Wykład 17.01.2011

Emily Dickinson (1830- 1886)

Life:

• She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. She lived her whole life in her father’s house.

• ‘Literary exchange’ with T. W. Higginson.

• Seven poems were published during her lifetime.

• About 1,775 poems were found after her death.

Dickinson as a Poet:- religious poet in the Puritan tradition

• poet of the romantic school

• proto- feminist poet

• first poet of modernism

• precursor of postmodernism

Characteristics of her poetry:

• She uses compressed, skewed (swerved, slanted) grammar, doesn’t believe much in plurals.

• She uses dashes.

• She omits auxiliaries, like ‘has been’. She’ll just say ‘been.’

• She often uses the root of the verb for verb.

• Her syntax is exploded (without limits or restraint)

Dickinson- Nature Poet

• Sometimes she is an inhabitant of nature, like the woods, the birds, the squirrels.

• Breathtaking immediacy (she delivers the natural world fresh and quivering for our inspection and delight). We feel like we are there, or that she’s there. Example of this: ‘I will tell you how the sun rose.’

I will tell you how the sun rose-

A ribbon at a time.

The steeples swam in amethyst,

The news like squirrels ran.

The hills untied their bonnets,

The bobolinks begun

Then I said softly to myself,

That must have been the sun!

• Dress of the hills, singing birds- first you have perceptions, then the conceptual tag

‘That must have been the sun!’

• ‘A bird came down the walk’- physical world is infused with the miraculous and the divine ‘natural religion’

• Nature teaches us a lesson: the sun goes down- the end of the human day, light, worry.

Nature’s darker side:

• The natural world is often invested with dark, demonic energy. It is difficult to bear it.

• She feels trapped by the natural world, it is overpowering:

‘I dared not meet the daffodils

For fear their yellow grown

Would pierce me with a fashion

So foreign to my own [..]

• Spectacular beauty of nature and the mortal lesson that it has to teach us.

• Sometimes she is at a distance from reality (sense of living in and through consciousness-modern).

• Sometimes the natural scenes are not depicted directly.

• Her poetry is both perceptual and artistic: hers is a poetry of indirection.

Dickinson’s poetry- Language and consciousness

• Consciousness- our perception of the world, and also what stands between the world and us.

• Dickinson’s poetry helps us realize that the project of great literature is frequently one of un-naming (cleansing the world from its customary labels and tags to install fresh perceptions).

‘It was not Death, for I stood up’ signals: not death, yet what then?

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 (North African windstorms)

Nor fire- for just my Marble feet

Could keep a Chancel, cool- (part of the altar, in front for clergy, or choir)

And yet, it tasted, like them all,

The Figures I have seen

Set orderly, for Burial,

Reminded me, of mine—

• She’s feeling something, and she’s got to find the right tags that would work through others that are wrong.

• Working her way through negativity (‘it was not…’) is a classic involvement of the reader, of negotiating where language points.

She describes what despair really feels like:

As if my life were shaven,

And fitted to a frame,

And could not breathe without a key.

And twas like Midnight, some—

When everything that ticked- has stopped-

And Space stares all around-

Or gristly frosts, first autumn morns,

Repeal the beating ground.

This is an experience of almost death.

And Space stares all around—We were feeling a kind of dreadful anxiety.

But, most, like Chaos—Stopless

‘Stopless’ becomes an adjective, something that can’t be stopped.

Stopless-cool-

Without a change or spar- (mast, a thick pole)

There is nothing to hold onto, we can’t keep afloat: we’re going to go under.

Or even a Report of Land—

To justify—Despair

The poem takes the word ‘despair’ and translates it into precisely the set of images that we’ve just looked at.

She is working through the words that we have to try to come up with something else.

Best way of understanding

Her poems show us the condition of knowing—making human knowledge out of loss, as if loss was our best way of understanding.

P

Most people go around with their eyes, hers were put out. She used to like to see that way, she can’t anymore.

oems about blindness:

Before I got my eye put out

I liked as well to see—

As other Creatures, that have Eyes

And know no other way—

B

(She cannot encompass that. It would simply break her.) She can’t encompass that. The human being cannot take measure of the world. It is impossible..

ut were it told to me—Today—

That I might have the sky

For mine—I tell you that my Heart

Would split for the size of me—

-The Meadows- mine

-All forests- Stintless stars- (stint- restricted in the amount)

-As much of Noon as I could take

-Between mine finite eyes

-The motions of the Dipping Birds

-The Morning’s Amber road

-For mine- to look at when I liked

-The news would strike me dead

-So safer- guess- with just my soul

-Upon the window pane

• She rests her soul against the windowpane, looks out of the world, and writes through the optic of the soul.

‘Success is counted sweetest’

Success is counted sweetest

By those who ne’er succeed

To comprehend a nectar

Requires sorest need.

Success is understood by people who’ve failed.

“Success is counted sweetest”

Not one of all the purple host

Who took the flag to-day

Can tell the definition,

So clear, of victory,

As he, defeated, dying,

On whose forbidden ear

The distant strains of triumph

Burst, agonized and clear.

Being hurt and deprived

It’s hurt that sharpens our sense of what it is we have not had. We tried to have it.

If we are deprived, we are hurting, and we are in pain it sharpens our appetite and our conception for beauty, for pleasure, for goodness, for truth.

‘To learn the Transport by the Pain.’

To learn the Transport (ecstasy, the pleasure) by the pain,

As blind men learn the sun,

To die of thirst, suspecting

That brooks in meadows run,

To stay homesick, homesick feet

Upon a foreign shore

Haunted by native lands, the while,

And blue, beloved air-

We are exiled, shipwrecked. We’re haunted by being at home, by fitting into the world. We are haunted by truth, even though we live in error. Maybe there is only error? Maybe there is only exile? Life a shipwrecked condition, an exile, where we are yearning for cognitive and spiritual home. The search for ‘home’ may be an error.

Woe- (sorrow, distress), deprivation, pain, loss- become angels of vision, channels of knowledge.

Dickinson is the great geographer of pain, pain and trauma, the pain that comes from trauma.

“After great pain, a formal feeling comes”-

You do not know what hit her.

She describes what this feels like after she’s been hit, the numbness.

This is the hour of Lead-

Remembered it outlived,

As freezing persons recollect the Snow-

First- Chill- the Stupor- then letting go-

Our most intense exchanges and negotiations may be with ourselves.

“One need not be a Chamber- to be Haunted”

“Alone, I cannot be”- suggests that our mind is busy, filled with internal traffic, we are all haunted.