Dickinson was convinced that a life worth living could be found within the mind and against the grain of external circumstance: “Reverse cannot befall/ That fine prosperity/ Whose Sources are interior—” (#395). The horror, for her, was that which set “Staples in the Song”—the numbing and freezing of the interior, a state she describes over and over:
There is a Languor of the Life
More imminent than Pain—
’Tis Pain’s Successor—When the Soul
Has suffered all it can—
A Drowsiness—diffuses—
A Dimness like a Fog
Envelopes Consciousness—
As Mists—obliterate a Crag.
The Surgeon—does not blanch—at pain—
His Habit—is severe—
But tell him that it ceased to feel—
The creature lying there—
And he will tell you—skill is late—
A Mightier than He—
Has ministered before Him—
There’s no Vitality.
(#396)
I think the equation surgeon-artist is a fair one here; the artist can work with the materials of pain; she cuts to probe and heal; but she is powerless at the point where
After great pain, a formal feeling comes—
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, mechanical, go round—
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought—
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone—
This is the Hour of Lead
Remembered, if outlived
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—
First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—
(#341)
For the poet, the terror is precisely in those periods of psychic death, when even the possibility of work is negated; her “occupation’s gone.” Yet she also describes the unavailing effort to numb emotion:
Me from Myself—to banish—
Had I Art—
Impregnable my Fortress
Unto All Heart—
But since Myself—assault Me—
How have I peace
Except by subjugating
Consciousness?
And since We’re mutual Monarch
How this be
Except by Abdication—
Me—of Me?
(#642)
The possibility of abdicating oneself—of ceasing to be—remains.
Severer Service of myself
I—hastened to demand
To fill the awful Longitude
Your life had left behind—
I worried Nature with my Wheels
When Hers had ceased to run—
When she had put away Her Work
My own had just begun.
I strove to weary Brain and Bone—
To harass to fatigue
The glittering Retinue of nerves—
Vitality to clog
To some dull comfort Those obtain
Who put a Head away
They knew the Hair to—
And forget the color of the Day—
Affliction would not be appeased—
The Darkness braced as firm
As all my stratagem had been
The Midnight to confirm—
No Drug for Consciousness—can be—
Alternative to die
Is Nature’s only Pharmacy
For Being’s Malady—
(#786)
Yet consciousness—not simply the capacity to suffer, but the capacity to experience intensely at every instant—creates of death not a blotting-out but a final illumination:
This Consciousness that is aware
Of Neighbors and the Sun
Will be the one aware of Death
And that itself alone
Is traversing the interval
Experience between
And most profound experiment
Appointed unto Men—
How adequate unto itself
Its properties shall be
Itself unto itself and none
Shall make discovery.
Adventure most unto itself
The Soul condemned to be—
Attended by a single Hound
Its own identity.
(#822)
The poet’s relationship to her poetry has, it seems to me—and I am not speaking only of Emily Dickinson—a twofold nature. Poetic language—the poem on paper—is a concretization of the poetry of the world at large, the self, and the forces within the self; and those forces are rescued from formlessness, lucidified, and integrated in the act of writing poems. But there is a more ancient concept of the poet, which is that she is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who—for whatever reasons—are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
The Province of the Saved
Should be the Art—To save—
Through Skill obtained in Themselves—
The Science of the Grave
No Man can understand
But He that hath endured
The Dissolution—in Himself—
That Man—be qualified
To qualify Despair
To Those who failing new—
Mistake Defeat for Death—Each time—
Till acclimated—to—
(#539)
The poetry of extreme states, the poetry of danger, can allow its readers to go further in our own awareness, take risks we might not have dared; it says, at least: “Someone has been here before.”
The Soul’s distinct Connection
With immortality
Is best disclosed by Danger
Or quick Calamity—
As Lightning on a Landscape
Exhibits Sheets of Place—
Not yet suspected—but for Flash—
And Click—and Suddenness.
(#974)
Crumbling is not an instant’s Act
A fundamental pause
Dilapidation’s processes
Are organized Decays.
’Tis first a Cobweb on the Soul
A Cuticle of Dust
A Borer in the Axis
An Elemental Rust—
Ruin is formal—Devil’s work
Consecutive and slow—
Fail in an instant—no man did
Slipping—is Crash’s law.
(#997)
I felt a Cleaving in my Mind
As if my Brain had split—
I tried to match it—Seam by Seam—
But could not make them fit.
The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before—
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound
Like Balls—upon a Floor.
(#937)
There are many more Emily Dickinsons than I have tried to call up here. Wherever you take hold of her, she proliferates. I wish I had time here to explore her complex sense of Truth; to follow the thread we unravel when we look at the numerous and passionate poems she wrote to or about women; to probe her ambivalent feelings about fame, a subject pursued by many male poets before her; simply to examine the poems in which she is directly apprehending the natural world. No one since the seventeenth century had reflected more variously or more probingly upon death and dying. What I have tried to do here is follow through some of the origins and consequences of her choice to be, not only a poet but a woman who explored her own mind, without any of the guidelines of orthodoxy. To say “yes” to her powers was not simply a major act of nonconformity in the nineteenth century; even in our own time it has been assumed that Emily Dickinson, not patriarchal society, was “the problem.” The more we come to recognize th
e unwritten and written laws and taboos underpinning patriarchy, the less problematical, surely, will seem the methods she chose.
This essay was read in its earliest form as a lecture at Brandeis University, and in its present version as one of the Lucy Martin Donnelly lectures at Bryn Mawr College. It was first printed in Parnassus: Poetry in Review 5, no. 1 (Fall–Winter 1976).
Uncollected
POETRY AND EXPERIENCE
Statement at a Poetry Reading (1964)
What a poem used to be for me, what it is today.
In the period in which my first two books were written I had a much more absolutist approach to the universe than I now have. I also felt—as many people still feel—that a poem was an arrangement of ideas and feelings, pre-determined, and it said what I had already decided it should say. There were occasional surprises, occasions of happy discovery that an unexpected turn could be taken, but control, technical mastery and intellectual clarity were the real goals, and for many reasons it was satisfying to be able to create this kind of formal order in poems.
Only gradually, within the last five or six years, did I begin to feel that these poems, even the ones I liked best and in which I felt I’d said most, were queerly limited; that in many cases I had suppressed, omitted, falsified even, certain disturbing elements, to gain that perfection of order. Perhaps this feeling began to show itself in a poem like “Rural Reflections,” in which there is an awareness already that experience is always greater and more unclassifiable than we give it credit for being.
Today, I have to say that what I know I know through making poems. Like the novelist who finds that his characters begin to have a life of their own and to demand certain experiences, I find that I can no longer go to write a poem with a neat handful of materials and express those materials according to a prior plan: the poem itself engenders new sensations, new awareness in me as it progresses. Without for one moment turning my back on conscious choice and selection, I have been increasingly willing to let the unconscious offer its materials, to listen to more than the one voice of a single idea. Perhaps a simple way of putting it would be to say that instead of poems about experiences I am getting poems that are experiences, that contribute to my knowledge and my emotional life even while they reflect and assimilate it. In my earlier poems I told you, as precisely and eloquently as I knew how, about something; in the more recent poems something is happening, something has happened to me and, if I have been a good parent to the poem, something will happen to you who read it.
Transcribed by Rich and first published in “Adrienne Rich and the Poetics of Change” by Albert Gelpi, in American Poetry Since 1960, edited by Robert Shaw (Carcanet Press, 1973). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
from CARYATID
A Column (1973)
. . . . . . .
I have just been reading three (two revised) volumes by Robert Lowell, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The first, called History, is a reworking of the (already reworked) poems in the second edition of Notebook, with 80 new poems added. From Notebook Lowell has lifted a group of poems dealing with his second marriage and his daughter, and published them separately in a volume called For Lizzie and Harriet. These poems have also been revised since they appeared in the Notebook versions. The third volume, The Dolphin, consists of new poems which delineate Lowell’s love-affair with his present wife, his divorce and remarriage. Of these seventy-odd poems, a number are placed in italics or quotation marks and are presumably based on letters written to Lowell by his wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick, during the period after he left her and through the time of their divorce.
I don’t know why Lowell felt he wanted to go on revising and republishing old poems; why not let them stand and proceed on, since life itself goes on? Perhaps, as he says, “the composition was jumbled” in Notebook; but he chose, as a mature poet, to publish that jumbled composition, and it represents his poetic and human choices of that time. What does it mean to revise a poem? For every poet the process must be different; but it is surely closer to pruning a tree than retouching a photograph. However, the intention behind History is clearly to produce a major literary document encompassing the élite Western sensibility of which Lowell is a late representative; a work to stand in competition with the great long poems of the past.
The lesson of Notebook/History is that brilliant language, powerful images, are not enough, and that they can become unbelievably boring in the service of an encapsulated ego. I remember Notebook as a book whose language sometimes dazzled even though it often seemed intentionally to blur and evade meaning, even though Lowell’s own rather pedantic notion of surrealism led to a kind of image-making out of the intellect rather than the unconscious. I remember saying to a friend that in poem after poem, at the moment when you thought Lowell was about to cut to the bone, he veered off, lost the thread, abandoned the poem he’d begun in a kind of verbal coitus interruptus. In History it strikes me that this is poetry constructed in phrases, each hacked-out, hewn, tooled, glazed or burnished with immense expertise . . . but one gets tired of these phrases, they hammer on after awhile with a fearful and draining monotony. It becomes a performance, a method, language divorced from its breathing, vibrating sources to become, as Lowell himself says, a marble figure.
History is a book filled with people: Robespierre, Timur, Allen Tate, old classmates, old lovers, relatives, Che Guevara, Anne Boleyn, King David, poets dead and alive, Kennedys and kings. Or perhaps I should say that for his poetry Lowell uses real people, versifies and fictionalizes them at will, and thus attempts to reduce or dominate them. They are face-cards in a game of solitaire, but solitaire is what it remains.
There’s a kind of aggrandized and merciless masculinity at work in these books, particularly the third, symptomatic of the dead-end destructiveness that masculine privilege has built for itself into all institutions, including poetry. I sense that the mind behind these poems knows—being omnivorously well-read—that “someone has suffered”—the Jews, Achilles, Sylvia Plath, his own wife—but is incapable of a true identification with the sufferers which might illuminate their condition for us. The poet’s need to dominate and objectify the characters in his poems leaves him in an appalling way invulnerable. And the poetry, for all its verbal talent and skill, remains emotionally shallow.
Finally, what does one say about a poet who, having left his wife and daughter for another marriage, then titles a book with their names, and goes on to appropriate his ex-wife’s letters written under the stress and pain of desertion, into a book of poems nominally addressed to the new wife? If this kind of question has nothing to do with art, we have come far from the best of the tradition Lowell would like to vindicate—or perhaps it cannot be vindicated. At the end of The Dolphin Lowell writes:
I have sat and listened to too many
words of the collaborating muse,
and plotted perhaps too freely with my life
not avoiding injury to others,
not avoiding injury to myself—
to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,
an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting—
my eyes have seen what my hand did.
I have to say that I think this is bullshit elequence, a poor excuse for a cruel and shallow book, that it is presumptuous to balance injury done to others with injury done to oneself—and that the question remains, after all—to what purpose? The inclusion of the letter-poems stands as one of the most vindictive and mean-spirited acts in the history of poetry, one for which I can think of no precedent; and the same unproportioned ego that was capable of this act is damagingly at work in all three of Lowell’s books. . . .
In 1973, American Poetry Review’s second year of publication, Rich contributed three short pieces under the title “Caryatid” as regular columns in three successive issues. The first two, “Vietnam and Sexual Violence” and “Natalya Gorbanevskaya,” were reprinted in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966�
�1978.
Of Woman Born
Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976)
FOREWORD
All human life on the planet is born of woman. The one unifying, incontrovertible experience shared by all women and men is that months-long period we spent unfolding inside a woman’s body. Because young humans remain dependent upon nurture for a much longer period than other mammals, and because of the division of labor long established in human groups, where women not only bear and suckle but are assigned almost total responsibility for children, most of us first know both love and disappointment, power and tenderness, in the person of a woman.
We carry the imprint of this experience for life, even into our dying. Yet there has been a strange lack of material to help us understand and use it. We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood. In the division of labor according to gender, the makers and sayers of culture, the namers, have been the sons of the mothers. There is much to suggest that the male mind has always been haunted by the force of the idea of dependence on a woman for life itself, the son’s constant effort to assimilate, compensate for, or deny the fact that he is “of woman born.”
Women are also born of women. But we know little about the effect on culture of that fact, because women have not been makers and sayers of patriarchal culture. Woman’s status as childbearer has been made into a major fact of her life. Terms like “barren” or “childless” have been used to negate any further identity. The term “nonfather” does not exist in any realm of social categories.
Because the fact of physical motherhood is so visible and dramatic, men recognized only after some time that they, too, had a part in generation. The meaning of “fatherhood” remains tangential, elusive. To “father” a child suggests above all to beget, to provide the sperm which fertilizes the ovum. To “mother” a child implies a continuing presence, lasting at least nine months, more often for years. Motherhood is earned, first through an intense physical and psychic rite of passage—pregnancy and childbirth—then through learning to nurture, which does not come by instinct.
Essential Essays Page 8
