Acceso a las coberturas

In this DEFINITIONPOEM, Dickinson uses geograph- ical and spatial imagery to speak about death and immortality, time and timelessness. She begins with a paradox: The physical smallness of the coffin is able to contain something immeasurably vast: “A Citizen of Paradise.” The image of the coffin or grave as a “Small domain” resonates with similar this-worldly or homey images found in her poems, where the grave is a bed, a room, an inn, a town, as in “AMPLEMAKETHIS BED—,” “SAFEINTHEIR ALABASTER CHAMBERS—,” “I went to Heaven—/ ’Twas a small Town—,” “WHAT

INN IS THIS,” “the little Dwelling Houses rise” (“The Color of the Grave is Green”), “adjoining Room” (“I DIEDFOR BEAUTY—BUTWASSCARCE”), “Doom is the House without the Door—,” and many others. Like these images, the democratic notion of a “citizen of Paradise” allows poet and reader to conceptualize the dead person in a familiar and comforting form: He or she is still a citizen, a member of a greater polity, someone with duties and rights, foremost of which is vic- tory over death.

But in the second stanza, the poem breaks away from its original tone and message. The first line is a variant of the first line of stanza 1, but with an essential difference: In the phrase “restricted Breadth”, it is impossible not to hear “restricted breath”—a diminished, disembod- ied transformation of the “citizen of Paradise.” As if to counteract that somber vision, the next three lines assert the superior grandeur of the grave to all earthly—and solar—spaces. What are we to make of this hyperbolic assertion? Dick- inson certainly loved the earth and celebrated nature as a holy temple (See “SOME KEEP THE

SABBATHGOINGTO CHURCH—”). Yet the myster- ies of death and immortality held a greater sway over her imagination. She states this explicitly in

the 1865 poem: “The Overtakelessness of Those/ Who have accomplished Death—/ Majestic is to me beyond/ The Majesties of Earth—” (Fr 894). At first glance, another assertion of the victory of immortality over the constriction of the grave, the second stanza is actually ambiguous: Is the grave so immense because of the immortality of the one whose body it contains—or because of the immensity of the grief of the mourner?

The question only deepens in stanza 3, where the coffin/grave has become a “small Repose,” and the “citizen of Paradise” has reappeared in the more poignant, personal form of a “single Friend.” The vision of the physical place of burial has shifted toward stillness, loss, immobility: from a Domain (full of life) to a restricted Breadth (a reduced space, the constricted breath of the dying), to repose (a nonspatial image implying the sleep of death). Although the verb is missing, the last two lines say that “To Him” who buries a friend comes “Circumference without Relief—/ Or Estimate—or End—.” Circumference is a key word for Dickinson, which appears in her cor- respondence and in 17 poems. Circumference was central to her notion of poetry; it was her word for the poet’s proper domain, a place where she encounters both revelation and the limits of knowledge. In this poem, Circumference implies the limits of what can be humanly known about death and eternity. This limitation is itself a state “without Relief,” and in this sense, it is another dimension of grief for the dead friend. “Without Estimate” negates the poem’s previous claim to define the relative dimensions of life, death, and immortality. The notion of “without end” has been transformed from “life without end” to “suf- fering without end.”

The poem’s initial attempt to affirm contain- ment was reinforced by a regular meter and a rhyme scheme containing more regular rhymes than the slant or partial ones Dickinson often uses. In stanza 1, not two but three of the four lines rhyme exactly. Yet shape dissolves in the poem’s final words and the final dash underscores this, giving a sense of openness. The attempt at a neat and satisfying defi- nition falls apart and we are left with the torment- ing mystery of mortality.

FURTHER READING

Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time, 236–38.

“A Dying Tiger moaned for

Drink—” (1863) (Fr 529, J 566)

Among Dickinson’s poems about thirst and hun- ger, this one is unusual, both for its exotic imagery, and for the fact that the speaker is not the one who is thirsting or hungering, but the one who tries to provide sustenance and fails. In the narrative of this poem, the tiger, a mighty, masculine beast, is dying of thirst in the desert. The speaker tries to bring him water, searches the arid place thor- oughly, catches drippings from a rock in her hand and brings it to him, but she is too late with her meager offering. The tiger has died while she was searching for what could save him.

While tiger and speaker have been spatially sep- arated in stanza 1, in stanza 2 they come together in the tiger’s eyes. The phrase “mighty Balls” refers to the tiger’s eyeballs. The choice of balls rather than eyes was probably based on sense and sound considerations. “Mighty balls” is a visual images whereas “Mighty eyes” are hard to envision; and the m, b and l sounds of “mighty balls” resonates with “My blame” and “his blame.” Although “thick” in death (a reference to the eyes filming over), the tiger’s eyes are still open: The speaker peers into these unseeing eyes and sees “A Vision on the Retina/ Of Water—and of me—.” Despite its unusual imagery, this is one of Dickinson’s deathbed scenes, in which the speaker strains to understand death by observing the experience of dying. The speaker has returned when the tiger is already dead, but the vision on his dead retina tells her what obsessed the tiger until his final moment: the object of his desperate need (water) and its location—just beyond his reach. The vision on the tiger’s retina is also, of course, the vision of the speaker’s failure to save him.

But in stanza 3, where she evaluates what hap- pened, the speaker exonerates both herself—“who sped too slow”—and the tiger—who died while

help was on the way. Instead, what is to blame is “the fact that He was dead—.” Does this strange assertion imply that blame lies in the fact that death exists at all? Or is this simply Dickinson’s way of saying that there is no way to place blame in an impersonal and incomprehensible universe? To blame a “fact” is to blame both nothing at all—and everything, the very conditions of existence. At least one critic finds this stanza an unconvincing attempt at rationalizing the speaker’s guilt: “The hardness of response, here, is a denial of feeling, a this-has-nothing-to-do-with-me statement. Yet the guilt is there, despite the denial. If there were no guilt, there would be no poem” (Pollack, 73). Pol- lack compares this poem with “I bring an unaccus- tomed wine,” another poem in which the speaker tries unsuccessfully to minister to the dying, and concludes, “Inevitably, the starved self does not have the emotional or the practical resources to function as a nurturer” (72).

While the sense of personal failure and inad- equacy as a nurturer is a central part of the poem, it does not exhaust its meanings. What we make of the poem depends on how we interpret the tiger and his relationship to the speaker. On the most literal level, the poem might be read as express- ing her haunted sense of failure to convey some life-giving nurture to a powerful male figure in her life. Or as a powerful, masculine beast the tiger may represent the male-dominated world in which Dickinson lived, here rendered harmless by the fact that he is dying of thirst. By transferring her own helplessness in that world to the tiger, she brings about a sympathetic bond with him. But it is also possible, within the spare, primitive, dreamlike set- ting of the poem, that suggests a half-buried psy- chic landscape, to see the tiger as an aspect of the poet herself. In the poems in which the speaker herself is starving, and practicing the survival art of living on a crumb, she is a tiny creature—a bird, a sparrow, less than a gnat. To express that part of herself that desires hugely, cannot slake its need in the dry world in which it is stranded, yet does not know how to starve and survive, Dickinson uses the image of the powerful masculine tiger. His would- be rescuer, that part of the poet that interfaces with the world and tries to bring back what will keep

the tiger/desire alive, is persistent but ineffectual. In Dickinson’s world, survival depends on knowing how to do without. Clearly the sparrow has greater resources than the tiger.

See also “GOD GAVE A LOAF TO EVERY

BIRD—,” “I HADBEENHUNGRY, ALLTHE YEARS—,”

“ITWOULDHAVESTARVEDA GNAT—,” and “UNDUE

SIGNIFICANCEASTARVINGMANATTACHES.”

FURTHER READING

Vivian R. Pollak, “Thirst and Starvation,” in Crit- ical Essays, Judith Farr, ed., 62–75. Richard Wil- bur, “Sumptuous Destitution,” in Critical Essays, Judith Farr, ed., 53–61.

“After great pain, a formal

feeling comes—” (1862)

(Fr 372, J 341)

Emily Dickinson was an anatomist of pain. She used the word in no less than 50 poems, and its variants—agony, despair, grief, hurt, and suffer- ing—countless times. Seeking to define the nature and course of the “ailment” she knew only too well, Dickinson took up the subject again and again, throughout her career, attacking it from dif- ferent perspectives and in different states of mind, Not surprisingly, therefore, her writings on pain contain a spectrum of attitudes. In a poem such as “IFYOUR NERVE, DENYYOU," she counsels emo- tional intrepidity, the necessity of feeling to the utmost, in spite of pain and fear. Yet in numerous poems she writes of the emotional numbness that comes after “great pain” and is essential to per- sonal survival.

In this poem, she describes this state of numb- ness with the oxymoron “a formal feeling,” that is, a kind of ritualized “nonfeeling,” fixed by cus- tom or habit—the opposite of living, spontaneous emotion. Throughout the poem she evokes this state in terms of inorganic materials: “Wooden way,” “Quartz contentment,” “Hour of Lead.” She conveys a sense of estrangement and lack of emotional integration through the personification

of the Nerves, the Heart, and the Feet, all ele- ments of a feeling, active individuals that carry out their separate functions, but do not com- municate with one another. The vision is similar to that of a poem written the following year, “I

TIE MY HAT—I CREASE MY SHAWL—,” in which

a kind of mechanical behavior, the carrying out of “Life’s little duties” replaces and attempts to disguise from others the death of a vibrant inner life. In “After great pain,” Dickinson evokes a less functional, more severe state of estrangement, verging on spiritual death. Biographer Charles R. Anderson, who considers this work “her most remarkable poem rendering the extinction of con- sciousness by pain,” suggests that the three stanzas “faintly shadow forth three stages of a familiar cer- emony: the formal service, the tread of pallbear- ers, and the final lowering into a grave” (Stairway, 238). In a related poem of 1865, “I’ve dropped my brain—my soul is numb—,” Dickinson writes “My nerve in marble lies.” In this poem, her nerves are themselves tombs, receptacles for her dead ability to feel.

The “stiff Heart” is estranged from its own for- mer capacity to bear great pain and has lost its abil- ity to place the experience in the recent or distant past. The Feet are indifferent as to whether they “go round” on the ground, in the air, “or Ought”—on whatever other medium they may find themselves. The famous image of “A Quartz contentment, like a stone—” floats syntactically in the air, without a clear referent, appropriately since there is no solid entity to which it can attach itself. Dickinson, who had a solid basis in geology through her studies with EDWARD HITCHCOCK at the AMHERST ACADEMY,

may have chosen “quartz” for its sound value, but she also knew that quarts is a very hard, crystal- lized mineral, that is, one that has grown fixed. “A Quartz contentment” is thus another permutation of the state of numbness, but with the added sense of something enviable. It is reminiscent of an idea she develops in a later poem, “How happy is the little Stone” (Fr 1569, 1882). The unfeeling stone is “happy” in the sense of “fortunate,” precisely because it has no feelings.

The final permutation of this notion is the “Hour of Lead,” lead being the “least elastic and

sonorous of all the metals,” as noted in Dickinson’s lexicon. This is a time “Remembered, if outlived,” but the way it will be remembered—as someone dying in a snowdrift experiences the process of los- ing consciousness—suggests the unlikeliness of sur- vival, reinforcing the image of death (“Tombs”) in stanza 1.

While the poem chillingly evokes the surrender to cold and stupor, Emily Dickinson, as we know, survived whatever personal ordeal motivated its writing. As for the nature of that ordeal, Dickin- son scholars have long debated whether Dickinson went over the brink of madness at some point in her life or only teetered on it. Critic John Cody, who took “After great pain” as the title of his psycho- analytic study of Dickinson, has made perhaps the fullest case that the poet did, in fact, experience a mental breakdown. For him, the poem under dis- cussion is a precise description of the acute phase of a psychotic illness, which, he believes, overcame the poet in the late 1850s, characterized by cata- tonia—a psychotic state of extreme inertia and stupor, as well as rigidity of the limbs (“The Feet, mechanical, go round—/ A Wooden way”). Cody presents an intriguing “reconstruction” of Dickin- son’s psychic history, in which the 1856 marriage of her beloved brother, WILLIAM AUSTIN, to the

woman she depended on as a “mother-substitute,” SUSAN GILBERT (DICKINSON), left Emily desolate

and abandoned. He hypothesizes that her fragile “defense mechanisms” gave way, releasing repressed rage and unacceptable sexual impulses, which, in turn, led to a breakdown of her sense of reality. Since Cody published his work in 1971, numerous scholars have taken issue with his thesis. The objec- tions of Dickinson’s biographer Richard B. Sewall are representative of their arguments. He notes that no mention of the poet’s breakdown has been found in the writings of her family and friends and that “Her production alone, with all the other things she had to do about the house, shows how firmly she kept her faculties under control during [this] time . . .” (Life, II, 491). (Cody anticipated this lat- ter objection and argued in his book that psychotics are quite capable of writing coherent poetry).

While this irresolvable debate is likely to con- tinue, it is largely irrelevant to the poem itself as

it affects its readers. Whatever Emily Dickinson’s personal experiences, this would not be the great poem it is if it did not speak to the aftermath of many kinds of “great pain.” Dickinson’s triumph was to have found universal imagery for the psy- chic experience she observed with such exactness. Robert Weisbuch, who likens this poem to Edvard Munch’s famous painting of a “frozen scream,” notes that Dickinson’s poems about extreme suf- fering “say precisely nothing about Dickinson’s unique experience. But they do afford an extraor- dinary comfort precisely because different people can bring their trouble to them. The poems in this sense are an autobiography not of Dickinson but of the reader” (“Prisming,” 217).

See also “I FELTA FUNERALINMY BRAIN,” “I LIKE ALOOKOF AGONY,” and “PAIN—HASAN ELEMENT OF BLANK—.”

FURTHER READING

Charles R. Anderson, Stairway of Surprise, 238–239; John Cody, After Great Pain, 291–355; Kamilla Denman, “Emily Dickinson’s Volcanic Punctua- tion,” in Critical Essays, Judith Farr, ed., 192–193; Joanne Feit Diehl, Romantic Imagination, 44–48; Alfred Habegger, My Wars, 409; Richard B. Sewall, Life, II, 491–492; Robert Weisbuch, “Prisming,” in Handbook, Grabher et al., eds., 216–217; Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Emily Dickinson, 468–469.