None of Emily Dickinson's readers has met the
woman who lived and died in Amherst, Massachusetts more than a century ago, yet
most of those same readers feel as if they know her closely. Her reclusive life made understanding her
quite difficult. However, taking a close look at her verses, one can learn a
great deal about this remarkable woman.
The poetry of Emily Dickinson delves deep into her mind, exposing her
personal experiences and their influence on her thoughts about religion, love,
and death. By examining her life some,
and reading her poetry in a certain light, one can see an obvious
autobiographical connection.
All the beliefs and emotions Emily Dickinson
wrote about were based, in one way or another, on the same aspect of her
upbringing, which was religion. During
her childhood, life in Amherst was based strongly upon religion and Puritan
values. The distinctive Puritan virtues
of simplicity, austerity, hard work, and denial of flesh, were ever-present
disciplines in Emily's life (Sewall 22).
Despite her stubborn denials to be labeled, she was very much of a
"New Englander". Cynthia
Griffen Wolff, author of Emily Dickinson, points out that Emily "knew
every line of the Bible intimately, quoted from it extensively, and referred to
it many more times than she referred to any other work... yet in this regard
she was not unusual by Amherst's standards" (72). The most prominent figure of religious
virtues in her life was her father, Edward Dickinson. Reading the Bible to his children and
speaking in town of religious ethics were daily events in his life. At home, he tried to raise his children in
the rigorous religion of their ancestors, however his methods appeared quite
harsh. People who knew the Dickinsons
referred to Edward as a "severe,
latter-day Puritan, a power-minded tyrant...", and his home was often
depicted as a "gloomy prison" (Sewall 8). In fact, Emily's fear and awe of him seemed
to dominate her life. Although he read
aloud from his Bible, conducted prayer service in his home daily, and he
educated his children in a strict Puritan way, he himself was not quite a
believer. He delayed conversion until
well into middle age, "...displayed no mark of singular devotion, defined
his vocation in terms of business, and was not inclined to explore the
mysteries of the Divinity" (Wolff 125)
It is possible that the paradox of faith which tore Emily's mind could
have had its roots in her father's own doubts.
No quandary in life presented Emily Dickinson
with such wrenching choices as the demand for conversion. Her doubts tempted her to rebel against God,
but her needs drove her toward faith in Him.
Neither stance could overcome the other, and neither could be
reconciled. Emotionally, she lacked a
direction of beliefs, however there was one thing she was sure of - God
existed. "Reason convinced her that
there must be such a Being as God; and as to God's existence she seems never to
have wavered" (Wolff 84). Believing
that He was there only gave her something solid to forsake. In a letter to her friend once she wrote,
"...and I am standing alone in rebellion, and growing very
careless..." (Sewall 375). However,
it was only when she had achieved complete poetic independence that she could
confidently write in open defiance of God: I
reckon - when I count at all -
First - Poets - Then the Sun
Then Summer - Then the Heaven of God -
And then - the List is done -
But, looking back - the First so seems
To Comprehend the Whole -
The Others look a needless Show -
So I write - Poets - All -...
...And if the Further Heaven -
Be beautiful as they prepare
For Those who worship Them -
It is too difficult a Grace -
To justify the Dream - (Sewall 355)
On several
occasions, Emily went as far as calling herself a pagan. The bitterness with which the comment was
made may have been aroused by the same feeling as in the line "Of Course -
I Prayed - / And did God Care?" of one of her poems. Unable to accept Heaven, she was left only
with this brief world, which, without Heaven, seemed somewhat of a dreadful
place to her. She wrote in a letter once
a prayer for forgiveness for trying to enjoy life too much. "Knew I how to pray," she wrote, "to intercede for your Foot
were intuitive, but I am a Pagan" (Sewall 590), and then the poem:
Of God we ask one favor,
That we may be forgiven -
For what, he is presumed to know -
The Crime, from us, is hidden -
Immured
the whole of Life
Within a magic Prison
We reprimand the Happiness
That too competes with Heaven
These religious
doubts she harbored in her mind and so often expressed led her to be seen as
having renounced her faith and, most often, replaced it with a belief in her
own powers, especially those employed in her art. Charles Anderson wrote that "...her
pained sense of estrangement from the religion of her fathers lingered to the
end, but so did the integrity that gave her courage to go her own way, to
continue her search for Heaven through poetry rather than through a theology
she could not accept." (Bloom 35)
Eventually she did find Heaven, and she accepted it with open arms. She is said to have discovered herself
"elected to receive the grace of God". The relationship with God she wrote of was much like a relationship of two people.
For that reason, many of her poems read as religious can also be seen as
poems of love. An example of one is this
poem:
My River runs to thee -
Blue Sea! Wilt welcome me?
My River waits reply -
Oh Sea - look graciously -
I'll fetch thee Brooks
From spotted nooks -
Say - Sea - Take Me!
One could
interpret this poem as her need to be accepted by God, as well as a love poem
expressing her yearning for human companionship. This yearning, along with other forms of love
poems, is shown a countless number of times in her works.
Emily Dickinson's love poetry follows a similar
pattern, one that is both peculiar and frustrating. She brings together lovers, perfectly matched
and deeply in love. They are not
unhappy, yet they are never allowed to be together by some higher power. "The same poetry that postulates
marriage as the ideal also accepts as a given that this marriage can never take
place" (Wolff 387) Emily could have
written love poetry celebrating the strength of a happy marriage or even
examining the difficulties of achieving that perfect union, but, for the most
part, she did not. Separation was too
much a part of her real-life relationships for her not to acknowledge it. For various reasons, the major friendships
and passionate relationships of her life "...confirmed her deepest
conviction: where passion is concerned, there must be separation" (Wolff
411). No poem captures this paradox more
powerfully than this poem of loss:
I cannot live with You -
It would be Life -
And Life is over there -
Behind the Shelf...
...I could not die - with You -
For One must wait
To shut the Other's Gaze down -
You - could not -...
...Nor could I rise - with You -
Because Your Face
Would put out Jesus's -
That New Grace
Her love is so
strong that she compares him to Jesus, and he outshines Him, yet she cannot
live with him, die with him, or rise up to Heaven with him, due to
circumstances she can not help. The
cause of separation, unlike her real relationships, is almost always the
same. "It is a trandescendent necessity; God decrees that distance"
(Wolff 412). In many of these poems, as
the one above, the speaker provokes Him into that action by claiming neither to
need the Divinity nor His heaven. The
lover's make their own paradise. Not
only does this show influence of Emily's relationships, but once again it
contains hints of her religious struggle.
Direct opposition of God is also set by the generosity, affection, and
willingness of the lovers to treat each
other as equals.
One characteristic of all the relationships
that Emily created in her poems is the idea of equality. Despite superficial differences of size, age,
or social power, the lover's are essentially equal, and neither wants to
dominate the relationship. This is shown
in these excerpts from one of her poems:
He was weak...I was weak...
...I was strong...He was strong...
...So he let me lead him in...
...So I let him lead me - Home
Emily allows
women to be treated fairly, in the same way as men. On many occasions in her poems the voice of
the "wife" speaks. For the
most part, the "wife" speaks of the hardships of the
relationships. Humorous, it is a feeling
of impatience in the voice of the woman upon discovering that creating that
Heaven-on-Earth is more easily said than done (Wolff 350). The wife often seeks to bring coherence to
the troubles through the old-fashioned domestic qualities taught to her in
order to accommodate for the lost paradise.
The love poetry of Emily Dickinson is not
"...idealizing and incorporeal...", but rather it is "...ardent
and filled with sexual invitation..." (Wolff 385). One poem unlike her usual writings explores
her ability for passion and possibly a yearning for it:
Wild Nights - Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile - the Winds -
To a Heart in port -
Done with the Compass -
Done with the Chart!
Rowing in Eden -
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor - Tonight -
In Thee!
This gives so
much evidence of Emily's capacity for passion that for a while (now passed)
"...critics generally supposed that the principle reason for her art lay
in some unfulfilled affair of the heart" (Wolff 385). However, her passion in poems is never
fulfilled due to the same theme of separation.
This separation she writes about not only deals
with love, but often with a more permanent separation, death. Death was only one more thing that Emily knew
of which kept people apart. The deaths
of her friends and family forced her to acknowledge the loneliness and
separateness of this world. The fact of
death led her to question once again "...the nature of this Being Who had
authored our fate..." (Wolff 84).
She found it hard to believe that she was to worship and love something
who could repeatedly take away from her all the relationships that meant so
much.
Emily Dickinson's preoccupation with death
began when she was young and continued on throughout most of her life. She was a meditative child, sensitive and
serious, and she began to puzzle over the mystery of death and new birth at a
very early age. Emily Dickinson was sure
that after death life on Earth was over, in all aspects. People lost all connections with previous
lives, and gained a morbid equality, such as that described in this poem:
...there was a little figure plump
For every little knoll -
Busy needles, and spools of thread -
And trudging feet from school -
Playmates, and holidays, and nuts -
And visions vast and small -
Strange that the feet so precious charged
Should reach so small a goal!
"The
cemetery is filled with the dead and under 'every little knoll' there lies
someone who was once a little child plying its tasks and pursuing its dreams;
yet all are now equally dead, equally far from life's pleasures" (Wolff
180).
The thing that frightened yet intrigued Emily
the most about death was the "...gradual isolation of an increasingly
helpless self moving toward the horror of the utterly unknown..." (Wolff
221). However, there was a certainty of
death. It was not a certainty of what
would become of one, but that death was sure to occur. When children die, many say they die
"too soon" Dickinson is apt to say that the death was not too soon,
and that there is never a "right time" to die. Wolff believes she would reprimand us for
"...thinking ourselves to clever and strong when we elude death for a
while, and even forgetting his long shadow falling across our paths..."
and reminding us that "...in the
end, the Angel of Death dispatches us all" (181). In 1884, Emily Dickinson experienced a
"year of deaths" when five people close to her, including her mother,
her nephew, and two men she felt strongly for, passed on. In was during this year that she wrote this
poem which exemplified her own collapse that year:
So give me back to Death -
The Death I never feared
Except that it deprived of thee -
And now, by Life deprived,
In my own Grave I breathe
And estimate it's size -
It's size is all that Hell can guess -
And all that Heaven surmise -
This poem is
about her confrontation with loss and death.
Emily is "...estimating the 'size' of death - distancing it, coming
to terms with it, and finding no fear in it" (Sewall 665).
The personal experiences of Emily Dickinson had
a great influence on her poetry. Through
her verses we can understand and relate to her much more easily. Without them, her withdrawal from society
would have kept her unknown. Once she
wrote:
This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me -
The simple News that Nature told -
With tender Majesty
Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see -
For love of Her - Sweet - countrymen -
Judge tenderly - of Me
It seems fairly
obvious that Emily Dickinson knew that someday her poems would be found and
would be used as a window into her thoughts.
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