My thanks to Kate Benedict for reminding me that I had intended to post a few poems by the divine Miss D. Perhaps some of our members will wish to post other poems. At one time or another many of us have expressed admiration for Dickinson in one discussion or another. Perhaps there will be less controversy on this thread, but I am curious to see what others make of these two poems.

632

The Brain--is wider than the Sky--
For--put them side by side--
The one the other wil contain
With ease--and You--beside--

The Brain is deeper than the sea--
For--hold them--Blue to Blue--
The one the other will absorb--
As sponges--Buckets--do--

The Brain is just the weight of God--
For--heft them--Pound for Pound--
And they will differ--if they do--
As Syllable from Sound.

640

I cannot live with You--
It would be Life--
And Life is over there--
Behind the Shelf

The Sexton keeps the Key to--
Putting up
Our Life--His Porcelain--
Like a cup--

Discarded of the Housewife--
Quaint--or Broke--
A newer Sevres pleases--
Old Ones crack--

I could not die--with You--
For One must wait
To shut the Other's Gaze down--
You--could not--

And I--Could I stand by
and see You--freeze--
Without my Right of Frost--
Death's Privilege?

Nor could I rise--with You--
Because Your Face
Would put out Jesus'--
That New Grace

Grow plain--and foreign
On my homesick Eye--
Except that You than He
Shone closer by--

They'd judge Us--How--
For You--served Heaven--You know,
or sought to--
I could not--

Because You saturated Sight
And I had no more Eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise

And were You lost, I would be--
Though my Name
Rang loudest
On the Heavenly fame--

And were you--saved--
And I--condemned to be
Where You were not--
That self--were Hell to Me--

So We must meet apart--
You there--I--here--
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are--and Prayer--
And that White Sustinance--
Despair--

The one is a trial of her wings on simple problems for their applicability. The imagery of her usage seems to me anti-gravitational in the manner of Magritte (his castles in the air), and immediately recalls Dalí's painting of himself as a small boy lifting the sea to find a sleeping dog beneath it. It is Shakespearean, of course, not so much as the other, and there is Emily Dickinson the mother of Frost, writing her superb monologue with its distinctive punctuation (from Carlyle and Coleridge?) not seen I think till Neruda's idiosyncratic dots and dashes. The crux is "sordid excellence", and if the student will make a long study of it, he will find that much difficulty has for him become a matter of interest for the sport it provides, merely.

In the midst of haggling over the sale (he had forgotten to up the penciled price, lately), a used bookseller made the flippant remark to me that "Emily wrote some good stuff".
The question remains who but Sappho (if she) wrote better stuff?



[This message has been edited by Christopher Mulrooney (edited February 12, 2001).]

Alan, when I have more time in a day or two, I will post my favorite Dickinson poems.

Regarding the first poem posted above, I wonder how E.D. failed to correct the repetition of "--side" in the first stanza. She frequently moved off-rhyme quite far, but I believe such repetitions as this are rare. This poem must have been dashed off, put into the bundle, and never studied again.

But I despair of discovering anything more about the methods and motives of Miss Dickinson. When young I once waited alone in her bedroom almost a whole afternoon willing her to appear, however ectoplasmically, and to answer a few questions; but she did not appear, much less speak. So I think she must be dumbly dead, like almost everyone else said to have died, except Napoleon, General Lee and my grandmother.

How fortunate for us that E.D. was not more directly involved in the affair of Mabel and Prof. Loomis with her beloved brother Austin (with whom a letter of hers suggests she slept, probably because there were so few beds in the house, for an undisclosed period of time). Had she been so involved, some of her passion and pent energy might then have been released in ecstatic sin, and we would not have quite so much of her wonderful poetry.

G.



[This message has been edited by Golias (edited February 13, 2001).]

CM, where did you get the idea that Emily D.
is Frost's mother? You can hear her perhaps
in an early poem like "Stars" but Frost is
not much influenced by her, if at all. Her
poems were first published in 1890, when Frost
was well into his teens, and though he loved
her work, that's not where he suckled. There
is much more Longfellow and Emerson in him
than Dickinson, and far more Milton, Horace,
Virgil, etc.
Anyway, here's a Dickinson poem I particularly
admire, which isn't one of the best known:

Of all the souls that stand create
I have elected one.
When sense from spirit files away,
And subterfuge is done;

When that which is and that which was
Apart, intrinsic, stand,
And this brief tragedy of flesh
Is shifted like a sand;

When figures show their royal front
And mists are carved away,---
Behold the atom I preferred
To all the lists of clay!

What a fine choice, Bob

Though I've read the complete poems of ED through, and various smaller collections many times, this one never leapt up at me before. Thanks for pointing it out in this way.

G

Phew! I love both of those posted by Alan, and that by Robert. More later. There's an interesting section on Atlantic's poetry page that has a commentary and several poets reading "I cannot live with you."

------------------
Ralph

I hate to interrupt the Dickinson lovefest...

Robert, the poem of ED's that you posted is one of her best. Thanks for posting it. I doubt I've read it elsewhere. I think we all have things to learn about compression, use of pov and imagery from her.

No one, however, has mentioned Dickinson's shortcomings. I, for one, can't read more than a few of her poems at a time. The ballad meter she used for nearly everything distracts and numbs very quickly. And the dashes -- never mind the way inexperienced readers/writers learn dash abuse from her work -- seem random at times. Some will probably tell me to loosen up, but after a few of her poems, how I long for the variety and precision of commas, semicolons, periods, and even (I shudder to even name that other "poetic" cliche punctuation) ellipses.

ED has a great natural lyrical gift. But studying a great poet's flaws are just as instructive as a study of strengths. Though I don't discount that my academic training has perhaps made me too much a critic.

Joel: thought you (and others) might enjoy
a comment I once received from J. V. Cunningham
at Brandeis, oh so many years ago: namely,
that the dashes probably didn't mean diddly-squat
(Cunningham was more elegant) to Dickinson because
when one investigates her recipe box, etc., there
they are--a mere, nervous tic of no importance.

Except, of course, to drive Joel and me to
distraction. The punctuation is MADDENING.

Who was it--Higginson?--who "regularized" her
meter and punctuation and so on? This is commonly
looked on by ED fans as some sort of great sacrilege.
I think he did exactly what a good editor SHOULD do--
he made the poems more intelligible and hence better.
(We'll ignore those places where he chose to substitute
his word for hers--diction should probably stay with
the poet.)

As Cunningham put it, "In the 19th century, editors
were expected to--wonder of wonders--edit."

I think the dashes substitute for other punctuation; she didn't want to bother learning the uses of commas, periods, colons and semi-colons. It's my understanding (though I may be wrong) that she tried to clean up the dashes after receiving some criticism about them (you'll notice that some of her unaltered poems are almost dash-free).

I said that I was going to post my favorite Dickinson poems, but I think the ones I like are the ones everybody likes:

After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Elysium Is as Far
I Died for Beauty — but Was Scarce
I Heard a Fly Buzz — When I Died
I Never Lost as Much but Twice
I Never Saw a Moor
I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close
Success Is Counted Sweetest

I assume everyone's read them, so I won't post them unless there are people who haven't read them.

Strictly speaking, under the law we aren't supposed to post copyrighted poems unless for the purpose of criticism and analysis -- posting them just to share them is a no-no. A lot of people don't realize that all of Dickinson's work is still under copyright; the only poems in the public domain are the altered versions first published in the late 1800's and early 1900's. (I say this, though I really have little respect for the law as it's presently written.)

[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited February 14, 2001).]