Asistencia en Medios Ajenos a la “Red DKV de Servicios Sanitarios” . 44

Since its first publication in The Springfield Repub- lican on February 14, 1866, when editor SAMUEL

BOWLES placed it on the first page with the title

“The Snake,” the solution to this “riddle poem” has been obvious to its readers. The true riddle for future commentators has involved the allusive sub- text of the poem. Yes, the poem is about a snake, but what else is it about? In this ongoing discussion, sex (both heterosexual and homosexual), nature as a whole, sin, and death have been put forth as the “true” concern of the poem. For some, the poem is about the vitality of language, a tour-de-force of imagistic magic. As in so much of Dickinson’s work, her specific yet resonant language, rooted in religious and literary traditions, yet strangely independent of them, lends support to all of these interpretations.

The speaker of the poem begins by addressing herself to a presumed listener/reader in the tone of a teacher and objective observer, offering a precise, visual description of the snake moving through the grass. By calling the snake a “Narrow fellow” she is being neither coy nor mysterious, but inviting the reader to think of this creature in unfamiliar terms. Instead of slithering, he rides, though on what invisible conveyance we can only conjecture. In the third line of stanza 1 the speaker inter- rupts herself in a chatty, informal tone and invites the reader in: “You may have met him? Did you not.” In the version pirated by Emily’s sister-in- law and confidante SUSAN HUNTINGTON GILBERT

DICKINSON and published by Bowles, the line ends

in a question mark, a change that agitated Dickin- son and reinforced her fear of what editors might do to her work. She wrote to her literary mentor THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON, to whom she

had previously expressed her reluctance to pub- lish, in early 1866: “Lest you meet my Snake and suppose I deceive it was robbed of me—defeated too of the third line by the punctuation. The third and fourth were one . . .” (L 316). Scholar Martha Nell Smith incisively explains the significance of the change: “By emphasizing the break between

the lines, the punctuation practically insists on a certain reading, whereas its omission makes the relationship between the two lines more indeter- minate . . .” (Rowing in Eden, 12). “Did you not?” means simply, “You have met him, haven’t you?” But, if lines 3 and 4 are read together, form rein- forces meaning: Without the aid of punctuation at the end of line 3 or a transitional phrase such as “let me tell you,” line 4 springs upon the reader with the suddenness of the snake’s appearance.

Stanza 2 continues the evocation of the snake in exact, yet indirect terms, primarily as the move- ment it causes in the grass, which divides cleanly, as if a comb had run through it. The homey comb image may be seen as the speaker’s attempt to “domesticate” the snake. Yet the stanza also offers ammunition to those who emphasize the poem’s underlying sexual content and view it as an exer- cise in stimulating voyeurism. Karl Keller sees the “shaft” as a male erection that both shocks and attracts the speaker (Only Kangaroo, 268–269). The “Whip Lash / Unbraiding in the Sun” that “wrinkled And was gone—” when the speaker stopped to pick it up, easily lends itself to phal- lic interpretation. In a similar vein, John Cody sees the “alluring swamp” of stanza 3—the “Boggy Acre” as a metaphor for the female genitals. Within the context of his psychoanalytic inter- pretation, he relates the poem to what he sees as Dickinson’s homosexual impulses, first directed toward her mother, and then to Sue Dickinson (After Great Pain, 437–438). (See Fr 1780, which begins “Sweet is the swamp with it’s secrets, / Until we meet a snake” for a poem whose snake/swamp imagery is more obviously sexual than it is in the poem under discussion).

Whatever the symbolic meaning of the “Boggy Acre,” it also reflects a precise observation of nature. Upon reading the poem, Bowles, who apparently underestimated the care with which Emily observed nature, remarked to Sue Dickin- son, “How did that girl ever know that a boggy field wasn’t good for corn?” “Oh, you forget that was Emily ‘when a boy’!” was the reply (Martha Dickin- son Bianchi, Face to Face, 2). Sue was familiar with Emily’s odd way of referring to her period of child- hood freedom to roam barefoot through the woods

near her house, collecting specimens for her her- barium. Associating that unfettered wandering with the kind of freedom generally reserved for boys, she referred to herself as one. She first used the phrase in a letter to her brother WILLIAM AUSTIN, when

she was 23: “Well, we were all boys once” (L 152, Jan 5, 1854). According to her latest biographer, Alfred Habegger, “Eventually, she looked backed at this free and fearless outdoor sauntering as a defining activity of her life ‘when a boy’—a phrase that became indispensable to her after her habits of seclusion were established” (My Wars, 159–160). For example, in Fr 1538, “The Savior must have been,” written in 1880, she writes: “The Road to Bethlehem / Since He and I were Boys / Was lev- eled.” Thus, for Habegger, “the speaker in this tricky poem is not male but a woman who was once a boy.”

Through the end of stanza 3, the snake is mov- ing about its own business, not interacting with the speaker or threatening her in any way, van- ishing as suddenly as it appeared. We have no indication this is a poisonous snake; indeed, since she stoops “to secure it,” it is probably a harm- less garden snake. Yet, two brief stanzas later, the snake has become a chilling, alienating presence. As stanza 4 begins, there is no hint that the poem is moving in that direction. The speaker assumes the simple, childlike persona of one on an equal plane with “Nature’s People,” for whom she feels “a transport / Of Cordiality.” Only in the last two lines of the poem, in images of unexpected dark- ness, does the snake’s life-stopping impact on the speaker suddenly emerge. It is possible to detect, as Cynthia Griffin Wolff does, hints of this emergence as the poem progresses. Wolff notes that “civilizing images”—the snake riding “as if there is a carriage,” the grass divided as if by a comb—are gradually displaced as the speaker “moves beyond civilization and arable land,” while at the same time moving “away from simple realism toward a portent of dan- ger” (Emily Dickinson, 489–491).

What danger does the snake represent? Cody offers a psychoanalytically based interpretation, focusing on the homosexual issue. Hypothesizing that Emily identified with her father, Cody sees the speaker’s account of how she often encoun-

tered the snake “when a Boy and Barefoot,” as the appearance of the father to the “oedipal boy:”

This fear of the snake is not for Emily Dickin- son simply a fear of male sexuality per se. For her, as for the oedipal boy, the snake is the great deterrent to her encroachments upon the swamp—the female love object.

Another unavoidable association of the snake is with the tempter of Genesis: the snake as Satan or evil. While it is impossible for a Western reader not to make this association, there is little or noth- ing in the poem that develops this meaning. For Wolff, the fact that Dickinson does not connect the snake to its meaning within a theological uni- verse or “any coherent system of symbols” limits the poem. She regrets that it is only “an isolated glimpse into an earthbound secret whose full extent cannot be charted and whose particulars emerge at such rare intervals that the essence of nature must remain forever hidden.” (491). While Wolff considers this a failure of the poem, the sense of nature’s inscrutability and indifference to human life, nature as a “Haunted House,” is an integral and compelling dimension of Dickinson’s worldview.

Whatever the significance of the snake to the speaker, its impact is fearsome and chilling. All the poem’s attempts to view it in civilized, domestic terms break down at the end. Visual images give way to “Zero at the Bone.” For Dickinson “Zero” is an image of death, associated with frost and belong- ing to the same semantic context as “Degreeless Noon,” which lies beyond the “Dial life” of the everyday. The long o sound of alone and Bone at the conclusion produces a mournful mood that rein- forces the sense of this “Zero.”

See also “A CLOCK STOPPED—,” “FURTHER IN

SUMMERTHANTHE BIRDS—,” and “WHATMYSTERY PERVADESAWELL!”

FURTHER READING

Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Face to Face, 26–27; John Cody, After Great Pain, 437–438; Alfred Habegger, My Wars, 159–160; Karl Keller, Only Kangaroo, 268–269; Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Emily Dickinson, 489–491.

“A nearness to

Tremendousness—”

(1864)

(Fr 824, J 963)

Dickinson is the great cartographer of those regions of psychic pain and disorientation that lie outside the boundaries of both ordinary sensibility and conventional language. In poem after poem she describes the mind’s strategies for survival both dur- ing and, more frequently, in the aftermath of great pain: numbness (“From Blank to Blank—,” Fr 484; “There is a Languor of the Life,” Fr 552); dream- ing (“We dream—it is good we are dreaming—” Fr 584); continued possession in imagination (“IF I MAY HAVEIT, WHENIT’SDEAD,”), the sustaining force of

habit (“WEGROWACCUSTOMEDTOTHE DARK—”);

and the assertion of a life beyond the grave (“THERE CAME A DAY—AT SUMMER’S FULL—”). In Fr 824, Dickinson uses spatial imagery to suggest an agony whose nature (its manifestation and only “cure”) is restless, even frenetic, and uncontainable motion.

In the first two lines of this poem, Dickinson, in a tone of bitter irony, notes that suffering “procures a nearness to Tremendousness,” which lifts us above the trivial and puts us in touch with the essence of existence. She may have been thinking of the great- ness of God, or, as she put it in a poem written the previous year, of “Death’s tremendous nearness—” (“I TRIEDTOTHINKALONELIER THING”).

Yet over the course of the poem’s brief expanse, the awesome connotations of “Tremendousness” are transformed into something very different: “Illocality”—a neologism by which the poet seeks to express a vacillating expanse in which she wan- ders blindly.

This transformation of meaning takes place gradually from line to line. In line 3, “Tremendous- ness” grows both vaguer (unstructured) and less knowable as it turns into “Boundlessness.” At the same time “Agony,” a word denoting extreme pain and associated with “the pangs of death and the sufferings of our Savior in the Garden of Gethse- mane,” becomes “Affliction,” a less exalted concept with overtones of an external cause of suffering, whether “sickness, losses, calamity, adversity, or

persecution,” as in ‘Many are the afflictions of the righteous’ (Psalms, xxxiv). Agony “procures” prox- imity to tremendousness; it is a steep price but a measurable one that results in a measurable gain. Affliction, in contrast “ranges Boundlessness,” that is, it “roves at large, wanders without restraint or direction.” The sense of purposeful action gives way to one of purposelessness.

“Procures” and “ranges” are the only two verbs of action in the poem. In stanza 2, action gives way to the negative action of “cannot stay” and the sta- sis of “is.” The poem is dominated by nouns of emo- tion: agony, affliction (twice), and contentment; and, even more heavily, by nouns of place/space: nearness, tremendousness, boundlessness, vicinity, suburb, acres, location, illocality. Although most of these are abstract nouns, they nonetheless allow the poet to make the existential spaces she invokes concrete. By means of them, she tries to tether the vastness, as if it were an immense balloon, to earth.

Yet the centrifugal, unsettling forces of emo- tion and language prove stronger. In the last line of stanza 1, the syntax loosens up, as the phrase “Vicinity to Laws” hangs indeterminately between what came before and what comes after it. Is Dick- inson saying that Boundlessness exists in “Vicinity of Laws”—near them, but outside them? Or are “Vicinity to Laws” and “Contentment’s quiet Sub- urb—” phrases in apposition—two ways of suggest- ing civilization and orderliness? Or is the former being defined as the latter? Similarly, “Affliction cannot stay” refers both backward to “Content- ment’s quiet Suburb” and forward to “In Acres.” In that “cannot stay” there are faint but distinct echoes of the expulsion from Eden, the “quiet sub- urb” where Adam and Eve cannot stay, forced to leave for the boundless wilderness they “procured” with the agony of their disobedience.

The poem ends with one of Dickinson’s anti-def- initions: “It’s Location / Is Illocality—.” “Tremen- dousness” (greatness) has turned to “Boundlessness” (formlessness) and finally to “Illocality”—(a para- doxical “placeless place”). The awe evoked by “Tre- mendousness” has disintegrated into the anxiety of the unlimited and the ungraspable. Dickinson embeds her meaning into the very sounds of “It’s Location / Is Illocality—.” The two phrases mirror

one another, but inexactly, reinforcing the uneasy sense of blurred and unstable boundaries.

See also “AFTERGREATPAIN, AFORMALFEELING COMES—,” “I FELTA FUNERAL, INMY BRAIN,” “I TIE MY HAT—I CREASE MY SHAWL—,” “IT WAS NOT

DEATH, FOR I STOODUP,” and DEFINITIONPOEMS.

FURTHER READING

Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time, 160–161; Robert Weisbuch, Emily Dickinson’s Poetry, 154–155.

“A Pit—but Heaven over it—”

(1863) (Fr 507)

In this striking, important poem, Dickinson situ- ates herself existentially between two extremes, two immensities between which she balances precariously. Although the images that embody it may vary, this is a central place in the poet’s psychic and spiritual life. It is indicative of a lifelong struggle to find her balance between faith and doubt, hope and despair, sanity and madness, and of a worldview in which the soul is continually balanced between two spiri- tual poles. One of the most famous poems in which this fundamental metaphor is developed is “I stepped from plank to plank—,” in which she “walks the plank” of spiritual peril: “The Stars about my Head I felt / About my Feet the Sea—.” Another is “BEHIND

ME—DIPS ETERNITY—,” which continues “Before Me—Immortality—/ Myself—the Term between—” and concludes “A Crescent in the Sea—/ With Mid- night to the North of Her—/ And Midnight to the South of Her—/ And Maelstrom—in the Sky—.”

Until R. W. Franklin’s pioneering editing work with Dickinson’s manuscript books, or fascicles, in the early 1980s, this poem was known to both scholars and general readers in a shorter, very differ- ent version. The earlier version, which appeared in Thomas H. Johnson’s Collected Poems, was missing the last five lines, which Johnson had erroneously included in another poem, “I TIEMY HAT—I CREASE MY SHAWL—.” It also contained a line, “Seed— summer—tomb” which is deleted in Franklin’s new authoritative version. In reconstructing the fuller, original poem, Franklin has revealed a far more

hopeful vision than earlier commentators were apt to discern. The closed, hopeless “circuit” from birth (seed) to tomb is replaced by a courageous and sur- prising strategy for overcoming terror.

In her discussion of the poem, Shira Wolosky finds “The poem . . . tries to ward off a terror already present. The heaven that should reassure her and make her position secure does not do so” (“A Syntax of Contention,” 166). And yet, while the speaker is by no means secure, neither is she wholly uncomforted by heaven. In stanza 1, the word “Pit” appears only twice, while “Heaven” is mentioned four times, as the poet turns from one to the other and back again, as she struggles to recon- cile these existential extremes, the heaven and hell, perhaps, of her inner life. The fact that heaven gets last mention suggests an unwillingness to let go of this pole of her reality. Moreover, although she cannot touch it, heaven surrounds her; it is above, beside her, and “abroad”—out in the open, at large. Note that there are no verbs in this stanza: the speaker is caught in a kind of paralysis as she reg- isters her situation. Numbness and paralysis appear frequently in Dickinson’s poems, for example, in “AFTER GREATPAIN, A FORMALFEELING COMES—”

“I’ve Dropped My Brain—My Soul Is Numb,” and “PAIN—HAS AN ELEMENT of BLANK,” in which a

failure to feel is the only mechanism the poet has at her disposal to survive unbearable pain.

In stanza 2, this paralysis continues: The only verbs that are introduced are in the form of infini- tives in the conditional tense, that is, no action occurs, but what would happen if certain actions occurred is contemplated. The speaker can neither move (disrupt her precarious balance) nor look (be visually aware, vividly conscious) nor dream (be careless, unconscious), since any of these actions could cause her to plummet into the abyss. Her chances for survival are held up by a lone prop, not further identified, suggesting only how fragile is the barrier separating her from the pit. Verbs of any kind are absent from the stanza’s final exclamatory line, suggesting her dismay, terror, and confusion in which all the poet can do is invoke the two oppos- ing fates that beckon her.

Scholar Joanne Feit Diehl argues convincingly that Dickinson’s Pit has an important origin in the

blazing pit of Hell that played so central and fear- some a role in the thinking of the 18th-century revivalist preacher JONATHAN EDWARDS. Edwards’s

theological vision, with its punitive deity and con- viction of the essential depravity of human nature, was anathema to Dickinson. Yet his fire-and- brimstone imagery was at the core of the PURITAN HERITAGE that embedded itself in her psyche. For

Dickinson, however, the cosmic drama was inter- nal. As Feit Diehl writes, “. . . in her abyss the flames are self-generated, created by the power of her own imagination. Furthermore, hers is an abyss that she tells us she can enter, and so it must be an internal, deeper part of the mind to which she descends and from which she emerges through the act of writing poems” (“Emerson, Dickinson, and the Abyss,” 158).

Indeed, she tells us in the first line of stanza 3, “The depth is all my thought—.” We may read this line as saying, “My thoughts are my hell, my pit” or “This pit is all in my imagination.” Although both readings place the pit within, the difference is a sig- nificant one with respect to the speaker’s chances of escaping it. In either case, she remains paralyzed and dares not ask her feet to carry her to safety, lest the slightest movement startle her and cause her to fall. (Note that “start” has the meaning of “startle”—its primary meaning in her Webster’s— in both its appearances in this stanza.) In an image suggesting the immense discrepancy between her external life and her inner reality, she shows herself