PRINCIPALES EFECTOS BIOLÓGICOS DE LAS JAULAS DE CULTIVO DE PECES EN EL MEDIO MARINO

(1862) (Fr 291, J 311)

This is one of Dickinson’s most famous riddle poems. If she had been given to naming her poems, she might have entitled this one “The Snow,” as she indeed alluded to it when she sent a copy to editor Thomas Niles (“I bring you a chill gift—My Cricket [“FURTHER IN SUMMERTHAN THE BIRDS”] and the Snow,” L 813). But a title would have worked against the main thrust of the poem—not simply to set a riddle before the reader, but to evoke the forever transforming, unfixable nature of the snow. To name it would be to undermine the intention of going beyond names to the mysterious essence of a phenomenon. Dickinson does this by conjuring a series of metaphors for snow, until the snow itself becomes a metaphor for any magical and ephemeral reality.

In this virtuoso display of metaphor-making, the snow becomes increasingly disembodied. “It” begins its transformations in the domestic realm, sifting through the leaden sieve of the storm clouds:

It sifts from Leaden Sieves— It powders all the Wood— It fills with Alabaster Wool The Wrinkles of the Road—

For Dickinson, who became the baker of the household, the sieve—a utensil for separating flour from bran, or the fine and the coarse of any pulver- ized substance—was a particularly apt image. The fine substance thus obtained “powders” the wood of houses, barns, and fences, like flour on a wooden board. Thus far, the imagery is simple and visual. But in the next two lines, the poet gives her imagination greater rein, turning “It” into “Alabaster Wool,” an image that merges the hard, white, smooth, cool material of which gravestones are made (see “SAFE IN THEIR ALABASTER CHAMBERS—”) with the soft, irregular, warm material of which sweaters and socks are knit. This substance, with its complex associa- tions, fills the “Wrinkles of the Road,” making it young again.

In stanza 2, “It” becomes increasingly animated, airborne, and disembodied. In the first two lines,

alternately moving in opposite ways, it turns into a flock of birds, first scattering, then “condensing.” “It” then becomes the somewhat vague “Juggler’s Figures”—balls or pins, presumably—that “situ- ates / Upon a baseless Arc—.” What holds the figures aloft has no material base, but is sustained by momentum and mystery.

In stanza 3, “It” is defined not by nouns but by verbs delineating simultaneous movement and stasis: “It” traverses yet halts, disperses and stays. In the final image of “It” curling “itself in Cap- ricorn—/ Denying that it was—,” the snow has withdrawn to a distant stellar constellation, a curl- ing wisp of smoke perhaps, or an ornery cat, so far away as to leave the speaker in doubt as to whether it has visited at all. She chooses Capri- corn, a goat with a fish tail, the tenth sign of the Zodiac, which represents the winter solstice. By this time, although we have doubtless “guessed” the answer to the riddle, “snow” is a great deal more than snow; it has become the deeper riddles of nature’s endless metamorphoses and the uncer- tainty of human perception.

In his illuminating article on Dickinson’s per- vasive use of the riddle “as almost a technique,” critic and poet Anthony Hecht traces her models to both the Bible and to the body of children’s fairy tales and verse with which she was familiar. Other riddle poems include “Who is the East?” (Fr 1085), “It sounded as if the Streets were run- ning” (Fr 1454), “She slept beneath a tree” (Fr 15), “The Guest is gold and crimson” (Fr 44), “A ROUTE OF EVANESCENCE,” “A NARROW FELLOW INTHE GRASS,” “A VISITORIN MARL—,” and “HE FUMBLESATYOUR SOUL.” When she sent these rid-

dle poems to her correspondents, Dickinson some- times enclosed a concrete object—a cocoon, pine needle, and some apples—as an “answer” to the riddle. While she doubtless enjoyed the intellectual play of these exercises, the fundamental notion of a riddle went deep into her nature, to her sense of existence as the greatest riddle of all. As she writes in the conclusion of “SOMETHINGSTHATFLY THERE BE—” (Fr 68), she writes: “Can I expound

the skies? / How still the Riddle lies!” A good part of her greatness lies in her never losing sight of the stillness of the Riddle, while continuing to come at

it from as many angles as her remarkably fruitful imagination could envision.

Dickinson had a considerably longer, earlier fin- ished version of this poem, which develops the notion of the snow as an annihilating force; a much darker work, it entirely lacks the playfulness of this one.

FURTHER READING

Anthony Hecht, “The Riddles of Emily Dickin- son,” in Critical Essays, Judith Farr, ed., 149–162; Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Emily Dickinson, 435, 437, 482–483.

“It was not Death, for I stood

up,” (1862) (Fr 355, J 510)

One of Dickinson’s most agonized and complex explorations of an inner state, this poem has been the subject of much critical scrutiny. Some see in the poem indications of religious despair, while at the other end of the spectrum are those who fer- ret out symptoms of severe mental illness. What- ever their differences, however, most scholars agree that Dickinson is here engaged in the attempt to define what cannot be defined, to name what has no name, to give form to what is formless. This is evident from the first word of the poem, “It”—“a blank around which the poet draws the boundaries for a phenomenon she cannot name . . . [a] kind of hole in knowledge. . . .” (Miller, Grammar, 76).

In her effort to describe an overwhelming inner state for which she has no ready designation, the poet leans heavily on the use of negatives:

It was not Death, for I stood up, And all the Dead, lie down— It was not Night, for all the Bells Put out their Tongues, for Noon. It was not Frost, for on my Flesh I felt Siroccos—crawl—

Nor Fire—for just my marble feet Could keep a Chancel, cool—

By a process of elimination, she pares away all the things that this state was not, in order to get at

what it was. The result, however, is anything but a sense of clarity, for the poem is structured on an elusive “logic.” For one thing, there is a lack of par- allelism among the negated options: While death is an existential state, night is a period of time, and frost and fire are extreme temperature sensations. Further, the speaker, even in her negations, is con- fused and prone to contradicting herself. Rather than sticking to her negative assertions, the poet partially retracts them in stanza 3: “And yet, it tasted like them all.” She goes on to say how “It” “tasted” like death, night, and frost, but not how it tasted like fire. This imbalance contributes to the unpredictable feeling of the poem and deprives the reader of a coherent structure to hold on to. Instead, Dickinson leaps from one stunning image to the next, creating new puzzles with each suppos- edly “explanatory” line.

Thus, in stanza 1, she eliminates the possibility that she is dead, but who are all the dead who are lying down? The image of the bells suggest she may be in a church or nearby in a churchyard cemetery. The number of times the bells toll is offered as proof that “It was not Night,” but noon. However, as critic Sharon Cameron points out, since “chimes at noon sound indistinguishable from those at midnight,” the speaker betrays her own confusion (Lyric Time, 49–50). In the image of the bells that “Put out their Tongues, for Noon,” the “Tongues” can be visualized as the clappers in the bell; this is a grotesque image, suggesting gleeful mockery of the poet’s state, as if the bells were spitefully stick- ing out their tongues at her. Furthermore, while the bells toll for “Noon,” a symbol for Dickinson of life at its highest intensity, often connoting love, fulfillment, happiness, and heaven, the tolling of bells, especially in light of the preceding lines, is also associated with death. Thus, death, denied in the first line, still hovers within the borders of the stanza.

The second stanza repeats the “It was not . . . for . . .” structure of the first, supposedly eliminat- ing “Frost” and “Fire” as explanations of the speak- er’s state. (Note how Dickinson re-enlivens a stock phrase: instead of having her “flesh crawl” with disgust or terror, she feels Siroccos—extremely hot, southern winds—crawling on her flesh). Yet the

two negations negate one another: She knows it was not frost because she felt on fire, it was not fire because she was so cold—her “marble feet” alone “Could keep a Chancel, cool—.” A chancel is the part of the choir of a church between the altar or communion table and the railing that encloses it. Why would it be hot, difficult to cool? Noting that a chancel is supposed to be located in the ecclesi- astical east of a church, scholar John Cody specu- lates: “East is the direction of sunrise and therefore suggests . . . approaching light and warmth. . . . By extension then, the chancel is the most ‘warmly’ located part of the church. But the poet’s mere presence is sufficient to chill it” (After Great Pain, 327). Charles Anderson suggests that we are meant to see the poet kneeling at the chancel rail, “beyond which sacrament and conviction are at white heat.” The word “tasted” in the following stanza leads him to speculate that the sacrament being enacted is the Eucharist (“Despair,” 29). Critic Joanne Feit Diehl, while agreeing that “[t]he ceremonies of the altar, the ‘Chancel,’ indicate that the moment is sacramental,” sees no sign of redemption in the experience that is evoked (Romantic Imagination, 117).

In the third stanza, “tasted” may simply imply how visceral the speaker’s experience was, or per- haps that it has left an aftertaste of all the things (death, night, frost, fire) it supposedly “was not.” For, in the remainder of the poem, she continues to “taste” them, exploring new images of death, night, and frost (but not fire). The sense that she was dead returns in her sense that she was like “The Figures I have seen / Set orderly, for Burial.” The horror implicit in “Set orderly” arises from the sense of indifference toward the dead, who are manipulated as unruly objects that must be brought under con- trol. The passive voice, which evades the issue of who is doing the ordering, enhances this sense of the dead as objects, which is developed in stanza 4. In images of enclosure and suffocation, the speaker sees her life as “shaven” and “fitted to a frame.” If this is meant to be an image of a body placed in a coffin, it is a terrible one, in which the body itself has turned to wood. Moreover, this coffin is locked with a key, a detail Anderson explains by noting that “spirits are locked in bodies, and since coffin

and corpse are one here, her vital life ‘could not breathe without a key’ to release it from the body of this despair” (“Despair,” 28).

Line 4 of stanza 4 returns to the image of night, negated in stanza 1, since the bells indicated it was noon. She now admits “And ’twas like Midnight, some—” And this midnight, as we move into stanza 5, is like the stoppage of time, like space staring all around. We are no longer in a church, and whether it is day or night is no longer relevant. The most fundamental dimensions by which the mind orients itself—time and space—are disappearing. In the next two lines, as she tells why her unnamable state “tasted” of frost, time (“first Autumn morns”) and space (the frozen ground) are restored. The “Grisly frosts” that “Repeal” the “Beating Ground” descend like a grim judgment from on high. The image is a complex one and cannot be contained within any one picture. The ground is “repealed,” as laws are, in this case the law of life. At the same time, the ground is likened to a beating heart that is stilled.

In the sixth stanza, the speaker drops all these partial analogies to what she experiences, finding its closest resemblance in “Chaos.” The universal indifference and ruthlessness that has been sug- gested in previous images here finds expression in the words “cool” and “stopless”—a typical Dick- insonian neologism, formed by adding a suffix to an established word. By turning the noun stop into a negative modifier, she creates a new meaning, endowing the notion of “not stopping” with a ter- rible momentum. Then with increasing concrete- ness she embodies this meaning in the images “No Chance,” “No Spar (ship mast),” “No Report of Land,” all images of what might stop or interrupt the “stopless Chaos,” if they existed. The final line presents one final puzzle: Why “Despair”? Wouldn’t “Report of Land” justify hope? In her elliptical way, Dickinson seems to be saying just that: Yes, to the sailor lost at sea, a report of land would justify hope; and only where hope can exist is despair possible.

See also “I FELTA FUNERAL, INMY BRAIN,” and

“THERE’SACERTAIN SLANTOFLIGHT.”

FURTHER READING

Charles R. Anderson, “Despair,” in Modern Critical Views, Harold Bloom, ed., 26–29; Sharon Cam-

eron, Lyric Time, 48–51; John Cody, After Great Pain, 326–328; Joanne Feit Diehl, Romantic Imagi- nation, 117–118; Cristanne Miller, Grammar, 78– 80, 100–101.

“It would have starved a

Gnat—” (1862) (Fr 444, J 612)

This stark evocation of childhood deprivation belongs with such poems as “I WASTHESLIGHTEST IN THE HOUSE—” and “I HAD BEEN HUNGRY, ALL THE YEARS—,” written during the same year. For Dickinson, who was 31 when she wrote these poems and in the thick of her period of “flood” cre- ativity, these fictionalized narratives seek to define the emotional essence—if not the literal facts—of her early years. Taken both individually and as a whole, they draw a childhood interior characterized by extreme smallness, hunger, and helplessness.

Of the various speakers in Dickinson’s hun- ger poems, this one is the most diminished and dehumanized. Elsewhere, the speaker is a sparrow (“VICTORYCOMESLATE—”) or the dining compan- ion of birds (“I had been hungry, all the Years”). In the nightmarish imagery of this poem, not only is she smaller than a gnat, but she is attacked and surrounded by parts of creatures (the “Claw” of hunger), by a bloodsucking worm (“Leech”) and a fire-breathing reptile of myth and fairy tale (“Dragon”). Though infinitesimally tiny, she has the appetite of a “living child.” Her dilemma lies in precisely this mismatch between her needs and her resources:

Nor like the Gnat—had I— The privilege to fly

And seek a Dinner for myself— How mightier He—than I!

The speaker is powerless. Not only is she forced to live on less than what would sustain a gnat, she is without the gnat’s resources to find its own food—or to dash its life out on the windowpane and be released from “beginning again.” The latter is an ambiguous phrase, which may refer simply to awakening day after day and once more engaging in

the quest for nourishment. Or it may be interpreted as a reference to an afterlife—something a gnat need not worry about, but whose prospect here does not comfort the speaker. Still, suicide beckons as a desirable, but never fully embraced, alternative to the constricted life she is forced to live, just as it does at the conclusion of “I was the slightest in the House”: “And if it had not been so far—/ And anyone I knew / Were going—I had often thought / How noteless—I could die—.”

Although the poem is a bitter accusation, an expression of rage, contained by the grotesque imagery, the identity of the accused is noticeably absent. While the most obvious candidates are Dickinson’s parents, some readers have suggested that God is the sadistic and withholding adult; certainly Dickinson evokes—and reproaches—the deity in similar terms in other poems (see “I NEVER LOSTASMUCHBUTTWICE—,” “GODISA DISTANT, STATELY LOVER,” “OF COURSE—I PRAYED—,” and

“IT’S EASY TO INVENT A LIFE—.”). Others, point-

ing out that the Gnat is masculine, have seen the whole poem as a comparison between “He” and “I” and speculated that writing about herself as child was Dickinson’s way of talking about being a woman in her male-dominated world. Emphasis is on what He could do and what the feminine “I” could not. The word not appears with greater frequency in Dickinson’s work than any words but articles, a few prepositions and and, it, is, that. The pattern reveals her way of getting at the nature of her experience indirectly, “or through mul- tiple, competing perceptions” (Miller, Grammar, 101). In this poem, “the female self is seen as the negative space that allows the positive pattern to merge” (Fulton, “Her Moment of Brocade,” 24– 25). Another, related supposition is that the poem reflects a state of being that has followed the poet into adulthood, an expression of the poet’s inabil- ity “to extinguish such inevitable hungers as the desire for literary recognition and for sexual gratifi- cation, or to renounce them” (Pollack, “Thirst and Starvation,” 71).

In light of these possible readings, it would be reductive to see the poem as “evidence” of parental (and particularly maternal) deprivation. Although Dickinson did once write, “I never had a mother

. . .,” she wrote in her letters in positive, affection- ate terms of home and parents with far greater frequency. The poetic truth she had to tell about her childhood and the more complex reality of her early years should not be confused. In her child- hood poems, she was creating a myth of her per- sonal origins, full of “exaggerated and fabulistic elements” (Habegger, My Wars, 406). Against this persona she would define the self-reliant “Colum- nar Self,” the self-nurturing poet she was striving to become. It is interesting to compare her vision of herself as a starved child with the mature Dickin- son’s nurturing relationship to children. According to her niece, MARTHA GILBERT DICKINSON BIANCHI

(Mattie), who lived next door, “Aunt Emily stood for indulgence” (Face to Face, 6). The poet, who devoted many daylight hours to baking and cook- ing for her family, would be remembered by the neighborhood children as the lady at an upstairs window who frequently lowered a basket of ginger- bread to them as they played outside the house.

See also “A LOSSOFSOMETHINGEVERFELT I—,”

“GOD GAVE A LOAF TO EVERY BIRD—,” and EMILY

NORCROSS DICKINSON.

FURTHER READING

Nina Baym, “God, Father, and Lover,” in Puritan Influences in American Literature, Emory Elliott, ed., 193–209; Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Face to Face, 6: Alice Fulton, “Her Moment of Brocade,” 9–44; Cristanne Miller, Grammar, 98–104; Vivian Pollak, “Thirst and Starvation,” in Critical Essays, Judith Farr, ed., 62–75.

“I’ve seen a Dying

Eye” (1863) (Fr 648, J 547)

Like many Victorians, Dickinson was fascinated and, to some degree obsessed, by deathbed scenes. As a girl of 15, she had insisted on being admit-