Cláusula de subrogación o de cesión de derechos

Jordan” (1860) (Fr 145, J 59)

This early poem is a dramatization of the story of Jacob’s wrestling with the Angel of God, as recounted in Genesis 33:24–32. This is a time of reckoning for Jacob, as he prepares to meet his brother Esau, whom he had cheated of his birth- right many years before. Esau is advancing with an army of 400 men, and Jacob, plagued by guilt for his past deed, fears the worst. Jacob wrestles with “a man” whom he defeats and refuses to release until “the man” blesses him. God then reveals his identity and gives Jacob his blessing, together with a new name: “Thy name shall be called no

more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince thou hast power with God and with men, and hast prevailed” (33:28). Jacob is now defined by the role he plays, for Israel means “the one who wrestles with God.” Jacob/Israel, in turn, performs an act of naming: “And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is pre- served” (33:30). The next day Esau arrives with his followers, but, to Jacob’s boundless relief, he greets his long-lost brother peaceably, with tears of joy.

As biographer Cynthia Griffin Wolff notes in her important discussion of this subject, the story of Jacob and the Angel of God was the primary text for the REVIVALS that repeatedly swept through

AMHERST during Dickinson’s girlhood (Emily Dick-

inson, 144). For centuries Protestantism had viewed Jacob as a kind of Everyman figure. Like Jacob, Christians who hoped for salvation could win God’s blessing, not by passive obedience, but by actively struggling with Him—and their own consciences. Although Emily Dickinson was never able to make the public commitment of faith expected of those who emerged from such God-wrestling, the story remained alive for her. Biographer Richard B. Sewall points out that, for Dickinson, “The Bibli- cal characters, especially the Old Testament ones, lived . . . as vitally, and often as secularly, as any out of Shakespeare or her favorite novelist, Dickens” (Life, II, 698). She once wrote to her close friend, ELIZABETH LUNA CHAPIN HOLLAND, about an inner

conflict she was having (about 1881): “Jacob versus Esau, was a trifle in Litigation, compared to the Skirmish in my Mind.”

Dickinson’s recasting of Jacob’s story in this poem was heavily influenced by the new 19th-cen- tury sermon style, which was replacing the imagi- natively restrained, doctrinally oriented Calvinist preaching of the past. This style, of which Emily’s revered REVEREND CHARLES WADSWORTH was a

master practitioner, was characterized by “diverting narrative, extensive illustrations, and even collo- quial humor” (David S. Reynolds, “Emily Dickin- son and Popular Culture,” 168). Thus, in a sprightly storytelling style, Dickinson depicts the struggle as one between “A Gymnast and an Angel.” The term Gymnast is not only an anachronism within the bib- lical context, it portrays Jacob as a physical being

whose skill or merit is purely athletic: He undergoes a number of metamorphoses in the course of three brief stanzas: from “Gymnast” to “Jacob” to “cun- ning Jacob” to “bewildered Gymnast.” The names Dickinson gives him track his stature: from name- less athlete to someone with a name, the legendary biblical figure, who then acquires an epithet denot- ing shrewdness, but who in his final appearance is once more demoted to a nameless athlete, utterly confused by what has happened to him. Thus, although Jacob triumphs and wins God’s blessing, his triumph is somewhat dimmed by the sense that he has been a player in a drama he does not under- stand. The “Angel,” who becomes a hungry angel in stanza 2, eager “To Breakfast—to return” and a “Stranger” in stanza 3, emerges as “God”—the final word of the poem. Thus, even as the two figures wrestle with one another, so do the meanings Dick- inson assigns them, making the poetic outcome more ambivalent than the physical one depicted.

Critics have most often viewed this poem as a parable for her own “worsting” of an orthodox Christian God, whose terms—notably surrender of her own evolving judgments and sensibilities to a fixed doctrine—she could never accept. For Joanne Feit Diehl, it “takes as its subject a poet’s birth, for it describes the struggle she thought essential before the individual imagination could wrest from God the power to create poems. . . . It is through discord, not harmony, through wrestling, not quiet affirmation, that Dickinson’s Jacob witnesses the coming of a new day” (Romantic Imagination, 38– 39). Biographer Thomas Johnson sees the struggle somewhat differently, as a “wrestling match” in which the poet strove to master the powerful cre- ative force that possessed her.

Dickinson’s later writing lends credence to this line of interpretation. Writing to THOMAS

WENTWORTH HIGGINSON, the spring she died,

after commenting on her illness and affectionately remembering him and his family, she writes play- fully: “Audacity of Bliss, said Jacob to the Angel ‘I will not let thee go except I bless thee’—Pugilist and Poet, Jacob was correct—.” In this last letter to the man she called her mentor but who failed to grasp the nature of her poetic genius, she reversed the role of Jacob and Angel, and assumed the role

of the one who blesses. For Dickinson’s most recent biographer, Alfred Habegger, this passage indicates the poet’s understanding that “her lyric vocation was a function of her essential lifelong struggle. Yielding to the nature of things no more than she had ‘given up’ to the Savior during the revivals of her youth, she asserted her own powers of ‘pagan’ ecstasy and sublime thought. She had been a defi- ant rule-breaker, and now, in her last defiant par- adox, she declared that that was what made her ‘correct’ ” (My Wars, 621).

In Genesis, God both blesses Jacob and wounds him in his thigh, giving him a permanent limp— an aspect of the story Dickinson knew well but chose not to include in her retelling. Significantly, although the gymnast of this poem is “bewildered” by his astonishing triumph, he emerges whole. Dickinson would return to the paradigm of two figures wrestling until dawn in her poetry many times (see, for example, “TWOSWIMMERSWRESTLED ONTHE SPAR—” and Fr 221, “He was weak, and I

was strong—then—”), but never with the sense of elation and amazement found here.

See also CONGREGATIONALISM and PURITAN HERITAGE.

FURTHER READING

Joanne Feit Diehl, Romantic Imagination, 38–39; Alfred Habegger, My Wars, 621; Thomas John- son, Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography, 74; David S. Reynolds, “Emily Dickinson and Popular Culture,” in Cambridge Companion, 168; Richard B. Sewall, Life, II, 698–699; Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Emily Dickinson, 143–153.

“Alone, I cannot be—” (1862)

(Fr 303, J 298)

This poem begins as if Dickinson, who had entered upon her years of seclusion, were answering the query, “How do you manage to be alone so much?” or “Don’t you mind being alone so much?” She answers assuredly, with a boast, that she can never be alone, since she is in the constant company of “Hosts.” We expect a poet to be visited by the

Muse. Dickinson’s muse, however, is no solitary, occasional visitor, but “Hosts”—a term whose basic meaning is “masses.” If we interpret the poem as an expression of Dickinson’s sense of poetic fecundity, then the word is indeed appropriate. In 1862, the year she wrote this poem, Dickinson also wrote 226 others (Fr 272 to 498). In claiming that the Hosts are “never gone,” she is describing the never-end- ing stream of inspiration that possessed her during her years of flood creativity.

The term “Hosts” suggests the heavenly Hosts of angels and, indeed, an aura of divinity surrounds these visitors; but this is only the starting point of the extended definition of them that constitutes the rest of the poem. In lines 3 and 4 of the first stanza, “Recordless Company—/ Who baffle Key—,” they become ethereal and mysterious. “Recordless” is a neologism, implying “not recorded, registered, imprinted, or remembered.” The fact that they can enter without having a key suggests that they are bodiless. In contrast, the noun with which “Record- less” is paired—“Company”—suggests a royal or mil- itary retinue. Yet, the members of this retinue have neither robes nor names. Dickinson defines them by what they are not. In a characteristic strategy for suggesting meanings that are not encompassed by ordinary language, she uses negatives (no, nor, not) “to create a kind of negative definition . . . [which] illuminates the subject of a poem by specifying what it is not, or by contrasting it with more easily named experiences and phenomena” (Miller, 99). Thus, she tells us that her visitors are not palpable beings, clothed with robes or identifiable by individual names; they are not beings with any need for alma- nacs (calendars of the days, weeks, and months, with the times of rising and setting of the sun and moon). And they are not associated with any particular “climes” (climates or particular regions of the earth). They are independent of both time and place.

What we are told about them in positive terms is that they have “general Homes / Like Gnomes—.” The phrase is striking for its linking of domestic and mythic imagery. In Dickinson’s lexicon, gnomes are imaginary beings that inhabit the interior of the earth and are the guardians of mines and quarries. They are thus associated with the inner world and its buried riches. Significantly, Dickinson used the

word to designate herself as a poet; she frequently signed her letters to her chosen literary mentor, THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON, “Your Gnome,”

alternating this signature with “Your Scholar.” A secondary meaning of “gnome” is a maxim. Scholar Judith Farr suggests that Dickinson used the term for herself to indicate that her poetic gifts were “gnomic” (dealing in maxims) or aphorisms—pithy summations of general truth (Passion, 348, n46).

In the final stanza, the speaker gives two more indications of the nature of her visitors: Their arrival is known to “Couriers within”—the poetic receptors of inspiration who relay its presence to the soul, or to that part of the soul that makes poetry; and “they’re never gone.” Related thematically to the gold that falls continually in “I WASTHESLIGHTEST IN THE HOUSE—” and to the sense of boundless

inspiration that permeates “I TASTEALIQUORNEVER BREWED—,” the poem expresses Dickinson’s aware-

ness of her poetic genius. Unlike the unbridled intoxication of the latter poem, however, this one is a cautious exploration of what can be known or said about the mysterious forces that possess her.

As in many of Dickinson’s poems, she achieves closure and draws attention to her final, climactic statement by varying the basically simple metrical and rhyme scheme. In the final stanza, she aban- dons the regular iambic movement of the first two stanza, with their exact or partial rhymes. The third line, with its stark absence of rhyme, points up the stark reality of what is “not” known about the ever- present visitors. (Porter, Early Poetry, 118–119).

See also “I DWELL IN POSSIBILITY—,” “IT WAS NOT DEATH, FOR I STOODUP,” and “THEYSHUTME UPIN PROSE—.”

FURTHER READING

Christianne Miller, Grammar, 98–104; D. Porter, Early Poetry, 118–119.

“A loss of something ever felt

I—” (1865)

(Fr 1072, J 959)

This poem was written in 1865, one of the “flood years” of creativity, in which Dickinson wrote 229

poems; she was 35, no longer attending church, rarely venturing beyond the hedge of the family compound. In this poem, which critics have spoken of as an expression of religious doubt and statement of intellectual honesty, Dickinson recalls the sense of ineffable longing for something lost, an aware- ness that was always with her, inseparable from her consciousness. In stanzas 1 and 2, she envisions herself as a child Mourner—an image related to other poems about childhood deprivation: She was impoverished, bereft of something from the first. At the same time, she suggests a kind of inverse cho- senness: The child Mourner’s precocious under- standing sets her apart from other children. She carries within her something hidden, a heresy she was too young to be suspected of. The lines suggest Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality,” with its evocation of the child who arrives “trailing clouds of glory,” that is, with knowledge of the divine, which fades as life goes on. In Dickinson’s child Mourner, however, the emphasis is not on the glo- rious remnants of this knowledge, but on the sense of longing and loss. Her first conscious knowledge was of the absence of divinity. As in Wordsworth, aging is seen as growing into a “fainter” wiseness.

What she has lost is embodied as a place: “a Dominion,” “my Delinquent Palaces,” “the site of the Kingdom of Heaven.” In lines 7 and 8, stanza 2, we encounter one of those moments when Dick- inson’s personal grammar can be confusing to the reader. Standard grammar suggests that the Domin- ion becomes “Itself the only Prince cast out.” The Dominion itself is in exile—a more absolute and devastating estrangement than its being merely unavailable to the speaker of the poem. In a strange transformation of the biblical account of Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness, who is cast out of heaven, heaven itself is cast out of some higher, unspeci- fied realm. What seems more likely, however, is that, grammatical irregularity aside, “it” refers to the child Mourner, who, alone, is cast out of the blessed kingdom. Such a notion resonates with Dickinson’s frequent references to herself as “wicked,” among the “bad ones,” left outside the fold, deprived of Christ’s love, in her letters to ABIAH PALMER ROOT

written when she was struggling with her inability to make a public declaration of faith.

In stanza 3, this notion of personal blame is carried forward in the phrase “my Delinquent Pal- aces.” Here the word “my” is crucial: By appro- priating the Delinquent Palaces, she makes their “delinquency” hers, another allusion, perhaps to her failure to believe. This notion is carried a step further in stanza 4, where she gives the lost place the familiar, religious name, “the site of the Kingdom of Heaven.” If the dominion/pal- aces become a grander thing—a Kingdom—they also grow paler, for the speaker is not looking for the Kingdom itself, but for its “site,” evoking an archaeological site, where a vanished city once stood. “Site” also suggests “sight”—the desire to experience the Kingdom directly, to see it with her own eyes.

If the “soft searching” the speaker engages in is her writing, then in stanza 4, the Finger that touches her Forehead is the dawning realization that her chosen path will not lead her to the King- dom. She suspects she is “looking oppositely,” in the wrong place or in the wrong way—that her very act of looking, as Dickinson, the poet, with her bereft consciousness, “opposes” the possibil- ity of finding the Kingdom. The metrical pattern reinforces this forlorn conclusion: Throughout, the poem is composed of lines of 4 iambs, with every first and third line ending with an extra stressed syllable. The last line, however, with its extra two syllables, one stressed, one unstressed, subtly shifts the rhythm, so that the poem seems to trail off wistfully, in a state of nonconclusiveness.

FURTHER READING

Thomas Johnson, Emily Dickinson, 125–126.