Guest Dickinson Bloggers!

Dear Readers -
I recently attended the annual Emily Dickinson International Society conference in Asilomar. What a great event! The speakers and panels were full of poetry, revelatory and insightful commentary, and scholarship. I even met some Prowling Bee readers!

One of the readers is a professor from Columbus State University in Georgia. He wrote me the following letter a few weeks before the conference and I was very happy to meet him there in person:

This past spring I taught a class on Dickinson's poetry.  For their final project, I gave them the option of creating their own "prowling Bee"-like blog (I referred them to your site and they used it quite a bit, I think).  I thought you might be interested in the results.  Here are some of their blogs:  

not Conclusion, Jacque Hutch 

Diving into Dickinson, Casi Turner 

A Bullet Hit a Bird, Alex Proft 

The Midsummer Mind  

Lenses of Literature, Rachael 

Kind regards,
Patrick Jackson 

Readers, I read through the blogs and I highly recommend them. Each student presents several poems along with very thoughtful explications. These are mostly poems I haven't gotten to yet, so it's great to offer them here. Each student blog has a unique style and each writer definitely has their own voice. There are some real treasures to be found!

I'm not sure if you can leave comments on the student blogs via this site, but please feel free to leave any comments below.

Check it out!

Susan

Beauty — be not caused — It Is –

Beauty — be not caused — It Is –
Chase it, and it ceases –
Chase it not, and it abides –

Overtake the Creases

In the Meadow — when the Wind
Runs his fingers thro' it –
Deity will see to it
That You never do it –
                              J516, Fr 654 (1863)

Dickinson begins by presenting Beauty as an essence, something drawn from Plato's Forms, timeless and unchangeable. Our mortal senses, part of the physical world, recognize and respond to it, but we cannot create it, neither can we grab hold of it or otherwise own it. As Dickinson puts it, Beauty Is. The capitalization in 'Is' matters.

In Plato's Symposium, Socrates links love to our response to beauty and traces its evolution: at first, love is a response to the beauty of a particular body; it then becomes more generalized, seeing and loving beauty in all bodies. As we mature and become more wise we recognize the beauty in more abstracted things: Souls, laws and institutions, knowledge, and finally we recognize and love Beauty itself in its ideal form.

Some have also seen the first stanza as hearkening back to Keats' "Ode on a Grcian Urn": "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."  But I don't think Dickinson is making that point. If she is channeling anyone besides Plato (whose writing and philosophy would have been familiar to her, if not from her academic studies then from lectures and discussions), I think it would be Emerson.
        It is Emerson the transcendentalist who seeks the still center where beauty abides, who writes, " within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related …" ("The Oversoul", 1841). Even more to Dickinson's point, he says that Beauty "cannot be handled. … It instantly deserts possession and flies to an object in the horizon" (The Conduct of Life, 1860).
        But perhaps most in tune with Dickinson here is his depiction of Beauty as "hiding all wisdom and power in its calm sky" (The Conduct of Life).

Having pretty much condensed the notion of ideal Beauty into three lines, Dickinson writes a pivot line, isolating it between the first three lines, preventing an initial quatrain, and the following quatrain to which it is linked by both grammar and sense.

However, cleave ultimately as it may to the second quatrain, "Overtake the Creases" is initially grasped as linked to the opening lines by means of the perfect rhyme of "Creases"with "ceases" and also because "Overtake" seems a continuation of chasing. But then we read on and find ourselves on a gusty day in a meadow creased by the fingers of the Wind. We might, for the sheer joy of it, for the beauty of it, try to overtake the Wind, but a "Deity" will make sure it never happens.

In isolation, "Overtake the Creases" is a wondrously ambiguous and mysterious phrase. What are the Creases, one wonders. I immediately thought of seams, of liminal space between one thing and another – between the physical and the ideal, the chasing and the not chasing. But then I meet the meadow and meaning wobbles. I've been pivoted from the third to the second person. I've moved from the abstract to the Real. I've come from the Ideal world into one with a Deity who might be the Christian God or who might be a casual symbol of the laws of nature.

If I look at the poem on the page, my attention is drawn to that isolated imperative: Overtake the Creases. What I read are two reasons not to: first, because Beauty disappears when pursued; second, because it is impossible to ever catch it. What is Dickinson really suggesting we do? Try to overtake? Or let it be? I think she is saying 'both' – or somehow just implanting the notion that sometimes, some critical time, we should go for the creases.

No Crowd that has occurred

No Crowd that has occurred
Exhibit — I suppose
That General Attendance
That Resurrection — does —

Circumference be full —
The long restricted Grave                                                       [long] subjected
Assert her Vital Privilege —                                                   [Assert] His Primogeniture
The Dust — connect — and live —

On Atoms — features place —
All Multitudes that were
Efface in the Comparison —
As Suns — dissolve a star —                                                 [Suns -] annul

Solemnity — prevail —
Its Individual Doom
Possess each separate Consciousness —
August — Absorbed — Numb —                                        [August-]  Resistless– dumb

What Duplicate — exist —                                                    [What] scenery
What Parallel can be —
Of the Significance of This —                                                [the] stupendousness
To Universe — and Me?

                                                            J515, Fr 653 (1863)

This poem describes a slice of Judgment Day (from the Bible's Rev 20:1-15) . It begins in a rather droll way, the tone conversational as if the speaker were making an offhand remark on the topic of large gatherings. She ultimately concludes, unremarkably, that Judgment Day will be the largest and most significant gathering ever in the whole Universe --  and also – but with a question mark –  the most significant event to herself.

It is that question mark paired with the droll opening tone that may expose the poem to the If of faith and doubt.

The second stanza flatly depicts what Revelations describes. The Grave, long portrayed (by many, including Dickinson herself) as a passive receptacle for the deceased to wait, "safe in their alabaster chambers" (Fr124), until the final Resurrection, here asserts "her Vital Privilege": to reassemble the scattered 'dust' and atoms of the dead into their recognizable former bodies.

            Although there is no wailing or gnashing of teeth, neither is it a happy crowd. We see no joyful reunions, no reconstituted flesh revelling in the touch of a breeze, or bird song (should there be enough atoms left for birds). Instead, Dickinson paints a picture of the numb solemnity of a solid mass of humanity just before the moment of judgment.

            She ends the poem rhetorically asking if there could every be anything like such an event, anything comparable to its significance both to the Universe and to herself. While the questions are simple they just don't reflect, for me, the tone of someone truly contemplating their doom. Judgment Day feels far-fetched, the scene too dispassionate. It is like Eliot's Prufrock squeezing "the universe into a ball" and rolling it "towards some overwhelming question" only to have the listener shrug.

            This may be exactly the effect Dickinson intended. It may well have been a reaction against a religion she was never quite comfortable with

Puritan/Calvinist Christianity emphasized the afterlife: the threat of hell and a hope of heaven. The threat was never made more clear than in Jonathan Edwards' 1741 sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Throughout the (very long) sermon, Edwards paints a fearsome picture of damnation – and even of God: "The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider, or some loathsome Insect, over the Fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his Wrath towards you burns like Fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the Fire."

 

William Blake's "Judgment Day", 1808

Echoes of this famous and fiery sermon reverberated in Dickinson's life whether at home, away at school, or in her local church. She experienced a wave of revival that made similar calls for parishioners to stand and make a clear declaration of conversion. Although her family and most of her friends did so, Emily Dickinson did not.

Her letters contain a few mentions of fiery sermons. One was disturbing:

The minister today … preached about death and judgment, and what would become of those, meaning Austin and me, who behaved improperly – and somehow the sermon scared me, and father and Vinnie looked very solemn as if the whole was true, and I would not for worlds have them know that it troubled me … . He preached such an awful sermon though, that I didn't much think I should ever see you again until the Judgment Day, and then you would not speak to me, according to his story. The subject of perdition seemed to please him, somehow. (Letter 175 to Dr. and Mrs. J.G. Holland, Nov. 1854; Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, pg. 124) 

Another sermon, no doubt intended to scare the devil out of parishioners, was laughed at by the whole family, including Dickinson's conservative and dignified father:

The rest have gone to meeting, to hear Rev Martin Leland. I listened to him this forenoon in a state of mind very near frenzy, and feared the effect too much to go out this afternoon. The morning exercises were perfectly ridiculous,  and we spent the intermission in mimicking the Preacher, and reciting extracts from his most memorable sermon. I never heard father so funny.  … He said he ran out of meeting for fear somebody would ask him what he tho't of the preaching. He says if anyone asks him, he shall put his hand to his mouth, and his mouth in the dust, and cry, Unclean – Unclean!! ( Letter 125 to Austin Dickinson, June 1854; Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, pg. 104-5).

In this poem, Dickinson does not describe salvation, damnation, God's mood, nor how humanity and the Universe came to this pass. Instead there's a sort of latent eeriness, certainly a lack of affect, in her depiction of corpse dust – and there would be countless tons of it –reconfiguring into a mass of long-ago bodies. The underlying question is, I think, Why? Why the big production? Why at all?

            I realize this poem can also be read as a stately and somber depiction of Judgment Day. Christanne Miller discusses how the uninflected verbs (verbs without tense, here used ungrammatically) such as "Exhibit," "be full," and "Solemnity – prevail," "undercuts any clear sense of time or of number. … Those crowds do still exist, and resurrection is … ongoing, universal, like the poem's verbs" (Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Gramnmar, p.68-9).

            Yet to me, even the meter works against the solemnity. There is an over-regularity, an over-stressing of iambic trimeter, that affects a reader's mood. The first stanza in this poem, with its strong meter, it's rhyme of "suppose" and "does", it's dry "Exhibit" and "General Attendance" all establish a wry mood. "Resurrection" appears anticlimactically in the last line of the stanza.

So, Reader, what do you think? A subtle undercutting of Judgment Day? Or a carefully-crafted serious treatment of it?

That I did always love

That I did always love
I bring thee Proof
That till I loved
I never lived — Enough — *[I] did not live

That I shall love alway —
I argue thee * [I] offer
That love is life — *[love] be
And life hath Immortality —

This — dost thou doubt — Sweet —
Then have I
Nothing to show
But Calvary —
J549, Fr652 (1863)


Short as it is, the poem makes me think of Shakespearean sonnets. We have arguments for love that outlasts time, a potentially doubtful beloved, and plenty of Elizabethan thees and thous sprinkled throughout. We even have something that sounds a lot like a closing couplet.

L.W. Willingham

John Drury, in The Poetry Dictionary, writes that historically sonnets often present "an argument, perhaps a romantic plea in the guise of a legal brief." The first sonnets, Drury says, were composed and exchanged in the early 13th century by Sicilian notaries (lawyers of the day) and their Emperor, Frederick II. 

Granted, Dickinson is no lawyer, but she lived with lawyers. Granted, this poem is not fourteen lines nor are the lines in iambic pentameter. Consequently, the arguments are not well developed, but Dickinson cleverly presents only the line of argument rather than the argument itself, thus achieving her trademark compaction.

In the first stanza the speaker claims she always loved the elided (and assumed) You. Her proof? That until she loved she was never truly alive (or alive enough). This is a rather sophististic way of getting around all those years when the speaker did not "always love."  What the Beloved, and at least a few readers, really want, however, is some real Proof, but we suspect the speaker's assertions will have to suffice. Shakespeare would flesh this out a little, but Dickinson holds back.

Having claimed the past, the speaker next argues deductively that her love will always endure: since love is life and life "hath Immortality" her love will therefore be immortal (this would be a valid but perhaps not sound deductive argument, but her point is taken). The ED Lexicon helps us out by suggesting that Immortality in this poem means "Timelessness; an infinite dimension." Love, then, operates outside of time. As Shakespeare would have it, Love is not "Time's fool" (Sonnet 116).

In the final stanza the speaker addresses her beloved directly. It begins with "This" – a pronoun without a clear antecedent. Whether it refers to the argument immediately preceding or to both first and second stanzas is of little consequence. Should the Sweet beloved doubt, then the speaker has nothing else to show but pain and misery.

Overall, the arguments seem half hearted and unconvincing. And surely if the Beloved shows doubts after hearing them, the speaker has other recourse besides donning the anguish of Calvary.

And yet… I like the poem. It reads well and doesn't really call for logical rigor and abundant proofs. The claims make emotional sense and there are some fine lines and phrases. Dickinson weaves the poem together with love and life: four repetitions of "love" and three of some version of "live" or "life". It is another, more subliminal way of saying that love is life.

Smiling back from Coronation

Smiling back from Coronation
May be Luxury —
On the Heads that started with us —
Being's Peasantry —

Recognizing in Procession
Ones We former knew —
When Ourselves were also dusty —
Centuries ago —

Had the Triumph no Conviction
Of how many be —
Stimulated — by the Contrast —
Unto Misery —

                                                            J385,  Fr651 (1863)

This poem might be grouped with others where either Dickinson claims and celebrates her calling as a Poet or else among those where she recounts a transcendent experience. But while both of those poem groups reflect an almost ecstatic confidence, the current poem seems quite breezy, even condescending, by comparison. The speaker would like to smile after her Coronation, but decides it would be a luxury – and tacky, really –  because in the Procession she would see folks she knew from the distant past, people who "started" with her, and many others – all of whom would be "Stimulated … Unto Misery" by contrasting themselves to her. At least some of those in the Procession, those who began with the speaker, are dismissed as "Being's Peasantry".  Ouch.

St. John sees the crowned saints

Some scholars have suggested that passages in the biblical book of Revelations are the basis of the poem. Cristanne Miller, for example, writes that the poem "probably refers to passages in Revelation such as 2:10, 'be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life,' and 20:4, 'And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them … and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years'" (Emily Dickinson's Poems As She Preserved Them, n. 276, p. 763). Sadly, those people who did not make that first cut must wait in the grave until the second Resurrection where they stand before God for judgment (Revelation 20:12-13). In this reading, the speaker would be figuratively counting herself among the crowned martyrs.

        This may be a sort of triumph fantasy where the person considered by others to be a spiritual risk has found her way to salvation or at least experiencing the mixed emotions when after experiencing an epiphany or transcendent spiritual experience one rejoins quotidean human existence.

It is likely, however, that Dickinson is using biblical language to celebrate the internal coronation she has come to feel as a poet. In “For this—accepted Breath” (J195, Fr230), for example, Dickinson claims an immortal crown because of her calling as a Poet – and a great one – and calls on the archangel Gabriel and the Saints to proclaim it.

        But it is her paean to poets, "This was a Poet" (J448, Fr446), two hundred poems ago, that seems most like the current poem. The notion of immortality is front and center there. The Poet, she asserts, is "Exterior – to Time." The Poet "Entitles Us – by Contrast – to ceaseless Poverty –". Likewise in the current poem, the poet, still bedazzled by that mixture of epiphany and confidence whereby she experienced a personal "Coronation" crowning her poetic calling, looks at those around her, those who are dusty, just as she was "Centuries ago." The dustiness is that of the earth, for without the divine spark, we are but flesh and blood. These are "Being's Peasantry" – those tied to life's appetites, achievements and failures, just as a peasant is tied to a parcel of land.

Poetically, nothing tingles or surprises. But I do appreciate the rhyming pair of "Luxury" and Peasantry.

I would be very interested in readers' opinions. What have I missed?

Death is potential to that Man

Death is potential to that Man
Who dies — and to his friend —
Beyond that — unconspicuous
To Anyone but God —

Of these Two — God remembers
The longest — for the friend —
Is integral — and therefore [Is] subsequent
Itself dissolved — of God —

J548,  Fr650 (1863)

 In this short poem Dickinson takes an austere yet perhaps cosmic view of life and death, employing a cool and even legal diction.

The first stanza claims that Death is significant (ED Lexicon for "Potential") only to the dying and and his friends. His passing is hardly noticed by anyone else – except God.

The second stanza seems straightforward: God will remember the dying person longer than the grieving friend because the friend will himself die and God won't. Yet Dickinson's formulation of the mortality of the friend is quite abstract and formal. Her use of "integral" is interesting. Her alternative choice of "subsequent" – is much less so and a much more straightforward choice. Legally, and Dickinson who resided in a house of lawyers often employs legal diction, "integral" suggests something requisite, elemental, or basic. Because the friend is integral, Dickinson says, "therefore" at death he is "dissolved" of God. "Dissolve" is another word with specific legal meaning. To dissolve, according to Henry Campbell Black's 1891 Dictionary of Law, is to annul, terminate; to "release or unloose the binding force."
        Could Dickinson be drawing from the pantheistic strains of Transcendentalism?  That, as Emerson wrote in "Nature", all of nature and this world comprise a "Universal Being" – a diffusely and absolutely conscious Divine of which we are all a "part or parcel"*? Surely at death, in such a reality, there would be a dissolving, a release into the elemental particles of which the Cosmos is made. I don't think Dickinson is suggesting, despite her "dissolved – of God –" that at death we are released from God, but rather that we are released by God – perhaps into the "currents of the Universal Being."

        Or it might simply be that Dickinson is making a confident statement of belief: No matter if your death is little noted or your life forgotten when your friends are dead: God cares and remembers. Beth Marclay Doriani, in Emily Dickinson: Daughter of Prophecy (1996), considers this poem to be one of what she considers to be Dickinson's consolation poems where she "looked past the tragedy of the moment to offer encouragement" (p. 101). To me, though, the poem seems neither consoling or encouraging.

I cannot find much poetry in the poem. It reads as philosophy garbed in ambiguity. I spent an inordinate amount of time on it and don't feel particularly rewarded. Usually Dickinson rewards contemplation and study. In terms of poetic devices, the two stanzas are in basic ballad form. In lieu of rhymes, Dickinson has the second and fourth lines of both stanzas ending in "friend" and "God" respectively. Perhaps she is emphasizing the idea that should you need to pick between friends and the Divine, it is wisest to choose the Divine.


* To expand: "I am nothing! The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God" (Nature, 1836).

No Rack can torture me —
My Soul — at Liberty —
Behind this mortal Bone
There knits a bolder One —

You cannot prick with Saw —
Nor pierce with Cimitar —
Two Bodies — therefore be —
Bind One — The Other fly —

The Eagle of his Nest
No easier divest —
And gain the Sky
Than mayest Thou —

Except Thyself may be
Thine Enemy —
Captivity is Consciousness —
So's Liberty –
Fr649 (1863)  J384

I've been struggling with this poem for a few weeks now. Oh, it goes along tamely enough for the first three stanzas. Dickinson builds the unremarkable case that the soul is not constrained by the "mortal Bone," but is instead, like the eagle, a creature of flight and freedom. It can "divest" itself of the body and "gain the Sky." It is the "bolder" of the two Bodies – and no wonder! Unlike your flesh body, it cannot be hurt by saws, scimitars, or even torturers' tools. It cannot even be bound; it can simply fly away.

But then there is the ambiguity of the fourth stanza: "Except Thyself may be / Thine Enemy –". Which phrases are these two lines are attached to? Is Dickinson saying that the soul can gain the sky unless you are your own enemy Or is she saying that unless you are your own enemy, Captivity and Liberty are both synonymous in some way with Consciousness? If forced to choose, I would opt for the latter reading although I don't think it is a significant point.

In terms of liberty enabling a consciousness-enhancing captivity, Adrienne Rich, in her marvelous essay on Dickinson, "Vesuvius at Home," recounts the following:

[Dickinson's] niece Martha told of visiting her in her corner bedroom … and of how Emily Dickinson made as if to lock the door with an imaginary key, turned and said, “Matty: here’s freedom.”

The poet's locked room becomes a metaphor for the mind, the enclosed space figures as the skull, the poet as the soul. Freed from outside care by the confinement, the soul may boldly venture beyond earthly realms and quotidian concerns. Consciousness emerges from the captivity; Consciousness whose liberty gains the Sky – and Dickinson often uses 'Sky' in place of 'heaven', 'cosmos', and even 'God' (ED Lexicon). 
        An interesting insight comes from Boston University's Thomas Finan who in 2015 wrote "'Captivity is Consciousness': Consciousness and its Revisions in Dickinson’s Poetry," The Emily Dickinson Journal, vol. 24 no. 2, pp. 24-45. Finan refers to the mid-1800s and the "major philosophical and literary themes involved in the rise of 'consciousness' [as] a concern with the way in which consciousness could imprison through its mediating and unifying capabilities." Finan is convinced that despite this concern, Dickinson found that "the walls of consciousness" could provide a barrier "behind which the self can withdraw." The confining barriers "can provide the prospect of liberty." Yes, much like turning the key in the lock of the door.
But besides all of that, the ambiguously anchored phrase, "Except Thyself may be / Thine Enemy –", remains of interest. Beyond the notion that we can defeat ourselves, there is Lucifer's definitive exclamation in Paradise Lost: "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."(John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 254-5). Surely, the mind that turns a heaven into a hell is its own enemy; the one that does the reverse achieves the Sky.

Dickinson has written about this self-enmity before:
    • in "One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted – " (J670 / Fr407), it is "Ourself behind ourself" that should scare us more than any ghost;
    • in "They shut me up in Prose" (J613 / Fr445), it is as laughable to put a bird behind a fence as to command a poet to stick to prose or a child to stay quietly in her room;
    •  in "A Prison gets to be a friend – " (J652 / Fr456), the 'Geometric Joy" of prison is of our own making and Liberty avoided "like a Dream."

But perhaps her most in-depth examination is yet to come. In J642/Fr710, Dickinson asks, "But since Myself – assault Me – / How have I peace / Except by subjugating / Consciousness? This seems contrary to the current poem where Consciousness is the desirable face of both captivity and liberty. Here, Dickinson wants peace at the expense of Consciousness yet cannot imagine how to abdicate herself of herself. The question is almost one of transcendental meditation. The whole poem is worth reading here:

Me from Myself — to banish —
Had I Art —
Impregnable my Fortress
Unto All Heart —

But since Myself — assault Me —
How have I peace
Except by subjugating
Consciousness?

And since We're mutual Monarch
How this be
Except by Abdication —
Me — of Me?
                             J642,  Fr710  (1863)

To Blog Followers

I'm doing a lot of entry adjustments right now, from the beginning up through current (although not necessarily in that order). I apologize for the load of notices this results in.

I've seen a Dying Eye

I've seen a Dying Eye
Run round and round a Room –
In search of Something – as it seemed –
Then Cloudier become –
And then – obscure with Fog –
And then – be soldered down
Without disclosing what it be
'Twere blessed to have seen –
                                                  Fr 648 (1863)  J547


The living have no way to really know what happens after death. There are the usual reports from the near dead or briefly dead: the tunnel with a light at the end, for example; or the evanescing (or perhaps effervescing) into the vast Oneness of the Cosmos. But we tend to take these tales with a grain of salt. The brain might be doing strange things as it closes down. We may be conditioned to expect certain outcomes and, thus, imagine we've seen them.
        In this poem, the speaker waits by a death bed or death beds hoping the dying person will provide some indication of what might be glimpsed as he or she passes through the veil separating life from death. But no such indication is forthcoming.
        It's a poem of frustration rather than grief. The speaker details the Eye's movements in the last moments, but it is clear it is not clinical curiosity about what an eye does before becoming "soldered down" with death, but rather curiosity about what the eye sees as the body dies. There is, however, no indication that dying Eyes see anything of note. They become cloudy, then obscured, and then, finally, closed in the finality of death. The poem ends with the speaker frustrated that nothing has been revealed, but Dickinson seems to imply that the dying are not "blessed to have seen" anything.

Fading Away, Henry Robinson: Victorian deathbed watch

In another poem's death scene frustration, a dying person "heard a Fly buzz" when she died rather than seeing "the King," undoubtedly Jesus or some other representation of God or the divine, that those gathered around her were clearly expecting. Instead she sees only a fly as her "Windows failed." The incongruous and existential disparity between savior and fly in this poem (Fr591) is profound.

Dickinson refrains from the hushed respect accorded death bed watches. While the buzzing blue fly is an almost sarcastic dismissal of hopes for a divine encounter,  Sharon Leiter  says that the Dying Eye's searching in the current poem "suggests nothing so much as a demented rodent of some sort racing desperately in circles' (Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson, 2007, p. 133). I don't think that Dickinson is dismissing the mysteries of life and death but rather depicting the vagaries, indignities, and ultimately the singularly alone-ness of the passage.

Dickinson compresses two stanzas in this poem, using traditional hymn or ballad style. She further knits the poem together with word sounds. The 'ou's of  "round and round" are echoed in "Cloudier" and 'Without". The rodent quickness is impelled by the "r"s of "Run round and round a Room" followed by the sibilance of "In search of Something – as it seemed – ." "Dying Eye" not only has a core rhyme but the visual element of the "y," and most of the end words can be sorted into two slant rhyme groups: Room, seemed, become; and seemed, be, and seen (plus down with seen).
        But the heart of the poem lies in the center as the poet builds to the final anticlimax. She begins with the Dying Eye searching, followed by three listings: Then it becomes cloudy; and then obscured; and then it is soldered down. Hope diminishes with each step into the final ironic subjunctive.

      - Susan Kornfeld

To fill a Gap

To fill a Gap
Insert the Thing that caused it —
Block it up
With Other — and 'twill yawn the more —
You cannot solder an Abyss •
With Air –

                                           Fr 647  (1863)  J546

• Plug a Sepulcher   (E.D. Archives)


This short poem starts out confidently as if stating a rule of thumb: if something has fallen out or been removed, fill the gap by putting that something back in. But the next statement is questionable: if you try to substitute something else the gap will only get worse? How can that be? A pearl lost from a necklace can be replaced by a similar pearl. One hearthstone may be substituted for another.  So what is Dickinson talking about?

When the heart is like an open grave

When she writes that using something other than 'the Thing that caused it' will cause the gap to 'yawn' apart, she conjures the 'yawning grave' – an epithet so familiar as to be almost trite. But Dickinson isn't talking about an earthen grave. Her Gap is an inner rupture, the loss, perhaps, of love or a loved one who occupied the heart. Like a grave, it bears the name of only one occupant. When that occupant is gone, the gap remains. Trying to fill it with another only rips it further.
The loss involved, the rupture, is so deep that the poet rephrases it in the penultimate line as an 'Abyss' – then as now meaning a chasm or void. It is invokes once more the image of a grave, itself the symbol of death and loss. You cannot fill this great gap with someone else; it cannot be soldered with air or annealed by time.

Dickinson wrote 'Plug a Sepulcher' as an alternative to 'solder an Abyss'. It's less subtle and lacks the sibilance, but maybe Dickinson was of two minds about subtlety here. 'Plug' fits with the short, strong 'Gap' and 'Block'. It crudely strips away any romanticism about the death or loss and her response to it. It's harsh, but Dickinson was clearly drawn to it.
To me, though, the harshness, the stab, almost, is more than adequately delivered in the truncated last line, 'With Air –'.  Helen Vendler observes that the poem 'staggers to its close'. A life and this line have been cut too short. There is no solution, no closure.

'Tis One by One — the Father counts —

'Tis One by One — the Father counts —
And then a Tract between
Set Cypherless — to teach the Eye
The Value of its Ten —

Until the peevish Student
Acquire the Quick of Skill —
Then Numerals are dowered back —
Adorning all the Rule —

'Tis mostly Slate and Pencil —
And Darkness on the School
Distracts the Children's fingers —
Still the Eternal Rule

Regards least Cypherer alike
With Leader of the Band —
And every separate Urchin's Sum —
Is fashioned for his hand —
                           F646, J545  (1863)


In this philosophical poem Emily Dickinson presents a benevolent and just deity through the metaphor of an arithmetic lesson. The teacher is 'Father', the word serving as both the metaphorical father of the student as well as the Father of Creation.

He is a wise teacher, knowing what must be told and what must be left for the students to make sense of. He begins the lesson with single-digit counting numbers, which for most children is simple as they can count along with their fingers. I picture the teacher writing on a chalkboard, pausing after the column of ones, then leaving a gap between it and a column of tens. This 'Tract between' is left as open space for imagination to enter and the students to traverse.
     The approach is frustrating and, Reader, I relate to the Peevish Student. It's no fun to face someone else's puzzle, especially when it comes to the mysteries of numbers and Eternal Rules. Yet when the students finally realize that the second column is the result of some function applied to the first, a function related to the addition of the zero, their peevishness disappears and fingers fly with the (wonderful phrase) Quick of Skill. Soon their slates overflow with calculations – the fleshing out, the adornments, of the underlying Rule governing the value and nomenclature of the tens.

Greenleaf's First Lessons in
Numbers, 1831, Boston

Dickinson never uses the word 'zero' in this poem, but it is implicit. She employs a subtle bit of word play around it as until the early 1800s, zeros were commonly referred to as  'cyphers'. Cypherless space, then, has no zero. Obvious enough. But in Dickinson's day, according to the Lexicon, readers would read 'cypherless' as not just 'lacking zero', but as 'undeterminable; without an exact meaning; unable to be expressed'. It is here that students journey between the column of ones and the zero-enhanced column of tens. It is here that we older readers discover how meaning saturates material, how abundance springs from nothing, and where we contemplate the world called forth from the void.

Whew.

The third stanza returns us from this rather Kirkegaardian leap and expands the metaphor  beyond arithmetic lessons. The students, still in the realm of Slate and Pencil, struggle with their lessons when darkness falls. Just so do we struggle with faith and spiritual advancement during dark times.
      A good School Master/Father understands this and in accordance with the Eternal Rule fashions each student's lessons according to ability and need. The 'least Cypherer' is valued as highly as the most brilliant pupil, even as much as, if I read it correctly, the leader of a band of angels. 'Cypherer' here again plays on 'zero': while in Dickinson's day it would mean someone who works with numbers, its association with zero suggests a person who amounts to nothing.
      The Eternal Rule governing all this may be what Dickinson's church would have taught as the Golden Rule – doing unto others as we wish others would do to us. It might refer to the numerous parables and teachings Dickinson would have read where Jesus made it clear that to the Father, the meek, the halt and the lame; the poor, the imprisoned, and the thief on the cross are as worthy of blessings and salvation – if not more worthy – than the most learned and powerful.

This poem is among the most regular of Dickinson's work in terms of meter and rhyme. Its simple construction mirrors the simple lesson it teaches. Or so it seems. The more I delved into the first stanza the more redolent and 'undeterminable' I found that 'Tract between' and its traversal to be.

Exhiliration — is within —

Exhiliration — is within —
There can no Outer Wine
So royally intoxicate
As that diviner Brand

The Soul achieves — Herself —
To drink — or set away
For Visitor — Or Sacrament —
'Tis not of Holiday

To stimulate a Man
Who hath the Ample Rhine
Within his Closet — Best you can
Exhale in offering.
J383 (1863)  Fr645

Oh to have a bit of that intoxicating joy that Dickinson writes about from time to time! It punctuates some of her most popular poems and is the polar opposite of her Gothic horror poems.

In the gay and charming 'I taste a liquor never brewed', for example, she is an 'Inebriate of air', a 'little Tippler / Leaning against the – Sun!' (F207).  That same year, 1861, Dickinson describes an irrepressible inner ecstasy as 'A Diagram – of Rapture!' (F212). In perhaps my favorite of these poems, she claims that 'Exultation is the going / Of an inland soul to sea', a 'divine intoxication' (F143). In other poems she depicts piercing joys, cosmic highs, and often transcendental experiences of Nature.

I find that Georgia O'Keefe's paintings often
reflecta deep and mystical ecstasy.

The current poem promises to give us a little more insight into inner ecstasies, but ends up cloaked as all mysteries are. It begins with a claim: it is possible to experience, even possess, something 'royally intoxicate', something that doesn't come from any 'Outer Wine'. It is 'diviner' than any happiness the finest liquers, riches, bonanzas, or foreign travels might offer.
        Some joys invite us to enter the sacred – or perhaps the inverse: a special place, a piece of music, meditation, dancing – poetry. We might at times want to invite a guest into our sacred realm. We might choose to experience the exhiliration sacramentally as a holy ritual. In this poem Dickinson describes not only exhiliration and perhaps enlightenment, but also empowerment. The Soul can achieve; the Soul can dispense.

The third and last stanza is difficult. A man with 'Ample Rhine' in his wine cabinet might be a good and worldly man, the Rhine wine standing for vitality and robust goodness; a man who might be stimulated to begin achieving his own diviner intoxication. Or, and I think this more likely, it might refer to a man whose Soul has already achieved an ample supply of the 'diviner Brand'.
        Why should the poet consider how to stimulate such a man – and for what purpose? The Emily Dickinson Lexicon's first definition of 'stimulate' is 'To excite, rouse, or animate to action by means of a motive. Perhaps the desired 'action' and the underlying motive would be the realization of a soul mate, a worthy Guest to share her inner wine – and someone who could reciprocate.
        In any case, Dickinson's prescribed stimulant is to 'Exhale in offering'. When we are full of wine, our breath reflects it. An exhalation of divine intoxicant would have not just odor, but power. The key word is 'offering'.  I am reminded of Old Testament offerings – blood sacrifices with savoury smoke to please the Lord while carrying prayers. I wonder if Dickinsons exhalations – her gnomic poems, letters, and conversation – might not be such an offering.