CULTIVOS SELECCIONADOS

This famous, fascinating, and difficult poem pres- ents the reader with a double mystery: 1) Who or what is “He”? In other words, what is the poem about? 2) What do the last two lines mean and how do they relate to the rest of the poem?

Stanza 1 initiates the riddle:

He fumbles at your Soul As Players at the Keys— Before they drop full Music on— He stuns you by Degrees—

At first reading, Dickinson seems to be describ- ing the same kind of cat and mouse game she evokes in another poem written at this time, Fr 485, 1862—“The Whole of it came not at once—.” In this brilliant anatomy of the cruel, stage-by-stage death of hope, she writes:

The Cat reprieves the mouse She eases from her teeth

Just long enough for Hope to teaze— Then mashes it to death—

Dickinson calls this “Murder by degrees,” a phrase echoing line 4 of “He fumbles at your Soul”: “He stuns you by Degrees—.” But the imagery of “He fumbles at your Soul” is more suggestive and complex. Dickinson could be talking about religious conversion, death, sex, the experience of writing a poem (which she described as the art of stunning herself with “Bolts—of Melody!”), or even of read- ing a true poem (which made her “feel physically as if the top of [her] head were taken off”).

The “He” of this poem begins as a piano player, then turns into a killer: a Zeus-like hurler of thun- derbolts and a scalper—an archetypal image of terror from Dickinson’s Puritan past. The pivotal image linking music to violence is “hammers”—the hammers of the piano, which, in another meaning, are also tools and instruments of violence. This development has been anticipated in stanza 1 by the lines “As Players at the Keys—/ Before they drop full Music on—,” a bizarre image that turns music into a fearful assault. The fumbling, assault-

ing fingers are also sexual of course, and their “now fainter, now nearer, now slower” rhythm is sugges- tive of the buildup toward orgasm. The notion of religious conversion, in which the convert is struck by God’s presence, is present in the notion of an “etherial Blow” that “Prepares your brittle nature,” and reveals the soul in its nakedness. Common to all these possible meanings is the experience of being overwhelmed in a manner more fearful than pleasurable. Several critics have interpreted it as a veiled expression of Dickinson’s fear of sex, or at the very least of “masculinity and masculine power, here embodied in the hell-fire preaching minister, or a Lover, or God Himself” (Cristanne Miller, Grammar, 114). Poet and feminist critic Adrienne Rich sees the masculine figure as the poet’s own power externalized in an image compatible with a patriarchal society (“Vesuvius at Home,” 105).

For critic Robert Weisbuch there is no need, and, indeed, no way, to pick the “right” interpreta- tion from among all these intriguing alternatives. He believes that the specific identity of the mas- ter is irrelevant and deliberately ambiguous, since what concerns Dickinson is not the cause, but “the experiencing of the terrible moment.” If “He” is the active figure, the pianist, blacksmith, scalper, and wind, the speaker is “the pounded piano, the tem- pered metal, scalped tree, and wind-pawed forest” (Emily Dickinson’s Poetry, 98). The present tense implies an ongoing narrative: a pattern of event that continually recurs.

In the poem’s final lines, Dickinson takes us into the primal forest where scalping is done:

When Winds hold Forests in their Paws— The Universe—is still—

The “you” of the poem becomes a part of nature itself, a passive forest in the “paws” of the winds. This image of merged bestiality and etherealness is the culmination of the building series of images of violent possession. The stillness of the universe is portentous, but whether it portends peace or anni- hilation, the beginning or the end of something wonderful or fearful is not clear. For, as Miller notes, the poem dramatizes “a moment of anticipa- tion and ambiguous fulfillment,” both ecstatic and terrible in which these opposite meanings stand

in constant tension to one another (Grammar, 115–116).

Note that in Thomas Johnson’s version, the poem is all one stanza except for the final unrhymed couplet, which stand alone as a kind of stunned coda. In the Franklin version, the two-line stanza trailing off in a dash, following three four-line stan- zas, conveys a sense of incompleteness. This open- endedness leaves room for different readings for the last line: “The Universe still exists or still waits” or “The Universe is still some unstated modifier, such as “still silent, still cold. . . .”

See also “I WOULD NOT PAINT—A PICTURE—,”

PURITANHERITAGE, and REVIVALS.

FURTHER READING

Cristanne Miller, Grammar, 113–118; Adrienne Rich, “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson,” in Selected Prose, 105; Robert Weis- buch, Emily Dickinson’s Poetry, 98–99

“‘Hope’ is the thing with

feathers—”

(1862)

(Fr 314, J 254)

This well-loved poem is one of Dickinson’s most famous DEFINITION POEMS. As in many of these

verses, the poet defines an abstraction with a physi- cal image. She explores a complex emotional phe- nomenon through the device of personification, a form of metaphor that allows her to imagine her relationship to the subject of the definition.

The personification she assigns to Hope in line 1 is only a partial one: a “thing with feathers” is not yet a bird, but some sort of object, not easily envisioned and defined only by the fact that it is feathered, that is, winged, capable of flight. It is a transient human experience, one that “perches” in the soul but does not live there. It “sings the tune without the words,” that is, a song in which ratio- nal, lexical meaning plays no role, while melody (music, the music of poetry) is all. Finally, it “never stops at all.” By this, Dickinson implies not that human soul is constantly buoyed by hope, but that

hope itself has an independent existence as an eter- nal force in the universe.

Biographer Cynthia Griffin Wolff points out that, although “Christ and the ‘Hope’ that He gave to the world repeatedly figured in traditional emblems as a bird,” modern readers “do not feel the presence of Christ in this poem” (Emily Dickinson, 478). In this context, it is worth noting that hope was an emotionally charged word in the religious struggles Dickinson experienced in her girlhood. During her year at the MOUNT HOLYOKE FEMALE

SEMINARY, an institution that aimed to turn its stu-

dents into devout Christians, 17-year-old Emily was classed among those who professed themselves as “without hope” of finding their Savior. In the poem under discussion, Dickinson draws from the images and lexicon associated with orthodox Christianity, but reinvents them within her own vision of what is sacred.

In stanza 2 the “thing with feathers” solidifies into “the little bird.” Abandoning its perch within the soul, it is transformed from a docile, if persis- tent, songbird into a dauntless world traveler:

I’ve heard it in the chillest land— And on the strangest Sea— Yet—never—in Extremity, It asked a crumb—of me.

Of course, it is really the soul that has been transformed by Dickinson into a landscape of storms, “chillest land” and “strangest Sea.” The image of the brave little bird, whose song is heard most sweetly in the gale of human sorrows, verges perilously on sentimentality. But the poet breathes life into the metaphor by evoking the bird’s mys- terious self-sufficiency and generosity. The giving is all in one direction. In poems Dickinson wrote about hunger during this same period, the speaker is a bird among birds, sharing their crumbs and mastering the art of surviving on next to noth- ing. (See “VICTORY COMES LATE—” and “I HAD BEENHUNGRY, ALLTHE YEARS—”). Here, however,

the bird of Hope is something separate from the speaker, and its song and warmth are received as a form of grace, without expectation or need of reci- procity. The final lines reverberate with a sense of awe and gratitude. Without alluding to a specific

episode, the poet persuades us “that a felt expe- rience informs the definition” (Weisbuch, “Pris- ming,” 216).

Throughout her writing life, Dickinson would continue to explore the nuances of hope as a thread in the complex fabric of human emotions. She wrote about hope in connection with fear (“WHEN I HOPED, I RECOLLECT,” Fr 493, J 768, “When I

hoped I feared,” Fr 594, J 1181) and disappoint- ment (“And this of all my Hopes / This, is the silent end,” Fr 975, “This is the place they hoped before,” Fr 1284). She described the soundless destruction of hope and used it as an occasion to assert the power of the mind to bear its “mighty Freight” and disguise its pain: “A great Hope fell / You heard no noise / The Ruin was within” (Fr 1187).

In two later poems, she once more attempts to define hope, but without the straightforward ebullience of the early definition poem. In Fr 1424, written in 1877, she declared: “Hope is a strange invention—/ A Patent of the Heart—/ In unremitting action / Yet never wearing out—.” Like the “thing with feathers,” this version of hope never stops. But it is a strange artifice, some- thing invented by the heart. She goes on to call it an “electric adjunct”—a reductive, mechanical term and, in her concluding lines, speaks of its “unique momentum,” which “embellishes” “all we own—.” What at first reading appears to be a posi- tive image soon reveals its skeptical, even bitter, underpinnings. For the word embellishment has the primary meaning of decoration and beautification; but it connotes artifice and falsity, distortion and self-deception.

In Fr 1493, written in 1878: “Hope is a subtle Glutton—” Dickinson gives us a personification diametrically opposite to the little bird who never asks a crumb of the one he warms and inspires. Note, however, that Hope is a “subtle Glutton.” This Hope “feeds opon the Fair—,” implying that it stays alive by focusing only on what is good or beautiful. If we observe it more closely, the poet goes on, we will note that, paradoxically, its gluttony implies great abstinence. What Hope abstains from is revealed in the second, conclud- ing stanza: “His is the Halcyon Table—/ That never seats but One—/ And whatsoever is con-

sumed / The same amount remain—.” The price of Hope’s “Halcyon” (tranquil) table is twofold: solitude and lack of fulfillment. Hope’s “food” is available in unvarying quantity, neither increasing nor decreasing. By its very nature, Hope remains in a state of eternal stasis, never attaining the object of its desire. The same shrewd insight is expressed in a poem of 1873, “Could Hope inspect her Basis” (Fr 1282), where Dickinson concludes that the only “assassin” capable of destroying Hope is “Prosperity—.” In other words, hope, once attained, is no longer hope but another state—one of satiety perhaps, but lacking hope’s special exaltation. This notion that expectation is superior to actuality, a central one in Dickinson, was given perhaps its best-known formulation in the 1877 poem “WHONEVERWANTED—MADDEST

JOY,” in which the poet warns against attaining

the object of desire, “lest the Actual—/ Should disenthrall thy soul—.”

See also “GOD IS A DISTANT, STATELY LOVER,”

“GRIEFISAMOUSE,” ABIAH PALMER ROOT, AMHERST

ACADEMY, and REVIVALISM.

FURTHER READING

David Porter, Early Poetry, 147; Barton Levi St. Armand and George Monteiro, “Dickinson’s ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” 34–37; Robert Weisbuch, “Prisming,” in Handbook, Grabher et al., eds., 216; Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Emily Dickin- son, 478.