EDIS, Amherst Chapter, Poetry Conversation 2 February 2018

EDIS, Amherst Chapter, Poetry Conversation

2 February 2018

Facilitated by Lois Kackley

Fascicle 5 Sheet 2

Source: Cristanne Miller, Emily Dickinson’s Poems as She Arranged Them, Cambridge, Massachusetts  London, England Harvard University Press, 2016

Lois. Emily Dickinson believed that poetry was a deceiver’s art as well as a place for truth. This is one of the comments made by Vivian Pollack in her wonderful new book, Our Emily Dickinson. She will be giving the annual keynote address at the EDIS meeting in Amherst this summer. The title of the address will be “Beyond our Emily Dickinsons.” So, she’s going to take off with this book. But it’s very rich in biographical information and also legacy poets like Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop. It’s rich in details about Dickinson’s relationships, but also the legacy poets. One of her positions that I found interesting is how poets that follow Dickinson – all of the famous names – had various responses to Dickinson’s poetry, and also she shows how they used Dickinson to work through their own battles – professional battles. And, you may enjoy measuring your own responses to Dickinson against some of these poets that you will recognize. So, starting out with sheet two, I thought we might play around with this little statement she makes about poetry being a deceiver’s art and a place for truth. I’ve played around with that thought quite a bit, and I think it’s potentially fairly fruitful as a way to look at a poem. Is she engaging in a kind of artistic deception, or can we see where she’s aiming at a truth that she wants to share. Well, let’s stick with our tradition and read all the poems aloud first.

[All the poems are read aloud.]

Good night, because we must,

How intricate the dust!

I would go, to know!

Oh incognito!

Saucy, Saucy Seraph

To elude me so!

Father! they won't tell me,

Won't you tell them to?

                        - J114/Fr97/M71

South Winds jostle them  -

Bumblebees come  -

Hover  - hesitate  -

Drink, and are gone  -

Butterflies pause

On their passage Cashmere  -

I  - softly plucking,

Present them here!

                        - J86/Fr98/M71

Low at my problem bending,

Another problem comes  -

Larger than mine  - Serener  -

Involving statelier sums.

I check my busy pencil,

My figures file away.

Wherefore, my baffled fingers

Thy perplexity?

                        -J69/Fr99/M71

What Inn is this

Where for the night

Peculiar Traveller comes?

Who is the Landlord?

Where the maids?

Behold, what curious rooms!

No ruddy fires on the hearth  -

No brimming Tankards flow  -

Necromancer! Landlord!

 Who are these below?

                        - J115/Fr100/M72

[ To hear this poem read aloud, go to https://youtu.be/MhDx5jr2whg ]

I had some things that I called mine  -

And God, that he called his,

Till, recently a rival Claim

Disturbed these amities.

The property, my garden,

Which having sown with care,

He claims the pretty acre,

And sends a Bailiff there.

The station of the parties

Forbids publicity,

But Justice is sublimer

Than arms, or pedigree.

I'll institute an "Action"  -

I'll vindicate the law  -

Jove! Choose your counsel  -

I retain "Shaw"!

                        - J116/Fr101/M72
[ To hear this poem read aloud, go to https://youtu.be/krTnr68ksCI ]

Lois. That’s a very appropriate poem for these days. [laughter] Alright, let’s start back with Good night, because we must. So, the speaker is put off because the night, the impenetrability of night, or night’s curtain on a relationship, or perhaps death’s refusal to admit, even incognito, regarding the so-called intricacies of life. What do you make of the tone of voice of the speaker, and is it successful. Does the attempt to lighten the failed interrogation of the father God work?

Greg. The tone is a little … childish? …a little naïve – which Dickinson often adopts when she addresses the most weighty of questions – death and immortality – at a time when women were properly proscribed from addressing or venturing on those topics. She adopts that little girl tone. “I’m not being threatening. I’m questioning your whole religious faith that the whole community’s based o, but, I’m just a little girl.”

Victoria. “Just asking a question.”

Lois. [laughing] Yeah, so, a little deceitful, huh?

Greg. Good point.

Robert. Saucy, Saucy Seraph. What’s she referring to, an angel?

Greg. Seraphim is a higher order of angel.

Martha. It could be a symbol for all the mysteries we’re asking about; we never get answers – because the dead people that know aren’t telling us.

Lois. That’s right, and to up that label, Saucey, on someone because they won’t reveal the information is rather, I find, exquisitely Dickinsonian. [laughing]

Dorothy. You can imagine, too, in her world, that she was a curious child and that she’s gone back to that metaphor of wanting to know things, and that word is probably like her, actually, so she’s applying it back.

Lois. That’s a good thought.

Dorothy. I have an image of the angels on a tombstone.

Lois. Oh. They don’t talk much, they’re all stone. Very good.

Dorothy. So, yes, she’s almost a child at the beginning of this poem. Good night, because we must – very childlike.  How intricate the dust! So, you’re lying there, and you can’t go to sleep, and you’re staring at space.

Lois. Well, I was kind of interested in whether you all read the third and fourth lines the way I did. She’s saying, I would go incognito to know, or is there another way to read that?

Greg. The way I read it was “I’d go – cross the vail – into the other world. To go incognito is to say, they won’t know who I am, and I can get back.

Lois. That’s a more complex way of saying what I was thinking. ( :

Victoria. When she’s saying Good Night, I think she’s saying good-by – because, we all must die. We came from dust, to dust ye shall return. So, she’s saying, I know – I would go …

Lois. Yeah, it’s that second line that keeps us from knowing for sure whether she’s talking about an occasion of having to say goodbye because it’s night, or if it’s about death, and she doesn’t make it clear, I don’t think.

Victoria. I think that’s what does it for me – the word dust. You go back to dust. So, she’s not saying “Goodnight, and maybe I won’t see you for a long time. If I could dress up incognito and follow you, they wouldn’t know. No, I think she’s saying, “Goodbye.” And, she’s pleading with God, saying, “The angels, they’re eluding me, about what’s going on, and Father, God, they won’t tell me, won’t you? God is the one place she could get the truth if she could get God to talk to her.

Greg. It’s the question that she always asked her whole life isn’t it? What lies beyond? [general agreement]

Polly. I don’t think it’s a particular death. Dust is capitalized. We’re all dust, but we’re pretty complicated.

Lois. You think that’s what the intricate is?

Polly. Mm.

Lois. To me, there are a lot of false doors here, a lot of false clues. To say intricate the dust. Intricate is a very alive word. There’s nothing intricate about a corpse.

Greg. The mystery, though.

Lois. the mystery is what’s intricate?

Victoria. Yeah.

Melba. But I’m looking at the definition [in the dictionary of 1844 that Dickinson used] of intricate, and if you go back to the Latin, it means to entangle, perplex, or embarrass, which does kind of fit with this.

Greg. Look up “embarrass” in that dictionary and it’s going to say something like, “puzzled, confused.”

Melba. Yes, you’re right.

Victoria. So, how confusing it is.

Greg. How puzzling it is. We’ve got all this scripture, and all these sermons, and aaaagh!

Melba. Perplexing, confused, yeah. How intricate the dust; and dust is puzzling, too, because I just assume it means fine dirt, but that definition included possibilities of mist, vapor, and storm. So you’re getting a sort of mixture of air and matter and water, which could stand in for a human being. We’re spirit, we’re matter.

Polly. Also, it’s capitalized. It could mean the universe

Greg. He ate and drank the precious Words —

His Spirit grew robust —

He knew no more that he was poor,

Nor that his frame was Dust —

Lois. Well, the first line in this poem just doesn’t do anything for me. This poem doesn’t stand up to most poems that we recall because of the beginning of the poem just pulling you in.

Melba. Right. It sounds like she’s got something interesting going on with he specific word choice, but it doesn’t cohere into anything. Maybe she realized that and decided to end this on the second stanza with the humorous note.

Lois. Very possible.

Victoria. When she puts that many exclamation marks … [laughter, general recognition] … she’s trying to give it some punch!

Lois. Well, part of the fun of these early fascicles is recognizing these themes that we are more familiar with later on. Beside the wonderful one that Greg just mentioned, can anybody else think of a poem that treats this topic a little more compellingly?

Greg. The topic of what lies beyond?

Lois. Yes. No need to labor over it. I just wanted to give everybody a chance to say so if they thought …

Victoria. I never lost as much but twice/ And that was in the sod.

Lois. Yeah, now that has that punch. That really gets hold of you by the ear lobes.

Victoria. And Burglar! Banker! Father!/ I am poor once more. Then, down in poem 100 [Franklin Edition] Necromancer! Landlord! She keeps wanting to pull, and demand in a way that [inaudible] for both of those poems – the early practices.

Lois. There’s a playfulness, isn’t there, in this poem, that she sheds, later in her career. Won't you tell them to? It is a deceitfully childish voice, but she also belies a certain lack of arrogance and indignation. It is a child-like voice, but to me there’s also a young person’s plaintiveness… Let’s move on. South Winds jostle them.

Burleigh. It is pretty saucy to suggest that you could just go incognito to the other side and then come back and know what it was all about.

Victoria. It is kind of cool, because you’d think that most people say “No, I don’t even want to go there.” She’s saying, “Yeah, if I could find out what it is, I’d do it.”

Greg. In another poem, she speculates on those whom she’s lost and who have passed away, and says, “I looked at sunrise once/ And then I looked at them/And wishfulness in me arose/ For circumstance the same” In other words, “I want to go. I want to be with them; I don’t want to be separated.” Those last two lines – I can imagine her stamping her foot and pouting. [laughter, general agreement]

Victoria. But in that other poem, I never lost as much but twice – Burglar! Banker! Father! – there’s more of a fist in there than that little stamped foot.

Greg. Yeah, she’s hurtin’.

Lois. There’s no question there, she’s just letting God have it – and also admitting her own anger.

Greg. Harrison called that poem “God in the hands of an angry sinner.” [laughter]

Lois. Well, shall we move on?” South Winds jostle them sounds to me like a made-up verse to accompany flowers to a friend. This is one of the poems she sent to Higginson. which, in itself could be discussed. I don’t know when, in the sequence of their correspondence ….

Victoria. Well, it says April 1862, so that was pretty early on. She sent one to Thomas Gilbert, Susan’s brother, to Ns – probably the Norcross cousins, and one to Higginson in 1862 with pressed flowers.

Judith. I just learned that Higginson also dried specimens.

Victoria. So, he would have been an appreciative recipient.

Lois. Is the voice of the speaker childlike in this one?

Greg. I wouldn’t say so.

Victoria. A real naturalists voice. That’s a really nice poem to send if you’re giving anybody flowers.

Lois. Well, I notice that Susan Snively used Low at my problem bending in her talk last week. I know she was talking about writing implement’s, but I thought that because it was so recently discussed you might want to share anything.

Greg. Well, a couple of people at that talk seemed convinced that this was another poem about death – the problem she’s contemplating is the question of immortality. I don’t see that at all, but it’s interesting that some did.

Lois. Neither do I. But, in a more general, abstract sense, you could say it’s about my best effort, that my best effort is futile in comparison with a larger problem. What came to my mind was that after she sent this letter to Higginson she could have thought “Now I’ve done that; I’ve submitted my poem, but the larger problem would be if my work got accepted and they wanted to publish [laughter].

Greg. Another question people were asking, which I don’t find a problem with at all, was, where is the question being addressed, to her, the speaker, or is it to her fingers? I didn’t think that was a worthwhile question, personally. [laughter]

Lois. She’s really kind of picking up our stride here, because there’s something very engaging, and sticks in my mind – that first line. Low at my problem bending, I don’t know what it is, but it’s very musical, and yet it’s not, but that phrase just stays with me.

Judith. Well, the contrast is interesting there. The image of bending low and attending to something and then something bigger comes along.

Lois. Yeah, the question mark – is it a rhetorical question?

Greg. Yeah, I think so. Right on a previous sheet, she ends the poem Wherefore mine eye thy silver mists,/ Wherefore, Oh Summer’s Day? The same fascicle here.

Robert. The poem I associate Low at my problem bending with is the poet trying to find the word. The Poet searched Philology. So, Low at my problem bending, she’s working on a poem, and then some larger theme comes up and she’s just stopped. What is behind the word she’s searching for.

Lois. So, you see it as a small problem being eclipsed by a larger one.

Robert. Right. What’s the final line? Not unto nomination/ The Cherubim reveal.

Lois. So, is this a defeated student? A defeated writer?

Greg. In a way, she’s grown, hasn’t she? She’s become aware of something larger now. Serene. That has a nice ring to it.

Judith. Serener, yet statelier. There’s a tension there.

Greg. She’s investing this problem with some positive qualities, I think; serenity – stateliness … “Oh, I’m going to pay attention to this. This deserves my attention.”

Lois. Would you compare this topic-wise with We Play at Paste?

Greg. Hm. Yeah.

Judith. Which she dissent to Higginson in the first letter.

Greg. In that poem, though, she’s fully matured. She’s an accomplished artist; she’s tackled the problem and mastered it.

Lois. Well, Cris [Miller] puts it – it’s not even in a fascicle, it’s one of the loose poems, so if the dating is correct We play at Paste was written after – or maybe she just didn’t, for some other reason, want to put it in a fascicle; we don’t know.

Judith. It’s 1862.

Lois. So that’s fascinating, isn’t it? She did not include it in a fascicle.

Greg. Well, aren’t there fifteen or so, what they call sets, which look like they actually were meant to go into a fascicle, but she didn’t actually sew them up? There were a lot of them.

Lois. Yes, I think that’s what Cris puts in here as “Unbound Sheets,” but We play at Paste didn’t even make one of those. It’s just a loose poem. But apparently she did retain it. She kept it.

Victoria. Well, if she sent this to Higginson, April 15^th – that was one of the first poems she sent him – so she had this in her stash at the same time she had this little flower – the South Winds jostles, and as you said, she made the decision not to include it for some reason. Hu0h. Because it seems like such a mature, finely honed poem than Low at my problem bending.

Lois.What inn is this, where for the night/ Peculiar traveler comes?

Greg. The speaker distances herself a little bit, doesn’t she? from the reality that she beholds, pretending not to know.

Lois. Necromancer – wizard, witch, that communicate with the dead. So, she’s calling upon them. Two things jump out at me. It’s too tempting to reflect on the Christian nativity story when she leads off with What Inn is this. I don’t know, I can’t help it [laughs] – anybody else? I don’t know – that’s a little bit misleading in the whole poem, but that’s the first thing I thought.

Greg. I think that word would have rung that way in the ear of anyone here in nineteenth-century Amherst. It would have suggested the nativity – just the sound of the word – I think.

Lois. Yet, the poem doesn’t bear that out, at least in my reading of it. The inn is the grave.

Polly. I see this as a nineteenth-century Gothic novel, or poem. It all seems to play into that whole genre.

Greg. I’d say that rooms are the graves and that the Inn is the cemetery.

Polly. What does the word below have to do with that though? …

Greg. The rooms are below.

Polly. Does it mean not in heaven, or in the ground?

Greg. In the ground.

Lois. What’s curious, is rooms.

Melba. She really has this idea that people in the cemetery get to talk to each other. [laughter].

I died for Beauty - but was scarce

Adjusted in the Tomb

When one who died for Truth, was lain

In an adjoining Room

Lois. But, those are almost reverent. To me, there’s no reverence in this poem. With all these questions it’s almost like an attempt at insulting somebody. “Where is the Landlord!?”

Greg. It’s not a dead serious poem, and she doesn’t want it to be. It’s more of an amusement.

Judith. Like, “What the heck’s going on?”

Burleigh. When I first read it I thought it was more about a dream, but now that we’ve discussed it I think it is about a cemetery and the grave.

Lois. And, nobody’s in Hell because there are no ruddy fires. [laugher]

Robert. Well, maybe it’s aligned with Safe in their Alabaster Chambers. There’s a sense of poking fun at this sense of “Where are they now, really? Come come.”

Lois. That’s a good one. Several of you mentioned it, too. … Well, there’s a little bit of indignation in this poem that I think is not in Safe in their Alabaster Chambers.

Greg. Because of the unanswered questions.

Melba. But there’s a solitariness that’s similar. She’s imagining the physical tomb as the transition space. It’s an inn; you’re not going to be there forever, but it’s not a place of torment, nor is it a place where there are other people. This is an empty building.

Lois. Well, Peculiar Traveller is the only reference –

Victoria. Peculiar meaning particular, rather than odd or queer.

Robert. I just want to say that the most memorable part of the poem to me is just the dramatic inquiry – the way it’s posing the six questions just to start out and engaging your interest.

Melba. I think that the fact that she’s addressing God as Necromancer is pretty provocative, too. That’s not a happy term to use for raising the dead.

Lois. There’s also a little humility if you look at it as a universal condition that – when we’re all dead – it could be speaking for all of us. “Where are the maids?”

Burleigh. The more we talk about it I think it’s really great that she calls him a Necromancer. [laughter]

Victoria. She calls him a mastiff, and some other choice words.

Burleigh. It would be an interesting list.

Victoria. I’ve started a list; I have some thirty-some names –

Greg. Burglar – Banker – Robber

Victoria. Yeah, yeah.

Lois. The next poem is another witty poem, I had some things that I called mine. I wanted to share with you this rival claim. There’s a portion in a letter to Elizabeth Holland, that is possibly a little helpful in identifying this rival Claim as the grim reaper. Down at the bottom she says, “I’m glad you’re not a blossom, for those in my garden fade, and then a reaper whose name is death has come to get a few to make a boquet for himself,” which to me is very interesting to me in light of this poem where she’s going to sue God.

Emily Dickinson Museum Discussion Group, January 2018

Emily Dickinson Museum Discussion Group, January 2018

Facilitated by Susan Snively

Emily Dickinson's Instruments of Writing

               

                I begin by quoting an excerpt from a letter (L656) from 49-year old Emily Dickinson to her cousin Louisa Norcross, dated early September 1880. This is Louise Norcross before she could read, land her mother, the wonderful Aunt Vinnie, a favorite aunt.

 "What is it that instructs a hand lightly created, to impel shapes to eyes at a distance, which for them have the whole area of life or death? Yet not a pencil in the street but has this awful power, though nobody arrests it. An earnest letter is or should be life-warrant or death-warrant, for what is each instant but a gun, harmless because ‘unloaded,’ but that touched ‘goes off’?

                Dickinson’s pronouns, “them” and “it,” – you see this often - hide the ambivalence of her seeking heart, torn between passion and violence—as in her mighty poem, “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun,” (764), which ends: “For I have but the power to kill, / Without – the power to die.” In the letter, words have the “warrant” to determine life or death, with “each instant” an instrument of threat or magic. She wonders her own hand, her most powerful instrument, may “impel,” or send, words to a distant reader? The word “hand,” which she used over 115 times in the poems, embodies both her own “narrow fingers” and her handwriting, which serve as the power-source for other instruments, like needles (294), knives (156), spades (886), or whips (1349) cooking spoons, trowels, you name it.               

This pencil in the street suggests the troublesome legal warrant described in Poem 1409:

Death warrants are supposed to be

An enginery of Equity

A merciful mistake

A pencil in an Idol’s Hand

A Devotee has oft consigned

To Crucifix or Block.

                Equity courts considered issues like trespass, marriage and divorce, wills and estates, and guardianship of minors, (James Guthrie, A Kiss From Thermopylae, p. 46) the ruling was given by the judge, not the jury.  Guthrie sees the judge as the “Idol’s hand,” a sovereign or “ecclesiastic authority,” and the pencil as “a device”  that could result in the execution of a “Devotee.” In such cases, a pencil or pen was deadlier even than a gun, because the execution might include torture. Idol and Devotee could also refer to an idolizing love, frustrating and dangerous to one who worshipped another.

Here’s a little not on Emily’s signature. As Guthrie writes, Emily Dickinson was often assigned by her father as “a defined legal function as witness and signatory” (p. 14). Her signature appeared on 19 of these documents, most of them involving the sale of Dickinson property. Her name thus carried a legal authority. (See Habegger, Appendix 4.) The first time she signed such a document was Sept. 1, 1843, when she was 12 years old. That was the same year she was writing Austin about “the hens laying finely.” (The signatures survive only as copies by a county register of deeds, in Michigan and Massachusetts.)

                For the poet, words are not just single instruments, but constitute a whole orchestra, garden, kitchen, funeral home, stage, firing range—and much more. Sometimes she exerts her power to utter the truth boldly, whatever the consequences. In letter 656 to Loo Norcross, she moves from the subject of death-warrants to make sly comments about their Aunt Elizabeth, “the only male relative on the female side,” and the militant Aunt Lucretia Bullard, her late father Edward’s Dickinson’s sisters. These power-aunts had visited Amherst in August, 1880 for a huge Dickinson family reunion.  The best part of a family reunion, as we all know, lies in the stories we tell after everybody’s gone. Of these aunts, Emily wrote Loo: “I think they lie in my memory, a muffin and a bomb.” “Now they are all gone, and the crickets are pleased….Their bombazine reproof still falls upon the twilight.” We have here a picture of a bombazine dress, mid nineteenth-century, I think, judging by the waist; worn by people at funerals, and by old people. So, “Who put the bomb in bombazine?”, we might ask. [laughter]

Loo Norcross knew how Emily could weaponize her daring candor. Pencil and pen allowed her to sharpen fine points, or drive across a page at speed. We may imagine her “pencil in the street” as part of a virtual militia with “awful power,” civic and intellectual. In her book Script and Scribble, a must-read for this crowd, Kitty Florey – there she is, raise your hand – you must read this book - writes that “a typical pencil can draw a line thirty-five miles long.” (S & S, p. 59.) Whether or not Emily knew this, she was fascinated by the power of pens and pencils to display mischievous meanings. First I’m going to read the poem, then I’m going to go back and unpack – or sharpen - 184

   

If it had no pencil,

Would it try mine -

Worn – now – and dull – sweet,

Writing much to thee.

If it had no word –

Would it make the Daisy,

Most as big as I was –

When it plucked me?
                   - J921/Fr184/M527

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

                Emily enclosed a wry variety of gifts in her letters:  flowers, pencil drawings, or a dead cricket. She sent “If it had no pencil,” to Sam and Mary Bowles, wrapped around a pencil stub. There’s a picture of the manuscript, which is in this library [Frost Library, Special Collections, Amherst College], with little pin-holes, and it’s very wrinkled, and she just wraps it up; it’s 2 inches long, and sent it off to Sam and Mary Bowles.

                In the first three lines of the poem, she describes the pencil as suffering a kind of battle fatigue brought on by too much writing. The cure, of course, is more writing. “Would it make the Daisy  - Most as big as I was – when it plucked me?” sounds like one of Dickinson’s teases. What might she have meant? “Would you make/draw/imagine me as/ transform me into” the Daisy—her nickname for herself. Does she want to be remembered as she was or exalted, or as she might become, “as big as I was” when “it” plucked her, like Tennyson’s “flower in the crannied wall” ?

Greg reads

Flower in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies,

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,

Little flower—but if I could understand

What you are, root and all, all in all,

I should know what God and man is

                Writing a poem can re-animate a poet’s spirit. In “If it had no pencil,” the pronoun “it,” used five times in eight lines, could signify “I,” “you,” “he,” “she,” and who knows what else. Dickinson gets a lot of juice out of this humble word. But the juiciest word, “plucked,” takes the “pencil” from the first line and gives it a trembling stem. The poem is structured around two indefinite phrases: “If it (you) had no pencil,” and “If it (you) had no word.” Alfred Habegger surmises that the poem was meant for Mary Bowles, to whom Emily wrote often, perhaps hoping that her husband Sam Bowles (writer, close friend, and publisher) would read it and write back. Mary “persistently refused to write, though she did send flowers, a book, other gifts.” So, Emily offered a beat-up looking pencil stub to one who offered “no word” for her – a little guilt trip.

                

Here is a brief summary of Emily’s writing instruments.  According to her biographers, she used a pencil in elementary school and at Amherst Academy. Her many letters to Austin, according to Habegger, were written in pencil. She is likely to have learned cursive writing and used pen and ink by age 12 or even earlier; her handwriting was described by Emily Fowler as “very beautiful – small, clear, and finished.” Of course, that changed over the years, as it usually does. Practicing penmanship according to the standards of the day, she wrote what one might see as a plain variation of Spencerian script. Spencerian had succeeded the beautiful copperplate, or roundhand, that, as Kitty Florey says, “is familiar to us on all the crucial American documents” like the Declaration of Independence.

Here you have a picture of Ben Franklin’s picture on the decoration of independence, and note the flourish underneath. He loved flourishes, did Ben Franklin.

                Emily used a dip pen, with a metal nib, for both poetry and letters, but using it became difficult as her eyesight great difficult. In early June, 1864, when she was staying in Cambridge with the Norcross sisters, she wrote Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “The doctor has taken away my Pen.” By then she was just past the height of her poetic productivity. Dr. Henry Willard Williams, treating Emily for anterior uveitis, an affliction of her irises, may have thought – and this is only a guess - that using a dip pen required more small movements that caused eye strain, or made it worse. Still, she continued to work on poems in pencil, and later copied them in ink.  Her “months of Siberia” stretched from April to November, 1864, and April to October in 1865. That’s a whale of a long time to be confined. Thereafter, she wrote in both pencil and pen until 1878 when (according to Marta Werner and Jen Bervin, who produced The Gorgeous Nothings)) “the pen is almost entirely discarded.” All of her envelope poems  collected into The Gorgeous Nothings are in pencil.

                Instruments of writing, like guns that don’t fire, arrows that fall short, or fishing lines that bring up old boots, carry stories of frustrated power. We see this frustration in P99, Low at my problem bending.

Low at my problem bending,

Another problem comes —

Larger than mine — Serener —

Involving statelier sums.

I check my busy pencil,

My figures file away.

Wherefore, my baffled fingers

Thy perplexity?

And P660,”I took my power in my hand.”

I took my Power in my Hand —

And went against the World —

'Twas not so much as David — had —

But I — was twice as bold —

I aimed by Pebble — but Myself

 Was all the one that fell —

Was it Goliath — was too large —

Or was myself — too small?
                                - J69/Fr99/M71

In the first poem, the poet is a dutiful student, trying to comprehend a vast subject like astronomy or mathematics, or the nature of God. The poet’s anxious, cramped posture, “Low at my problem bending,” describes a painful deference to a “serener” power (maybe as in “serene” majesty). When she “checks” her busy pencil, there’s a pun. She may be correcting her work, or giving up the hope of getting it right. When her “figures file away,” they resemble humiliated prisoners, or classroom dunces.

                When she ends poems with a question mark, as in  “I took my power in my hand,” she makes defeat seem inevitable, ineradicable—and honest.  The poet had wanted to free herself from the thicket of a problem, or challenge the ten-foot giant “Goliah” (Goliath)  and save her people, as did the boy David with his slingshot, in the book of Samuel.  The poem’s power lies in compressing an impossible dream into a brief nightmare. In both poems, she perceives herself as “small,” (Inadequate, weak, naïve.) Still, to give words to the problem helps her bend low, daring her eyes to regain their focus, and confront her “perplexity.” Ending a poem with a question is a more daring act than ending it with a homily, as Tennyson does.               

                In poem 450, “The Outer from the Inner,” Dickinson becomes an instrument.

The Outer -- from the Inner

Derives its Magnitude --

'Tis Duke, or Dwarf, according

As is the Central Mood --

The fine -- unvarying Axis

That regulates the Wheel --

Though Spokes -- spin -- more conspicuous

And fling a dust -- the while.

The Inner -- paints the Outer --

The Brush without the Hand --

Its Picture publishes -- precise --

As is the inner Brand --

On fine -- Arterial Canvas --

A Cheek -- perchance a Brow --

The Star's whole Secret -- in the Lake --

Eyes were not meant to know.

Dickinson is an instrument in this poem, but she has been one all along:  poet and poem, sculptor and statue, but in this poem, she demonstrates how stealthily the instrument shapes her mind and her art.  The more I read this poem, the more I notice how the poem keeps evolving out of itself, from the epigrammatic first stanza to the celestial mystery of the last two lines. Instruments of movement and measurement not only enable the poet, but also help her identify both with, and as, the work itself. In the mechanics of a rotating wheel, she notices both the regulating axis and the whirling spokes. A watcher from her wide windows, she must have learned the physics of wheel behavior on the streets of Amherst, the odd rhythms of center and circumference—(a favorite word). The wheel’s spokes whirl in counterpoint to the wheel’s rim.

                The third stanza’s first line—“The Inner paints the Outer”—brings together art history, philosophy, and anatomy, although Dickinson would have avoided the trap of those categories.  It is not the painter’s, but the brush’s inner life “without the artist’s hand” that “publishes” itself  “On fine – Arterial Canvas,” the heart “branded” with its secret identifying mark: the blood that tells the truth on the skin. Puns lurk in the language: art, artery, fine—used twice—canvas. The “inner, the central mood” may flush a cheek or dampen a brow. But the poem doesn’t dwell on the artist’s mood; rather, it ends with a mystery. A star reflected in a lake is just a reflection, not the star itself, too far away to comprehend. The last lines, almost crazily gorgeous, plunge us into the lake and forbid our knowing a star’s “whole secret”: its origin, composition, or life-span. Instruments, whether pencils or telescopes, not only wear out, but also show both our mortality, and the mortality of the universe that dwarfs people struggling to see the infinite in  a mere reflection.

                Many of Dickinson’s most memorable poems seem not only generated by, but aroused by, this evidence of mortality. We have spoken before in this group about P 327, “How the old Mountains drip with Sunset,” but midwinter is a good time to revisit it.

How the old Mountains drip with Sunset

How the Hemlocks burn --

How the Dun Brake is draped in Cinder

By the Wizard Sun --

How the old Steeples hand the Scarlet

Till the Ball is full --

Have I the lip of the Flamingo

That I dare to tell?

Then, how the Fire ebbs like Billows --

Touching all the Grass

With a departing -- Sapphire -- feature --

As a Duchess passed --

How a small Dusk crawls on the Village

Till the Houses blot

And the odd Flambeau, no men carry

Glimmer on the Street --

How it is Night -- in Nest and Kennel --

And where was the Wood --

Just a Dome of Abyss is Bowing

Into Solitude --

These are the Visions flitted Guido --

Titian -- never told --

Domenichino dropped his pencil --

Paralyzed, with Gold -- 
                                 - J291/Fr327

[ To hear this poem read aloud, to to ]

The poet’s use of “how” to structure the poem makes the poet into a master-observer or guide to the spectacle of sunset. If she were a telescope, such as Emerson recommended be placed on every street (as mentioned by Keith Mikos in an EDJ article in 2016), she might, if she were a telescope, move her vision deliberately through the changing hues of the “Wizard Sun.” The sun’s failing light falls on trees, steeples, grass, houses, even invading dark places like nests and kennels – that’s one of my favorite lines, because of all the ens - until “the Dome of Abyss” takes its bow into solitude. The verbs about gradual darkening are so apt and precise that they wake up, rather than shut down, our imaginings. Stanza 2 for example. This has got to be one of the strangest stanzas she ever wrote. Who knits, handing something til the ball is full; what is that in knitting?

Faye. Somebody holds the skein in their hands, like this.  the other person winds it, and then the ball is full. I didn’t interpret it as that, but now that you say that …

Susan. well, I’m not sure either. But, the Lip of the Flamingo! Has anyone ever! There’s a little beak.

Greg. It’s a noisy, chattering bird.

Betty. There were no flamingos in Amherst

Susan. No, but she’d read about them. In the library was Audubon’s wonderful book

Greg. She’s just saying “I’m not a chatterbox, isn’t she?”

Susan. She may.

Greg. And also, for handing the scarlet, I’ve also thought of that as possibly referring to a hand-held distaff.

Elizabeth. You will see, in that picture in the handout, that there’s a patch of red below the beak, and it does appear to be a scarlet lip.

 

Susan. Well, the next time you’re looking at the picture of Emily Dickinson that we all know, note her upper lip. It has a little beak. [laughter]

The poet tucks in a reference to knitting, and then—of course, what else!—invites a Flamingo into the poem, perhaps to set up her color scheme of Dun, Scarlet, Sapphire, Dusk, and Night.

I love to imagine Emily Dickinson as a filmmaker, long before anyone else exchanged the telescope in the street for a camera. She could create a range of images, and line them up to test the range of her instruments. In doing so, she challenges her poetic conventions, using indirect rhymes until the last stanza, where “Told” and “Gold” chime like church-bells. As David Porter writes about this poem (in Dickinson, The Modern Idiom), “Virtuoso performance is the poem’s reason for being.”

                A mixture of tones serves as counterpoint to images of houses, an “odd flambeau” (like a watchman’s lantern, or a sunset’s green ray), a “Dome of Abyss.” Seen through the eyes of a poet who looked at her home land-and-skyscape with some knowledge (gleaned from articles and periodicals) of Italian painters, the images Emily creates are more spectacular than conventionally pleasing. Sixteenth-century masters like Guido Reni, Titian, and Domenichino, she hints, could not render a sunset in Amherst. [laughter] Too paralyzed by to capture what they saw, they felt too humble and or dropped the pencil. Maybe, after her pencil had done its work, she dropped her instrument into a well of darkness.

                The late, much-missed scholar David Porter’s discussion of the “Dome of Abyss” image in Dickinson: The Modern Idiom, is virtuoso literary interpretation. Here’s a selection from his chapter, “Strangely Abstracted Images”:

                “What shall we compare to this habitual Dickinson moment of a presence conceived as an absence?...It is the felt presence of the invisible, a sensuous absence, or an absence felt as a presence.”

                This learned, beautifully-written book of David Porter’s is so packed with insights that, were I using a pencil to record my own thoughts, I would surely not just drop it but be tempted to eat it. [laughter] Dickinson’s poem ends with a great Italian painter going all ga-ga when he sees the golden sky, becomes de-pencilled, and is therefore unable at that instant to be a painter.  Porter writes, “with Dickinson’s ‘Dome of Abyss’ we stand at a comparable threshold of both verbal and figurative consciousness.” A “threshold moment,” as he calls it, becomes a passage into what Dickinson called the “presentiment” that “darkness is about to pass.” As she stepped across that threshold in her poem, her “lightly created” hand touched the invisible.

                So, what does this first poem, If it had no Pencil, suggest to you?

Greg. You say you think it was written to Mary Bowles?

Susan. Well, that’s what Habbegger says. She wrote a lot of letters to Mary Bowles, and poems, and Mary didn’t write back.

Betty. She’s a little angry with Betty. Calling her it seems like the coldest way of addressing anyone.

Greg. A good Dickinson quote to remember is “Til it has loved, no man or woman can become itself..” So, she uses that word a little loosely.

Betty. That wasn’t the custom at the time, was it?

Greg. Not that I know of.

Susan. She used it a lot though. It stood for everything. A bleak little poem reads, Why make it doubt/ It hurts it so.

Greg. And the Master letters. Oh, did I offend it - [Did'nt it want me to tell it the truth] Daisy - Daisy - offend it.

Jule. Maybe she’s thinking of it more as a soul.

Kitty. There’s a line from Hamlet, where the ghost’s departing, and Hamlet says something like, “See, it is offended. See, it walks away.”

Betty. But here, I guess, she’s using it because she’s angry at Mary. It’s in italics, I assume, because she’s underlining it?

Susan. Yes.

Betty. It just seems very [disgusted?] to me.

Harrison. It’s how you might refer to a child.

Susan. That’s always bothered me. “Had a baby last year, and it’s doing fine.” [laughter]

Victoria. I think that’s part of it, too – to eliminate gender, and maybe even hierarchy of dominance or power, or any kind of way that you could define something that would just be a common object, which would – object don’t have any kind of sex, in English. So she’s taking those kinds of gender words that we have and wrenching all of that out of them. She’s just like, “I’m going to go way beyond that.

Susan. And, to do that to somebody who was her friend, sort of, but who’s husband was very much her friend – and I’m not suggesting anything else; I think they were just very good friends. It’s a little dodgy. Is she writing to Mary because she really wants Samuel to read what she’s written, and is the poem also, therefore, to Samuel Bowles. “You’ve been travelling, you haven’t written to me,” etc.

Victoria. Well, she doesn’t use the word “you” – if you had no pencil. Would you try mine. If you inserted the word you it would make more of a personal collection, but this is sort of keeping at an emotional distance.

Susan. And then she’s sending the pencil to Sam and Mary Bowles, and the wrapping it in this paper with the little pin-holes in it. It’s two inches long, and I’ve looked at a picture of it and tried to figure out if it had teeth marks in it. [laughter] Because, if it did, that would be really cool, but I’m not sure it does.

Kitty. It seems like an act of terrible irony. “If you don’t have time to write, here’s a little pencil.

Susan. Yeah, you don’t have to write much, because I know you can’t.

Harrison. It’s belittling.

Susan. But then, she calls her Sweet. It’s endearing.

Elaine. When did “it become a belittling word. We all have that assumption. Has it changed in the last hundred years?

Susan. I haven’t been around for quite that long. [laughter]

Elaine. I’m wondering if it’s a way to distance. And, if you refer to children and infants as it when there’s a high rate of infant mortality, then you’re keeping yourself in a safer place. [general agreement]

Jill. Susan, could I go on to where it comes in again? Because, as usual with Emily, there’s a reversal, because it could make sense if it read, “If you had no word,” which Mary doesn’t, would you make the Daisy myself most as small as I was when you met me – when you fertilized our friendship, right? That would make sense because she’s saying “You belittle me by ignoring me. But, I can’t get any logic out of it, because it’s not “small,” it’s “big.” Doesn’t the second stanza amplify the first by reflecting on the past – their relationship – because that one’s in the past tense - Most as big as I was/ When it plucked me.

Susan. Yeah, that makes sense, because If it had no word means what? If it had no word to write to me, or, if it had no word from me?

Jill. Oh, I see. If I didn’t write to you, then I would loom in your imagination, because – well, they’re not Freudianized back then, so it’s not that the subconscious aggrandizes those things we feel guilty about, so it couldn’t be that.

Jule. I thought it meant most as big, or most as important as I was when you first wanted my friendship.

Kitty. To paraphrase what Dickinson might be getting at in the second four lines, she starts out by saying how she has been so generous, how she has written, the pencil is down to a stub, so the last line, If it had no word, Mary or her husband, would it make the daisy, meaning Emily, as big as Emily was when it plucked me. Would she gain stature if she didn’t write so much – if she held back, if she was harder to get. If she wasn’t quite so forthcoming, would that gain her more stature in these people’s eyes. It does seem that the two things are contrasted in the two sets of four lines.

Elaine. And she does use the word dull, as in “Am I becoming dull?”

Kitty. So, if you had no words from me, would I be more important to you. Am I going too far and overwhelming you …

Susan. Dull can mean so many things. It can mean stupid. Having no point. Not sharp. Worn out. Anyway, much to contemplate. Let us move on to, not Flower in the crannied wall. It’s one of those poems that makes you almost wish you didn’t know. [laughter]

Melba reads:
Low at my problem bending,

 Another problem comes —

Larger than mine — Serener —

Involving statelier sums.

 I check my busy pencil,

 My figures file away.

 Wherefore, my baffled fingers

 Thy perplexity?
                                  - J69/Fr99/M71

Susan. And she doesn’t answer the question.

Jill. Maybe she’s saying, “Why worry about a little poet’s problem, when there are problems in the world going on, like the civil war. It’s minimal, choosing the right rhyme, when people are dying, and they don’t know whether they’ll get an amputation when it’s needed, or something like that.

Jule. I don’t understand the serener if the problem is larger than hers. Serener doesn’t seem to –

Jill. Yeah, you’re right,

Susan. So, what does “serene majesty mean? Does it mean that she’s just had a nice nap and a cup of tea? …. Serener – larger than mine; more important. Low at my problem bending That is wonderful, because, what were we told when we were kids? “Sit up straight!” And we can see her, with a candle, trying to work out this thing, whatever it is. And, the fact is, we don’t know, except that there are sums involved. What would statelier sums suggest?

Jill. Ah, the accounting on the judgement day.

Susan. Ye shall be numbered among the baddies and the goodies. And, check my busy pencil –

Harrison. Stop.

Susan. Stop. Just stop it.

Jule. Could she be talking about – statelier sums – serener – could it be death? Someone died? She’s concerned that someone died, and the problem wasn’t so important…

Faye. Do you know what year?

Susan. It’s early. And the dates, you know, are almost purely speculative. She could have written this in her twenties.

Faye. It seems like a young poem.

Elaine. It seems so basically simple.

Jill. I don’t think you can dig too much, because whatever’s going on up there is putting perspective on her ability to add the column or whatever mathematics she is doing. If we read the word Wherefore to mean “why,” then why should I worry about these figures when everyone’s going to die.

Susan. What a grim … [laughter] She’s not finishing this poem. She’s not answering that question, “Why am I so baffled? Why am I perplexed? Oh it’s because I’ve been worried about God. Or, I’ve been shunned by my schoolmates – or my parents are mad at me, or, I want to run away, or  - whatever.

Kitty. It’s right up there with “the dog ate my homework.”

Elaine. How about Thy perplexity? Who’s the Thy?

Greg. Fingers. [general agreement]

Susan. But, she’s projected her mind – into her fingers – and, she’s talking to them. Kind of sweet, but it’s also displacing the problem from her brain to her hand. So there it is; we fall off the end of this problem – it’s a hoop snake. I guess there were such things in mythology. It’s head was eating it’s tail.

Harrison. She has in mind Robert Frost’s little irony, “Forgive, Oh Lord, my little joke on thee/ And I’ll forgive your great big one on me.” [laughter]

Robert. I was connecting in my mind this poem with the one that begins Shall I take thee, the Poet said/ To the propounded word? The poet’s working on the poem, and then gets stopped, and then something arrives – and the sense that Not unto nomination/ The Cherubim reveal. The use produces this further clarity.

Susan. Yeah, it’s 1243, for those of you who have a book with you.

Shall I take thee, the Poet said

To the propounded word?

Be stationed with the Candidates

Till I have finer tried —

The Poet searched Philology

And when about to ring

For the suspended Candidate

There came unsummoned in —

That portion of the Vision

The Word applied to fill

Not unto nomination

The Cherubim reveal —
                 - J1126/Fr1243/M557

Susan. So, can’t solve that problem. [laughter] I love that Not unto nomination/ The Cherubim reveal. This is 1872, so, the problem continues

Victoria. The baffled fingers reminds me of Domenichino. He dropped his pencil. His fingers were just baffled to try to depict that gorgeous sunset. The fingers can’s say what she would want to say, or what he would want to draw, or paint.

[brief aside on Domenichino]

Susan. But, let’s take our power in our hands.

Jill Reads.

I took my Power in my Hand --

And went against the World --

'Twas not so much as David -- had --

But I -- was twice as bold --

I aimed my Pebble -- but Myself

Was all the one that fell --

Was it Goliath -- was too large --

Or was myself -- too small?
                     - J69/Fr99/M71 

Susan. It just takes that old story, which we all love, about David and Goliath, little David killing the ten-foot giant, and really knocking a hole in his head. It takes that whole thing and says, “Well, it didn’t work for me.” [laughter]

Greg. The defeat in the second stanza is always a surprise, because she sets out so powerfully. [general agreement]

Susan. Just imagine if the poem was just the first stanza. We’d say, well, good for you, girl.

Victoria. You know, I’ve seen just the first stanza used in some feminist art and I’ve wanted to say, that’s not the whole … [laughter] … that’s not the whole picture, Sister. [laughter]

Jill. Really, that second stanza is really funny to visualize, almost like a slapstick. You only have this little pebble, but you’re so weak, as slapstick figures usually are; they’re wimps – usually men – and this tiny pellet bowls them over. [general agreement]

Susan. So, it’s about self-defeat, but it’s not just defeat, it’s really injury.

Jule. She’s lost a lot. You’re bold, you’re confident, then all of a sudden it’s gone. You lost. Didn’t work.

Susan. What difference does it make, do you think, that this poem ends with a question?

Elaine. You know, that’s a question. If you took all of her poems that have question marks, would that come up with some sort of enlightenment or not?

Susan. I don’t know the answer to that. She doesn’t know.

Jill. Was it the fall of the patriarchy, or was it myself? I can’t fight this man, or this system. She was very aware of the patriarchy, of course.

Jule. Maybe she was fighting herself. Was Goliah too large – in the beginning she’s twice as bold. [general agreement”

Elizabeth. What I’ve always wondered is – what she doesn’t ask, of course, is “was the pebble too small?” And, if she herself was too small. She doesn’t ask if the power wasn’t too small – the power which she projects through the pebble. So I don’t know if it shows more disbelief in the pebble or the power, or disbelief in herself.

Susan. Yeah, and hand suggests that whatever she was doing was with her hand, and, we don’t think of Emily Dickinson as a famous rock thrower or javelin hurler. So, what power did she have with her hand?

Greg. How about a pen?

Susan. How about a pen – or a pencil?

Jule. It seems to me, maybe only because I’ve been reading a lot about this issue, is part of her expression of ambivalence about having things/ not having it; being public/ not being public; approaching that publication world – I just feel like she’s on both sides again. She’s always ambivalent. She’s trying her best, she’s doing great work, but she’s not really pushing that [inaudible]. She’s not willing to take the steps required to reach fame.

Susan. It’s not that she doesn’t have the power.

Jule. That’s right. She knows she’s written great poems, but, what does she do with them? And I think that’s what she was always struggling about.

Susan. If it’s about poetry. It could be about religion. It could be about death. It could be about a failed friendship.

Greg. It’s nice that you can’t tell what it’s about, because then it becomes a more universal expression of something unattained, and you can make it anything you want.

Susan. Yes. Now, let us move to The Outer from the Inner.

Greg reads.
The Outer -- from the Inner

Derives its Magnitude --

'Tis Duke, or Dwarf, according

As is the Central Mood --

The fine -- unvarying Axis

That regulates the Wheel --

Though Spokes -- spin -- more conspicuous

And fling a dust -- the while.

The Inner -- paints the Outer --

The Brush without the Hand --

Its Picture publishes -- precise --

As is the inner Brand --

On fine -- Arterial Canvas --

A Cheek -- perchance a Brow --

The Star's whole Secret -- in the Lake --

Eyes were not meant to know.
                            - J451/fr450/M225

Lots of Ps.

Susan. Lots of Ps, lots of puns. The first stanza is sort of witty. Eighteenth-century wit – Duke or Dwarf

Greg. I looked up Axis in her dictionary, and one of the meanings is, indeed, “axle” It’s the same word.

Susan. So, it takes from the first stanza, which is entirely wit – word play. There’s nothing to see. And then, there’s something we can see right in the street, and you can watch it’s behavior. And it is mysterious in away, when you look at a wheel, that it seems to be going in two different directions. Then, when we get to the third stanza, we get the analogy to painting – pictures – and it gets rather mysterious. The Brush without the Hand/ It’s Picture publishes precise/ As is the inner Brand. What’s that?

Jule. Is Brand the central mood? What you put into it?

Susan. Could be. Yeah. What else could the brand be?

Greg. An impression.

Susan. An impression, yeah. On fine Arterial Canvas. We’re in the world of anatomy now.

Faye. Flowing through the blood.

Susan. So, what’s happening when the inner paints the outer?

Elaine. I think of a blush. [general agreement]

Susan. Or sweat on a brow, or trembling – something. And then, this poem takes off. I think the last two lines are unbelievably wonderful. I want to picture it, but I can’t. You try to picture this, and you plunge into the lake. You can’t know the star’s secret – because it’s in the Lake! The lake is something that we can’t know; it’s the vast abyss. But, I could be totally wrong about that.

Harrison. It reminds me of the last lines of The Lightening is a Yellow Fork - The Apparatus of the Dark/ To ignorance revealed.

Kitty. There’s something about secrets. You had said earlier, “The blood tells the truth?” But then the star has a secret different from people.

Julie reads.
The Lightning is a yellow Fork

From Tables in the sky

By inadvertent fingers dropt

The awful Cutlery

Of mansions never quite disclosed

And never quite concealed

The Apparatus of the Dark

To ignorance revealed.
                          - J1173/Fr1140/M540

So, maybe if you don’t have a pre-conceived notion, you understand more.

Susan. Awful Cutlery. That’s wonderful. That cutlery sure is awful!

Kitty. Where did you get those words? [laughter]

Susan. That’s the ugliest fork I ever saw! [laughter]