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Tanja Trkulja Professor Aleksandra Izgarjan American Literature of XIX century April 2010.

EMILY DICKINSONS POEMS: THEME OF NATURE

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My nosegays are for captives; Dim, long-expectant eyes, Fingers denied the plucking, Patient till Paradise.

To such, if they should whisper Of morning and the moor, They bear no other errand, And I, no other prayer. (P 79)

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INTRODUCTION

In the woods we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part of parcel of God. (Emerson, Nature 1863,)

Emily Dickinson was born in the western Massachusetts village of Amherst. Except for brief visits to Boston and to Washington, D.C. and a year at Mount Holyoke, she spent her life there, mainly within the grounds of the family mansion. Despite such limited experience she produced 1,775 poems, only seven of witch (and these over her protest) were published during her lifetime. For the first two or three years of her career, she wrote nearly a poem a day, and altogether, she produced verse of such quality that she is placed with Walt Whitman in the first rank of nineteenth century American poets. Dickinson found irony, ambiguity, and paradox lurking in the simplest and commonest experiences. The materials and subject matter of her poetry are quite conventional. Her poems are filled with robins, bees, winter light, household items, and domestic duties. These materials represent the range of what she experienced in and around her father's house. She used them because they constituted so much of her life and, more importantly, because she found meanings latent in them. Though her world was simple, it was also complex in its beauties and its terrors. Her lyric poems captures impressions of particular moments, scenes, or moods, and she characteristically focuses upon topics such as nature, love, immorality, death, faith, doubt, pain, and the self. Though her materials were conventional, her treatment of them was innovative, because she was willing to break whatever poetic conventions stood in the way of the intensity of her

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thought and images. Her conciseness, brevity, and wit are tightly packed. Typically she offers her observations via one or two images that reveal her thought in a powerful manner. She once characterized her literary art by writing My business is circumference. Her method is to reveal the inadequacy of declarative statements by evoking qualifications and questions with images that complicate firm assertions and affirmations. In one of her poems she describes her strategies this way: Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--/ Success in Circuit lies. This might well stand as a working definition of Dickinson's aesthetics. Dickinson's poetry is challenging because it is radical and original in its rejection of most traditional nineteenth-century themes and techniques. Her poems require active engagement from the reader, because she seems to leave out so much with her elliptical style and remarkable contracting metaphors. But these apparent gaps are filled with meaning if we are sensitive to her use of devices such as personification, allusion, symbolism, and startling syntax and grammar. Since her use of dashes is sometimes puzzling, it helps to read her poems aloud to hear how carefully the words are arrange. What might seem intimidating on a silent page can surprise the reader with meaning when heard. It's also worth keeping in mind that Dickinson was not always consistent in her views and they can change from poems, to poem, depending upon how she felt at a given moment. Dickinson was less interested in absolute answers to questions than she was in examining and exploring their circumference.

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DICKINSONS STYLE

Her seeking the crux of experience affected her style. As part of her seeking essence or the heart of things, she distilled or eliminated inessential language and punctuation from her poems. She leaves out helping verbs and connecting words; she drops endings from verbs and nouns. It is not always clear what her pronouns refer to; sometimes a pronoun refers to a word which does not appear in the poem. At her best, she achieves breathtaking effects by compressing language. Her disregard for the rules of grammar and sentence structure is one reason twentieth century critics found her so appealing; her use of language anticipates the way modern poets use language. The downside of her language is that the compression may be so drastic that the poem is incomprehensible; it becomes a riddle or an intellectual puzzle. Dickinson said in a letter, All men say 'what' to me; readers are still saying What? in response to some of her poems. Her seclusion may have contributed to the obscurity of her poetry. One danger of living alone, in one's own consciousness, is that the individual may begin to create private meanings for words and private symbols, which others do not have the key to. So language, instead of communicating, baffles the reader. Dickinson does fall into this trap occasionally. Dickinson was enamored of language; she enjoyed words for their own sake, as words. One of her amusements was to read Webster's Dictionary (1844) and to savor words and their definitions. This interest gives a number of her poems their form--they are really definitions of words, for example Pain has an element of blank, Renunciation is a piercing virtue, or Hope is the thing with feathers. Sometimes consulting the 1844 dictionary clarifies a line, for a meaning appearing in her dictionary may no longer be used. Her linguistic mastery and sense of the dramatic combine in the often striking first lines of her poems, such as Just lost when I was saved!, I like a look of Agony, and I can wade grief.

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Dickinson consistently uses the meters of English hymns. This is undoubtedly one reason why modern composers like Samuel Barber and Aaron Copland have set her poems to music and why the dancer Martha Graham choreographed them as a ballet. Knowing other stylistic characteristics may help you read her poetry: She uses the dash to emphasize, to indicate a missing word or words, or to replace a comma or period. She changes the function or part of speech of a word; adjectives and verbs may be used as nouns; for example, in We talk in careless--and in loss, careless is an adjective used as a noun. She frequently uses be instead of is or are. She tends to capitalize nouns, for no apparent reason other than that they are nouns. To casual readers of poetry, it may seem that Dickinson uses rhyme infrequently. They are thinking of exact rhyme (for example, see, tree). She does use rhyme, but she uses forms of rhyme that were not generally accepted till late in the nineteenth century and are used by modern poets. Dickinson experimented with rhyme, and her poetry shows what subtle effects can be achieved with these rhymes. Dickinson uses identical rhyme (sane, insane) sparingly. She also uses eye rhyme (though, through), vowel rhymes (see, buy), imperfect rhymes (time, thin), and suspended rhyme (thing, along).

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THEMES

Though Dickinson's insights are profound, they are limited in topic. Northrup Frye points out, It would be hard to name another poet in the history of the English language with so little interest in social or political events. She lived through the Civil War, yet her poems contain no clear references to that national trauma. Richard Howard comments wryly, ... there was only one event, herself. The idea of identity or, alternately, the failure of identity runs through her poetry. One form it takes is the achievement of status or the lack of status; repeatedly she uses terms like queen, royal, imperial, and lowly. Status can be achieved through crucial experiences, like love, marriage, death, poetic expression. She insisted on the need and the right of the individual to maintain integrity; one way of doing this was to exercise inflexible principle in selecting or making choices. Two or more of themes she uses may occur in the same poem, and several themes are clearly connected. Themes that can be recognized in her poems are those of death, love, pain, religion, inner state of mans soul and nature.

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POEMS OF NATURE

Emily Dickinsons commitment to life, to this world with its complex range of emotions and relationships, also included a commitment to the physical earth. Dedicated to living a life experienced to its fullest, Dickinson celebrated the marvelous beauties of nature. But unlike the Romantics who cherished nature in its sublime magnitude, its overwhelming grandeur, Dickinsons appreciation for nature includes an appreciation for details, its minute and often overlooked inhabitants, and its tiny pleasures. Of course, Dickinson also felt natures sublimity and recorded it in her poetry, but more often she felt reverence for its subtle processes and intricate details. Thus, much of Dickinsons interest in nature is centered in the small spaces of her garden where she tended her treasured flowers, watched the birds and bees flit between blooms, and enjoyed the changing light and shades of daytime. She saw nature as an end in itself and not merely as a vehicle to philosophical truths. Of course, her observation of nature led her to contemplate the rhythms and meanings of life and to find correspondences between life in her garden and in human society, but unlike many Transcendentalists who saw God in and through nature, Dickinson saw nature as godlike, as worthy in itself of worship, attention, devotion. Thus, her nature poems do not always look for the meaning behind nature; she does not seek in nature a revelation of God as the Puritans and even the Transcendentalists might have. Nature is its own revelation and worthy of contemplation in and of itself. Naturethe Gentlest Mother is, Impatient of no Child The feeblestor the waywardest Her Admonition mild In Forestand the Hill By Travellerbe heard Restraining Rampant Squirrel Or too impetuous Bird

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How fair Her Conversation A Summer Afternoon Her HouseholdHer Assembly And when the Sung go down

Her Voice among the Aisles Incite the timid prayer Of the minutest Cricket The most unworthy Flower When all the Children sleep She turns as long away As will suffice to light Her lamps Then bending from the Sky With infinite Affection And infiniter Care Her Golden finger on Her lip Wills SilenceEverywhere

(P 80. No. 1) Unlike the Puritanical God, whom Dickinson viewed as distant and judgmental father, nature is for Dickinson The Gentlest Mother, both patient and nurturing. Embracing a feminine version of the earth, Dickinson imagines Nature as a kind, careful and graceful mother who watches over even her tiniest creatures as part of her Household. Nature does not punish severely like a father but admonishes mildly like a caring mother. The Rampant Squirrel and too impetuous Bird are not beneath her notice and care. Indeed, natures gentleness, her fairConversation and the soft music of her Voice transform her Household into an Assembly of worship where even the minutest Cricket and most unworthy Flower can offer up prayers that she will hear. Dickinson is carefully replacing God with nature, contrasting natures gentleness and care with the absent figure of the Puritanical God who is supposed to watch over and care for this

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earth but fail to do so. Nature steals Gods worship because she is more gentle, her admonitions are softer, and her care more universal. Her voice does not sound in thundering judgment and law but speaks gentle and fairConversation; her ears are not closed to her childrens timid prayer, as Dickinson felt Gods were; and her will is enforced with infinite Affection and infiniter Care like a mother who gently hushes her children to sleep, not with a fathers chastising hand. Natures rhythms are life-affirming, and thus she receives the worship and prayers of an adoring creation and of this adoring poet. Dickinson captures her rapturous love of nature in sensuous language and images. To describe the beauty and power of nature is for Dickinson both an impossible task and the calling that she has chosen for herself. How the old Mountains drip with Sunset How the Hemlocks burn How the Dun Brake is draped in Cinder By the Wizard Sun

How the old Steeples hand the Scarlet Till the Ball is full Have I the lip of the Flamingo That I dare to tell? Then, how the Fire ebbs like Billows Touching all the Grass With a departingSapphirefeature As a Duchess passed

How a small Dusk crawls on the Village Till the Houses blot And the odd Flambeau, no men carry Glimmer on the Street

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How it is Nightin Nest and Kennel And where was the Wood Just a Dome of Abyss is Bowing Into Solitude These are the Visions flitted Guido Titiannever told Domenichino dropped his pencil Paralyzed, with Gold (P 147-8, no. 110) While this poem ends with an impossibility of artistically capturing the Vision of the setting sun and the finished day, the rest of the poem is committed to capturing that moment with vivid language. Not only that Dickinson personify the different figures that play a part in the bewitching sunset but she uses rich, luxurious language that paints a picture and thus makes the sunset palpable. The Mountains drip with the sunset which also drapes the brake. The rich, sensuous sounds of drip and drape give the lines an exotic feel and cause the reader not only to see the fiery burning sunset but also to feel the way it seems to shimmer across the landscape like golden paint. Indeed, the moment is so full of wonderful images that the sun is called a Wizard, whose wonderful display bewitches onlookers. The sunset is a grand ball, where steeples escort grand ladies into the assembly room and the departing sun leaves glints on the grass like those reflected from the sapphires of a duchess departing after the dance. The moment is regal and rich; Scarlet and precious jewels and grand ladies dazzle the scene. Dusk crawls out as the ball finishes and the stars Glimmer on the skys streets like torches (Flambeau) that no men carry. Night encloses the world with its cathedral Dome of Abyss and with a gentlemanlike bow encloses the wood in solitude. The repeated Hows of the poem function not only as exclamatory superlatives but also ask a real question that the poem tries to answer: How can I describe the glory of such a sunset? The regal, sensuous imagery captures the transcendent Vision that is the sunset, a vision that paralyzes artistic attempts to depict it in its rich Gold beauty and power. The language throughout is rich and palpable; the images are specific and concrete. Thus, Dickinson captures the Wizard power of the sunset by using images not of the sunset but of a royal ball. By

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using an entirely different set of images, Dickinson is able to convey the beauty of the sunset and the overwhelming power it impresses on its viewers. The image of nature as a wizard is one that Dickinson often uses to convey this w orlds unexplainable power over her emotions. The power of sunrise and sunset are invoked in an earlier poem that shows how even the tiniest of natures details can enthrall Dickinson; the quiet Murmur of a Bee holds as much sway over Dickinsons feelings as does a beautiful sunset. The Murmur of a Bee A Witchcraftyieldeth me If any ask me why Twere easier to die Than tell

The Red upon the Hill Taketh away my will If anybody sneer Take carefor God is here Thats all.

The Breaking of the Day Addeth to my Degree If any ask me how Artistwho drew me so Must tell! (P 115, No. 44)

Like Witchcraft, the sunrise and sunset, even the tiny Murmur of a Bee has a mysterious, inexplicable power to mesmerize Dickinson, who is utterly awed. As usual, nature is again used as a metaphor to describe the poets life. Emily Dickinson explains how magic interferes, pollutes, and stops her imagination, creativity and her freedom to write poems. Next, she states that enlightenment makes her lazy to write poems on her own. Then, if people laugh or

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judge her work, she would have Gods help to give her strength to continue. Finally, Dickinson concludes claiming that when her inspirations add to her knowledge, the Artist would guide her to write. If one knows what he/she wants to do, no matter how people try to influence you (with their ideas), always stick to your ideas; because that way, one would realize that it is actually oneself that is guiding themselves.

It was almost as if Dickinson felt compelled to roam the border area between the temporal and the eternal, hoping to transcend the artificial divisions of this world and achieve union with the One. And Nature became the key. Through its agency, she thought a person might achieve a mystical union with the deity, losing oneself in the divine spirit immanent in the natural world. Spiritual renewal and divinity are then available here and now if one learns to tap the wellspring of Nature. But to embrace such a view, one has to throw over the Christian concepts of sin, grace, forgiveness, and justification. From the perspective of traditional religion, the poet was indeed sailing into "dangerous waters" in flirting with such an idea.

During this early period, she may have done no more than "flirt;" but she clearly yearned for a mystical experience and even, on occasion, wrote as if she had attained it. Poem 63 shows how deeply Nature could stir the poet, and the language ,she uses - references to light, ecstasy, wonder, grace - is typical of a mystic:

A something in a summer's Day As slow her flambeaux burn away Which solemnizes me. A something in a summer's noon A depth -- an Azure -- a perfume -Transcending ecstasy. And still within a summer's night A something so transporting bright I clap my hands to see --

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Then veil my too inspecting face Lest such a subtle -- shimmering grace Flutter too far for me (P 120-1. No. 63) Interestingly, Dickinson combines in this one poem both the language of the old religion (solemnizes, grace, veil) and the language of mysticism, her new religion; (transcending ecstasy, transporting bright, shimmering) as she tries to articulate a sense of the ineffable something in Nature. As is typical of mystics, the poet struggles with the difficulty of expressing what is fundamentally inexpressible - all at a time in life when her poetic expression was still in its formative stages. She had thus taken upon herself a doubly challenging task: developing her craft while also attempting to give ineffable experience verbal expression.

Other poems similarly confront the difficulty of interpreting a vision that defies description in words (ironic indeed for a poet!). The rarity of the mystical experience is the focus of this next poem:

The Soul's Superior instants Occur to Her -- alone -When friend -- and Earth's occasion Have infinite withdrawn -Or She -- Herself -- ascended To too remote a Height For lower Recognition Than her Omnipotent -This Mortal Abolition Is seldom -- but as fair As Apparition -- subject To Autocratic Air

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Eternity's disclosure To favorites -- a few -Of the Colossal substance Of Immortality (P. 275-6, no. 33) It is a moment of supreme transcendence which Dickinson describes here: the soul ascends to a remote height outside both time and place. Awareness of self is obliterated (This Mortal Abolition), the poet echoing Emerson's own description in Nature of becoming nothing as all mean egotism vanishes. It is clear that she is describing an inward apprehension of the Spirit, a sense that is not transmitted through normal channels of communication. It is a superior instant because eternity has imparted a rare glimpse of the Colossal substance of Immortality.

In a series of early poems Emily Dickinson reiterates her sense of the eternal shining through the images of the natural world so often that one is tempted to conclude that she had replaced orthodoxy with a kind of natural religion. Some keep the Sabbath going to Church I keep it, staying at Home With a Bobolink for a Chorister And an Orchard, for a Dome (P 116, no. 57)

Yet, these poems came to be balanced by her growing conviction that the veil between man and God cannot be penetrated. The experience of the divine is at best fragile and tenuous. In one poem she complains of the fleeting nature of such experiences: Did Our Best Moment last -/ 'Twould supersede Heaven. Unfortunately, however, such Best Moments don't last, and she concludes on a note of disillusion:

A Grant of the Divine That Certain as it Comes -

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Withdraws -- and leaves the dazzled Soul In her unfurnished Rooms.

Left with a sense of loss and emptiness, she seems to question the value of such a heavenly moment because it is so transient.

Emily Dickinson believes that there is a mysterious link between nature and man, and which cannot be explained by intellect or scientific method. Thus her poems on the theme of nature cover a vast variety of aspects. Sometimes they are child-like in their simplicity and fairylike in their intimacy but at time she looks deeper and finds that nature is mysterious power which deals in destruction of man and leads him tragically to death. To her, Nature is a haunted house. Emily Dickinson knew that she could not penetrate the unknowable or comprehend the deepest mysteries, but she insisted on asking questions. In her, we notice, the anguish of Shakespeare. She reveals an agonizing sense of ironic contrasts. She persistently asserts that intuition nor reason can solve the riddle of existence:

But nature is a stranger yet; The ones that cite her most Have never passed her haunted house, Nor simplified her ghost. (P 139-40, no. 96)

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REFERENCES:

Dickinson, Emily and Rachel Wetzsteon. The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003. Martin, Wendy. The Cambridge Introduction to Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: University Press, 2007. P. 86-90 Tandon, Neeru and Anjana Trevedi. Thematic Patterns of Emily Dickinsons Poetry. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2008. P. 148 Skipp, Francis. American Literature. New York: Barons Educational Series, Inc, 1992. P. 48 Farr, Judith and Louise Carter. The Gardens of Emily Dickinson. Harvard: First University Press, 2005. P. 30 Meyer, Michael. Thinking and Writing about Literature. Available at:

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/eng384/emilybio.htm Emily Dickinson Poetry Project IST 11. Available at: http://lit11istlaura.blogspot.com/ Emily Dickinson: An Overview. Available at:

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/dickinson.html Doyle, Connie. Experiment in Green. Available at:

http://www.spiritualitytoday.org/spir2day/894133doyle.html