Those who’ve been around this blog for a while know my stance on the grand intimidating creature that is Literature: It’s a frightening word, and its content seems designed solely to make us feel dumb. Poetry especially has a reputation for being impossible to decipher unless you’re in with the “high literature” crowd.
The whole air of it is silly and ridiculous.
As someone who has spent years studying and understanding how to exist in that “heightened” place of mind, I’m here to break down that reluctance and almost snobby barrier. Because, the truth is, poetry is awesome. To be more specific, Emily Dickinson is AWESOME. And I pinky promise you don’t need to be able to identify meter or have intimate knowledge of the nineteenth century to enjoy her poetry.
I could talk about this for ages, so let me summarize. First, always try to read poetry aloud. That lets you listen to it, and feel it roll off your tongue. I usually start enjoying the sound of a poem way before I enjoy its meaning. Then, the big scary question: What does it mean? I have a trade secret for you guys, something scholars are very reluctance to admit:
There’s no one right answer.
Because nobody knows. That’s the punchline of the whole thing. Teachers who tell you there’s one definitive meaning to a poem are viewing poetry as something far away and untouchable. But while we can analyze the techniques used, the historical context, even the author’s life to try and decipher what the author had in mind (which is already Sisyphus task), a poem is a conversation between the writer and the reader. You are half of that conversation, so don’t see your role, your connections and observations, short.
What follows is my attempt at a pretty formal analysis of one of Dickinson’s poems. I do this to show you more or less what that kind of thing looks like, so it doesn’t seem quite so foreign. You go word by word, phrase by phrase. When I got stumped, I checked online for others’ interpretations. Then, most importantly, I dropped the image of what a grand literary genius would be like, and let her tell me herself.
One of the challenges with discussing Dickinson specifically is that there is, put simply, too much. We fall back on frequently broached topics; Because I could not stop for Death, or anything to do with Sue, or her lifestyle and refusal to marry. To begin elsewhere is to start counting grains in a desert: where on Earth do you start?! Every time I open my book to hear her speak to me, I never find the same words again (my brother used to pull out my bookmarks when we were little, so I’ve grown accustomed to read without them). But I suppose the only place to start scooping sand is where we’re standing.
Having now just opened the Christianne Miller edition of Dickinson’s Complete Works to pages 418 and 419, chosen randomly, let me share what I’ve just read, for the first time, from her unbound sheets in 1863.
What Soft – Cherubic Creatures –
These Gentlewomen are –
One would as soon assault a Plush –
Or violate a Star –
Such Dimity Convictions –
A Horror so refined
Of freckled Human Nature –
Of Deity – ashamed –
It’s such a common – Glory
A Fisherman’s – Degree –
Redemption – Brittle Lady –
Be so – ashamed of Thee – (Dickinson, 1863)
Where to start? The first stanza calls gentlewomen “Soft – Cherubic Creatures”. Right away, we’re enraptured. The use of Cherubic, turning this concept of a child with angel wings into an adjective, not yet used upon the gentlewomen, but the word creatures, something foreign, distanced from our standard assumptions of humanity, mingling instead with both the divine and animal. She immediately follows with two jarring images: assaulting a plush or violating a star. Not only is she using literary tools (hyperbole, personification, metaphor), but is presenting wonderfully strange images to make her point.
Somewhat more disoriented in the second stanza, though delighted by the combination of horror and refined, I peeked into the White Heat blog, that generously informed me that Dickinson is sneering at the limited concept of being a woman, thus “Dimity Convictions” (which comes from a specific fabric), and “A Horror so refined”. Slighting this belief by both playing into its expectations with words like refined and Deity and Lady, she simultaneously pairs each concept with a transformative contradiction: a horror refined, an ashamed Deity, a brittle Lady.
Emily Dickinson is, in a word, irreverent. A random poem, from a random page, and she is fascinating, appalling, challenging, and naming us all at once. That is the best way I can show you My Emily Dickinson: someone who doesn’t rely on her most famous work, or on the approval of her peers, who is long dead and never met me, but has nonetheless performed nothing short of magic in speaking to those who live in her future.
Sabrina Parra Díaz 