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Areas of InterestWeb Paper Project Dickinson Concordance Dickinson & Humor H 157 Exploring Dickinson's variants Poems on this SiteSafe in their Alabaster Chambers PlayersLavinia Dickinson Mabel Loomis Todd Millicent Todd Bingham Martha Dickinson Bianchi Thomas H. Johnson R. W. Franklin Publishing HistoryCodes for Editions Annotated Timeline Fascicles MLT's Notebook Dickinson Stuff Home"Magic of Emily Dickinson" Site Index |
The Magic of Emily DickinsonIntroductionAaah! (I had been hungry, all the years) Ooooh! (It was not Death, for I stood up) Wow! (I read my sentence -- steadily) Ha! (My period had come for Prayer) What? (A Pit – but Heaven over it) Conclusion Works Cited
IntroductionMuch has been written about Emily Dickinson as a performance poet. Charles R. Anderson called her a "verbal entertainer," (4) "[who] began as a wit, a precocious word-juggler" (3). Locke defines wit as "the power of joining thought and expression with an aptness calculated to delight by its unexpectedness" (qtd. in Anderson 4). Albert J. Gelpi, however, was, perhaps, the first to invoke the metaphor of magic, referring to a Dickinson letter as a "nimble feat of verbal prestidigitation" (65). Magicians wow an audience of any age but the adult inevitably asks, "How did he do that?" So too, the reader of Dickinson is often surprised, sometimes astounded by her "nimble feats." This paper answers the question, "How’d she do that?" – analyzing five poems to discover the various sleights of hand Dickinson employed. The climax of the trick will be referred to as the "gotcha." The distractions, which serve the magician’s purpose, are also the stuff of deep meaning for the poet. However, no attempt will be made to explicate the poems; the focus will be the technique and craft as revealed by structure and other devices that contribute to the "gotcha" effect. The five poems selected come from a nine-month period: 510J/355F "It was not Death, for I stood up" "about summer 1862, in Fascicle 17;" 579J/439F "I had been hungry, all the years" and 412J/432F "I read my sentence -- steadily" both from "about autumn 1862, in Fascicle 15;" and 1712J/508F "A Pit – but Heaven over it" "in Fascicle 24" and 564J/525F "My period had come for Prayer" "in Fascicle 28," both "about spring 1863" (Franklin 379, 461, 456, 519, 533). Each of the five features a different surprise or "gotcha" technique. 579J/439F is the most subdued form, represented by the "ah!" which occurs at or near the end of a poem, often as a final flourish of revelation, sometimes an aphoristic expression. [note 1] The "ooh," as found in 412J/432F, refers to a riddle where the answer is revealed or strongly hinted at as opposed to a true conundrum or riddle with Leyda’s "omitted center" [note 2] (qtd. in Porter 18). A strong twist of circumstance – unexpected but consistent with the context – creates a "wow." "Ha!" indicates the humorous handling of a poem (as opposed to its content). A "what" is the introduction of a bizarre element which remains relatively unquestioned by the reader, similar to the "wow" except that what is introduced is foreign to context. [note 3] Aaah! (I had been hungry, all the years)The first trick, the "aah," is found in the poem, "I had been hungry, all the years." The last stanza functions as the "gotcha," in this case an aphorism.
This poem is predictable, familiar Dickinson with regular hymnal meter (one beat missing in line 19). The two exact rhymes in the stanzas one and five act as a frame for the others. The fairly consistent rhymes coupled with the highly regular meter reinforce the simplicity of the straightforward, first person narrative about hunger – functioning as the "nothing up my sleeve." Whatever the deeper meanings of the various images and the connections between them, the poem reduced to its most simplistic form sets up the revelation. Bennett says of the conclusion, "We know what it is like no longer to want – precisely because we can have…. None [of this knowledge] helps explain the uncanny quality that makes this poem so effective" (Bennett 144). It is effective precisely because of the distractions introduced. For instance, "hungry" in line one connects to "table" in line three. However, when the speaker draws near, she reaches not for food, as might be expected, but "Wine." Lines five and six pair "hungry" and "table[s]" again. Although "wine" is not mentioned in line eight, the off-rhyme "mine" carries the echo. When "Bread" does finally show up in the third stanza, the association of "table" + "Bread" + "Wine" together alludes to spiritual hunger under the figure of the eucharist. This further shifts the reader’s attention by adding another layer of meaning to hunger. The introduction of "Berry" is another device which distracts. By the speaker identifying herself as a "Berry," the reader becomes uncomfortably aware that the consumer can be consumed. While the reader is still busy pondering, the poet succinctly reveals the essence of the story in the last stanza, presented as a personal discovery, eliciting the "aah." "Simultaneous reflection and elicitation of effect is, finally, what Dickinson’s poetry is about" (Bennett 133). Ooooh! (It was not Death, for I stood up)The second trick, the "ooh," is found in "It was not Death, for I stood up." This particular poem riddles by negation, listing all the things that the answer is not — with the "gotcha" – the revelation – at the very end in line 24.
The opening line forces reader to begin keeping track of what "it" was not while wondering what "it" is. From the ominous beginning with "Death," "Night," "Frost," "Siroccos," and "Fire," the relentless 4/3/4/3 iambic meter never shifts – the reader is marched along by its regularity to the end of the poem. The parallelism with which it opens: "it was not NOUN, for" lulls the reader like an incantation. The rest of the poem builds "stanza by stanza, image by image, paradox by paradox" (Bennett 132). The poet teases the reader away from direct consideration of the riddle by the pattern-breaking, two-line digression into "chancel" and "marble feet." The reader is abruptly returned with "and yet, it tasted, like them all." "Taste" in line nine is the fourth of the senses to be introduced, with the effect of fully engaging the reader. Exploiting this engagement, the poet distracts again with "figures," forcing attention farther and farther away from the riddle. The multiple uses of "and" oppose the long vowel sounds of "life," "shaven," "frame," "breathe," and "key," creating chaotic images which flash quickly by. Then one more time the reader is faced with the riddle, "And 'twas like Midnight, some." The constant shifting away from the riddle and back to it disconcerts, as well as diverts attention while illuminating meaning. "The denial of the reader’s expectations operates to compel a more affective reading as it provokes the mind’s effort to reconcile the expected image with what actually appears in the poem" (Porter 146). This is real audience participation! If the regular rhythm has carried the reader until now, the fifth stanza with its "stopped clock" slows that rhythm, heightening the suspense. Ironically, the only exact rhyme occurs here. "Piling up one negation upon another, the speaker predicates what cannot be, of a state that nevertheless is" (Bennett 132). Despair is the answer to the riddle. [note 4] All the negatives become illustrations of what despair is not. Wow! (I read my sentence -- steadily)The third trick, the "wow," also requires a high degree of audience participation. When the magician places his tophat on the table and pours a pitcher of milk into it, no one asks, "Why is he doing this?" They are conditioned to wait to see what comes out of the hat. This poem, about the speaker’s being sentenced to death, likewise raises no immediate questions. The rabbit comes out of the hat in line 11.
Dickinson’s consistent metaphorical use of legal language and images provides the backdrop for the unexpected switch. As in the first poem, the poet employs a personal narrative style. Although the overall tone appears to be resignation, the speaker actively looks for a way. That there is no way is "steadily" revealed as the tension escalates from "extremest clause" through "God have mercy." The climax, which reveals the extent of despair, is stretched visually in the two longest lines -- 9 and 10. The meter of these lines is such that if they were broken the reader would not particularly notice them. This is exactly why they are not broken. Their length reinforces the end-words "extremity" and "agony." The "gotcha" of line 11 provides relief. The phrase, "But she," introduces the "wow" with a flourish. There is no more threat; there is no more fear. Nothing has changed, yet everything has because of the prior relationship of the soul and Death. A superficial reading might refract a sense of acquitted from "Acquainted" even though Anderson would disagree that the speaker’s sentence "has been executed not by legal but by verbal machinery. In the triple pun, ‘And there, the Matter ends,’ the fictive ‘I’ experiences a new death by losing his soul as well as his identity in the depths of despair, the curtain is rung down on the bad dream along with all the legal theatricalities that bodied it forth, and the poem destroys itself in a tour de force. The reader, if any one, suffers shock" (Anderson 207). He refers to this further as "Dickinson['s] macabre joke" (207). What makes this "gotcha" a "wow" as opposed to a "what" is that nothing outside the context of the poem has been introduced. The soul and Death were already present. The "wow" is the inconceivable, improbable friendship between them. Ha! (My period had come for Prayer)The fourth trick, the "nimble feat of verbal prestidigitation," that Dickinson used is that of humor, the "ha." Cazamian wrote, "We make a thing humorous by expressing it with a certain twist, a queer reserve, an inappropriateness, and as it were an unconsciousness of what we all the time feel it to be"(qtd. in Whicher 181). According to Whicher, "native [American] humor [of the 19th century] … depended in part on a somewhat exaggerated but realistic observation of character, in part on fantastic incident of the ‘tall story’ variety, and in part on verbal extravagance and surprise" (172). Sirles goes further, "Jocular commingling of language styles lies at the heart of 19th-century humor writing" in which the writer "often assumes a narrator’s role, providing readers with the sounds, cadence, and extemporaneous quality of spoken language." All of these can be noted in the following poem, "My period had come for Prayer."
The formal wording of the first two lines suggests that the poem will be a commentary on prayer. However, the mocking use of "tactics" and "rudiment" immediately and humorously contradict this. The informal query "Creator – was it You?" continues the humor as an instance in which "readers don’t just read the story, they listen in on the characters’ conversations, gleaning personal information from their speech" (Sirles). In four lines, the speaker both speaks "grandiloquently," with "fancy discourse" and familiarly, with "orality" (Sirles). The second stanza reverts to formal diction with a pronouncement and the beginning of a personal quest, the tall story. The final word in line eight, "Friend," shifts back casual with images of "house," "chimney," and "door." The style returns to pretentious with "infer his Residence" in line 11. "Vast prairies" and "settler" intrude a frontier-flavor, further characterizing the speaker as a setup for the conclusion of the poem. In line 15 the speaker once again addresses the Creator but this time by the exquisitely formal "Infinitude -- Had'st Thou no Face?" This last example in particular, the substitution of a quality for a noun, is one of Dickinson’s "word tricks" [note 5] "among them the recurrent habits of disorienting the reader’s expectations by substituting an abstract word for an expected concrete word (and vice versa), by employing a noun to denote the quality of an object rather than its image, and by synesthetic imagery." (Porter 145). Picturing the speaker as playing all the parts and assuming appropriate poses and perhaps dialects is great fun. In line 17 the fun is over as the reader knows by the image of "Silence condescend[ing]." The "ha!" is rendered as moral of the tale—the speaker worships instead of "pray[s]," "mak[ing] herself—as cultural object or cultural ‘Other’—both the speaking and the perceived subject of her humor" (Juhasz, Miller and Smith 104). What? (A Pit – but Heaven over it)1712J/508F: "About spring 1863, in Fascicle 24 (lost, except for the last five lines, which are on H 157). The missing text derives from a transcript (A Tr2a) prepared by Harriet Graves, an assistant to Mabel Todd" (Franklin 519). Dickinson wrote to T.W. Higginson, August 1862: "You say 'Beyond your knowledge.' You would not jest with me, because I believe you - but Preceptor - you cannot mean it? All men say 'What' to me, but I thought it a fashion" (Johnson L271). The "what" of the following poem, "A Pit – but Heaven over it," is in line 19.
This poem has a highly unusual layout of three unequal stanzas: the first with three lines, the second five, the last with 13. It is also unusual in that it uses a refrain: "A Pit -- but Heaven over it," and "a Pit -- With Heaven over it" in the first stanza, "Ah! Pit! With Heaven over it!" in the second, "a Pit -- with fathoms under it" in the fifth. Why repeat the "Pit" line? In the first stanza particularly, the image of "Pit" is overwhelmed by the threefold reference to "Heaven." Even with the addition of "and yet" (line three), the reader must be terribly conscious that "Heaven" is the controlling factor. The "Ah!" in line nine confuses things further. Is it an expression of surprise? What is the purpose of three exclamation points? The final shift of the refrain changes "Heaven" to "fathoms," "over" to "under." Why? The idea of a refrain, or at least a reprise, can also be found in the scansion. The first stanza is 4,4,5 iambic and the second is 3,3,3,3,5 iambic. The third begins with the same pattern as the second: 3,3,3,3,5, then at line 14 shifts back to 3,3. The purpose of this regularity as with the refrain appears to have reference to circuit (line 14). More repetition, this time in structure, takes place in the second stanza where three pairs of infinitives create a singsong effect: stir/slip, look/drop, dream/sap. Taken as a whole, the regular rhythm, the refrain, and the bouncy pairs seem antithetical to any concept of the "Pit." In this incredibly audible poem, at lines eleven and twelve a strong "s" sound surfaces: "start us," "sit," "so straight," scarce suspect" followed by only two in the altered refrain. In line fourteen, however, it hisses back with "its circuit just the same," then twice in fifteen: "seed—summer." However, line fifteen ends with a shift in sound with the word "tomb." This long "oo" appears in five consecutive words: "tomb," "whose Doom to whom?" Three of these end with "m" which is conspicuous in the last six lines: "them," "tremble," "Bomb," "Bosom," and the final word "calm." Why is this? What is the poet doing? After sixteen lines the consistent meter staggers. The hiss changes to incantation, a bell-sound booms. The "what" or the "gotcha" is the word "Bomb." Ironically, just in time for the "gotcha," the rhythm returns (line 19). This return to the familiar reinforces the sense of relief which is brought by "Bomb." How is it that "Bomb" brings relief? It does so by shifting the perceived power from the "Pit" to the speaker. Does this make logical sense? Hardly. Yet, consider that "Bomb" may be a pun on balm which would exact rhyme with the poem’s final word calm. In a discussion of 1128J/1150F "These are the Nights that Beetles love," Cristanne Miller says that the beetle/"Bomb" "stands for the possibility of terror in a way that is instructive… ‘improv[es]’ one’s nervous condition—suggesting that danger lies not in becoming too excited or overwrought but rather in becoming too dull, too unimaginative, complacent" (Juhasz, Miller, and Smith 112). This is in direct contrast to the apparently dangerous situation described in the current poem. Here the use of "Bomb" increases the danger. [note 6] ConclusionAs has been shown, like a skilled magician, Dickinson had more than one trick in her repertoire: from the casual but clever "ah" – a meaningful observation – to an "ooh" so enticing riddle by negation – to a "wow" where "matter" might matter a great deal in a defining death – to a "ha" which mixes "Infinitude" with "chimney" – to a "Bomb" of a "what" that stuns while it soothes. Part of the pleasure in reading Dickinson is the same as audience participating [note 7] in the illusions. Knowing how a trick is done does not diminish either the wonder or the pleasure. Rather, it increases respect for skill and flair of the magician. Endnotes[Back] 1. The expressions "ah", "ooh," "wow," "what," and "ha" are designations which represent audience response. [Back] 2. Leyda: "A major device of Emily Dickinson's writing, both in her poems and in her letters, was what might be called the 'omitted center.' The riddle, the circumstance too well known to be repeated to the initiate, the deliberate skirting of the obvious - this was the means she used to increase the privacy of her communication; it has also increased our problems in piercing that privacy." [Back] 3. Other Dickinson poems (Franklin numbers) conform to the "gotcha" categories:
[Back] 4. Paul Ferlazzo says (88-89) that this poem "has been occasionally misunderstood as a poem dealing with something other than a serious psychic upheaval. Charles R. Anderson treats the poem as an expression of religious despair, (note 18) and John B. Pickard also treats the poem as if its subject were despair…(note 19). Clark Griffith, on the other hand, correctly discards despair as the subject … . He observes that the poem 'turns out to be grounded in a psychic disturbance.' (note 20)." Ferlazzo, Paul J. Emily Dickinson. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976. [Back] 5. Porter: "G.F. whicher declares this 'playing with words' is a mannerism Emily Dickinson acquired from the native humor of her time. This Was a Poet, p. 205." "A trick of playing with words as with counters that could be arranged in striking and unusual patterns" (Whicher 205). [Back] 6. "The quatrain about the "Bomb upon the Ceiling" is preceded and followed by lines explicitly detailing the harmlessness of the situation the speaker is in, or remembers…. Equally important in limiting the effect of these lines' disruption, the speaker presents the threat of the "Bomb" in the form of a rule…. Such a dictatorial statement, while shocking in its actual content, cannot by definition be radical; its form and frame mediate the shock…. One must simply learn how to see the proper place of this kind of disorder - to learn how to respond with adult 'merriment' rather than with childish 'terror' " (112). [Back] 7. That the reader has no choice but to particpate is found in Porter: "This possibility for numerous extensions from certain of her 'freighted' words is a marked characteristic of Emily Dickinson's poetry. R. P. Blackmur speaks of the Dickinson manner as 'the compactness of that which is unexpanded and depends for context entirely upon its free implication.' (note 10). He isolates precisely the difficulty in arriving at definitive readings for a number of Dickinson poems. The reader, in other words, lacking precise contextual direction provided by the poem itself, brings to it his casual inferences, and, in effect, is compelled often to give the symbols a reading rooted in his own experience. Here is the verbal equivalent of sfumato…." (99). Works CitedAnderson, Charles R. Emily Dickinson’s Poetry: Stairway of Surprise. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960. Bennett, Paula. Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet. Iowa City, Iowa: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1990. Franklin, R.W., ed. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Variorum Ed. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1998. Gelpi, Albert J. Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965. Johnson, Thomas H. ed. Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1986. Juhasz, Suzanne, Cristanne Miller, and Martha Nell Smith. Comic Power in Emily Dickinson. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1993 Porter, David T. The Art of Emily Dickinson’s Early Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966. Sirles, Craig. "Opposing Voices, Apposing Styles: Structure and Metastructure in 19th-Century American Humor Writing." Publication of the Illinois Philological Association Vol. 1 1997. 28 October 2004 <http://www.eiu.edu/~ipaweb/pipa/volume/sirles.htm>. Whicher, George. This Was a Poet: A Critical Biography of Emily Dickinson. New York, London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939. | |||||||||||