From It Came from Amherst, Mildred Faintly’s just published annotated and selected poetry of Emily Dickinson.
A careful reading of Dickinson makes it clear that she, far more than Poe, is the 19th century American master of horror. Dickinson’s poetic terrors are particularly significant because they suggest a power specific to her gender. Women identify the self with the body far more than men do. Poe stories raise the fear factor by recourse to elaborate claustrophobic situations. Dickinson achieves more with a single very physical detail that induces a subtle shudder—what Allen Ginsberg called a “graphic wince.”
But the most characteristic feature of Dickinson’s horror is its humor. Her affinity is with the Addams Family rather than the House of Usher.
I haven’t told my garden yet,
lest that should conquer me;
I haven’t quite the strength now
To break it to the bee;
I will not name it in the street
for shops would stare at me,
that one so shy, so ignorant
Should have the face to die.
The hillsides must not know it,
where I have rambled so,
nor tell the loving forests
the day that I shall go,
nor lisp it at the table,
nor heedless by the way
hint that within the Riddle
one will walk today.
The speaker is contemplating suicide. She cannot bid final farewell to the garden she loves lest she be overcome by her emotions, lest that should conquer me. Likewise, she lacks the command of countenance, the bold front (face) to say her final goodbye to the town, the countryside, or her family at table.
The Riddle is of course existence beyond the grave.
The suicide’s concern with good manners provides the tensile structure of the poem; the prim delivery is a masterpiece of deadpan humor.
That after-horror, that ’twas us
that passed the mouldering pier
just as the granite crumb let go—
—our savior, by a hair–
a second more, had dropped too deep
for fisherman to plumb;
the very profile of the thought
puts recollection numb.
The possibility to pass
without a moment’s bell
into conjecture’s presence
is like a face of steel
that suddenly looks into ours
with a metallic grin:
the cordiality of Death
who drills his welcome in.
Here the word pier means “one of the supports of the spans of a bridge.” The image is that of a bridge that has collapsed just after the speaker crossed over it. In the light of the author’s generally cavalier attitude to pronouns, us may be taken for “I” without further ado. Just as the granite crumb let go means “just as the granite crumbled” God, our savior insofar as he saved her, did so at the last possible moment.
Another moment and the speaker would have dropped into the waters below the bridge, waters so deep as to make even the recovery of her body impossible. To bring to mind even the hint or outline, the profile of that thought, makes her numb with dread.
She ponders the possibility that she might have passed into death without even the shortest pause a clock could measure, a moment’s bell. Death is here conjecture, because our state there is unknowable to us. The thought of such sudden personal annihilation is like a steel death’s head.
The use of the word drills makes the metaphor excruciatingly vivid.
I felt a funeral, in my brain,
and mourners to and fro
kept treading, treading till it seemed
that sense was breaking through—
and when they all were seated,
a service, like a drum
kept beating, beating, till I thought
my mind was going numb—
and then I heard them lift a box
and creak across my soul
with those same boots of lead again,
then space began to toll,
as all the heavens were a bell,
and Being but an ear,
and I and Silence some strange race,
wrecked solitary here—
and then a plank in reason broke
and I dropped down, and down
and hit a world, at every plunge
and finished knowing then.
Poe’s nightmares of premature burial end with claustrophobic physical horror. Dickinson raises the terror to metaphysical heights by describing intellectual annihilation.
This poem is narrated by a corpse, dimly aware of the motion of mourners around it. But the awareness is intellectual and not quite physical (till it seemed that sense was breaking through). The dead person’s awareness, which is no longer bodily, is carefully developed in succeeding stanzas, and leads ineluctably to the final shock: the experience of extinction.
The funeral service is perceived as a meaningless, monotonous repetition of sounds that no longer convey any meaning. (like a drum kept beating, beating, till I thought my mind was going numb). Here again, physical experience is at one remove. Words are experienced abstractly, as mere vibrations by the pure awareness of the deceased.
The lifting of the coffin (abstracted into a box) is sensed with detachment as something outside—even though the speaker is inside it. The footsteps of the pallbearers, heavier for the weight they bear (boots of lead), cause the church floorboards to creak. This sound is also experienced in an immaterial, non-bodily way (I heard . . . creak across my soul).
The tolling of the church bells is also experienced as a disembodied sound (space began to toll, as all the heavens were a bell, and Being but an ear). Physical reality is only perceived in its non-physical manifestation, as vibrations, unmoored from their causes.
There is nothing left of the speaker’s being than a receptive silence (I and Silence some strange race wrecked solitary here).
The finale is when the speaker’s being, reduced to a non-physical, purely intellectual awareness (a mere plank in reason), ends. This final loss of being is likened to the fall when a floor-board gives way under one. The sense of plummet is deepened from a fall through a storey of a house to a fall down a chasm, bouncing off crags as one goes. And even this is further widened by replacing the implied crags with worlds. The experience of personal nothingness is widened to a cosmic emptiness.
After great pain, a formal feeling comes;
the nerves sit ceremonious, like tombs;
the stiff heart questions, “Was it he, that bore?”
and, “Yesterday, or centuries before?”
The feet, mechanical, go round
a wooden way,
of ground or air or ought,
regardless grown:
a quartz contentment, like a stone.
This is the Hour of Lead,
remembered, if outlived,
as freezing persons recollect the snow:
first chill, then stupor, then the letting go—
After a traumantic experiences, one’s mental activity (feeling . . .nerves) becomes sluggish. Dickinson describes this stunned (stiff) reduction in activity as formal in the sense of “solemn, dignified,” and ceremonious, like tombs.
It seems as though the experience happened to someone else: the heart (the self) wonders if it all actually happened to her. The sense of time (the framework of all inner experi-ence) is is impaired (Yesterday, or centuries before?)
One’s limbs seem to move of themselves, without sensation (mechanically, a wooden way). One no longer notices the outside world (of ground or air or ought, regardless grown).
Contentment is a sense of pleasure or satisfaction: here it is ironically equated with the insensibility of minerals and metals.
Dickinson takes the conventional equation of shock and feelings of chilled numbness with brilliant literalness, and amplifies it into psychosis, the letting go of all contact with reality. When we realize this is poem about the onset of madness, the foregoing descriptions of feeling unmoored from one’s body, and from all time-space relations appear in their proper clinical light, and word contentment shows its full resonance, as a description of the wierd pleasure of escaping intolerable pain.
I died for Beauty, but was scarce
adjusted in the tomb
when one who died for Truth was lain
in an adjoining room.
He questioned softly, why I failed?
“For Beauty,” I replied –
“And I for Truth. Themself are one;
we brethren are,” he said.
And so, as kinsmen, met a night,
we talked between the rooms
until the moss had reached our lips
and covered up our names.
In this vegetal vision of annihilation, Dickinson’s saccharine Protestant hymn prosody is subverted with eerily cheerful results.