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(1860) (Fr 143, J 76)

In this DEFINITIONPOEM, Dickinson takes the reader on a journey into a symbolic landscape: the jour- ney of the “inward soul” into “deep Eternity.” She defines exultation, not as arrival or fulfillment, but as “the going,” the act of embarking on the seaward journey. Typical of many of her definitions, this one makes a noun (“Exultation”) correspond to a verb or verbal form (“the going”) instead of to another noun. From this simple core, the definition then expands in complex ways: “Exultation is ‘going’ in a particular landscape and direction” (Miller, A Poet’s Grammar, 84–85, 97–98).

There is no lyrical “I” in this poem. Nonethe- less, the speaker is clearly felt to be the “inward soul” of the poem, one whose native place is the Land, not the sea, not deep eternity. She makes this identification explicit in stanza 3, in the line “Bred as we, among the mountains.” On one level, this is an allusion to the geographical reality of her life in the CONNECTICUT RIVER VALLEY, surrounded by mountains. In another famous poem, she writes, “I never saw the sea” (Fr 800, J 1052); in fact, her only chance to glimpse it would have been during one of her infrequent visits to Boston, and there is no record in her surviving letters that she did. But inwardness is also a complex metaphor: It connotes the native, safe but confining place, which must be left behind to journey toward Eternity. And that “place” is a spiritual one; after all, it is the soul that is inward. This suggests caution, timidity: a soul that does not habitually venture outward. But an inward soul is also one that looks inward for what it needs; it is capable of transcending physical limita- tions and knowing the world through imagination. This is precisely the assertion of Fr 800:

I never saw a Moor— I never saw the Sea—

Yet know I how the Heather looks And what a Billow be.

Thus, in “Exultation is the going” Dickinson escapes, via the inward soul’s exertions, into an exhilarating inner journey. Significantly, in the most up-to-date edition of her complete poems (Franklin), this poem is preceded and followed by poems filled with cocoons, prisons, and the dream of escaping: “But I tug at my childish bars/ Only to fail again!” In “Exultation” she succeeds in imagining the escape; her focus is not on the bars that confine but on the landscape opening before her. She moves easily “Past the Houses,” and thence “Past the Headlands,” points of land, usually high and with a sheer drop, extending out into a body of water. Once the head- lands separating water from land have been passed, the voyage into deep Eternity has begun. Eternity, one of the great concerns of Dickinson’s poetry, is defined here only as the traveler’s distant, ecstatic destination, an unknown, transcendent reality.

At this point, as stanza 3 begins, the journey/ definition appears to be interrupted by the speak- er’s question,

Bred as we, among the mountains, Can the sailor understand The divine intoxication

Of the first league out from Land?

Here, Dickinson’s idiosyncratic grammar pres- ents a difficulty. According to standard grammar, the modifying phrase “Bred as we, among the mountains” refers to the noun most closely follow- ing it: “the sailor.” But the “we” is the speaker, the inward soul, the nonsailor. The intended sense of the stanza can only be “Can the sailor (who spends his life at sea) understand the divine intoxication felt by those of us who were bred among the moun- tains?” The question is rhetorical, an assertion that the sailor cannot understand what the inward soul is experiencing. “Exultation” (and its variant “divine intoxication”) is thus further defined as something inaccessible to one for whom the sea is second nature. By shifting the poem’s emphasis to the sailor, Dickinson contrasts those who have an abundance of something “divinely intoxicat- ing,” with those who have been deprived of it and

are experiencing it for the first time. In declaring that the intoxication of the deprived inlander is greater than what the sated sailor can understand, Dickinson reverts to a central theme of her poetry: the notion that deprivation brings a greater, truer appreciation of what is lacking (see “SUCCESS IS COUNTEDSWEETEST”).

Dickinson wrote many poems with references to boats as emblems of the solitary self on the broad sea of Life and Eternity. The same year that she wrote the poem under discussion, she also composed a darker one using the images of sea and sailor, in which she is turned back from a near encounter with Eternity: “Therefore, as One returned, I feel/ Odd secrets of the line to tell!/ Some Sailor, skirt- ing foreign shores—/ Some pale Reporter, from the awful doors/ Before the Seal!” (Fr 132).

But “Exultation is the going” is fired by a joyous optimism: the inward soul is on its way; the voyage, however much delayed, is beginning. In both tone and imagery, it echoes a letter the poet sent to her friend ABIAH PALMER ROOT in younger days, when

she was embarking on her lifelong journey of inde- pendent thought and creativity: “. . . The shore is safer, Abiah, but I love to buffet the sea—I can count the bitter wrecks here in these pleasant waters, and hear the murmuring winds, but oh, I love the dan- ger! . . .” (L 39, late 1850). “The first league out from Land,” however, is not a large distance—3 statute miles or about 4.83 kilometers. The traveler can still look back and see land. With the journey scarcely begun, the speaker is still in that thrilling state of expectation, which characteristically holds more sat- isfaction for her than reaching the desired goal.

FURTHER READING

Suzanne Juhasz, Undiscovered Continent, 132–137.

“ ‘Faith’ is a fine invention”

(1861) (Fr 202, J 185)

This much-quoted quatrain has generally been read as Dickinson’s economical critique of the brand of religious belief that ignores the evidence of sci- ence. As such, it reflects her time as a student at

AMHERST ACADEMY, where she was influenced by

the thinking of EDWARD HITCHCOCK. For this emi-

nent geologist, chemist, and man of religion, there was no contradiction between science and faith. He believed that, to the contrary, the findings of science only bolstered faith in a creator and an ordered creation.

The mocking speaker of this epigram is not so even-handed, however. She ridicules faith, both by putting it in quotation marks, and by defining it as “invention,” a word drawn from the vocabulary of the field of investigation this kind of faith stands opposed to. The “Gentlemen who see!” are uphold- ers of this rigid patriarchal religion, clergymen or theologians, and their “seeing” is clearly meant in the revelatory sense—to see spiritually, to see God’s Truth. “See” is underlined in Dickinson’s original manuscript, as if to mock the gentlemen’s fervor for a vision that she dismisses as an “invention.” That kind of seeing may be all right for such gentlemen, she implies, but let us have access to the vision of the microscope, in the event of an “Emergency.” Let us keep the more useful inventions of science and modern medicine around, just in case. Critic Charles Anderson suggests that Dickinson’s wit and irony in this poem are wholly the result of the way she plays off native Saxon words to describe the faith of the fathers and uses learned borrow- ings to describe the modern doubt. He writes: “The deliberateness of this contrast is shown in the skill with which she complicates the issues by throwing one unexpected Latinate word into the first line, so that faith becomes a mechanical thing . . .” (Stair- way, 39).

For scholar David Porter, the poem implies that close investigation of the things of this world is what sustains one who does not accept the specious comfort of strong belief (Early Poetry, 160). Cer- tainly Dickinson was such an observer, of nature, and of the inner landscape of thoughts and feel- ings. Biographer Richard B. Sewall offers a differ- ent interpretation, based on Dickinson’s belief that faith must be “nimble,” rather than complacent. He suggests that the poem is about the need for an ever-watchful eye, a “spiritual microscope” that continues to question, as hers did until the end of her life, the assumptions of one’s faith.

Dickinson included this quatrain in a letter to her close friend, Springfield Republican editor SAMUEL BOWLES. In the letter, the verse is followed

by these cryptic sentences:

You spoke of the ‘East.’ I have thought about it this winter. Don’t you think you and I should be shrewder, to take the Mountain Road?

That Bareheaded life—under the grass—wor- ries one like a Wasp. (L 220, about 1860)

Viewed within the context of this brief let- ter, with its oblique references to the “East,” as the Resurrection was referred to, “the Mountain Road,” the arduous pathway to God’s realm, and the “Bareheaded life,” which clearly refers to death, the quatrain seems to be part of an ongoing reli- gious discussion. While Sewall accepts this reading, he also sees a very different underlying concern in poem and letter: the issue of whether Bowles should publish her work:

[S]he cannot live on the “faith” that somehow, someday, some editor will see her work for what it is and publish it. She has run out of patience; this is an “Emergency.” Get a micro- scope! The ‘East,’ about which Bowles had spoken to her, may be the world of the Bos- ton and New York publishers. But she urges Bowles not to wait for them. Would it not be ‘prudent,’ ‘shrewder,’ for her poems to take the “Mountain Road” (the path between the range of hills that separates Amherst and Springfield [the home of the Springfield Republican] for publication in the Republican? Time is running out. There may be a sense of urgency because of Bowles’ health, which had been precarious for several years. “That Bareheaded life—under the grass—worries one like a Wasp.” (Life, II, 478–479).

This interpretation may be a bit of a stretch (Sewall himself says only that it “may be valid”), yet it is worth remembering that Dickinson regu- larly employed code words and phrases with inti- mate correspondents such as Bowles and SUSAN

HUNTINGTON GILBERT DICKINSON. She also incor-

porated her poems within her letters in such a way as to alter the meanings they had outside the let-

ter context. Thus, what was originally a 16-word critique of the old religion might well have been used, in this letter, to express a very different crisis of belief.

See also “A WORD MADE FLESH IS SELDOM,”

“THOSE—DYINGTHEN,” and LETTERS.

FURTHER READING

Charles Anderson, Stairway, 38–40; David Porter, Early Poetry, 160. Richard B. Sewall, Life, II, 478– 479; Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Emily Dickinson, 248.

“Forever—is composed of

Nows—” (1863) (Fr 690, J 624)

In this DEFINITION POEM Emily Dickinson envi- sions a “Forever” that is not only accessible but also present at every moment of life. She is not dealing here with what she called her “Flood sub- ject” of whether there is an afterlife in the Chris- tian sense—the soul’s immortality. Instead, what concerns her is the heaven on earth, a sense of mortal time that partakes of eternity. In a two-line epigram written the same year, Fr 500, Dickinson captures the essential idea behind this poem: “Not ‘Revelation’—’tis—that waits, / But our unfur- nished eyes—.” Revelation is already here—it is we who lack the vision to recognize it. “Forever—is composed of Nows—” belongs to a group of poems in which Dickinson locates heaven in the every- day world, where “commonplace objects and acts blaze into spiritual significance” (Weisbuch, “Pris- ming,” 220). These include Fr 1734, where she writes, “EDENISTHATOLDFASHIONED HOUSE” / We dwell in every day / Without suspecting our abode / Until we drive away,” and Fr 236, “SOMEKEEPTHE

SABBATH GOING TO CHURCH—” where she wor- ships among the flowers, birds and bees of her gar- den, declaring, “So instead of getting to Heaven, at last—/ I’m going, all along.”

In a poem written the previous year, Fr 310, she notes with keen self-insight: “Heaven is what I can- not reach! / The Apple on the Tree—/ Provided it do hopeless—hang—/ That—“Heaven” is—to Me!” Here, Heaven is defined as the unattainable,

a vision that arises from a sense of inner emptiness and exclusion from paradise. Should she possess “the interdicted Land” it would cease to be Heaven. But in “Forever—is composed of Nows—,” the poet describes another inner reality in which Heaven is attainable, not in any sudden or singular act of tak- ing possession or transcending to another realm, but moment by moment.

In the first stanza, she declares time and eternity to consist of the same substance (“Nows”):

Forever—is composed of Nows— ’Tis not a different time— Except for Infiniteness— And Latitude of Home—

In this striking image, she evokes eternity in domestic terms, as a kind of celestial upgrade to a never-ending, more spacious home than the one she occupies on earth. Critic Robert Weisbuch sug- gests the core of this distinction when he notes that “If paradise is available for the right asking in every instant, it lasts only for an instant as well, and its departure makes a newly intolerable gloom of absence” (“Prisming,” 220). But in the “Forever” of the poem under discussion, there is no such loss. This is the poet’s vision of earthly paradise and in what follows she speculates on how we might get there.

What would be necessary, she tell us in stanza 2, is to give up the illusion that the smooth fabric of time can be artificially divided into separate, tiny snippets (“dates,” “months,” and “years”) and thus open ourselves to the boundless continuity of sacred time. Dickinson describes this surren- der as a dissolving and an exhaling, images that evoke the serenity of a self-forgetful yet life-giv- ing merger with a greater whole. What such merg- ing signified to Dickinson is suggested in letters to her sister-in-law, SUSAN HUNTINGTON GILBERT

DICKINSON, in which she speaks of “forever” in a

similar tone, using language that echoes that of this poem. “There is no first, or last, in Forever— It is Centre, there, all the time—,” she wrote in 1864 (L 288) and in one of her last letters to Sue, she implored “Be Sue, while I am Emily—Be next, what you have ever been, Infinity—.” This suggests that, in spite of her disappointment in Sue and the

estrangement that had long existed between the two women, in Emily’s inner world, Sue contin- ued to represent a boundless, never-ending love. Is the “forever” of this poem, then, connected to the vision of a boundless love? This notion is sup- ported by another poem written around this time, in which she writes of her “idolatrous” love as both time and eternity: “YOU CONSTITUTED TIME—/ I

deemed Eternity / A Revelation of Yourself—.” In stanza 3, she continues to elaborate on what such uninterrupted time would be like, “Without Debate—or Pause—/ Or Celebrated Days—” and concludes that our years would be no different from “Anno Dominies.” (Note that in Johnson’s earlier version of the poem, he corrected the poet’s mis- spelling and gives the correct “Anno Domini’s”). “Anno Domini” or A.D., of course, indicates the

Year of Our Lord commonly used in the kind of earthly calendar Dickinson advocates giving up. But she uses the word here in the reverse sense, returning it to its literal meaning of “God’s years.” This much is clear. The question that lingers, how- ever, is whether the poet is as enthusiastic about this loss of distinctions as she appeared to be earlier in the poem. Would a life without debate or pause or days to celebrate be a relief or an unrelieved bore? These things, after all, represent the imposi- tion of human perceptions and values on raw time, mental categories we are not really capable of dis- solving. The poet surely knew this, and on another level would not have wished to dissolve them. Her poetic vision is one in which mental and temporal divisions, ceaseless inner debate, and awareness of time’s passage play a dominant role.

Nonetheless, what she strove for in her poetry was an almost superhuman freezing of these inexo- rable processes that would allow her to penetrate to the eternal core of “Now.” When she wrote this poem, Dickinson was in the middle of an extraor- dinary period of artistic fecundity; she would write 295 poems in 1863 alone, her most productive year. In writing these poems she must have experienced that expanded, heightened consciousness that comes to the artist in moments of transcendent creation. She had discovered the opposite of her universe of deprivation, one in which the moments were sufficient unto themselves. Dickinson’s great

biographer Richard B. Sewall observes, “Much of what is often called the ‘breathlessness’ of Emily Dickinson’s poems comes from the urgency of her attempts to arrest the moment, to catch and preserve its essence” (Life, II, 681). In this con- text, “Forever—is composed of Nows—” stands as a description, both of Dickinson’s poetic oeuvre, consisting of some 1,789 separate “Nows,” as well as of her life in poetry, as she experienced it.

See also “CRISISISA HAIR” and “I SHALLKNOW WHY—WHEN TIMEISOVER.”

FURTHER READING

Richard B. Sewall, Life, 681; Robert Weisbuch, “Prisming,” in Handbook, Grabher et al., eds., 220; Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Emily Dickinson, 234, 237.

“Four Trees—upon a solitary

Acre—” (1863)

(Fr 778, J 742)

This striking landscape poem, widely analyzed by Dickinson scholars, deals with the poles of certainty and uncertainty, order and disorder, design and randomness in the natural world. Instead of Dick- inson’s usual lyric “I,” the speaker is an impersonal voice that reports what it observes while attempt- ing to understand the relationship of the scene to a greater whole. The opening description gives the reader a bare minimum of particulars: Four trees are standing on an acre of ground. There is no hint that the number of trees has any special meaning, beyond the fact that this is the number that hap- pens to be there. The poet does not tell us why the trees are there, whether they have simply sprung up or were left standing when the rest of the acre was cleared. Moreover, Dickinson, a learned botanist, chooses not to specify the type of trees. Nor do we know why the acre is “solitary.” Whether we are meant to believe that there is nothing else on the acre or that the acre is in some way disconnected from its surroundings is unclear. None of these things are important to the speaker, who is intent on plumbing the larger meaning of what she sees.