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13 December 2014

A Prison gets to be a friend —

*Note: the following poem is out of Franklin order because I inadvertently omitted it earlier. This is the last of the out-of-order poems.


A Prison gets to be a friend —
Between its Ponderous face
And Ours — a Kinsmanship express —
And in its narrow Eyes —

We come to look with gratitude
For the appointed Beam
It deal us — stated as Our food —
And hungered for — the same —

We learn to know the Planks —
That answer to Our feet —
So miserable a sound — at first —
Nor even now — so sweet —

As plashing in the Pools —
When Memory was a Boy —
But a Demurer Circuit —
A Geometric Joy —

The Posture of the Key
That interrupt the Day
To Our Endeavor — Not so real
The Cheek of Liberty —

As this Phantasm steel —
Whose features — Day and Night —
Are present to us — as Our Own —
And as escapeless — quite —

The narrow Round — the stint —
The slow exchange of Hope —
For something passiver — Content
Too steep for looking up —

The Liberty we knew
Avoided — like a Dream —
Too wide for any night but Heaven —
If That — indeed — redeem —
                             F456 (1862)  J652



At first glance the poem seems to share similarities to other of Dickinson's work where she is numbed to liberty or otherwise circumscribed or impeded. But Dickinson's use of the first person plural, the frequent "we" and "our", signal that in this poem she is talking about the human condition. The metaphorical prison bars are a "Phantasm" that that we choose – or learn – to observe. We avoid liberty, willingly exchanging it, or at least coming to acquiesce in the exchange, for the quieter, "passiver" state of "Content". Heaven might offer real freedom, but in the last line Dickinson expresses some doubt that heaven can in fact "redeem" us.
   
Newgate prison cell, 1856
The physical body is very present in this poem. It begins with the human face contrasted with the "Ponderous face" of the prison. Its window eyes are viewed with our eyes. Our feet feel the floor, we hear its noises; we recall splashing in pools of water. But the essence of the poem centers on freedom. 
        Should we mourn the loss of childish freedom when unfettered life is "Too wide" to comprehend or negotiate?  Freedom may have been as lovely to a child as the cheek of its mother, but even that image reminds us that children are held in loving bonds to their parents. Childish pleasures, Dickinson implies, give way to a "Geometric Joy" where immersion in confinement produces the sort of mindfulness espoused by sages and ascetics. 
        If all we can now see of the sun, so long taken for granted, is its light filtering through prison windows at predictable times, we respond with "gratitude". The noisy planks converse with our feet, becoming over time a sweeter sound than that of our childhood "plashing". This is is a walking meditation Dickinson describes. Joy can be found in the geometry of a cell. 
        This is not indicative of agoraphobia as Maryanne M. Garbowsky ("The House Without the Door: A Study of Emily Dickinson and the Illness of Agoraphobia") has suggested, but rather an insight into transcendence. How do we transcend the prison of our earthly existence? Not, according to this poem, by travel or adventure or the pursuit of wealth or ambition; but rather by self knowledge. For I think that Dickinson's metaphor can be read not only that earthly life is a prison, but that we ourselves are both prisoner and prison.
        We exchange the hope of youth, the dreams we had, for contentment, a much quieter and less exciting state of being. We avoid "The Liberty we knew" as something unmanageable and quite beyond our grasp. The transcendence of the "stint" comes when we find the sweetness, the "Demurer Circuit", and that "Geometric Joy. 
        Despite all that, I do not think that Dickinson is celebrating the "stint"; she paints a rather meager transcendence and an over-all cramped vision of life. And it is rather sad to read the poem written, in Franklin's chronology, just previous to this one, "It was given to me by the Gods"  [F455], where she exults in her youthful discovery of poetic talent:

Rich! 'Twas Myself – was rich –
To take the name of Gold –
And Gold to own – in solid Bars –
The Difference – made me bold –

It was in her small bedroom where Dickinson dreamed and wrote. She increasingly chose that room over all other places. Adreinne Rich, in her marvellous essay on Dickinson, "Vesuvius at Home",  wrote:
Her niece Martha told of visiting her in her corner bedroom on the second floor at 280 Main Street, Amherst, and of how Emily Dickinson made as if to lock the door with an imaginary key, turned and said, “Matty: here’s freedom.”

So while the poem isn't really celebratory, it is a reflection of Dickinson's own transcendence of her "narrow Round" and "Phantasm steel". 



The first two stanzas alternate iambic tetrameter with iambic trimeter – a common ballad structure. But beginning with the third stanza Dickinson uses iambic trimeter in all but the third line. The effect is to emphasize the last words of the first two lines of each stanza: Planks / feet; Pools / Boy; Key / Day; steel / Night / stint / Hope / knew / Dream. 
        Each word is one syllable; most have a long, lingering vowels. One exception, "stint", cuts through the slow sounds around it (narrow Round, slow exchange of Hope), adding extra emphasis on the word that in its double meaning of limitation and task is at the heart of the poem.

13 comments:

  1. Great essay on a difficult poem. I agree that there is a transcendence happening here. This new "stint" is not as great as splashing in a puddle, but neither is it any longer "miserable" as it was at first. It is now a demurer, geometric joy. This is a maturity. Transcending, but a little sad.

    I always love the way the metrical and literal "feet" trip up in her poem "After great pain a formal feeling comes" and there is perhaps a touch of that in this poem as the 4-3-4-3 pattern is interrupted, ironically, in the line "We learn to know the planks/ That answer to our feet", where you are expecting 4 beats there in first line, but get 3 instead. And the rest of the poem after this changes and becomes 3-3-4-3. (Planks become a synonym for "lines" that "answer to our feet"). May be a reach, but it is in keeping with other poems.

    I wonder what the "key" is referring to in this poem? "The posture of the Key/ that interrupt the day": on one hand it is interrupting the endeavor, and the key is not as "real" as the phantasm of steel cage, but on the other hand, it is presumably opening the cell door. So this key is posed as both hindrance and relief here. What is the key? Might the answer to this question unlock something in this poem?

    Maybe the "key" doesn't matter so much. "Posture" might be a more important word here. "Posture" and "phantasm" both suggest fake, and lead one to question both the cell and the escape.

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    1. I take the 'The posture of the Key / That interrupt the Day / To Our Endeavor...' as something of an interjection just as the Key is an interjection in the patient pacing. You could easily skip from 'A Geometric Joy' to "Not so real / The Cheek of Liberty'. But that key ... An upright posture vs. horizontal means open vs. shut. It must complicate the 'slow exchange of Hope' and serve as an unwanted (?) locus of attention.
      Could poetry be the key and its posture the locking/releasing of the poem?

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    2. Ah, that's what she means by posture? Turning the lock into the upright open position. That makes sense.

      Clever to think of the key as both an interjection to the poem and to the patient pacing. The key as poetry, as "interjection" perhaps, is an interesting idea. It does seem to be longed for in this poem, romantic liberty, even if the more real "prose" world is ultimately accepted.

      Always so many echoes between her poems. I'm thinking of "content" here echoing the "Quartz contentment" in "After great pain". In both cases there is an acceptance of pain and reality leading to contentment. And I'm thinking about all the in vs. out poems, like "The Soul selects her own Society" in which you simultaneously could take the inside or outside perspective.

      There may be a longing for the outside, as perhaps is hinted at in that "key," but still, in this poem at least, the prison (the body? the mind?) is "escapeless -- quite". Even heaven is doubted. No hope here... but still, there is contentment and joy!

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  2. “A Prison gets to be a friend”, hmmm, where have we heard that before? ‘Shawshank Redemption’, 1994. “Red” Redding (Morgan Freeman), Shawshank Prison librarian, gets paroled after serving 40-years of a life sentence (just a “stint”). Free, he struggles to adapt to life outside prison and fears that he never will.

    Franklin dates ED’s fascicle copy of ‘A Prison gets to be a friend’ (F456) “about late 1862”. Before we summarily dismiss Garbowsky’s “agoraphobia” hypothesis, it’s worth reading two letters ED wrote to close friends eight years before she composed ‘A Prison gets to be a friend’:

    On January 15, 1854, 23-year-old ED wrote her best friend, Susan Gilbert [brackets mine]:

    “I'm just from meeting, Susie, and as I sorely feared, my "life" was made a "victim." I walked - I ran - I flew - I turned precarious corners - One moment I was not - then soared aloft like Phoenix, soon as the foe was by - and then anticipating an enemy again, my soiled and drooping plumage might have been seen emerging from just behind a fence, vainly endeavoring to fly once more from hence. I reached the steps, dear Susie - I smiled to think of me, and my geometry [“A Geometric Joy”!], during the journey there - It would have puzzled Euclid” . . . . “Several [of the congregation] roared around, and, sought to devour me, but I fell an easy prey to Miss Lavina Dickinson, being too much exhausted to make any farther resistance. . . . She entertained me with much sprightly remark, until our gate was reached, and I need'nt tell you Susie, just how I clutched the latch, and whirled the merry key [“The Posture of the Key”!] , and fairly danced for joy, to find myself at home!” (L154)

    Six months later, about July 25, 1854, ED wrote a close friend, Abiah Root:

    “You asked me to come and see you - I must speak of that. I thank you Abiah, but I dont go from home, unless emergency leads me by the hand, and then I do it obstinately, draw back if I can. Should I ever leave home, which is improbable, I will with much delight, accept your invitation; till then, my dear Abiah, my warmest thanks are your's, but dont expect me.” (L166)

    These are not letters a 23-year-old budding poet with garden-variety shyness would write. In them, ED describes common symptoms of agoraphobia. Wikipedia summarizes: “Agoraphobia is a mental and behavioral disorder, specifically an anxiety disorder characterized by symptoms of anxiety in situations where the person perceives their environment to be unsafe with no easy way to escape. These situations can include open spaces, public transit, shopping centers, crowds and queues, or simply being outside their home on their own. (American Psychiatric Association (2013), Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.), pp. 217–221)

    One perspicacious undergraduate argued that ED used her agoraphobia to her poetry’s advantage: “While agoraphobia is often a debilitating and shaming disorder, in Emily Dickinson’s case, it works to empower her mind and imagination. Even though this disorder dislocates and limits her physical existence, as she must confine herself within the home, her creativity as a poet thrives and expands as a result. Due to the former, negative connotation of agoraphobia, many critics of Dickinson are uneasy with the idea of reducing her to a psychological disorder. However, as an intensive analysis of her poetry will reveal, agoraphobia or symptoms associated with agoraphobia, offer a source of inspiration and generativity.” (Vanderhurst, Lauren. 2011. “A Prison Gets to be a Friend”: Emily Dickinson, Agoraphobia and Introspection, Emergence: A Journal of Undergraduate Literary Criticism and Creative Research, p.4)

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    1. It is very interesting to compare how ED uses the words "geometry" in the letter and "Geometric Joy" in the poem.

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    2. I like how Emily is making fun of her difficulties. What surprises me is that she writes about it to her friends. What she describes certainly isn’t normal and should be taken seriously. When I was at that age I experienced something very similar. My way of coping was to act as normally as possible and not to tell anybody. In my case as in hers it got worse over time. I couldn’t understand back then what was wrong with me and why I was having these problems. Now I know it can be labeled complex posttraumatic stress disorder. I think she suffered from something like that. Many of her poems make perfect sense when read from this perspective.
      Bessel van der Kolk in his book “The Body Keeps the Score” points out that people with complex PTSD are frequently misdiagnosed. Here are some of the diagnosis various authors attributed to ED: Dickinson was psychotic (Cody 1971); she had lupus erythematosus (Reynolds 1979); she suffered from Hesperian Depression, known today as Seasonal Affective Disorder (Cameron 1972, Oren and Rosenthal 2001)9 ; she was anorexic (Thomas 1988); she was mad (Lindauer 1994); she was neurotic and schizotypal (Monroe 1992, Winhusen 2004);10 she was agoraphobic and sexually deviant (Garbowsky 1989, Kavaler-Adler 1991); she suffered from bipolar disorder (Kaufman 2001, Ramsey and Weisberg 2004, Goldberg 2019)11 and panic disorder (McDermott 2000, Archer 2009); she was an incest and trauma survivor (Hirschhorn 1991, Perriman 2006); she had tuberculosis (Mamunes 2007); she was autistic (Brown 2009); she was epileptic (Gordon 2011, Domenico, Chirchiglia, and Marotta, 2019).
      (Vivian Delchamps: "The Names of Sickness": Emily Dickinson, Diagnostic Reading, and Articulating The Emily Dickinson Journal, Volume 28, Number 2, 2019, pp. 106-132)

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  3. ED fretted about alternative words and phrases in this poem [13 in brackets]. To my ear, some of them sound better or clarify ambiguities. ED didn’t agree:

    A Prison gets to be a friend —
    Between its Ponderous face
    And Ours — a Kinsmanship express [exist, subsist, arise] —
    And in its narrow Eyes —

    We come to look with gratitude [fondness, pleasure]
    For the appointed Beam
    It deal us [furnish]— stated as Our food —
    And hungered for — the same —

    We learn to know the Planks —
    That answer to Our feet —
    So miserable a sound — at first —
    Nor even now — so sweet —

    As plashing in the Pools —
    When Memory was a Boy —
    But a Demurer Circuit [Measure] —
    A Geometric Joy —

    The Posture of the Key
    That interrupt the Day
    To Our Endeavor — Not so real [true, close, near]
    The Cheek of Liberty —

    As this Phantasm [Companion] steel —
    Whose features — Day and Night —
    Are present to us — as Our Own —
    And as escapeless — quite —

    The narrow Round — the stint —
    The slow exchange of Hope —
    For something passiver — Content
    Too steep for looking up —

    The Liberty we knew
    Avoided — like [As] a Dream —
    Too wide for any night but Heaven —
    If That — indeed — redeem — [If Even That —redeem —]

    P.S.: Researching this poem, I ran across an appropriate closing acknowledgement in a doctoral dissertation that ED would approve: “Most importantly, I would like to thank Emily Dickinson for being so unclear.” (Kannan, .M., 2011, The Publics of Emily Dickinson, doctoral dissertation, 182 pages).

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    1. Thanks for providing the alternatives. I like her ultimate choices best but love looking at the others and thinking about the decision...
      I love the dissertation quote!

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  4. I wonder how much she really 'craved' recognition and appreciation -- at least from the general public. I do find it easy to imagine she wrote for herself, Susan Dickinson, Thomas Higginson, Samuel Bowles, and such others -- plus (and perhaps more significantly) imagined future readers of similar imagined ilk.

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    1. Exactly, to me it seems very probable that she wrote mainly for herself in order “to keep the dark away”. But when scholars tell me she craved recognition I cannot dispute it; so far, I have only read about 300 poems and one biography. It seems odd that she didn’t give any instructions to her sister on the poems if she wanted them to be published after her death.
      Still the evidence of her psychological difficulties is strong. Perhaps we should ask why she is so concerned with “exploring states of psychic extremity“.

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    2. According to Jerome Charyn, ED kept her letters and poems with her trusted Irish maid Margaret Maher and instructed her to burn them all when she died. Maggie did burn the letters but returned the sewn "fascicles" and loose sheets of poetry to ED's bedroom dresser where Lavinia found them. Charyn speculates that ED guessed correctly that Maggie would be unable to burn the poetry. Elsewhere I read that Lavinia burned the letters before finding the poems. (It was customary in the 19th century to burn a decedent's correspondence. Custom did dictate what to do with poetry, thankfully.) Whatever happened, we can awfully close to losing an entire world.

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    3. *didn't dictate*

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    4. Seems ED was ambivalent about what to do with the poems and left it to chance. According to Franklin she sent about six hundred poems to friends. The rest she kept to herself.

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