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.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the excellent explication and for including the passage from 'Song of Myself'.
ReplyDeleteThe plural "Strangers" of Line 1, "These Strangers, in a foreign World", suggests that a family of Irish immigrants, newly arrived from the potato famines of Ireland, are the recipient of ED's generosity. She did the same earlier in F486, 1862:
"He told a homely tale
And spotted it with tears —
Upon his infant face was set
The Cicatrice of years —"
The influx of Irish immigrants into Amherst was a result two things: the Irish potato famine of 1845-1855 and the completion of a railroad spur line to Amherst in 1853, a project sponsored by ED's father . "During the Great Irish Potato Famine, between 1845 and 1855, an estimated 2.1 million Irish people emigrated from Ireland to North America, with the majority coming to the United States." (Google AI).
Thanks that bit of context. Yes, and her father's father employed many Irish too for the building of the school, so she grew up with these poor working men around her. And their maid Maggie was Irish too. I like that idea of this poem being about the Irish. It helps atone for some iffy remarks about the Irish she wrote to her brother her in a letter. She was pretty young when she wrote this letter, and teasing Austin for being too harsh a schoolmaster, but it still makes you wince. "We are quite alarmed for the boys, hope you wont kill, or pack away any of em, so near Dr. Webster's bones t'ant strange you have had temptations! You would not take it amiss if I should saw we laughed some when each of your letters came - your respected parents were overwhelmed with glee, and as for the young ladies they gave a smile or so by way of recognizing your descriptive merits. Father remarks quite briefly that he "thinks they have found their master," mother bites her lips, and fears you "will be rash with them" and Vinnie and I say masses for poor Irish boys souls. So far as I am concerned I should like to have you kill some - there are so many now, there is no room for the Americans, and I cant think of a death that would be more after my mind than scientific destruction, scholastic dissolution, there's something lofty in it, it smacks of going up! Wont you please to state the name of the boy that turned the faintest, as I like to get such facts to set down in my journal, also anything else that's startling which you may chance to know - I dont think deaths or murders can ever come amiss in a young woman's journal - the country's still just now, and the severities alluded to will have a salutary influence in waking the people up." Death by scholastic dissolution! It smacks of going up. That's funny. But the idea of killing the Irish to make room for the Americans is a harsh joke, even though I suspect she wrote it with tongue firmly in cheek, probably to poke fun at the prevailing xenophobia.
ReplyDeletePerhaps ED put a clue in her letter that will ease your wince (L44, To Austin Dickinson, June 15, 1851; ED was 20 and full of it.).
ReplyDeleteNear the end of your above quote, ED drops a line set off with dashes, " — I dont think deaths or murders can ever come amiss in a young woman's journal — ". That line is a crude, overstated attempt at dark humor by a "young woman" barely out of her teens, but I think she's telling Austin, in case he didn't already know it, that her letter is ironic and not to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, her tone does grate on modern ears.
PS. Massachusetts banned slavery in 1783, but well-to-do landowners in the upper Connecticut River Valley owned slaves before that time. Descendents of those slaves still lived in western Massachusetts during ED’s lifetime.
ReplyDeleteBefore the influx of Irish “refugees” during the late 1840s, African Americans were the domestic workers for wealthy families, including the Dickinsons, who hired Blacks as gardeners, stable managers, and domestic help. ED herself was raised by a Black nanny, and several academic studies document traces of Negro dialect in ED’s letters and poems.
Correction: Although the Dickinson family hired many African American servants during ED's early lifetime, she did not have a Black nanny.
ReplyDeleteFielder, Brigitte. 2022. "Emily Dickinson's Black Contexts." The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson, edited by Cristanne Miller and Karen Sánchez-Eppler, OUP Oxford, 2022, pp. 353–71.
Murray, Aife. 2010. Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson's Life and Language. University of Massachusetts Press, 2010.