The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (23 page)

CXLIII

TO pile like Thunder to its close,
Then crumble grand away,
While everything created hid-
This would be Poetry:
Or Love,—the two coeval came—
We both and neither prove,
Experience either, and consume—
For none see God and live.

CXLIV

THE Stars are old, that stood for me—
The West a little worn,
Yet newer glows the only Gold
I ever cared to earn—
Presuming on that lone result
Her infinite disdain,
But vanquished her with my defeat,
’T was Victory was slain.

CXLV

ALL circumstances are the frame
In which His Face is set,
All Latitudes exist for His
Sufficient continent.

 

The light His Action and the dark
The Leisure of His Will,
In Him Existence serve, or set
A force illegible.

CXLVI

I did not reach thee,
But my feet slip nearer every day;
Three Rivers and a Hill to cross,
One Desert and a Sea—
I shall not count the journey one
When I am telling thee.

 

Two deserts—but the year is cold
So that will help the sand—
One desert crossed, the second one
Will feel as cool as land.
Sahara is too little price
To pay for thy Right hand!

The sea comes last. Step merry, feet!
So short have we to go
To play together we are prone,
But we must labor now,
The last shall be the lightest load
That we have had to draw.

 

The Sun goes crooked—that is night—
Before he makes the bend
We must have passed the middle sea,
Almost we wish the end
Were further off—too great it seems
So near the Whole to stand.

 

We step like plush, we stand like snow-
The waters murmur now,
Three rivers and the hill are passed,
Two deserts and the sea!
Now Death usurps my premium
²⁸⁶
And gets the look at Thee.

Dickinson is
the
American poet whose work consisted in exploring states of psychic extremity.

—Adrienne Rich

“You who desired so much,” begins Hart Crane’s 1927 poem “To Emily Dickinson.” He goes on to write: “Truly no flower yet withers in your hand.” Emily Dickinson has kindled poetic fervor in writers for much of the twentieth century. Examples abound of poets who invite Dickinson into their poems and who, like Crane, personally address her. Adrienne Rich invokes Dickinson in her 1964 poem “I Am in Danger—Sir—,” whose title comes from a letter Dickinson wrote to
Atlantic Monthly
editor Thomas Higginson. In another poem, “The Spirit of Place” (1981), Rich speaks of Dickinson’s Amherst house: “This place is large enough for both of us / the river-fog will do for privacy / this is my third and last address to you.” In “The Uses of Emily” (1986), the poet Maxine Kumin disparages “masculine critics” who give little heed to the women poets of their day, instead electing Dickinson as the safe choice, the “one woman worth mention.” She goes on to note that Thomas Higginson was disdainful of Dickinson’s poetry in the years just following her death.

Dickinson has served as an inspiration for countless poems, notably John Berryman’s “Your Birthday in Wisconsin You are 140,” Robert Bly’s “Visiting Emily Dickinson’s Grave with Robert Francis,” Amy Clampitt’s “Amherst,” Archibald MacLeish’s “In and Come In,” Carl Sandburg’s “Public Letter to Emily Dickinson,” and William Stafford’s “Emily.”
Visiting Emily
:
Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Emily Dickinson
(Sheila Coghill and Thom Tammaro, eds., Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), an anthology of poems by more than eighty poets, celebrates the mystifying poet of Amherst and confirms her extraordinary influence on modern poetry.

Susan Glaspell’s 1930 play
Alison’s House
explores the lingering influence of a great poet, modeled after Emily Dickinson, on her family eighteen years after her death. As in much of her work, Glaspell focuses on the past as a source of strength and insight. In 1931 Glaspell received a Pulitzer Prize for
Alison’s House;
she was the second woman ever to receive the Pulitzer. Throughout her career, Glaspell wrote thirteen plays, fourteen novels, and more than fifty short stories, articles, and essays.

Playwright William Luce delves into Dickinson’s private life and thoughts in his one-woman play
The Belle of Amherst
(1976). The play focuses on the poet’s passionate relationships with her childhood friends and her father, and Luce interweaves her poetry and epigrams into the script.
The Belle of Amherst
offers a unique glimpse into the mythologized psychology of Dickinson, particularly in regard to her strong motivation to write. The actress Julie Harris portrayed Dickinson in a 1976 Broadway performance of
The Belle of Amherst.
The show was filmed and aired on television, and Harris received her fifth Best Actress Tony Award for the role.

Can the life and poetry of Emily Dickinson be danced? For Martha Graham, the answer was an obvious yes. The acclaimed dancer and choreographer Martha Graham is remembered for her many innovations in modern dance; indeed, her name has become synonymous with the form. Her work
Letter to the World,
which premiered in 1940, takes its title from Dickinson’s lines “This is my letter to the world, / That never wrote to me” (p. 5). Clad in a full, white gown reminiscent of the clothes Dickinson wore from her twenties on, Graham portrays the inner life of the poet—her torment, loss, and struggle to be happy. Barbara Morgan’s well-known photograph of the performance captures Graham kicking her leg over her back, with her white dress swept up about her. Andy Warhol created a silkscreen print of the image entitled “Letter to the World (The Kick).” In her poem “Martha Graham in ‘Letter to the World’ ” (2001), Lyn Lifshin writes, “Her words, a swirl of / her body.”

The passion and eccentricity of Dickinson’s poetry translate well into music. Composers as diverse as Jan Meyerowitz, Vincent Per sichetti, and Rudolf Escher have adapted Dickinson into their own symphonic poems. A work by Samuel Barber for a cappella chorus, “Let Down the Bars, O Death” (1936), is based on one of Dickinson’s poems (p. 208). In 1950 Aaron Copland finished his work for voice and piano titled
Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson
; his idiosyncratic approaches to each poem often mirror Dickinson’s own erratic use of punctuation and language.

In 2001 Simon Holt composed A Ribbon
of Time,
a cycle of five pieces based on Dickinson’s “I heard a fly buzz when I died” (p. 252). The second piece in the cycle, “Two movements for string quartet,” won the 2002 Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award for Chamber-scale Composition; in the piece, the arrangements for the strings are spare and precise, creating a space for the buzzing fly, which is represented by a viola.

The power and simplicity of Dickinson’s poems make her writing ideal raw material for visual artists. Her poetry has been incorporated into the works of such artists as Barbara Penn, Elaine Rei chek, and Liz Rideal. In her paper sculptures, New York-based artist Lesley Dill uses a blend of exotic papers, including rice and metallic papers, to fashion dresses and necklaces reminiscent of Dickinson’s customary attire; she then lithographs Dickinson’s text onto the sculptures.

The poems of Miss Emily Dickinson (who has hitherto been known to Englishmen chiefly if not only by some very injudicious praise of the kind usual with Mr. Howells) are posthumously published, and from the short preface written by her sympathetic and friendly editor we learn some interesting facts of her life. She appears never to have travelled, or, indeed, left the house of her father in Amherst, Mass., where she led the life of an absolute recluse, and only appeared in society at a yearly reception given by her father to his friends. We are told that she wrote verses abundantly, but “absolutely without the thought of publication, and solely by way of expression of the writer’s own mind.” The editor prepares us for the want of form and polish in her poems, but expects us to regard them as “poetry torn up from the roots, with rain and dew and earth still clinging to them, giving a freshness and a fragrance not otherwise to be conveyed.” A merit is here implied in their very imperfections as producing the effect of poetry drawn from an absolutely natural unconventional source. We very much doubt, however, whether this conclusion may be fairly adduced from the uneducated and illiterate character of some of these verses, although we fully recognize in them the unmistakable touch of a true poet. In these days considerable mastery over form in poetry is not uncommon, but in our minor poets it is rare indeed to find much original thought, or a strongly marked individuality. For this reason it is, perhaps, difficult not to overvalue these qualities, when we find them, as in Miss Dickinson, separated from any merits of form. We continually see the thoughts of prose put into verse, but, while some of the poems in the present volume can scarcely be described as in verse at all, they almost all contain a genuinely poetical thought, or image, or feeling. Miss Dickinson’s chief characteristics are, first, a faculty for seizing the impression or feelings of the moment, and fixing them with rare force and accuracy; secondly, a vividness of imagery, which impresses the reader as thoroughly unconventional, and shows considerable imaginative power....

The editor suggests a comparison between the poems of this writer and those of William Blake; but, beyond the fact that they are both quite indifferent to the technical rules of art, the comparison is not very far-reaching. Miss Dickinson possesses little of that lyrical faculty to which Blake owes his reputation; but, on the other hand, she is gifted with a far saner mind. Her poems, however, may be said to be distinctively American in their peculiarities, and occasionally call to mind the verses of Emerson. The editor with his unfailing sympathy tells us that, “though curiously indifferent to all conventional rules,” she yet had “a vigorous literary standard of her own, and often altered a word many times to suit an ear which had its own tenacious fastidiousness.” Some of the poems, however, seem destitute of any metre whatever, the lines do not scan, the rhymes are arbitrarily thrown in or left out, in accordance with no fixed system, and grammar, and even good taste are only conspicuous by their absence. But in some of her roughest poems there is still an idea which forces the reader to attend to its meaning, and impresses him, in spite of the irritation he may feel at the form.

—September 5, 1891

The curious fame of [Emily Dickinson] is something unique in literature, being wholly posthumous and achieved without puffing or special effort, and, indeed, quite contrary to the expectation of both editors and publishers. No volumes of American poetry, not even the most popular of Longfellow‘s, have had so wide or so steady a sale. On the other hand, the books met with nothing but vehement hostility and derision on the part of leading English critics, and the sale of the first volume, when reprinted there, did not justify the issue of a second. The sole expressed objection to them, in the English mind, lay in their defects or irregularities of manner; and yet these were not nearly so defiant as those exhibited by Whitman, who has always been more unequivocally accepted in England than at home. There is, however, ample evidence that to a minority, at least, of English readers, Emily Dickinson is very dear. Some consideration is also due to the peculiarly American quality of the landscape, the birds, the flowers, she delineates. What does an Englishman know of the bobolink, the whippoorwill, the Baltimore oriole, even of the American robin or blue-jay? These have hardly been recognized as legitimate stock properties in poetry, either on the part of the London press or of that portion of the American which calls itself “cosmopolitan.” To use them is still regarded, as when Emerson and Lowell were censured for their use, “a foolish affectation of the familiar.” Why not stick to the conventional skylark and nightingale? Yet, as a matter of fact, if we may again draw upon Don Quixote’s discourse to the poet, it is better that a Spaniard should write as a Spaniard and a Dutchman as a Dutchman. If Emily Dickinson wishes to say, in her description of a spirit, “ ’Tis whiter than an Indian pipe,” let her say it.

—October 8, 1896

The secret of Emily Dickinson’s wayward power seems to lie in three special characteristics, the first of which is her intensity of spiritual experience. Hers is the record of a soul endowed with unceasing activity in a world not material, but one where concrete facts are the cherished revelation of divine significances. Inquisitive always, alert to the inner truths of life, impatient of the brief destinies of convention, she isolated herself from the petty demands of social amenity. A sort of tireless, probing energy of mental action absorbed her, yet there is little speculation of a purely philosophical sort in her poetry. Her stubborn beliefs, learned in childhood, persisted to the end,—her conviction that life is beauty, that love explains grief, and that immortality endures. The quality of her writing is profoundly stirring, because it betrays, not the intellectual pioneer, but the acutely observant woman, whose capacity for feeling was profound....