Emily Dickinson and the Poetics of Revelation

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Aug 20

Emily Dickinson was the stylistic antonym to her only American equal Walt Whitman. While he wrote in lengthy verses which made for even lengthier poems

—cadentially most similar to the prophetic poetry of the old Testament—Dickinson usually wrote very brief poems, cadenced according to ballad or hymnodic meter. Their flow, often every few words, was deliberately disrupted by her prolific use of dashes.

Like all great poets, she fashioned for herself a private vocabulary of images and metaphors through which she reconstituted the “world of normal experience”—and the exterior of Dickinson’s life was more normal and routine than almost any other great writer.

Reconstitution of the world is the great and salvific power of poetry; it is the sacramental rendezvous of the mind with the world wherein the world becomes a “cleansed occasion”—a moment from which reality emerges under some spiritual mood—appearing as lovely, as alienating, as forgiving, as hateful, as hopeful.

In the cleansed occasion, the world gives evidence of its spirituality, assuring the soul and mind that they do not demand too much of the world when they seek more than pleasure, more than pleasant arrangements of matter.

The “cleansed occasion” aﬀords an opportunity for the friendship between consciousness (self) and cognized (world) to deepen into a quality which I identify as reverence.

Reverence is the guarantor of the religious disposition, and it serves as the foundation for such ecstatic insights as these in the Psalms: Bless the Lord, o my soul. O Lord my God how great thou art. . . Who stretcheth the heavens like a curtain: Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters: Who maketh clouds his chariot: Who walketh upon the wings of the wind.”

Reverence, in its profoundest sense, is an awareness of meaningfulness, which is really a transparency of the permanent qualities belonging to the world: love, truth, and beauty.

By the same token, religious meaning is the transparency of the Divine Plan, of providence, of the Paraclete’s action.

Within the context of this introduction, I’d like to oﬀer two of Emily Dickinson’s poems as “cleansed occasions”—etudes for our imaginations in learning how to reconstitute the world from the mundane into the mystical.

To my quick ear the Leaves—conferred—The Bushes—they were Bells—

I could not find a Privacy From Nature's sentinels—

In Cave if I presumed to hide The Walls—begun to tell—

Creation seemed a mighty Crack—To make me visible—

-F912, J891, sheet 10, 1865

In the first line, I find the largest but most appropriate way to interpret “quick” is meaning “vitally instigated,” or rather instigated by some unique, life-giving principle.

Here is a spiritualizing of the senses, such that the ear is not simply a sound canal, but a power of the poet in the same way that we might say intellection is a power of the mind.

The “quick ear” hears voices everywhere as opposed to simple sounds, where a voice is the use of sound to make meaning and not merely the burping of some object (a sound)

The “Leaves” oﬀer a coherent speech to the quick ear; the poet is suggesting a discerning of secrets impossible to a non-poetic, non-visionary mode.

Bells are most often associated with “wedding” and “funeral”, although given the rest of the poem, it seems unlikely that the bushes are death knells.

Indeed, reading the final two lines of the first stanza suggests that the bells are an announcement of her presence—a theme continued in the opening of stanza two, with the gossiping of the cave’s walls in defiance of the poet’s intended secrecy.

Two essential words for understanding this poem are “privacy” in the first stanza, together with “hide” in the following. The word privacy may conjure up Dickinson’s claim about the soul, that she “selects her own society”, but something more is being suggested.

The poet desires an aloneness which the world cannot oﬀer; nature’s watchmen

—“sentinels”—are equally as intolerant of the poet’s desire as the Cave in which she “presumed to hide”.

This being poetry, I claim the liberty here to interpret the image of the “Cave” as platonic (important for later).

The last two lines are the most powerful, but also the most enigmatic of the eight lines, in part because the 7th line accomplishes a magnificent paradox: creation—a term of vast descriptive import—is expanded through the adjective “mighty,” and then devastatingly narrowed to a “Crack.” Perhaps, as I think will become evident when my exegesis is finished, “Crack” refers not so much to a narrowing of creation as the narrowness of the opportunity for visionary insight.

If the “Cave” is an image for deliberate eﬀorts at self-forgetfulness or the thrusting of oneself into a sort of ignorance of the world , then the “Privacy” which is sought for and the “Cave” which is hidden in become idioms for an abandonment of the pursuit of meaning.

The poem is, for me, one about despairing of despair.

The poetic impulse—and the aesthetic impulse more broadly—forbids the abandonment of the pursuit of meaning; if one can recognize the world under an appropriately creative description, the world becomes an opening or “Crack”, an opportunity for surreptitious understanding of who the self is (“make me visible”): a consciousness primed for receiving the permanent and spiritual qualities of creation.

“Nature’s sentinels” is an image of watchfulness; it acquires its full sense in contrast to the image of the poet’s forfeiting her duty to “reconstitute the world”, to “hide” in a cave rather than to be in conference with reality in the ratification of enduring meaning.

i.e. To “have faith” in God despite evil; to “fall in love” with another despite human frailty; to “come to peace with the world” despite the ubiquity of suﬀering.

Therefore, ‘the visibility of the self’ is not a simple description of self-understanding. It is the apparentness of one’s identity and purpose which becomes evident through worthwhile activity: to the saint, for example, it is apparent that one is made to love and serve God, especially the more one does, in fact, love and serve God.

A Door just opened on a street — I — lost — was passing by —

An instant’s Width of Warmth disclosed - And Wealth — and Company.

The Door as sudden shut — And I — I — lost — was passing by —

Lost doubly — but by contrast — most - Informing — Misery.

-F914, J953, sheet 10, 1865

Poetry is a form of rhetoric. One way to understand it is argumentation for or defense of a certain experience. But because there is a certain mystery to experience, “obviousness” is not a sound principle in interpreting a good poetry.

Dickinson’s second poem is ostensibly about walking down a street and passing an open door.

My intuition is to read this poem as being about “attention”, the giving and taking of it.

As such, the street in line one would constitute the corridor of consciousness, or the extension of self-awareness forward into the future and backwards into the past, the byway of imagination and memory.

In considering the status of the poet as “lost”, it may be useful to draw a distinction between living in the moment, and living for the moment. Roughly, the latter might be called the strategy of the saint, while the former would be the strategy of the sinner, or the person who seeks to hoard something in defiance of its inevitable passing away.

“Passing by” is an unnecessary comment from those who exist in the moment, because one moment is replaced by another, and gradually, one finds oneself a permanent fixture in the flow of time. This is the precious function of identity, which itself is the long-term project of attention.

The poem is therefore not about a certain experience of the present; “An instant’s Width of Warmth disclosed” is the present.

The eight lines of the poem describe a temporal dislocation, or an inability to be attentive to the present “moment.”

The wealth of the moment of the poet is missing is described without detail; inattention berefts the poet of the ability even to describe what she is missing, except in a general manner which indicates how diﬀerent it is from her condition.

The final two lines—always the most interesting—imagine the poet as re-alienated; it’s not simply that the poet conceives of herself as a warning, but as an education of the moment (informing misery).

The poet’s experience is private, but through her “informing-misery”, it becomes a metaphysical fact: suﬀering is most real. Through this metaphysical facticity, the poet’s inner life also becomes a public event: it informs.

This insight is essentially Christian; it motivates Christ command to ease the suﬀering and poverty of others. Human suﬀering is never exclusively private; it is always, in some dimension, a public event and consequently demands a public response—the redistribution of another’s attention to the suﬀering, in order to alleviate it.

In a way, this poem adopts an seemingly anti-poetic attitude, since the poet is bereft of insight and anything enduring at its conclusion; instead, she is the eternal outsider, 'the one who always misses the moment.’

Undoubtedly, certain readers will find these interpretations unbelievable in the sense of unsupported by the text.

It may be so, but all reading of a great work of imaginative literature becomes a misreading; minds are capable of meeting, but they are not capable of reading minds in the strong meaning of the phrase. The poet intended to say something; we, as readers, intend to discern a meaning which is impossibly private, and thus we must also become writers in a secondary sense: our readings must be creative, inventive.

We must also take creative reading seriously; most of us will never be equal minds with a writer like Dickinson. Since imagination is not simply the creation of pretty images, but also the “making” of the world into something rich in permanent, spiritual qualities such as beauty, truth, and love, lack of imagination is a tragedy.

It is incumbent upon the individual to remedy this tragedy to whatever extent possible. For most of us, this is achieved not through the writing of great literature, but the reading of it.

If an enduring poem is read culpably—in other words, by someone responsible for forming beliefs and composing his interior world—and carefully, then it becomes transformative, and by transformative, liberating in the best way.