David's Simple Life

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) wrote her verse far different from that of other American poets, showed the fact that one could take a single household and an inactive life, and make enchanting poetry out of it.

Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her early letters and descriptions of herself in her youth reveal an attractive girl with a lively wit. Her later retirement from the world, though perhaps affected by an unhappy love affair, seems mainly to have resulted from her own personality, from a desire to separate her from the world. The range of her poetry suggests not her limited experiences but the power of her creativity and imagination.

Emily Dickinson was not predictable; yet the comic sense, widely abroad, upsetting much stability, was bound at last to break that tie holding the poet within the bondage of social preoccupation. Emily Dickinson was not only a lyric poet; she was in a profound sense a comic poet in the American tradition. She possessed the sense of scale and caught this within her small compass. A little tippler, she leaned against the sun. The grave for her was a living place whose elements grew large in stone. Purple mountains moved for her; a train, clouds, a pathway through a valley became huge and animate. Much of her poetry is in the ascending movement, full of morning imagery, of supernal mornings: seraphim tossing their snowy hats on high might be taken as her symbol. Her poetry is also comic in the Yankee strain, with its resilience and sudden unprepared ironical lines. Her use of an unstressed irony in a soft blank climax is the old formula grown almost fixed, yet fresh because it was used with a new depth—

Faith is a fine invention
For gentlemen who see;
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency!
She could cap tragedy with tragi-comedy.
Drowning is not so pitiful
As the attempt to rise.
Three times, ’tis said, a sinking man
Comes up to face the skies,
And then declines forever
To that abhorred abode
Where hope and he part company
For he is grasped of God.
The Maker’s cordial visage,
However good to see,
Is shunned, we must admit it,
Like an adversity.

She was concerned with eternal verities; yet her elastic and irreverent rebellion broke forth again and again—

“Heavenly Father,” take to thee
The supreme iniquity,
Fashioned by thy candid hand
In a moment contraband.
Though to trust us seem to us
More respectful–”We are dust.”
We apologize to Thee
For thine own Duplicity.

Occasionally her wit turned mordantly upon earthly matters: “Menagerie to me my neighbor be.” She saw the small and futile motions in a house to which death had come. And she could double ironically upon herself as well as upon the Deity. In the end–or at least in the composite, for the end is hardly known–she contrived to see a changing universe within that acceptant view which is comic in its profoundest sense, which is part reconciliation, part knowledge of eternal disparity. If she did not achieve the foundation of a divine comedy she was at least aware of its elements; its outlines are scattered through the numberless brief notations of her poems.

Like Poe and Hawthorne and Henry James, though with a simpler intensity than theirs, Emily Dickinson trenched upon those shaded subtleties toward which the American imagination long had turned. “I measure every grief I meet with analytic eyes.” Anger, hope, remorse, the weight of the past, the subtle incursions of memory, the quality of despair, and fear, cleavages in the mind, all came under her minute scrutiny—

One need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.

Even her glances toward an exterior world at their finest are subjective. Her poetry was indwelling in a final sense; she used that deeply interior speech which is soliloquy, even though it was in brief song.

She never lost a slight air of struggle; this appeared persistently in her sudden flights to new verbal and tonal keys, in her careless assonances which still seemed half intentional, in the sudden muting of her rhymes. She verged toward the dramatic, as others in the tradition had done before her; almost invariably her poems concentrate upon a swift turn of inner drama: yet like the others she sheered away from pure drama. Her language is bold, humorously and defiantly experimental, as if she had absorbed the inconsequence in regard to formal language abroad during her youth in the ’50′s when Whitman was writing; yet often she achieved only a hasty anarchy in meaning and expression, and created hardly more than a roughly carven shell.

Emily Dickinson was, perhaps the last, of those primary writers who had slowly charted an elementary American literature; and she possessed both the virtues and the failings of her position. Her poetry has an abounding fresh intensity, a touch of conquering zeal, a true entrance into new provinces of verbal music; but incompletion touches her lyricism. Often–indeed most often–her poems are only poetic flashes, notes, fragments of poetry rather than a final poetry. Yet like the others who had gone before her–Whitman, Hawthorne, Emerson, James–she set a new outpost, even though like them she had no immediate effect upon American literature. It was not until ten years after her death that the early poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson appeared; and the space widens if the ’40′s are remembered as formative years for Emily Dickinson, the ’80′s for Robinson. Nor does he show any perceptible trace of her influence. But if not by her power, then by some profound stress in the American character, the gates were being slowly opened for an ample poetry.

Hopefully through reading Emily’s poem I could learn more about her and her poetic sense of life.

Tags: English, 博客

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 at 21:04 and is filed under 杂谈视野. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.