The Emily Dickinson Reading Circle, 11March2016

The Emily Dickinson Reading Circle, 11March2016
Fascicle 16

Polly. [Recommending a book on Dickinson’s fascicles, Holds up a copy of "Emily Dickinson's Fascicles: Method & Meaning" by Dorothy Huff Oberhaus Published by Penn State Press, University Park, Pennsylvania, 1996] … she focuses on all the fascicles but primarily on fascicle 40, the final one, and that’s the one she talks about most but in the course of it she talks about the others. Her background was in seventeenth century metaphysical poets, when she worked for her doctorate, so she knows that tradition very, very well. When she started reading the Dickinson poems she realized how closely Emily’s poetry fit into that period, in particular the poems of Herbert, that we know she read, and she was particularly fond of Thomas a’ Kempis’ Imitation of Christ. Dorothy’s theory, which she develops, is that all of the fascicles taken together are in the tradition of “a spiritual and poetic pilgrimage,” starting with the first poem in the first fascicle and leading up to the last one, the fortieth, and that all together they place Dickinson’s work in this tradition of Christian devotion. We’re so used to dealing with the poems one-on-one, we pick a favorite, pick here, pick there, without really looking at the context of the poem or the order in which it’s presented, and I think we get a sense, just from reading around the table that these poems are talking to one another, that they all relate to one another in some way. So I just wanted to point this out, that you can look at them as Emily Dickinson talking about art, and she is; she’s talking about art. She’s also talking about this struggle she had, through her life, to become a Christian, to have a spiritual life. She felt that she had been overlooked by God, left out of the church. All her friends were having symptoms that God was in their lives and she definitely wasn’t. She wasn’t going to say that she had such evidence just because there was a revival going on. It also left her with a great feeling of being left out that I think shines in her poetry. So, this was one of the crucial struggles of her life. So, Dorothy, who died two years ago, had come close to completing her study of all the fascicles, and I hope someday they’ll see the light of day and be published, because I really want to know what is in it.

Margaret. Well, that was a really nice introduction to Dorothy’s work because Marthat O’Keefe tried to look at the fascicles in that kind of way. She believed, much like Dorothy, that it was a spiritual journey, and she likened it to St. John of the Cross. Then, Ellie Hegenbotham, who like me was rather skeptical. Frankly I was skeptical of Dorothy because she’s very deliberately putting the fascicles in that order. We don’t know that that’s the right order.

Polly. No. She was depending on Franklin.

Margaret. Well, it was Todd, who labeled the fascicles as she worked with them, so that I was a little bit skeptical and so was Ellie. But what she did was begin to see how the poems were talking to one another. That was her focus, so that’s a kind of a nice confirmation.

Polly. Well, Dorothy was a little skeptical about Mable Loomis Todd but she rarely caught Franklin out. She did a couple of times, with his order. The very first poems in the first fascicle that Franklin divides into three poems she insists is one.

Margaret. Absolutely. In fact, I think they’re even longer. I think they stretch over several pages. So, thank you.

Connie. The word “fascicle,” when did that start being used?

Polly. That’s what Mable Todd called them. She didn’t know what to call them.

Margaret. Which is a bit surprising …

Polly. Vinnie came and put them in her lap. She chose “fascicles.”

Margaret. Which is kind of strange because chapbooks were very popular in the nineteenth century. Chapbooks are what people did. They created their little booklets and called them chapbooks.

Greg. I just learned recently that in botany a fascicle means a little cluster of flowers.

Margaret. Yes, and when the first poems were published and Higginson wrote about poetry being “torn up by the roots.”

Someone. Mable was very into art, and she wanted to be a little bit removed from “chapbooks,” I think.

Alice. Although there’s very little sacred language in them, she’s constantly in a dialogue with the Christian faith, and I see it from a musical standpoint, the use of the common meter, which so many of the hymns were in, the Isaac Watts and other hymn writers. So, it’s working in that it’s working in that very strong tradition of hundreds of thousands of poems written in that very simple form. Over and over again I come back to saying “This is eight lines of poetry, two verses of four lines each that don’t quite rhyme. They’re exact in the rhythm, and she takes that form and just turns it inside out within that tiny space. She is so free with it, it’s just amazing, but it’s rooted in both words and music – the rhythms in the faith tradition

Greg. She called it “singing.

”

Margaret. Well, that turning inside-out is my point on iconicity, You have to break through a conventional way of seeing in order for the poem to work in you so that you feel that embodied experience of felt life that connects you to that spiritual dimension that’s over and above the actual words on the page.

Alice. Yes, the words on the page are almost covering it, as if it’s hidden and covert.

Margaret. Yes, it is. Wallace Stevens has a beautiful image for all of that. He talks about the leaves covering the barren rock. These are the leaves that’s covering what’s really underneath. We subliminally know, but we don’t consciously know it.

Alice. Because we can’t put it into words and she comes closer than most… and subjecting herself to the tightest discipline. This is not the sprawl of poetry that goes in great long lines. It’s the opposite, just into the bone.

[Interlude}

 Polly. So many of these poems are about the feeling of saying goodbye since you go over the divide hoping that people will come to you. They’re done in different degree – very tangible descriptions of the landscape. It’s almost like a child talking. “I wonder if Richard will go to the mill” and a generic 

Richard, someone in her family. What was interesting is that you said “going to the mill. ” What I found interesting when I read that poem is that it can be both. It can be to the mill, but actually to mill, which is to actually do the work.

Polly. Or is it more like the British go “to Hospital.”

[At this point, all 16 poems in fascicle 40 are read out loud. I am not reproducing them all here]

Barre. Can someone tell me why I don’t have He showed me heights I never saw in my book? [Johnson edition.]

Margaret. Oh, she has two versions of this poem. The other is I showed her heights she never saw. [Franklin edition].

[Interlude]

Jeff. Did Mable Todd pull destroy all the bindings?

Greg. She took them apart. She had her own numbering system; it’s explained in Franklin – I can’t understand it. She wrote on the manuscripts in blue pencil. Amherst College still uses that system in their collection. That’s why Franklin had to try to put them together again by examining the pin holes and bled-through ink stains.

Someone. What inspired Mabel to take them apart?

Polly. I think it was because she was working with Thomas Wentworth Higginson of finding the strongest poems that would make the most sense in the earliest publications that people would expect and not quarrel with, saying that she was being irreligious, and all kinds of things that they’d object to. Crazy punctuation – meter, I think they were hunting for the ones that they could get safely published to prepare for the next one.

Greg, He asked her to group them by strength A, B, and C poems.

[interlude]

How noteless Men, and Pleiads, stand,
Until a sudden sky
Reveals the fact that One is rapt
Forever from the Eye —

Members of the Invisible,
Existing, while we stare,
In Leagueless Opportunity,
O'ertakenless, as the Air —

Why didn't we detain Them?
The Heavens with a smile,
Sweep by our disappointed Heads
Without a syllable —
                          - J212/Fr342/M180

[ To hear this poem read aloud, go to https://youtu.be/RNjnyruw3VA ]

Of nearness to her sundered Things
The Soul has special times —
When Dimness — looks the Oddity —
Distinctness — easy — seems —

The Shapes we buried, dwell about,
Familiar, in the Rooms —
Untarnished by the Sepulchre,
The Mouldering Playmate comes —

In just the Jacket that he wore —
Long buttoned in the Mold
Since we — old mornings, Children — played —
Divided — by a world —

The Grave yields back her Robberies —
The Years, our pilfered Things —
Bright Knots of Apparitions
Salute us, with their wings —

As we — it were — that perished —
Themself — had just remained till we rejoin them —
And 'twas they, and not ourself
That mourned.
                       - J607/Fr337/M177

[ To hear this poem read aloud, go to https://youtu.be/xUnokvhpAyA ]

Margaret. At the last meeting, we were looking at her second poem, Of nearness to her sundered things, and we got to the last stanza and somebody said that themselves was a strange usage. Look at that last stanza. It’s amazing. The Gave yields back her Robberies, right>? –The Years our pilfered Things. Think about the rapt being taken away from the eye. Bright Knots of Apparitions/ Salute us, with their wings Again you’ve got that semantic network with Members of the Invisible. Then, final stanza, As we — it were — that perished, as if we had perished. It’s a complete reversal. In the first one she’s alive, thinking about the dead, and in this one she’s dead and she’s thinking about the living. It’s amazing how parallel those two stanzas are    

    

Margaret M. And to me, the misuse I guess you could say, of the reflexive is like making the reflexive a nominative. It reflects that reversal that she’s undergoing with her consciousness.

Margaret. And her “self” anaphors, when they attach to a word, they all involve mapping across domains. So that “I have a Bird in Spring/ That for myself doth sing” – well it should be “doth sing for me.” Why “myself?” Because “I have a Bird in Spring” is being written when it isn’t spring. She’s thinking of it in winter. She puts herself in the future in the spring, therefore she uses the “self” pronoun. If she’s in her reality space of the present, she does not use the “self” pronoun. There is at least one poem where it looks as though I’m wrong, where she does use “me,” and it’s A fair fictitious People. It’s a very complex crossing of domains where in fact she crosses back and so therefore it’s “me” and not “myself.” It’s amazing how consistent she is in her own grammar.

Greg. I have found similar usages of the reflexive pronoun in the New Testament and in Aurora Leigh.

Margaret. Yes, and the fact that she makes it singular is interesting too, and I haven’t dealt with that.

Mary Clare. I’m struck by how un-mystifying this poem is. It’s very straightforward. [General Agreement] It’s like a little story

.

Margaret M. I think her use of the singular themself rather than themselves is to emphasize that she is playing with the grammar, in a deliberate, conscious, and consistent way.

Margaret. And also I think, Members of the Invisible, and Why didn’t we detain them, and Polly asks, about it [variant], Why didn’t we detain it. She’s thinking of the plural, everybody coming to me, but thinking of them as individuals. So it’s each one of them, rather than themself.

Greg. Very straightforward – it’s just a dead person talking. [laughter]

Johnson 445
'Twas just this time, last year, I died.
I know I heard the Corn,
When I was carried by the Farms -
It had the Tassels on -

I thought how yellow it would look -
When Richard went to mill -
And then, I wanted to get out,
But something held my will.

I thought just how Red - Apples wedged
The Stubble's joints between -
And the Carts stooping round the fields
To take the Pumpkins in -

I wondered which would miss me, least,
And when Thanksgiving, came,
If Father'd multiply the plates -
To make an even Sum -

And would it blur the Christmas glee
My Stocking hang too high
For any Santa Claus to reach
The Altitude of me -

But this sort, grieved myself,
And so, I thought the other way,
How just this time, some perfect year -
Themself, should come to me -

[ To hear this poem read aloud, go to https://youtu.be/PVVwPV3Q0y0 ]

Margaret. But what I find striking in this poem is in the second stanza where it says And then, I wanted to get out, I don’t want to be here.

Polly. The apples wedged in the cornfield are interesting to me.

Alice. I love that image.

Polly, Yeah, but how close was the apple tree? It must have been very close.

Greg. Well, the apple carts were often shaped like a wedge. They could be pulled through the stubble of the corn.

Mary Clare. I like how the Carts wen stooping. I like the use of that verb. It’s a whole story there, it’s a whole picture. Carts and bending and picking up the pumpkin. Not the carts, but the people.

Greg. The apple carts often had just two wheels. They were on a single axle so they would tip forward as they moved along.

Jeff. And they put them down like that to stop them.

Someone. So it’s both. What do you call that.

Someone else. Compression.

Margaret. It’s also metonymy, isn’t it?  ….. And what about And would it blur the Christmas glee/ My Stocking hang too high?

Polly. There’s the verticality again.

Margaret. I’ve always thought of it as a kind of past participle  - “my stocking is hung too high,” but as I read it for the recording I realized that the would it blur it. “if I hang my stocking too high,” so that she’s actually hanging her stocking. Of course, where she is it’s going to be too high for Santa Clause to reach, so I see it much more actively now than I did.

Polly. Isn’t that pagan – hanging a Christmas stocking in heaven?

Someone. I’m surprised that Santa Clause is in one of her poems.

Margaret M. I didn’t think that they celebrated Christmas

Greg. She wrote once to her cousins, “Father frowns upon Santa Claus and all such prowling gentlemen.” [laughter] And Susan got in real trouble in Amherst, I guess, for hanging Christmas wreaths out.

Margaret. Oh yes, she did.

Jeff. Santa Claus – it’s very playful. There’s a lot of playfulness in the poem. It’s almost sing-songy, almost like a child’s poem.

Polly. Yes, but there are only two rhymes in the whole poem, mill and will and glee and me.