4
ONE OF THE MOST PUZZLING PIECES of “work in throes” is a fragment that appears on a scrap of brown wrapping paper.
Credit: Fr1599A; manuscript: “A 112,” Amherst College Archives and Special Collections.
We could crush an entire universe into those four words, and consider all of Dickinson’s writing “A Woe/of Ecstasy.” But the fragment exists both “as an autonomous lyric throe” and as a variant to the final line of a particular poem:
A Sloop of Amber slips away
Upon an Ether Sea,
And wrecks in Peace a Purple Tar,
The Son of Ecstasy—[Fr1599C]
“Please accept a Sunset,” she wrote coyly to the poem’s possible recipient, Edward Tuckerman, professor of botany at Amherst College. She is, of course, describing that elusive and violent sinking of the sun, and she captures the moment in a deeply lyrical portrait that no one else could ever have painted. And her last line, “The Son of Ecstasy,” in the version she may have sent to Tuckerman, lends the poem a Christ-like sense of awe, and a playfulness about the repetitive patter of “Son” and “sun.” But the variant of “A Woe/of Ecstasy” changes the discourse as it migrates into the poem, and it holds us and the poem “spellbound” for an instant, as Werner suggests. Suddenly that “Sloop of Amber” is a bit more ominous as it “slips away.” And we now have a poem about Apocalypse; Dickinson’s “Sloop of Amber” might well be the poet’s craft, with its delicate and delightful color, as it ripples, or “wrecks [the] Peace,” of that “Purple Tar,” and drops the poet into the nothingness of eternal night—hence, “A Woe/of Ecstasy,” as if beauty and destruction arrive in the same breath, like some irritable angel, and leave without one last trace of awe.
Dickinson’s fragments are “solitary outriders” that often gallop right into the middle of a letter, and “may at any moment revolt against the sovereignty of singular address,” so that the letters of her last two decades are as “undomesticatable” as the scraps themselves, and live in some borderland between poetry and prose. In one particular draft of an 1885 letter to Helen Hunt Jackson, we have all the beats and line breaks of a poem.
Whocouldbe
illinMarch—
thatMonthof
proclamation?
SleighBellsand
Jayscontendin
myMatinee,and
theNorthsurren—
dersinsteadof
theSouth,a
reverseofBugles—[Letter 976; manuscript: “A 976”]
And one of her crafted poems migrates right into the shivering lines of the letter like some magnificent fugitive that barely creates a rift.
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—[Fr1675B]
Jackson herself was a kind of fugitive—a female author—who begged Dickinson to publish her poems. A writer with little suppleness of her own, and a clubfooted gait, she still understood Dickinson’s angular style and relentless music. And why, we would have to ask again, didn’t the poet have any genuine male preceptors, even if she liked to pretend that Colonel Higginson posed as one? None of the males around her, neither Higginson nor Sam Bowles, had the least clue of what her poetry was about. Both were prominent editors who championed women’s causes, yet they’d never have recognized that rage within the poet, or the Vesuvius she had become. They couldn’t sift through her volcanic ash. Sue had become her part-time preceptor, had dealt with this ash and some of her “Snow,” but Helen Hunt Jackson was a huntress with her own Yellow Eye, searching for other poets, and would have made Dickinson dance and sing in public—she who was only a Prima within the shadow box of her mind. And that’s why those two lines—“Immured the whole of Life/Within a magic Prison”—flew into her letter like some strange missile, torn from a poem about human guilt, and some hidden Crime, as she must have seen herself as a criminal in that undecorated room with its minuscule desk and sleigh bed, where she became an alchemist of sorts, firing her Woe of Words, like pellets that weren’t meant for public consumption, but to wound herself perhaps, or to shatter her Lexicon, to break and break and break, though her violence went unseen, sequestered as she was, a homebound waif in a white dress, sentencing herself to” a magic Prison.”
“Agoraphobia was her alibi,” Werner reminds us in Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios, “ ‘I’ was her alias.” She had many personas, more than one. And we, like ghouls, try to toy with her biography, to link her language with her life. We cannot master her, never will, as if her own words skate on some torrid ice that is permanently beyond our pale, yet we seek and seek, as if somehow that soothes us, as if we might crack a certain code, when all we will ever have is “A Woe/of Ecstasy.”
5
THE DEFIANT ONES, SUCH AS MARTA WERNER, match fire with fire, as if some of their own sparks will bring us a little closer to Dickinson—language is the one witchery we have at our disposal to deal with a witch. And this is what Marta Werner does in Radical Scatters. She has found a lexicon to examine the Lexicon of Dickinson’s late fragments, and has revealed the radical heart of Dickinson’s writing: This poet was not a finisher; everything she wrote was always involved in its own entangled process and growth, like one of her perennials, and she moved with such a nimble violence between poetry and prose, until their lashing rhythms were almost identical.
“Having abandoned the institution of ‘authorship’ early in her writing life,” Werner insists, “Dickinson was able to set in motion a work without beginning or ending. . . . The fragments—the work in throes—scatter in all directions at once.” And, what is most critical, “[e]verything must be redefined in their wake.”
We now have to reconsider the poet’s workshop—both early and late—as an alchemist’s laboratory, where she was in constant agitation, and where “pandemonium” reigned—“the spectacular turbulence and commotion . . . that attended the act of composition.” She seemed much more interested in the outreaches of her mind than in the notion of a finished text—everything was in flight, and in flux, in that laboratory, where lines could migrate from text to text like wild, astonishing birds. And it’s no simple conceit that her narrators often spoke to us from the other side of the grave, or that she seemed so involved with the dead in her poems.
Like Men and Women Shadows walk
Opon the Hills Today . . .[Fr964]
She communed with us, like some clairvoyant, as if she had found a melody and a cadence to speak for the dead—and inhabited a necropolis all her own. But it was no high-wire act, no ventriloquism, even though she had the artist’s power to mimic.
We can never outgrow her “radical scatters”—each time, we discover a different trajectory, another dip and arc, and we approach her with a certain peril. We all want our own Miss Emily, a RepliLuxe we might fathom and control, and that’s one of the reasons we’re so obsessed with her biography. To know Dickinson is to contain her. Even if we found a certain “provenance” for that 1859 daguerreotype, genuine proof that she loved Condor Kate, it might utterly destroy that stale image of a sexless, reclusive mouse, but we still couldn’t solve the great riddle of her art.
What if there were a host of Condor Kates? And she devoured one Kate after another with her wildness and her will? And what if we found the recipient of the “Master Letters”? Or could prove that she had more than an epistolary romance with Judge Lord? None of this could give us much purchase into her mind. She lived the life of a privileged spinster in a nineteenth-century New England cow town with its own college. Her father was a tyrannical man who beat his horses and was captain of his own fire company. But his elder daughter was as tyrannical as he was. She built a whirlwind around her and lived within its walls. I doubt he was ever aware that Miss Emily was an alchem
ist, and creator of her own recondite language. We know she never married, whether or not she was “The Wife—without the Sign.” She might never have slept with a woman, or with a man. And she never traveled beyond Boston or the nation’s capital. “To shut our eyes is Travel” [Letter 354], she wrote, and she traveled everywhere she required in the shifting harbors of her poems, where she could search for her “Blue Peninsula.” She had her “Wild Nights” and who are we to question them? Whether they were with Condor Kate or with the ravelments of her pen while everyone else was asleep at the Homestead, she brought the English language to the very borders of possibility and then pushed beyond these borders. Her move from word to word was so rapid that we can barely keep up with her transcriptions and marks on the page. Perhaps her various dashes are internal whispers of the mind trying to keep pace with the violence of thought, where the melodies atomize the words, shove them at us like broken teeth.
6
BEHIND ALL HER ARIAS THERE SEEMS TO BE a black hole. It’s Roland Barthes who said In Writing Degree Zero that modern language has moved outside history, into dream and menace. And that’s one reason why there’s so little reward in studying the poet within the context of her times. She’s larger than her Lexicon. And nineteenth-century manners and dominions cannot explain her. She tore some of her vocabulary from Shakespeare, but what she must have sensed most was the menace that lurked behind every speech in Hamlet, as the doomed prince of Denmark chased ghosts in the dark. “Hamlet wavered for all of us—,” she wrote in 1877. [Letter 512] And like Hamlet, she ran after these ghosts, the living and the dead, witness and illusion, with the one rapier she had. “Words, words, words.” She could inhabit the psyche of all her favorite characters at once—Hamlet, Antony, Cleopatra, Enobarbus, Ophelia, Lady Macbeth—enchantress and doomster, wrapped in a succulent caprice, fat with pity and fear and a glorious spite, she whirls around us and wounds us with her seductions and the jagged edges of her lines—
She dealt her pretty words like Blades—
How glittering they shone—
And every One unbared a Nerve
Or wantoned with a Bone— [Fr458]
With all her Blades and Loaded Guns of language, she endured a deep ontological fear, that dread of being alive, yet this is only one more mark of her warlike contradictions, where that same fear is often coupled with a kind of Ecstasy, as she floats all by herself in some “syllableless Sea.” [Fr1689] She devoured Sam Bowles’ Springfield Republican every day of her life, knew all about Whig politics, silver mines in Potosí, sea disasters, the eruptions of Mount Etna, butcheries of the Civil War, and even wrote about them, but what she feared most, what obsessed Emily Dickinson and filled her with demons, was Nature’s own civil war—the change of seasons. She could delight in the robin’s first call, and dread that it might also be the last, as if the signs of some cold spell might be the signature of an eternal ice age.
I dreaded that first Robin, so . . .
I thought if I could only live
Till that first Shout got by—
Not all Pianos in the Woods
Had power to mangle me—[Fr347]
If she could crack through that morbid catacomb of winter, and wake—with a certain dread—to the robin’s “first Shout,” none of Nature’s other calls could disrupt her own call to music. But the dread always returns. It’s not only Death that calls in his comfortable carriage, that freezes at the bone, and “Dresses each House in Crepe, and Icicle” [Fr556], but the winter frost paralyzes us and impairs our sense of sound.
When they begin, if Robins may,
I always had a fear
I did not tell, it was their last Experiment
Last Year . . .[Fr1042]
What if she herself became mute, could no longer sing, and had to suffer through her own “Last Experiment”? Would she really drown in a “syllableless Sea”? “The Soul has Bandaged moments,” when Dickinson cannot sing, and—
She feels some ghastly Fright come up
And stop to look at her . . .
Caress her freezing hair—
And then, like “the Bee—delirious borne,” she dances, “a Bomb, abroad,” and her song is in full sway again. But nothing lasts. That listlessness comes back, and she’s now a “Felon”—
With shackles on the plumed feet
And staples, in the song.
The Horror welcomes her, again
These, are not brayed of Tongue—[Fr360]
And thus she went through a series of crises, from silence to sound, from powerlessness, where her Feathers were plucked, to rampant song, where all her Feathers preened and she could bray her head off. What caused these crises, like a peristaltic crunch that could freeze her hair, remains a matter of conjecture—and concern. Was it the constant swerve in her relationship with Sue, a volcano every bit as volatile as the poet?
That those who know her know her less
The nearer her they get—[Fr1433C]
Or was it Kate, who also had the power to wound, and could stun the poet into silence? Or some unknown suitor, with a history tucked away in letters we will newer find? And a hundred other disappointments, a whole catalogue of deaths? How will we ever know?
And with all her sense of “homelessness,” she felt at home in the land of Abyss. That’s why she was so drawn to the secret gift of wells—a well could suck up her own reflection in its damp, dark plummetless bottom, could annihilate whatever outline she had.
What mystery pervades a well!
The water lives so far—
A neighbor from another world
Residing in a jar
Whose limit none has ever seen,
But just his lid of glass—
Like looking every time you please
Into an abyss’s face![Fr1433A]
Her own language was like that damp abyss, with its deceptive lid of glass and plummetless bottom, where words could migrate from well to well. But not all scholars believe in the authority of Dickinson’s magic wells. In This Republic of Suffering, a poignant study of the Civil War’s visible and invisible casualties, Drew Gilpin Faust, historian and president of Harvard University, talks about the discontinuities in Dickinson’s poetry, her smashing of syntax and her questioning of Christian myths: The poet is at war with language itself, as if she had moved beyond sound and sense, beyond heaven and hell, and the crisis of language she has provoked “is about not just whether there is a God and we can know him but whether we can know or communicate anything at all.”
Faust isn’t wrong about the poet’s quixotic quest—to tear apart the order and hierarchy of all things. And Dickinson never doubts her ability to do so, even if her music should fail her.
The Definition of Melody—is—
That Definition is none—[Fr849]
It’s the world that seems so tentative to her, with all its rumblings. If Higginson abandons the poet, runs off to South Carolina to command his own Negro regiment, his “Scholar” says in her own testy voice: “I should have liked to see you, before you became improbable. War feels to me an oblique place—” [Letter 280, February 1863]
And Lincoln himself is just as improbable and oblique. Right after his reelection in 1864, she scribbles a note to Vinnie while exiled in a Cambridge boardinghouse with her own eye troubles, and she must have witnessed the full panoply of the torchlight parades of Lincoln Clubs through Cambridge:
The Drums keep on for the still Man . . .[Letter 297]
And not another word about Lincoln in her letters, oblique or otherwise, as if there’s no room for him in her eschatology—she might have also held a grudge against Lincoln, since her father was an old-line Whig, who never had a real place in the Republican Party. And yet she was able to create her own little daguerreotype of Lincoln, a portrait in three words that captures his one essential feature. Lincoln was “the still Man,” who held a nation together with his own silent glue.
And “the still Man” did remain in her imagination long af
ter he was shot. In a letter-poem to Sue right after Gib’s death, she wrote:
The Tent is listening,
But the Troops are gone![Fr1625]
She could have been talking about Lincoln, and her own silent life as a poet—that Bird of Dissolution she had become. Perhaps her own sense of the Apocalypse came from the Civil War. Drew Gilpin Faust reminds us how much greater and more personal the carnage was than we could ever have imagined—“infantry engagements, even as they grew to involve tens of thousands of men, remained essentially intimate; soldiers were often able to see each other’s faces and to know whom they had killed.” She tells us about all the shallow graves, where hogs rooted relentlessly for whatever human parts they could unearth, while souvenir seekers roamed the battlefields robbing the dead. And in April 1865, when Union soldiers entered the burning capital of Richmond (the rebels had set their own fortress on fire), they found almost all the women dressed in black—the war had created a necropolis of widows and ghosts. That sort of necropolis must have whirled around in Dickinson’s brain—ghosts loomed everywhere in that haunted house of hers. Never a Civil War poet, she did record the carnage in her own fashion; the amputations she wrote about related to the Lord. She was, like Jacob, “Pugilist and Poet” [Letter 1042]; she boxed with God and all His angels in her poems, and according to Dr. Norbert Hirschhorn, “it’s not clear that God won.”
She never had her own cosmology of angels and devils, unlike William Blake. Whatever she watched was mostly from her window-sill. This was how she framed the world. The circuses she saw passed beneath her window.
Friday I tasted life. It was a vast morsel. A circus passed the house—still I feel the red in my mind though the drums are out.[Letter 318, early May 1866]
That red was palpable enough, and was like a lasting streak that colored her “little workmanships” [Fr640], the monumental tinkering she did with the help of her pen and little black pot in the tiny drawer of her tiny desk. She gardened, she baked, attended a mother who had become more and more of an invalid, and spun her startling web of words like the spider-artist she had become.
A Loaded Gun Page 16
