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02-18-2016, 11:35 AM
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Emily Dickinson and the Ambiguous “It”
Emily Dickinson and the Ambiguous “It”
This essay is the second in a series focusing on techniques in Dickinson’s poetry that I intend to appropriate for my own work. I have noticed that Dickinson frequently uses the pronoun “it” ambiguously in the first line of poem. Let’s take poems 400-500 as a test group: twelve of them, 12%, have a first line containing the pronoun “it” with no antecedent. In one poem, 491 (“While it is alive”), the “it” is specified later in the poem—it is “Love.” In another, 405 (It might be lonelier”), the context makes clear that “it” refers to “my life” or even “I”. The remaining ten, however, are more difficult to interpret. Each of these poems seems one long metaphor or simile describing an “it,” and the reader must infer what literal thing the figurative language is pointing at. These poems, I confess, often leave me feeling irritated—my irritation, however, is not with the author, but with myself: I am certain Dickinson means something specific, but I have failed yet again to determine precisely what “it” is. I do sometimes end up roaring at her, in my mind, “What the Hell are you talking about, you mad genius?” On a more positive note, one of the joys of re-reading Dickinson is suddenly reaching a better understanding of what had been baffling before.
Let’s look at some examples. Poem 414 begins with a simile describing an ambiguous “it”, but, as we shall see, the simile itself is hard to pin down:
'Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch
That nearer, every Day
Kept narrowing its boiling Wheel
Until the Agony
Toyed coolly with the final inch
Of your delirious Hem
And you dropt, lost
When something broke
And let you from a Dream
A machine-like “Maelstrom” has a “notch” (a notched gear, I imagine) and keeps “narrowing its Boiling Wheel” until the machinery catches “the final inch/Of your delirious Hem.” What the simile describes is certainly fascinating: “You” are in a dream, where the cogs of some machine daily pull at the hem of your clothing. When the final inch is pulled by the machine (and you are caught in the machine), you are let out of the dream (of life into death?).
The next stanza (lines 10-13) is a simile as well and describes the opening simile. Dickinson adds another figurative layer to the figurative language describing the “it”:
As if a Goblin with a Gauge
Kept measuring the Hours
Until you felt your Second
Weigh, helpless, in his Paws
The mechanistic imagery continues (“Gauge” and “measuring”), along with the emphasis on time (moving more quickly now in “Hours” instead of “Days”). Still, one is left to wonder what “it” is—surely something so big and important that to name it would be to kill it with abstraction: life, the passage of time, fate, doom, destiny, etc. Like many of the ambiguous-“it” poems, poem 414 works like a riddle, compelling the reader to look outside itself for something in reality that corresponds to what is described. This extratextual pointing is called “deixis” (adjective: “deictic”).
Poem 420 (“You'll know it—as you know 'tis Noon—“) works as a veritable dissertation on deixis:
You'll know it—as you know 'tis Noon—
By Glory—
As you do the Sun—
By Glory—
As you will in Heaven—
Know God the Father—and the Son.
By intuition, Mightiest Things
Assert themselves—and not by terms—
"I'm Midnight"—need the Midnight say—
"I'm Sunrise"—Need the Majesty?
Omnipotence—had not a Tongue—
His lisp—is Lightning—and the Sun—
His Conversation—with the Sea—
"How shall you know"?
Consult your Eye!
Whatever “it” is here is important—one of the “Mightiest Things”. Like other “Mightiest Things” it “assert[s]” itself “by intuition” and cannot be known “by terms” (line 8). This method of understanding privileges visual and immediate perception over auditory and second-hand learning. To understand “it,” you shouldn’t look up the definitions of others; rather than consulting various authorities, you must “Consult your Eye!”
I here include a list of some other “ambiguous it” poems: 417 (Is it dead — Find it —), 420 (You'll know it — as you know 'tis Noon —), 426 (It don't sound so terrible — quite — as it did —), 430 (It would never be Common — more — I said —), 444 (It feels a shame to be Alive —), 454 (It was given to me by the Gods –), 462 (Why make it doubt — it hurts it so —), 468 (The Manner of its Death), 495 (It's thoughts — and just One Heart —). Their first lines immediately provoke confusion and a sense of urgency. These poems are engaging because the “it” could refer to anything, and the reader spends the rest of the poem trying to whittle the possibilities down.
The challenge with this technique is to make the reader believe that the “it” at which you, the poet, are hinting is worth the effort the poem requires; otherwise the poem will be dismissed as merely “obscure.” Dickinson’s poems are always worth the effort.
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Aaron Poochigian
Last edited by Aaron Poochigian; 02-18-2016 at 11:40 AM.
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02-18-2016, 01:12 PM
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Riddle me a riddle!
Aaron, interesting points about the "it" poems. I've always thought of them as riddle poems, and I could be wrong, but there's a book somewhere called Emily Dickinson and Riddle.
RCL is Ralph La Rosa, not Mr. Clauson
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Ralph
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02-18-2016, 01:18 PM
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I would say the first is a nighmare from which she wakes, the machine therefore is vague. The poem captures the fear and illogicality of dreams.
I think the second 'it' is everything, existence as a miracle.
Maybe I'm wrong but I don't find either of these poems obscure or puzzling.
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02-18-2016, 02:54 PM
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Aaron, some of Dickinson's hints are much more specific than you seem to be assuming. For example, a "Maelstrom" is a violent whirlpool, not a machine, and she seems to be imagining it spiraling inward with a leading edge (the notch) that keeps narrowing. The whirlpool is getting closer and closer to her until it is starting to grab her hem and pull her downwards, and as she drops into it, she wakes up. The rest of that poem continues with two other situations of imminent death. But whether it is actually death that she is describing metaphorically or a kind of psychic destruction is what we can't know.
Susan
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02-18-2016, 03:34 PM
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But the oscillations of a watch's balance spring resemble a maelstrom, don't they? And these are regulated by the notches of the escapement.
Both clocks and watches turn up in her poems a lot. Speaking of which, here's a photo of Emily's watch, on display at Harvard University.
Rather than counting down to death itself, I'm inclined to think she's counting down to her next "fall" (epilepsy was called "the falling sickness"), or episode of whatever "Agony" or "Sickness" or altered-consciousness thingy seemed to be striking her from time to time; scholars heatedly debate whether or not the evidence supports a diagnosis as specific as epilepsy, but I strongly suspect that something, whether physical or mental, was going on, and that she both dreaded and valued these experiences.
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02-18-2016, 08:13 PM
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What's the "it" in this one?
It dropped so low in my regard
I heard it hit the ground,
And go to pieces on the stones
At bottom of my mind;
Yet blamed the fate that fractured, less
Than I reviled myself
For entertaining plated wares
Upon my silver shelf.
In my opinion, while Emily might or might not have had something specific in mind, she chose not to share it with us because she was more interested in the general process by which something -- be it an idea, a relationship, a friendship, etc. -- can captivate us but then somehow be discredited in our minds, how we can be taken in. To identify a single "it" would narrow the poem's focus, or at least distract us from what really interested her, the way we sometimes regret what we once embraced. As in many poems, including poems that do not feature an "it," she minutely describes an introspective process of thought or emotion, and she is more interested in the process and the way the mind works during that process than she is in the specific instances that may have triggered the process.
Last edited by Roger Slater; 02-18-2016 at 09:05 PM.
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02-18-2016, 09:12 PM
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I like that, Roger. It reminds me of stuff Maz used to say about the difference between prose and poetry. (She characterized prose as a narrowing down to a specific meaning, and poetry as an opening out to multiple possible meanings.)
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02-20-2016, 11:14 AM
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Yes, Julie, Joseph Raab talks about Dickinson in this way when he writes, “One could therefore call her not an ‘either/or’ poet
but rather a ‘both/and’ poet: instead of discarding meaning she expands it” (293), from his essay in “The Metapoetic Element in Dickinson.”
The Emily Dickinson Handbook. Eds. Gudrun Grabher, Roland Hagenbuchle, and Cristanne Miller. Amherst: U Mass P, 1998. 273–98.
Greg
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05-30-2016, 09:33 PM
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Epilepsy sounds right.
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