To live so small as I —
And yet I was a living Child —
With Food's necessity
Upon me — like a Claw —
I could no more remove
Than I could coax a Leech away —
Or make a Dragon — move —
Not like the Gnat — had I —
The privilege to fly
And seek a Dinner for myself —
How mightier He — than I —
Nor like Himself — the Art
Upon the Window Pane
To gad my little Being out —
And not begin — again —
F444
(1862) J612
Dickinson uses food as a metaphor for the
existential deprivation she felt from her childhood years. A master of first
lines, the poet begins dramatically: “It would have starved a Gnat – / To live
so small as I.” It would be hard to find a tinier and more insignificant
creature than a gnat. Why would the poet, as a “living Child,” have been so
starved that a gnat dined better than she, that hunger fastened her in its grip
like a giant claw?
The
claw, like true hunger, is impossible to dismiss. It would be easier for her, she writes, to
coax a leech from sucking her blood or to move a dragon.
The
gnat is also better off, “mightier,” than the poet because at least it can fly about and
search out its dinner. The child – or at least upper middle-class children such
as Emily Dickinson – must be given food. They couldn’t just run about town and
hustle a bit of dinner for themselves. But the child poet was given precious
little nourishment.
Dickinson saves
the greatest bitterness for the last
stanza: The gnat has the “Art” of gadding his “little Being out” by crashing
into the window. That’s enough to kill a gnat, but such a death is not possible
for the starved child. It’s really a powerful image: the gnat is lured by the
outdoors. It gathers itself and flies pell mell for freedom, only to be dashed
against clear glass. The child doesn’t have even an illusion to lure her to an
accidental – and easy – death. The gnat doesn’t have to “begin – again” either.
Should the child die, she may very well have to start over in an afterlife.
The poem reads as a bitter indictment of
her culture, schooling, and family. Her mother
was weak and unable to provide emotional nourishment, requiring it instead from her children. Her father was austere and
undemonstrative. The church was strict, the cultural mores conventional, the
opportunities for a woman who danced to the music of a different dervish slim.
It’s
achingly sad to think of the child. Yet the poet sprang from the child. She did
not resign herself, did not take false sustenance, ever and always told the
truth – but told it “slant.”
I love the word "gad". Her use of this word as a verb is not in the dictionary -- but we know exactly what she means. The word almost sounds like an insect hitting glass. And it has the connotation of gadfly -- tying in literally with the image of a gnat and with a sense of purposeless extinction of life.
ReplyDeleteI tend to think that "begin again" refers to having to continue to live -- to wake up the next morning hungry -- rather than an afterlife or rebirth.
Your literal view of the poem as a recollection of ED's childhood sounds accurate to me. Thanks.
I agree with your suggestion on "begin again," now that I think about it. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteThis poem is about two people, “He”/“Himself” and “I”/”myself”/”my”.
ReplyDeleteED Lex defines “gad” as “coax; remove; steal; pry”.
OED defines “gad” as “”to go from one place to another, esp. aimlessly or idly; (now esp.) to go out or go travelling in the pursuit of pleasure or entertainment; to gallivant”, as in ‘to gad about’.
OED defines “gadfly” as “Any of various parasitic flies which cause great agitation in the livestock on which they deposit eggs or inflict bites”. Metaphorically, a gadfly is an irritating iconoclast or revolutionary, often in the Romantic tradition.
Pollak (1979) posited that “He”/”Himself” in Stanzas 3-4 was the gnat, but in that case, ED would not have capitalized the two words.
ReplyDeleteED used the window-pane metaphor in two previous poems.
In ‘The Sun kept stooping – stooping – low!’ (F182), the “window pane” separated ED from an elusive sunset:
“[I] Charged from my chimney corner –
But Nobody was there!”
In ‘Before I got my eye put out’ (F336) her “window pane” protected her from too much “Sun”:
“So safer—guess—with just my soul
Upon the window pane
Where other creatures put their eyes—
Incautious—of the Sun—”
Here, in ‘It would have starved a Gnat’, ED’s “window pane” prevents her “little Being” from enjoying the freedom a man has to choose between his current world and another far away.
An interpretation of the four stanzas:
I was starved for love and affection, both at home as a child and as a young woman.
That need held me like a claw that I could no more escape than I could coax a leech away or make a dragon move —
Unlike a gnat with wings to fly in search of food (love and affection), I felt trapped, with no way out of my Amherst life. But he was mightier than I and,
unlike me, Wadsworth could move to San Francisco and start a new life. I lacked the Art (power) to escape my “window pane” and even if I could, I’d have to begin my life all over again.
“In her poetry as in her life, Emily Dickinson pursued a strategy of containing hungers, in response to externally imposed deprivation, beneath which the pressures of a volcanic self continually threatened to erupt. . . . Like the paralyzed speaker in "It would have starved a Gnat," she was unable either to extinguish such inevitable hungers as the desire for literary recognition and for sexual gratification, or to renounce them.”
(Pollak, Vivian R. 1979. Thirst and Starvation in Emily Dickinson's Poetry. American Literature , 519(1): 33-49.).
Thanks for the comments and the reference --
ReplyDeleteI love this site. Your comments, Susan, are acute and sensitive and they bring Emily's verses, which can be opaque, to light. Anyway, this poem about the gnat always gets me. To imagine oneself so. Just stop for a second and conceive what emotional experience must have been for Emily---that, so desirous of something to appear in her heart-chamber besides whatever it was she was feeling, that she would shrink her expectations to gnat-size. I always think of the "gad" as a playful way for her to be grateful to the gnat's appearance. She was given a break from the cyclic downer-ish thoughts; she did not have to "begin again" the compulsive yuck of her everyday angst---at least not for that moment. I do not think of the gnat as exploding against the pane.
ReplyDelete