Just as He spoke it from his Hands

Just as He spoke it from his Hands
This Edifice remain—
A Turret more, a Turret less
Dishonor his Design—

According as his skill prefer
It perish, or endure—
Content, soe'er, it ornament
His absent character.


         -F953, J848, sheet 20, 1865

A strange poem which empties itself as it goes.

You start with something, "it," being spoken from “his Hands.”

Just as He spoke it from his Hands

It’s an evocative image, Hands that speak, almost biblical. Then you get the edifice itself, and, somehow, it remains. It abides, just the same as when it was when it was created.

This Edifice remain—

“Edifice” is an odd word. It’s a bit empty, like saying "house" instead of "home." The house remains, yes, but what about the home? So, here you have something spoken into existence by his Hands, and what was built remains. But for what?

In the second stanza we will find out that his character is absent from the building. I’m thinking of Dickinson’s line, “Nature is a haunted house.” Somehow, in this poem, creation itself is called into question.

You get more clue into this “absent character” in the next line.

A Turret more, a Turret less
Dishonor his Design—

This edifice turns out to have turrets. This would make it a castle. A castle implies a king, a kingdom, and a whole hierarchy. It also implies protection. Turrets were originally built for guards, so that they could watch out for incoming enemies.

But turrets are ALSO ornamental. This poem plays with both ideas because in the second stanza adding a turret "ornaments" the builder's absent character.

Okay, so we have a structure that is both beautiful (ornamental) and functional (protects), and is "perfectly" made as is. So we need not add any more to what is already there, right?

But hey! Maybe we want to? Maybe we want to add to the design. God is like a busy father then, absent and not listening to our ideas.

Then we get the difficult second stanza:

According as his skill prefer
It perish, or endure—  (but if enduring, then)
Content, soe'er, it ornament
His absent character.

There are a number of ways to take this. This is my best guess:

The builder in the second stanza is not the same as the first. The builder of the edifice, the Lord of the castle, in the first stanza is different from the builder-on of turrets in the second stanza. The second builder is the one who is now “dishonoring His design.”

The one dishonoring the design may prefer the empty house to perish, but IF this new builder adding the turret has the skill, and the edifice endures, then you can at least be content that the structure designed (the turret added) will show us the absent character of the King. 

In that sense, you may see this poem as that very Turret, the one that points to the Landlords absent character. This poem, from this perspective, is punk. It's nearly heretical. I take it as a push-back against a Lord of the manner.

If I was going to try to get at this poem from a biographical bent, this is what I would surmise: Emily’s father, Edward Dickinson, was famously controlling about his family and how the house was designed and kept. Remember that Emily lived in this house her whole life. There must’ve been some power dynamics over taste. Like many fathers (and especially back then), Edward Dickinson was a controlling presence, and yet was also mostly absent from the house.

***

That’s one take on the poem. It's a well-considered possibility. But I also can see there is a more surface-way to read this poem too.

This poem could be read as being about the tension between faith in the perfection of divine design and uncertainty about what that design actually means. We might believe that everything has been made according to a divine plan. But we cannot necessarily see that plan. We can only look at the world and try to understand the character of the being who made it. (A bit like a poem with many meanings).

In this interpretation, “Content, soe'er,” might mean that the structure remains content regardless. It’s purpose is simply to testify to its creator, whether it perishes or endures. Yet the creator remains absent, leaving us to decide what the testimony means.

***

If you look at the recent batch of poems, and especially the ones that Dickinson wrote on this same piece of paper, sheet 20, you'll see that they all have these kinds of layered meanings in them. All levels of these poems can be useful depending on your needs, but it's worth remembering that, for the careful reader, there is often a more subtle and compelling reading lying in wait below the first. And sometimes that second one is a brazen reversal.

Is this poem more about the perfection of the King's Castle as it seems to be at first, or is it more about the absence inside the house that keeps it from being a home?


               -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

P.S. I picked up an Emily Dickinson Selected Poems at the local Sunnyside Book Swap a couple days ago. The selection had a forward by Billy Collins. I stood at the swap and read the intro and then put the book back for some lucky reader. The biggest takeaway I got from Collins' intro was his observations on the way Dickinson played the Anglo Saxon language off the Latinate for effect in her poems. The current poem at hand is a good example. "Just as he spoke it from his hands" is very Anglo Saxon. But the second line has a very different Latinate sound, "The Edifice remain." It is a subtle clue as to the meaning of the poem for me. The first line is full of substance. The second, like the more flashy and formal Latinate, is emptier. The home, on other words, has become an edifice.