Emily Dickinson Reading Circle 12 May 2017

Emily Dickinson Reading Circle

12 May 2017

Facilitated by Christopher Benfey

Chris. I think we should do spinach first, and then we can have the applesauce. So, I suggest we talk about two things. First, about riddles and definitions, since the only big insight I think I’ve ever had about Emily Dickinson is about the riddle poems and the definition poems – the relation between them.

Margaret. Oh come on Chris. There’s your “Emily Dickinson and the Problem of Others,” where you had some insights as well…

Chris. Oh yeah, but that was so long ago. I was a different person – somebody with two middle initials! … Then, I thought we might gossip a little, about the movie, the exhibition at the Morgan Library, etc. There are a lot of opinions in the air, all of a sudden about certain modes of Dickinson mythology, and this seems to be a good moment to air some of those things. You’ll find I have sort of wishy-washy opinions, and you’ll have strong, passionate positions, and I’ll annoy you by taking – kind of – the long view, or being annoying in my evasiveness’.

   I think these two things – the scholarly issues, what I want to say about the riddles and definitions correspond to one widely held version of Dickinson, and all of these issues - THE RENTING OF THE BEDROOM!!! [general hilarity] are attached to another. I think there are at least two versions of Dickinson, and they’ve been with us from the time the poems were first published – from the 1890’s. One is a very restrained Dickinson, a New England nun, the Dickinson of renunciation. “Renunciation is a piercing virtue,” the Dickinson who didn’t, didn’t, didn’t; didn’t marry, didn’t publish, didn’t do anything, didn’t leave her door. And that Dickinson wrote rhymed verse and metered verse and in many ways conventional New England women’s verse, and that’s the Dickinson I best [inaudible] the “cooked” Dickinson,” using the anthropological distinction between “raw” and “cooked. Already in the 1890’s there was the making of a different Dickinson, You saw it in the English reviewers who said “She doesn’t even know how to rhyme! She thinks alcohol rhymes with pearl. What is the matter with her.” And that’s when Alice James says it’s reassuring that the British get things so wrong. [laughter] And, they think of Dickinson as[inaudible] with Thomas Wentworth Higginson. And for Alice James and others Dickinson is transgressive, and wild, and American. She doesn’t rhyme, and she doesn’t know that “it’s” isn’t how you do the possessive [laughing] even after a year at Mount Holyoke. She doesn’t know how to spell. She spells “upon” “opon.” What are those dashes for? They’re wild! Crazy! And that was the Dickinson that Sue was warning Mabel that Dickinson was seen on the lap of a man, or something. These witch-women in the Homestead, What are they going to do now? Now, the raw Dickinson and the Cooked Dickinson: The cooked Dickinson was, through the 20s, was contrasted with Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman is – “tear the doors off their jams, and Dickinson is sort of prim white dress. Meekness, cooked, and Whitman is wild. And, there’s a poem that became associated with that, and it became sort of The Poem of Emily Dickinson, and that was Because I could not stop for Death. And that cooked Dickinson persisted until the 70’s or so, and then another poem just sort of blew it out of the water, and that was My life had stood a loaded Gun, and you just know the movie’s going to end with that poem. But then we have in this other, explosive poem that Adrienne Rich, which she famously first delivered at a commencement address at Smith, when she said, “This is the poem that gives us the real Dickinson, the raw – Vesuvius at Home. And I think we still have these dueling Dickinsons. Every time there’s a new movie, every time there’s a decision about the Homestead …….

There’s a whole body of writing about Dickinson’s “definition poems.” Sharon Cameron in a famous book called “Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre,” has a whole chapter about the definition poems, and it seemed to many of us with this magical biographical factoid that Emily Dickinson lived on one side of Main Street and Noah Webster lived on the other, [this is not true] and she said “for several years my lexicon was my only companion,” there was something about dictionary definitions that just obsessed her. Her definitions are pretty weird definitions; we all know that she doesn’t go to Webster’s book from across the street – that other word horde from Main Street in the nineteenth century. You know, if you look up “hope” in Noah Webster’s 1844 dictionary it says something like the religious meaning, an expectation of salvation is like, number two. All of the definitions that can be drawn into a religious orbit are. And then, we get Emily Dickinson’s indelible – somebody said it was the best lyric for a punk rock song – Hope is the thing with feathers. Very strange definition. And, right below it [on handout] is another strange definition. If you look up “doom” in the dictionary you get a again a hell-oriented religious thing Or, Doom is the house without the door. And, for our spinach purposes, the beginnings of the poems are almost what we need for this little introduction. One thing that we perhaps notice right away with these definitions is that Dickinson tends to define, almost exclusively, abstractions. That’s what she’s interested in defining. She doesn’t say “A bird is –.“ A whole series of words that she defines are BIG abstractions. Greif is a Mouse. And her riddle poems tend to be about concrete things – A Route of evanescence – I wrote a whole book about this poem. Nobody on first reading of this poem knows the answer; that’s the interesting thing about it. When I test it on smart undergraduates – what do you do with it? – A Route of evanescence? You all know the answer, right? But not for my very bright, brilliant, intelligent students.

Member 1.  Not for me, either. I don’t know what it is.

Member 2. Me either.

Chris. Oh Good! Sol we have two guinea pigs. Let’s give it a quick try with just the two of you, OK? Are there any words that you don’t know? … Cochineal is a deep red dye.

Wendy Reads:

A Route of Evanescence
With a revolving Wheel—
A Resonance of Emerald—
A Rush of Cochineal—
And every Blossom on the Bush
Adjusts its tumbled Head—
The mail from Tunis, probably,
An easy Morning's Ride—

                         -J1463/Fr1489/M618

[To hear this poem read aloud, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hxD1eWYH7I ]

Chris. So, this is a late-ish poem, it’s not a late, late poem, but she sent it to more people than she did any other poem [that we know of], and she sent it to some of her closest friends, to some of her literary friends, and you sometimes find it with her own name, like it was some sort of self-portrait. It was a very important poem to her. It’s a very finished poem. Some of them you don’t know if they’re quite finished, or whether they’re drafts, she doesn’t say.

                        First of all, we might not want to assume that it’s a riddle by reading it. It does seem a little unclear, what it’s about, right? – even if we don’t say,” Ah, this is a riddle like ‘what’s black and white and read all over?’”

Member 3. At first it’s like it’s a shrub of some sort. Then you get to the mail.

Chris. Yeah, what’s that mail doing in there? [laughter] It’s some kind of moving shrub. [laughter]. None of us would know what it’s about. She provided an answer.

Member. When I read that I thought it was about a carriage, bringing in mail – the wheel going around and bringing the world to you.

Chris. Yes. To the degree that there’s something to visualize here, one of those things is some kind of letter bearing– and she loved letters. She said “A letter is a joy of Earth. It is denied the gods.” That’s a good reason to be mortal – that you get letters. [laughter] “The way I read a letter’s this/ Tis first I lock the door.” So, some kind of grand letter delivery system, from North Africa. And it only takes the morning to get there, right? – like FedEx.

Lynn. The resonance – I got the idea that one creature is resonating to something violent and exciting. So, from the whole thing I get this idea of creatures responding to one another.

Chris. Good. Yeah, I see that too. … So, we have a lot of abstract words, but they’re sort of concrete in a way – their tumbling, their resonance. Yeah, I think that’s good. Some of the answers I’ve gotten from my students are: something about the seasons, and the changing of colors – green to red in the fall, or the passage of time, which is related to the seasons, or the turning of the earth through the seasons. My gut feeling is that those answers aren’t wrong answers. One of the things about Dickinson’s riddle poems is that they have multiple answers. I also think the reason Dickinson gave the answer to this one is either because she had tried it on people and they didn’t know what in the hell it was about, or because she has such a self-identification with it’s subject that she liked signing it “hummingbird.” … Higginson and Mabel Todd ruined all of the riddle poems by titling them [general sighs of dismay] with the answer. It had already started with “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” which was published by the Springfield Republican – under the title “The Snake.”

Margaret F. She often has much longer poems when she’s younger, and then redacts them into short little things later, and I think she did that with the hummingbird poem as well. … “Within my Garden rides a Bird.” She just comes back to the same idea. Listen to this one.

All the letters I can write

Are not fair as this —

Syllables of Velvet —

Sentences of Plush,

Depths of Ruby, undrained,

Hid, Lip, for Thee —

Play it were a Humming Bird —

And just sipped — me —

Chris. And also “I taste a Liquor never brewed” is also supposed to be another hummingbird poem.

Polly. When a hummingbird is near, the first thing you is that you hear it,

Chris. That’s why it’s called a hummingbird.

Polly. Yes, there’s a noise like bad weather. She doesn’t mention the sound of the bird.

Chris. She wants it to be silent, actually. I think she loves the evanescence of it. [crosstalk].

Member 2. Can we get back to the mail? From Tunis, probably? Does this have to do with the exotic coloration?

Chris. Well, the main thing is the speed. The idea is that the hummingbird is so fast that it can get from Tunis to New England in a morning.

Margaret M. I just think she’s really teasing in this poem. “You’ll never guess it.” [laughs]

Chris. I have never had a student guess this correctly. Never.

Margaret F. It’s a lot like the Anglo-Saxon riddle poems. Some of those still haven’t been answered.

Chris. Exactly right. You read the Exeter book and down below, in a footnote, it says something like, “Possibly the Crucifixion.

Greg. I suspect a lot of your students have never seen a hummingbird.

Chris. That's true, About a quarter of the students in any given class have never seen a hummingbird. [crosstalk] So now, back into my narrow little “cooked” point. The riddle poems take very concrete thing and turn it into just a cloud of abstraction. We’ll take this little hummingbird and turn it into a Route of Evanescence. And even “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” which ends in that famous line, “Zero at the Bone,” moves from the concrete to the abstract. My theory about the definition poems is that they take an abstract thing and take it in a concrete direction. I do think that there’s another turn of the screw though, and that is that the definition poems tend to have built-in riddles, and the riddle poems have a built-in definition. So – "Hope" is the thing with feathers – it ain’t much of a riddle, eh kids? What’s the thing with feathers? A bird!. What’s “the house without the door? A prison!

Lynn. Or a tomb.

Chris. Or a tomb. Then you might ask, how conscious is she of this concrete/abstract idea? So that’s why I went to this poem, Some things that fly there be. I’ve always loved this poem. Dickinson has several gorgeous poems; one is These are the days when birds come back – these gorgeous poems that are in tercets. There’s something special about her poems that are in three line stanzas. There’s that wonderful spider poem – A Spider sews at Night. So, look at this poem.

Some things that fly there be —
Birds — Hours — the Bumblebee —
Of these no Elegy.

Some things that stay there be —
Grief — Hills — Eternity —
Nor this behooveth me.

There are that resting, rise.
Can I expound the skies?
How still the Riddle lies!
                      - J89/Fr68/M52

[ To hear this poem read aloud, go to https://youtu.be/tAT8sFlUAgM ]

Another riddle poem. In the Exeter book of riddles, down at the bottom there’d be a [inaudible]. What do we think this is – what does this sound like?

Member 4. Death

Chris. Yes, death or resurrection. Dickinson is always saying, like, “With what bodies do they rise” [laughs] Like, “I don’t get this whole resurrection thing – bodies in the ground? Does the whole body go up? But it’s the two second lines of the first two tercets that interest me. Some things that fly there be/ Birds — Hours — the Bumblebee. What about that statement?

Margaret F. Well, it’s two positives with an abstract in the middle.

Chris. Yeah, so it’s concrete – abstract – concrete. And it has a surprise to it. Yeah, there are things that fly – birds. Hours? There’s a certain cognitive re-positioning in our brains. We say, “Oh yeah. Tempis fugit. OK., I get that.” And then she says, the Bumblebee and we’ve got to flip back again, right? I mean, our minds do this very quickly and automatically, but there is a sort of – to use her words – adjust it’s tumbled hear, right? Mm. We adjust our tumbled head. Of these no Elegy. We don’t write poems to mourn their flying. Then, I think the real kicker in this poem – the emotional gagger. Some things that stay there be and we think we’re going to get concrete-abstract-concrete again, right? Houses. But look what she does, she doesn’t say guest or house or rock. Some things that stay there be – Grief! For me it’s like the whole poem. Then she does that little cognitive thing again – Hills, the she pulls the rug out from under you again – Eternity. All I mean to suggest here is that when Dickinson is thinking about riddles, How still the Riddle lies – she’s thinking about this kind of switching back and forth between the abstract and the concrete.