Ha! ("My period had come for Prayer")
from "The Magic of Emily Dickinson"
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."
|
1 5
9
13
17 |
My period had come for Prayer –
God grows above - so those who pray
His House was not - no sign had He –
Unbroken by a Settler –
The Silence condescended –
|
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).
Endnote
[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."
Works Cited
Juhasz, Suzanne, Cristanne Miller, and Martha Nell Smith. Comic Power in Emily Dickinson. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1993
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.