic and even perilous extremes to which the soul is subject. In the first stanza the Soul is introduced in a “Bandaged” moment when, constricted and paralyzed,  “some ghastly Fright” stops to look at and caress her. Like in a nightmare when one is unable to move, the Soul is “too appalled to stir.”
Dickinson would have heard about and seen pictures of mummies--and
the image seems to have rooted in her imagination
            That first line, “The Soul has Bandaged moments,” is among my Dickinson favorites. The use of “bandage” as an adjective still sounds fresh since we are used to hearing the word only as a noun or verb. And while a bandaged soul is clearly a metaphor for the stifling constriction of depression, it also suggests protection. We bandage something wounded to protect it. The bandaging also recalls mummification—another Gothic image. Victorian explorers had been bringing mummies out of Egypt for decades by Dickinson’s time and a couple of mummy books and stories had been published. In fact, within a few years of this poem, Louisa May Alcott, author of the beloved Little Women, wrote a short story called “Lost in a Pyramid; or, the Mummy’s Curse.” There were a few famous incidents prior to this poem, including one in Boston, of mummy unwrappings. Dickinson was explicitly tapping into a very current element of horror here.
            As for the romance aspect, the very next stanza couples the frightening apparition and the mummified soul with the remembrance of a lover. Just as the Lover kissed the woman whose soul is bandaged, so the Fright hovers to “Sip” Goblin-like, from those very lips. That’s a vampire image, or even a succubus (which would be an interesting gender reversal as the succubus is a female demonic figure who drains the souls of men by having sex with them as they sleep). The “Theme—so—fair” is the lover; the “thought so mean” that accosts it is the frightful apparition. Could it be that in its depression the Soul converts the touch of the lover to the touch of the vampire dead or the soul-stealing succubus? Unlike Snow White who is revived by the life-giving kiss of her prince, the Soul of this poem seems to subliminally dread and fear it.
            Thankfully, the soul “has moments of Escape” when it bursts out of its confinement to dance and swing all day and night. The word Dickinson chooses to describe this is “Bomb.” Talk about manic depressive—the poem takes us from catatonia to explosive delirium. She likens herself in these moments to an imprisoned bee, miserable without the nectar of “his Rose.” When finally released from his dungeon, he becomes so lost in his flower that he is aware only of “Noon”—the fullness of day—and “Paradise.”  If this sounds familiar, it’s because Dickinson wrote about this very bee in “Come slowly—Eden!”. In that poem, written the previous year, the “fainting Bee—”

Reaching late his flower,
Round her chamber hums—
Counts his nectars—
Enters—and is lost in Balms.

The vampire or demon lover were other
images Dickinson would have been known
It’s a beautiful and very sexual image. Yet, in tandem with the current poem, the flower might be read as dangerously passive. It is the bee who flies to her, hums around her, “counts his nectars,” and then enters to become lost in the flower’s luscious sweetness. The flower is no more able to escape the attentions of the bee than the bandaged Soul those of the demon lover. In some way, the poet has become both flower and bee in this poem. She knows what it is to fly in ecstasy to a loved object; she also knows what it means to be besieged.
            The very excess of the Soul during its escape seems to lead to the awful and humiliating punishment that follows. “Retaken,” the Soul’s “plumed feet” are shackled, she is “led along”—and one imagines a prisoner cruelly dragged back to jail as the townspeople watch. The plumes suggest a bird, a common symbol for the Soul—one frequently used by Dickinson. But of course a shackled bird cannot fly. In perhaps the most horrifying image of the poem, the bird’s very song has been stapled. These wouldn’t be the dainty staples we use to fasten a few pieces of paper together. Those hadn’t yet been invented. These staples would have been heavy blacksmith-forged fasteners for holding carriage parts or large door latches together—not the ethereal beauty of birdsong or poetry.
            A bird whose song was killed would be like a poet whose poems had been stilled. Is there a toll on the poet’s pleasures so that if she enjoys a lover’s kiss or a few hours of delirious joy (as in “He touched me, so I live to know”) she must pay for it by periods of incapacitating depression? The last two lines seem to imply as much. “The Horror” of the bandaged moments when the soul is helpless against the Fright, “welcomes her, again.” What a sad line! This is something she is used to. The very last line, “These, are not brayed of Tongue—,”a particularly ugly and awkward one, is worth unpacking.

             “These” refers to all the frights and indignities that the soul is subjected to while unable to stir. The tongue does not bray about this. Donkeys, not poets, bray and it is not an attractive sound at all. To speak of the horrors would be like the grating noises of a farm animal known for stubbornness and lack of sense. And why does Dickinson twist normal sentence structure so that the poem ends in “not brayed of Tongue” instead of the more natural “the tongue does not bray”? Perhaps she wanted “Tongue” at the end as a slant rhyme with “again.” It is also a rather ugly word and that is the way, I think, she wanted to leave the poem. The harshness is what lives.
I also think that “brayed of Tongue” is too suggestive of the word “prayed” to be ignored. Whatever the poet is experiencing is not something that she either prays about or feels that prayer could properly express. Her bandaged prison of depression or despair is truly a hell from which no words can escape, whether a call for help, a poem, or a prayer.

23 comments:

  1. In my cursory reading, I wasn't able to understand so much of what is written above. I agree that "brayed" is a suggestive of "prayed." What I thought she wrote was "betrayed," which I think works well too as (1) it is the "Felon led along," and (2) her imagery of the bee-lover and feminine soul are deeply private.

    Also, I feel that staples also might elude to a secondary meaning--as a noun, staples can mean "a place of supply," or "a chief commodity or production of a place" (from m-w). As an adjective, it can mean "produced regularly or in large quantities." These secondary meanings align with "brayed" as the donkey produces the sound regularly and in excess.

    "Plumed feet," "song," "not brayed of the Tongue" are all evocative of "Hope is the thing with feathers-" There too, the tune that kept so many warm did not have words.

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    1. 'Staples in the song' parallels 'shackles on the...feet' so I disagree with the reading of this noun as an image of sustenance - it doesn't seem to work semantically or syntactically - I align more with the author's reading of an image of punishing iron imprisonment.
      I think Fuseli's Nightmare is a relevant context to this poem, with its prone female figure, heavy goblin figure, and dark donkey head in the background...

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    2. Thank you, Anonymous for the 'Nightmare' reference. I just looked it up and it does seem chillingly relevent (https://smarthistory.org/henry-fuseli-the-nightmare/)

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  2. What's interesting to me is that is no "I" here. This is a dispassionate description of heights and lows, but from a perspective that frames the whole drama, it's clinical and inimitably observed and rendered.

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  3. Dickinson wasn't alive in 1789. You refer to her 1789 poems in your sidebar.

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    1. Dickinson wrote 1789 poems. That's a lot of poetry!

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  4. Oxford English Dictionary

    Brayed (adj)

    1. Beaten small, bruised, pounded.

    1382 Bible (Wycliffite, E.V.) 1 Sam. xxv. 18 Fyue busshellis of brayid corn.

    1575 G. Turberville Bk. Faulconrie 333 With a little salte brayed verie small.

    1811 J. Pinkerton Petralogy II. 265, I only found a dust composed of brayed marble.

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    1. How interesting! Yet with "tongue" in the line, I go with the ED Lexicon on it being a noise like a bellow: http://edl.byu.edu/lexicon/term/475614

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  5. You write beautifully...there is a lot of depth to your analysis...It helps me understand and appreciate Emily's poems. I actually feel enriched after reading it.

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  6. Emily lived in such hard times we now have some comfort in doctors providing some help in sickness and have not suffered war in this country. We also have less work due to modern appliances,cars,running water,electric lights,and heat. Thanks for your blog it helps me understand her poetry and admire her for her courage and genius.

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  7. Great in depth analysis, I definitely obtained some new material from another perspective. One could also say that her use of capital letters on most nouns in the poem emphasise the importance of these words in the narration of the poem. The poem also focuses on an out of body experience with Dickinson exploring transient thoughts and an unknown realm between life and death.

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  8. Helen Vendler, in her book on ED's work, sees this as a poem about jealousy. It may be so, I don't know, but I like your analysis better because it is no more specific about the cause of the turmoil of the soul here than ED is herself.

    Some other thoughts. Isn't it the lover who hovers over the lips and not the goblin? And, I love your insight about 'staples'. Of course, the kind that ED would be familiar with would be used for such things as fastening a chain to a prison wall. Finally, I find makeller63's comment so interesting. It allows me to make sense of that final line: the horrors that welcome her do so with full throat, not with shredded tongue. It accentuates the sheer horror of where she ends up.

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  9. the last lines of Keats's "In Drear Nighted December"

    But were there ever any
    Writh'd not of passed joy?
    The feel of not to feel it,
    When there is none to heal it
    Nor numbed sense to steel it,
    Was never said in rhyme.

    "These, are not brayed of Tongue -" hits me similarly.

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  10. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  11. Franklin dates this poem “about summer 1862” when ED was 31. In Stanzas 1 & 2 the female narrator describes a horrifying memory: “She feels some ghastly Fright come up / And stop to look at her // Salute her with long fingers / Caress her freezing hair / Sip from the very lips / The Lover hovered o’er”.

    How could the narrator be any clearer in saying she remembers being sexually abused?

    On 23 January 1850, ED, just turned 19 in December, wrote her close friend and classmate, Jane Humphrey:

    "Dear Jane,
    ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙
    Oh ugly time - and space - and boarding-school contemptible that tries to keep us apart - ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ Eight weeks [months] with their bony fingers still poking me away - how I hate them - and would love to do them harm! Is it wicked to talk so Jane - what can I say that isnt? Out of a wicked heart cometh wicked words –

    Very sincerly yrs-
    Emily E. Dickinson.”

    Note the “long” / “bony” fingers in the two excerpts.

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  12. In “early 1861”, ED wrote ‘I've heard an Organ talk, sometimes’:

    I've heard an Organ talk, sometimes –
    In a Cathedral Aisle,
    And understood no word it said –
    Yet held my breath, the while –

    And risen up—and gone away,

    A more Bernardine Girl –
    Yet – knew not what was done to me
    In that old Chapel Aisle.

    The last two lines could refer to religious transport, but they have an ominous tone to me. Holyoke was a Christian seminary with a chapel, and its founder, Mary Lyon, psychologically abused ED weekly in the chapel in front of her classmates because she would not accept Christ as her savior.

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    1. A horrifying thought just flashed as I finished writing this morning's comment (below). The "Organ" in Line 1 of 'I've heard an Organ talk, sometimes –' (F211) is ED's clitoris, its "talk" is her orgasm, and "sometimes" refers to her abuser's "success/failure".

      NEVER, EVER, underestimate ED.

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    2. Continuing down this ghastly path, one of ED’s favorite tropes is to camouflage the physical senses: see, hear, feel, smell, taste, by interchanging them. She does this in Line 1 of ‘I've heard an Organ talk, sometimes’, using “heard” to mean “felt”.

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  13. This comment should precede my previous (3:14 pm) comment.

    In ‘Through lane it lay’ (F43, Franklin date “about late 1858”), ED described her fright as her father drove her in late August 1847, age 16, in his open buggy to MounHolyoke Female Seminary, 10 miles south of Amherst. The lonely country road threaded through a narrow 2-mile valley, “The Notch”, with high craggy overhanging cliffs. He left her, away from her home for the first time in her life.

    Through lane it lay—thro' bramble—
    Through clearing and thro' wood—
    ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙
    The tempests touched our garments—
    The lightning's poinards gleamed—
    Fierce from the Crag above us
    The hungry Vulture screamed—

    The satyrs fingers beckoned—
    The valley murmured "Come"
    ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙

    Note the “satyrs fingers” beckoning, “Come”.

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  14. Most horrifying of all, the final two stanzas describe how the narrator feels as that ghastly memory returns, chains her poet feet, and staples her poet song. [Brackets mine to clarify the compound adjective of “The Soul”].

    Note the comma after “Song”, literally connecting the six lines into a single stanza but emphasizing the last two:

    The Soul's retaken moments—
    When, Felon[-]led along,
    With shackles on the plumed feet,
    And staples, in the Song,

    The Horror welcomes her, again,
    These, are not brayed of Tongue—

    The narrator’s saddest line closes the poem. She cannot tell a soul what happened to her at that “boarding-school contemptible”.

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  15. Could the “horror” of F360’s last stanza be the same recurring dream/memory of “terror” she told Higginson about in her second letter to him, 25 April 1862: “I had a terror-since September - I could tell to none-and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground-because I am afraid.”?

    If so, this poem is a Rosetta Stone for ED's depression cycles.

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  16. "These" in the last line refers to "The Soul's retaken moments/When felon-led along". Stanzas 3 and 4 are "moments of Escape", "retaken moments", when inspiration bests brays of "Horror", memories like Stanzas 1 and 2. There, in those repressed memories, "felon-led along", the shackled poet shuffles through The Inferno of Deep Depression, no Virgil in sight.

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