Protection asked of me—
Befriend them, lest Yourself in Heaven
Be found a Refugee—
-Fr805, J1096, early 1864
This is a rare straight-forward poem from Dickinson, and one that speaks to our moment now as well as any. One can imagine this poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, or written on a sign held by any one of the millions of protesters last week at one of the "No King" rallies.
The poem recalls Matthew 25: 41-46: "Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: For I was hungry, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee hungry, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me."
Is this poem meant, as it seems, to be a proverb for the general public, or is there something more personal in its use of the pronoun "me?" Thinking about the issues of her time, I wonder if slavery is on Dickinson's mind here. Her “preceptor” and friend, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was a famous and outspoken abolitionist. There is a really great book about Dickinson’s friendship with Higginson called “White Heat” by Brenda Wineapple, that gives a lot of context for all of this, and also serves as terrific character study of Higginson, who was quite the guy. Dickinson never wrote directly about the issue of slavery, for whatever reason, but there are many oblique references to it, and perhaps this poem is one of them.
If the “me” is not just a generalized “me,” but, in fact, the author, then we could ask, what protection might have been asked of Dickinson? Here I think of that passage in Whitman’s Song of Myself,
“The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,
And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him,
And brought water and fill’d a tub for his sweated body and bruis’d feet,
And gave him a room that enter’d from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes,
And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;
He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass’d north,
I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean’d in the corner.”
On the whole I tend to favor Dickinson’s poems over Whitman’s, but here I find Whitman’s testimony much more moving and inspiring for its specificity than Dickinson’s. Whitman is bravely putting himself out there and doing, through his poem, what Dickinson only suggests in hers.
“The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,
And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him,
And brought water and fill’d a tub for his sweated body and bruis’d feet,
And gave him a room that enter’d from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes,
And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;
He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass’d north,
I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean’d in the corner.”
On the whole I tend to favor Dickinson’s poems over Whitman’s, but here I find Whitman’s testimony much more moving and inspiring for its specificity than Dickinson’s. Whitman is bravely putting himself out there and doing, through his poem, what Dickinson only suggests in hers.
So, perhaps Dickinson is chastising herself here for not doing more?
The turn around in this poem is well-put. You will eventually become the stranger that you turn away. It’s a truth well worth reflecting on, then and now.
The turn around in this poem is well-put. You will eventually become the stranger that you turn away. It’s a truth well worth reflecting on, then and now.
-/)dam Wade l)eGraff
The photo you found to accompany this poem and commentary is perfect and so moving.
ReplyDeleteReading your last sentence, I am reminded of how we often compliment a work of poetry or art as being “timeless,” but we sometimes need a reminder of why this designation is so appropriate. For art, when it is good, speaks to shared human experiences that are, often surprisingly, not limited to our contemporary social or political settings and understandings. We might think of them as experiences shared vertically through time, with people unknown to us, instead of shared horizontally with our friends and companions. In this sense poetry is not prose, as Dickinson was adamant to tell us, because it is communicating outside of the conventions of our day.
Yet so often poems or other works of art draw from specific encounters with the world, and so avoids abstraction too! Emily Dickinson is so brilliant and making her poems very particular, true to her lived experience, and yet also keeping the door open to additional meanings that resonate through time. As you and Susan have pointed out, she does this in so many ways. By way of chiasmus and sliding modifiers and other grammatical inversions. By choosing a word or phrase which in itself shocks us into seeing outside of our usual assumptions. By creating oppositions (as the straight and round opposition you draw our attention to here) that create a kind of fertile tension in our minds. “Timeless” because a good poem keeps generating ideas outside of the circumstances of its original creation, connecting us to people who lived before and will live after us. This poem does that for me, even in its brevity.
(You drew our attention to the straight and round opposition not here but in your commentary on the last poem, “Ample make this Bed.”)
DeleteGood point about the timeless, though I find Whitman's timefulness valuable too. He did that beautifully, taking the specificity of the moment and making it stick in poetry. Love your idea of "fertile tension." And I'm glad to see "sliding modifiers" mentioned. I remember having a conversation with Susan in which I lamented that there seemed to be no official name for such things, which are, after all, pretty common in poetry. I settled on sliding modifier for lack of a better term. Thanks for your thoughts, Tom.
ReplyDelete