The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson Read Online

75)

Adrienne Rich, in several striking poems, presents a feisty and determined Dickinson. In the fourth section of “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” she portrays her

Reading while waiting
for the iron to heat,
writing, My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum,
or, more often,
iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird,
dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life.
(Rich, The Fact of a Doorframe, p. 18)

And in “The Spirit of Place,” Rich angrily describes the Emily Dickinson Industry’s invasion of her home:

In Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst
cocktails are served the scholars
gather in celebration
their pious or clinical legends
festoon the walls like imitations
of period patterns.
(Rich, The Fact of a Doorframe, p. 184)

But despite “The remnants pawed the relics / the cult assembled in the bedroom,” the scholars do not get the last word, for “you whose teeth were set on edge by churches / resist your shrine / escape.” Rich vows that her relationship to Dickinson will be a very different one in which “with the hands of a daughter I would cover you / from all intrusion even my own / saying rest to your ghost” (Rich, The Fact of a Doorframe, pp. 184-185).

Dickinson’s widespread influence can perhaps best be seen in poets who are in most ways nothing like her. e.e. cummings, as formally explosive as Dickinson was—at least superficially—conservative, begins one poem in this way:

my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am through haves of give,
singing each morning out of each night
my father moved through depths of height
(e.e. cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962, p. 520)

cummings’s “dooms of love,” “sames of am,” and “haves of give” recall Dickinson’s peculiar use of the genitive case in a poem in which she describes heaven as “The House of Supposition” that “Skirts the Acres of Perhaps” (Complete Poems, poem 696). In addition, the paradoxes of the third and fourth lines of cummings’s stanza—“each morning out of each night” and “depths of height”—resemble Dickinson’s characteristic trait, discussed earlier, of translating big into small, life into death, and—in the case of poem 696, riches into poverty: “The Wealth I had—contented me—/ If ‘twas a meaner size—”.

Dickinson has even made her way into fiction. Judith Farr’s 1996 novel I Never Came to You in White offers a fictionalized biography of Dickinson. And in A. S. Byatt’s 1990 novel Possession: A Romance—a double love story in which two modern academics investigate the secret love affair of two Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte—Dickinson is the model for the female heroine. At the beginning of the novel, Byatt provides a list of some of the more silly-sounding articles critics have written about her heroine:

They wrote on “Arachne’s Broken Woof: Art as Discarded Spinning in the Poems of LaMotte.” Or “Melusina and the Daemonic Double : Good Mother, Bad Serpent.” “A Docile Rage: Christabel LaMotte’s Ambivalent Domesticity” (Byatt, Possession: A Romance, p. 43).

But before long, these limited views of LaMotte give way to a much more rich and complex one, mostly because Byatt lets the poet speak for her eccentric, resourceful self, as in this letter:

I have chosen a Way—dear Friend—I must hold to it. Think of me if you will as the Lady of Shalott—with a Narrower Wisdom—who chooses not the Gulp of Outside Air and the chilly river-journey deathwards—but who chooses to watch diligently the bright colours of her Web—to ply an industrious shuttle—to make—something—to close the Shutters and the Peephole too—(Byatt, p. 205).

Dickinson’s influence can be felt everywhere. Writers are in her thrall; every year the Poetry Society of America offers an award “for a poem inspired by Dickinson”; the 2002 Modern Language Association featured several panels on her work; she even has her own International Society. As Dickinson herself predicted, her light may have gone out, but the lenses of later ages keep reflecting and refracting it in all sorts of inventive and unexpected ways. The intense eyes of the young woman in the photograph will keep peering into ours for a very long time.

Rachel Wetzsteon received her doctorate in English from Columbia University in 1999 and is Assistant Professor of English at William Paterson University. She has published two books of poems, The Other Stars and Home and Away, and has received various awards for her poetry. She currently lives in New York City.

PART ONE

LIFE

THIS is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,—
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.

Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!

I

SUCCESS is counted sweetest
By those who ne‘er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple host
Who took the flag to-day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of victory,

As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Break, agonized and clear.

II

OUR share of night to bear,
Our share of morning,
Our blank in bliss to fill,
Our blank in scorning.

Here a star, and there a star,
Some lose their way.
Here a mist, and there a mist,
Afterwards—day!

III

SOUL, wilt thou toss again?
By just such a hazard
Hundreds have lost, indeed,
But tens have won an all.

Angels’ breathless ballot
Lingers to record thee;
Imps in eager caucus
Raffle for my soul.

IV

’T is so much joy! ’T is so much joy!
If I should fail, what poverty!
And yet, as poor as I
Have ventured all upon a throw;
Have gained! Yes! Hesitated so
This side the victory!

Life is but life, and death but death!
Bliss is but bliss, and breath but breath!
And if, indeed, I fail,
At least to know the worst is sweet.
Defeat means nothing but defeat,
No drearier can prevail!

And if I gain,—oh, gun at sea,
Oh, bells that in the steeples be,
At first repeat it slow!
For heaven is a different thing
Conjectured, and waked sudden in,
And might o‘erwhelm me so!

V

GLEE! the great storm is over!
Four have recovered the land;
Forty gone down together
Into the boiling sand.

Ring, for the scant salvation!
Toll, for the bonnie1 souls,—
Neighbor and friend and bridegroom,
Spinning upon the shoals!

How they will tell the shipwreck
When winter shakes the door,
Till the children ask, “But the forty?
Did they come back no more?”

Then a silence suffuses the story,
And a softness the teller’s eye;
And the children no further question,
And only the waves reply.

VI

IF I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

VII

WITHIN my reach!
I could have touched!
I might have chanced that way!
Soft sauntered through the village,
Sauntered as soft away!
So unsuspected violets
Within the fields lie low,
Too late for striving fingers
That passed, an hour ago.

VIII

A wounded deer leaps highest,
I’ve heard the hunter tell;
’T is but the ecstasy of death,
And then the brake2 is still.

The smitten rock that gushes,
The trampled steel that springs:
A cheek is always redder
Just where the hectic3 stings!

Mirth is the mail of anguish,
In which it caution arm,
Lest anybody spy the blood
And “You’re hurt” exclaim!

IX

THE heart asks pleasure first,
And then, excuse from pain;
And then, those little anodynes4
That deaden suffering;

And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.

X

A precious, mouldering pleasure ’t is
To meet an antique book,
In just the dress his century wore;
A privilege, I think,

His venerable hand to take,
And warming in our own,
A passage back, or two, to make
To times when he was young.

His quaint opinions to inspect,
His knowledge to unfold
On what concerns our mutual mind,
The literature of old;

What interested scholars most,
What competitions ran
When Plato was a certainty,
And Sophocles a man;

When Sappho5 was a living girl,
And Beatrice6 wore
The gown that Dante deified.
Facts, centuries before,

He traverses familiar,
As one should come to town
And tell you all your dreams were true:
He lived where dreams were born.

His presence is enchantment,
You beg him not to go;
Old volumes shake their vellum7 heads
And tantalize, just so.

XI

MUCH madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.