Further Poems of Emily Dickinson

Front matter

FURTHER POEMS

OF EMILY DICKINSON

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

I

When the little, unexplored package gave up these poems of Emily Dickinson which her sister, Lavinia, saw fit never to publish, it was for one breathless instant as if the bright apparition of Emily had returned to the old house, with the bees and birds still busy beneath her window, to salute us with her wings.

Many of the pages are difficult to read. Some of the writing is in the shy character of her girlish habit; others are so bold there are but two words on a line and in ink not yet faded.

There are poems of each variety she made her own. They flash, they are droll, they are Nature speaking aloud, they tell the love she glorified in so direct and intimate a way that this may have been the reason they were withheld; and there are also a number of her metaphysical poems which her "Sister Sue" recognized from the first as her claim to genius.

It is possible that these were intended for another volume in the series already published. It is certain that to destroy them would be heresy to the faith of her following.

It is almost a hundred years since the birth of Emily Dickinson in 1830, and she herself said:

After a hundred years Nobody knows the place, Agony enacted there Motionless as peace."

Yet in her own case it has not proved so. She has not been left behind; and in an age that outgrows everything in faith or fashion Emily is yet to be overtaken. There seems to be in her something of what she calls

The over-take-lessness of those Who have accomplished death."

But Emily may be said to have accomplished death without loss of life, and to have become the incarnation of her own poem:

As if the sea should part And show a further sea, And that a further, and the three But a presumption be Of periods of seas Unvisited of shores, Themselves the verge of shores to be— Eternity is these."

II

Emily was a universal creature, her mind always tuned for a dash to any pole, her raids on truth directed by her own premonitions,—a "Fellow of the Royal Infinity" perhaps, like her own "Pine Tree."

Yet there have been critics, souls even, one rejoices not to say priests, disturbed by her irreverence. It has also been said that her letters and conversation were salted with the Bible and its characters with a spontaneous directness that would have delighted St. Francis of Assisi as much as it would have desolated Cotton Mather. But the religious naïveté of her environment must be suggested in extenuation,—the Calvinistic rigidity of precise definition so antagonistic to her intuition of the unknown.

It is in this mood of exasperation that she asks:

We prate of Heaven, We pray to Heaven, Relate when neighbors die At what o'clock to Heaven they fled— Who saw them wherefore fly?"

If she appeared to take liberties with her own relation to her religious training it was probably because she often felt nearer of kin to her Father in Heaven than her New England father on earth. Her spirit approached the Unseen with more assurance in the range of the immaterial and boundless by some subtle bond that saved her from fear, until she was snatched back again by the force of instilled temerity.

She says she often felt "God must be lonesome in dreary highness, up above flower or cloud or star"; and when in one rebellious outburst she cries:

I don't like Paradise! Eden will be so lonesome Bright Wednesday afternoons—"

it is an Emily oppressed by the loss of perspective on her dear familiar, the foreseeing herself projected into a spacious prominence abhorrent to her.

The more she braves it out, as in the poem:

If God would make a visit Or ever took a nap, So not to see us,—but they say Himself a telescope Perennial beholds us, Myself would run away From Him and Holy Ghost and All,— But there's the Judgment Day!"

the more she trembles beneath her little dimity apron lest after all "God turn and look at me." For being Puritan born and bent, the Judgment Day, though less imminent, was no less due than Cattle Show or Commencement.

In her outbreak over the injustice done to Moses:

It always seemed to me a wrong To that old Moses done To let him see the Canaan Without the entering—"

and further on where she speaks of

God's adroiter will As boy should deal with lesser boy—"

she is not really calling her Creator a bully, she is only "Emily outraged" again, as when we ran to her with our childish tales of injustice.

Old man on Nebo Late as this One justice bleeds for thee!"

is not literary extravaganza. Emily meant it. She too had known a Paradise withdrawn, such as Dante never conceived.

Never was she more in earnest than when she cried:

Of course I prayed. And did God care? He cared as much as On the air A bird had stamped her foot And cried 'Give me'!"

Here she is venting what she calls "the smart misery of life."

She must be taken in all sincerity, if at all. If she begins a poem in startling fashion:

My period had come for prayer No other art would do, My tactics missed a rudiment, Creator, was it you?"

the last verse carries this supreme conclusion:

The silence condescended The heavens paused for me, But awed beyond my errand I worshipped Did not pray."

To one who knew Emily in life, she was a denizen of awe. "Areas of the supernatural she recognized about her." In her poem:

It's easy to invent a life, God does it every day, Creation but the gambol Of His authority—"

she is merely for the moment in the greenroom, behind the scenes of creation, and, taking her Maker on equal terms, relating it from that point of view.

She did profess the Devil as the best of friends, if "he could be amended", so that his ability became "durably divine", thereby ranging herself alone against the condemning trio,—Milton, Dante and Goethe.

She never glossed over her own stark need to know, yet her real reverence is not alien to that of the Psalmist David, the Prophet Isaiah, or that shrewdest of them all, the Paradoxer of Ecclesiastes. Something of those dramatic Old Testament maidens was inherent in her likewise. She would have hidden Moses, gone to her king with the demure mien of Esther, exulted full stride with Miriam, and oh! most surely have let down that red thread with Rahab from sheer love of mystery and a sign. The devotion of Ruth was hers also, and later in life the quality of the inconsolable Rachel.

It is a misdemeanor to chide Emily for irreverence.

Only picture her drooping away from her dear pastor on that week-day summer afternoon, under his urgent invitation to conviction of sin and a policy of speedy reconciliation with her Maker, while her will was adamant to resist such blasphemy against her own ideas of Love and Life. Wide allowance he made for her, somewhat abashed by her shining ignorance as she denied being party to any quarrel with what had made her, or any need of any one to make it up for her. Honor to him that he informed her father she seemed exceptional to the rules of the technique of regeneration as commonly practised.

No, Emily could not be made to have faith. Her alert curiosity could not be drugged into it by dogma. Nor could she be watched in her soul's most holy offices.

As she herself expressed it:

Too much of proof affronts belief, The turtle will not try Unless you leave him, Then return—and he Has hauled away!"

Quales, Blake, Jonathan Edwards strove in her make-up, and each won out at intervals in her writing. The way she bares being without subterfuge is like nothing but the primitives on the cloister wall. She pretends nothing, disdains posture calculated to throw any one subtlety into high relief or out of true focus. It is all laid down without a superfluous gesture. She leaves it there, without rounding it out; and the flat fact is oftenest on a spiritual dead gold, underlaid with sheer simplicity, as seen by the frank stare of a child.

III

Emily's affair with words was her own. She read the dictionary as the rest of her family read the newspaper for the latest news, but no one ever saw her consult it. It was magic to her, not a spelling book; and as some one has said, "there is an absolute lack of studio finish in her work."

Of all beings she was the most tacit. Speaking of summer's grace striving with her for notice she says:

I never questioned her, She never questioned me, Our compact was a wordless Sympathy."

Nothing was ever short enough for her. Yet she was always so hurried that of the endless New England winter she declares:

The Winters are so short I'm hardly justified In sending all the birds away And moving into pod—"

and her sister Lavinia heard her repeated murmur in her later years, "Oh, Vinnie, my work, my work!" and was at loss to understand. For, though Emily relied on Lavinia for the stability of her universe, she did not confide in her.

Her spontaneity in words pried under accepted usage or set fire to it. She speaks of "the Sun, busy with majesty", and of a day after a tragedy that "unrolled as huge as yesterdays in pairs." She casually alludes to God as "vouching with hyperbolic archness"; and who else ever began so lusty a line for the dead as:

What care the Dead for Chanticler? What care the Dead for day? 'Tis late your morning vex their face With purple ribaldry!"

Purple ribaldry—a revel it must have been to her when that adjective caught her.

In an exhaustive review of her in the Revue des Deux Mondes entitled "La Vie Secrète d'Une Puritaine, Emily Dickinson," it is exciting to see how she sparkles in the exact language of science and court, which adds a cutting to her gems that leaves our blunter English dim by comparison.

Metaphor is her characteristic figure, of course, and it could never be too terse for her liking; for which reason some of her admirers who are Oriental scholars long to see her consummate in the concentrated and permanent forms of the Chinese. Her letters are the record of her external life, her poems the journal of her mind and soul—where they went—what happened to them.

She has been given a wide range of labels by her reviewers, from the "Modern Sappho" to a "Hermit Thrush"; from a "New England Nun" to "an Epigrammatic Walt Whitman." One Reverend Father of a most holy Order declares: "Emily is Malchizedeck, without father, without mother, without descent; having neither beginning nor end of life; born not after the law of carnal commandment but after the power of an endless life."

Yet to one who saw Emily "plain"—

Light laughs the breeze In her castle above them—"

and escaping their verbal nets, light laughs Emily at all efforts to enmesh her.

There has been undue stress laid upon her avoidance of what Emerson calls "those devastators of the day." She was never wantonly a recluse, nor did she know she was one. She ran from people because time was precious and the Declaration of Independence promised her the right to happiness where and how she found it. How well her sister Lavinia knew it was no renunciation to fly many of the situations she faced in Emily's stead. Emily's poems came and she let them in, while Lavinia, hearing a knock, opened the door to "traffic with a berry woman."

The world Emily was running from was not the world of now. It was a small country village "drifted deep in Parian" all the slow winter long, a small country village all the dusty summer through—with its births and deaths, spites, ministerial taking-sides, early tea parties, religious revivals in season, or the panic of unexpected relatives driving up for uninvited visits. All of which became empty or arduous beside that inner society peopled by the Brownings, "Immortality", "Eternity", the Brontës and all the rest of her intimates.

Always those three Brontë girls were most her own kin. The desolation of their grim Haworth rectory howled over by distracted winds makes Emily's form of exclusive solitude seem cosmopolitan. As one of her English critics said, "she built her world of treasures and familiar things within. She never adjusted herself to her world—she moved to a brilliant and subtle solitude leagues within—without shrinkage, rather with increase of her mental powers."

Had a career been open to Emily she would never have fluttered far from the doorway of the old place that cherished her. She was mentally free to the quiet necessary for her thought. That was the freedom she craved.

It is easy to work When the soul is at play"

she says.

Nor could there be a gentler illustration of her inborn modesty than her little way of putting in "My Sister Sue said—" before some blinding flash of her own, which never deceived Sister Sue when quoted back at her by the dazzled hearer.

In their day, to teach or to marry was the only question. Of one Emily seems never to have dreamed; of the other to have dreamed only.

To her Sister Sue she gave that "love which is the passionate art of sharing", but the protection of her home where all drew a charmed circle about her was a dominant element in her result. There, of every shade in Nature she was

"Witness for the crown—"

There her ears caught those

"Drums off the phantom battlements."

There, ofttimes "among her mind" such glee possessed her she vows had she but ballet knowledge she would put herself abroad

In pirouette to blanch a troupe Or lay a Prima mad."

Again her mental exercise took a colder shade, and she says:

I tried to think a lonelier thing Than any I had seen, Some polar expiation, An omen in the bone Of Death's tremendous nearness."

It was there she became conscious in her chamber of a "Shapeless Friend." It was there she

Opened wide her narrow hands To gather Paradise."

IV

The love poems as given here form an almost unbroken narrative of Emily's own experience, from the first sight of the man she heard as a stranger preaching in Philadelphia, on through their mutual bewilderment, certainty, and renunciation.

Without a doubt their first recognition is recorded by her in an otherwise rather insignificant poem sent to her Sister Sue a little later:

As the eyes accost and sunder In an audience, Stamped in instances forever— So may countenance Entertain without addressing Countenance of One In a neighboring horizon, Gone as soon as known."

Hitherto the bread of life had been broken for Emily by aged hands. She had associated public worship with all that was most depressing, painstakingly pointed out in its loneliest light as a remote means of escape from the Judgment Day. Was it strange that from the first moment she was won by a young heart kindling the Light of the World before her seeking eyes?

She heard the stranger more than once before they met and spoke together, speculators both in those conjectures of the Spirit toward which she was temperamentally predisposed. He was young, full of the grace of youth as well as the grace of God; the power of conviction and eagerness was his also. His preaching must have been for her the original of her later lines to her nephew:

Had but the tale a warbling teller All the boys would come, Orpheus' sermon captivated— It did not condemn."

It certainly captivated Emily, nor did it condemn; for it was held by her Sister Lavinia as well as her Sister Sue that Emily was the one who resisted—when his own ties of home and pulpit were mentally lost down the winds under the spell she cast over him.

As one of her devoted advocates has written me, "Emily grew her vision standing for the truth as God gave her to see it. For this she withstood volcanic passion. With every impulse to go to hell, with the whole lineage of martyrs to passion sanctioning it, from Sappho to Byron, she just didn't. Sappho became Puritan."

Emily herself says:

I took one draught of life— I'll tell you what I paid, Precisely an existence, The market price, they said."

She glorified her Elect and felt herself glorified in him. It is due in some part to his persuasive and brilliant ministry that her poems more often than not concern themselves with immortality and have a tendency toward heaven in the last line. After his death she was more than ever permeated by the Unseen, which was almost an actual presence with her at times.

All her life through there were men of distinguished attainment who sought her for her peculiar fascination and continued to come to the very end to hear her talk and to meet her high demand for their own conclusions, as best they might. But one only dominated her. To Emily All had no codicil.

It would never be common more, I said, Difference had begun—"

expressed it for her.

"Till death is too brief loving"

she discovers later, as also that piercing truth,

So well that I can live without— I love Thee."

One of her "transporting aims" she tells in:

The Heaven you know to understand— That you not be ashamed Of me in Christ's bright audience Upon the further hand."

In their earlier days she was often playful, always rapt in her approach, whether she tended her flowers for him, her "Bright Absentee", or shivered before Love's "Alpine requirements", or offered her

"Shares in Primrose banks"

for a sight of his face,—or, baffled in trying to say how much she loves, begs the question with

The wind does not require the grass To answer wherefore when He pass She cannot keep her place!"

She declares, "He taught me waiting by myself", "Fortitude of Fate", "Altitude of Death"; yet it was "Joy to have merited the pain!" She says:

Where thou art, there it is home— Cashmere or Calvary!"

which lays bare the hidden meaning of her soft, repeated "I am not at home now", or "When I was at home", spoken of in her Life and Letters.

As the years went on, what had been voluntary renunciation passed by cold gradations into what she called "a threadless way" through which she "pushed mechanic feet"; while more closely she identified love and death in eternity, until her love poems and death poems were almost inextricably one, leading up to the climax of that poem beginning:

"A wife at daybreak I shall be"

where "with miracle behind her and miracle before" she passes "from midnight into victory" with her undaunted words:

Midnight. 'Good night!' I hear them call, The Angels bustle in the hall, Softly my Future climbs the stair, I fumble at my childhood's prayer, So soon to be a child no more! Eternity, I'm coming, Sir, Master, I've seen that face before."

For Emily—

Death but the drift of Eastern gray Dissolving in the East away Before the West begins."

Martha dickinson Bianchi

July, 1928 The Evergreens, Amherst, Massachusetts

I fear a man of scanty speech,

I FEAR a man of scanty speech, I fear a silent man, Haranguer I can overtake Or babbler entertain—

But he who waiteth While the rest Expend their inmost pound, Of this Man I am wary— I fear that He is Grand.

Publication is the auction

PUBLICATION is the auction Of the mind of man, Poverty be justifying For so foul a thing.

Possibly,—but we would rather From our garret go White unto the White Creator, Than invest our snow.

Thought belongs to Him who gave it— Then to him who bear Its corporeal illustration. Sell The Royal air In the parcel. Be the merchant Of the Heavenly Grace, But reduce no human spirit To disgrace of price!

Some work for Immortality,

SOME work for Immortality, The chiefer part of Time; He compensates immediately The former checks on Fame.

Slow gold, but everlasting, The bullion of To-day Contrasted with the currency Of Immortality.

A beggar here and there Is gifted to discern Beyond the broker's insight— One's Money—One's the Mine.

The popular Heart is a

THE popular Heart is a Cannon first, Subsequent a drum; Bells for an auxiliary And an afterward of rum.

Not a to-morrow to know its name, Nor a past to stare, Ditches for realms and A trip to jail For a souvenir!

Funny to be a Century

FUNNY to be a Century And see the people going by, I should die of the oddity, But then I'm not so Staid as he.

He keeps his secrets safely, very— Were he to tell, extremely sorry This bashful globe of ours Would be, So dainty of publicity!

I cannot dance upon my toes,

I CANNOT dance upon my toes, No man instructed me, But often times among my mind A glee possesseth me That had I ballet knowledge Would put itself abroad In pirouette to blanch a troupe, Or lay a Prima mad! And though I had no gown of gauze, No ringlet to my hair, Nor hopped for audiences like birds, One claw upon the air,— Nor tossed my shape in Eider balls, Nor rolled on wheels of snow Till I was out of sight in sound, The house encored me so— Nor any knew I know the art I mention easy here— Nor any placard boast me, It 's full as opera!

'Tis opposites entice,

'TIS opposites entice, Deformed men ponder grace, Bright fires, the blanketless— The lost, Day's face.

The blind esteem it be Enough estate to see; The captive strangles new For deeming beggars play.

To lack enamour Thee, Tho' the Divinity Be only Me.

Color, Caste, Denomination

COLOR, Caste, Denomination— These are Time's affair, Death's division classifying Does not know they are.

As in sleep—all here forgotten, Tenets put behind, Death's large democratic fingers Rub away the brand.

If Circassian—He is careless— If He put away Chrysalis of Blonde or Umber, Equal butterfly—

They emerge from His obscuring, What Death knows so well, Our minuter intuitions Deem incredible.

I reckon, when I count at all,

I RECKON, when I count at all, First Poets—then the Sun— Then Summer—then the Heaven of God— And then the list is done. But looking back—the first so seems To comprehend the whole— The others look a needless show, So I write Poets—All. This summer lasts a solid year, They can afford a sun The East would deem Extravagant, And if the final Heaven Be beautiful as they disclose To those who trust in them, It is too difficult a grace To justify the dream.

This was a Poet

THIS was a Poet— It is that Distills amazing sense From ordinary Meanings, And attars so immense From the familiar species That perished by the door, We wonder it was not Ourselves Arrested it before.

Of pictures the discloser— The Poet, it is he, Entitles us by contrast To ceaseless poverty.

Of portion so unconscious The robbing could not harm, Himself, to him, a fortune Exterior to Time.

Strong draughts of their refreshing minds

STRONG draughts of their refreshing minds To drink, enables mine Through desert or the Wilderness, As bore it sealéd wine— To go elastic, or as One The camel's trait attained, How powerful the stimulus Of an hermetic mind!

We miss a kinsman more

WE miss a kinsman more When warranted to see Than when withheld by oceans From possibility.

A furlong than a league Inflicts a pricklier pain— Till we, who smiled at Pyrenees, Of parishes complain!

Who giants know, with

WHO giants know, with Lesser men Are incomplete and shy, For Greatness—that is ill at ease In minor company.

A smaller could not be perturbed, The summer gnat displays Unconscious that his single sail Does not comprise the sky.

Growth of Man like growth

GROWTH of Man like growth Of Nature Gravitates within, Atmosphere and sun confirm it But it stirs alone.

Each its difficult ideal Must achieve itself, Through the solitary prowess Of a silent life.

Effort is the sole condition, Patience of itself— Patience of opposing forces, And distinct belief.

Looking on is the department Of its audience, But transaction is assisted By no countenance.

Doom is the House Without the Door

DOOM is the House Without the Door— 'T is entered from the sun, And then the ladder's thrown away Because escape is done.

'T is varied by the dream Of what they do outside, When squirrels play and berries die— And hundreds bow to God.

Experience is the angled road

EXPERIENCE is the angled road Preferred against the mind By paradox, the mind itself Presuming it to lead Quite opposite. How complicate The discipline of man, Compelling him to choose himself His pre-appointed pain.

I cautious scanned my little life,

I CAUTIOUS scanned my little life I winnowed what would fade From what would last till heads like mine Should be a-dreaming laid.

I put the latter in a barn, The former blew away— I went one winter morning, And lo! my priceless hay

Was not upon the "scaffold", Was not upon the "beam", And from a thriving farmer A cynic I became.

Whether a thief did it— Whether it was the wind— Whether Deity 's guiltless My business is to find.

So I begin to ransack— How is it, Heart, with thee? Art thou within the little barn Love provided thee?

A bird is of all beings

A BIRD is of all beings The likest to the dawn, An easy breeze does put afloat The general Heavens upon.

It soars and shifts and whirls And measures with the clouds In easy, ever dazzling pace, No different the birds—

Except a wake of music Accompany their feet, As should the Dawn emit a tune For ecstasy of it.

A prison gets to be a friend;

A PRISON gets to be a friend; Between its ponderous face And ours a kinsmanship exists, And in its narrow eyes We come to look with gratitude For the appointed beam It deals us—stated as our food, And hungered for the same.

We learn to know the planks That answer to our feet, So miserable a sound at first Nor even now so sweet As plashing in the pools When memory was a boy, But a demurer circuit, A geometric joy.

The posture of the key That interrupts the day To our endeavor,—not so real The cheek of Liberty As this companion steel, Whose features day and night Are present to us as our own And as escapeless quite.

The narrow round, the stint, The slow exchange of hope For something passiver, content Too steep for looking up, The liberty we knew Avoided like a dream, Too wide for any night but Heaven, If that indeed redeem.

Who court obtain

WHO court obtain Within himself Sees every man a king; So poverty of monarchy Is an interior thing.

No fate depose Whom Fate ordain— And who can add a crown To him who doth continual Repudiate his own?

The child's faith is new,

THE child's faith is new, Whole—like his principle— Wide—like the sunrise On fresh eyes; Never had a doubt, Laughs at a scruple, Believes all sham But Paradise!

Audits the world— Deems his dominion Broadest of sovreignties, And Caesar mean By comparison, Baseless emperor, Ruler of naught, Yet swaying all!

Grown by and by To hold mistaken His pretty estimate Of prickly things, He gains the skill Sorrowful as certain, Men to propitiate Instead of kings.

Forever is composed of nows—

FOREVER is composed of Nows— 'T is not a different time, Except for infiniteness And latitude of home.

From this, experienced here, Remove the dates to these, Let months dissolve in further months, And years exhale in years.

Without certificate or pause Or celebrated days, As infinite our years would be As Anno Domini's.

A science—so the savants say,

(With a Daisy)

A science—so the savants say, "Comparative Anatomy", By which a single bone Is made a secret to unfold Of some rare tenant of the mold Else perished in the stone. So to the eye prospective led This meekest flower of the mead, Upon a winter's day, Stands representative in gold Of rose and lily, marigold And countless butterfly!

To offer brave assistance,

TO offer brave assistance To lives that stand alone When one has failed to stop them Is human,—but divine To lend an ample sinew Unto a nameless man Whose homely benediction No other cared to earn.

Drama's vitalest expression

DRAMA'S vitalest expression Is the Common Day That arises, sets, about us: Other tragedy Perish in the recitation, This the more exert When the audience is scattered, And the boxes shut.

Hamlet to himself were Hamlet Had not Shakespeare wrote, Though the Romeo leave no second Of his Juliet, It were tenderer enacted In the human heart— Only theater recorded Owner cannot shut.

A secret told

A SECRET told Ceases to be a secret then. A secret kept— That can appal but one. Better of it continual be afraid, Than it And whom you told it to Beside.

I dwell in Possibility

I DWELL in Possibility A fairer house than Prose, More numerous of windows, Superior of doors.

Of chambers, as the cedars— Impregnable of eye; And for an everlasting roof The gables of the sky.

Of visitors—the fairest— For occupation—this— The spreading wide my narrow hands To gather Paradise.

Expectation is contentment;

EXPECTATION is contentment; Gain, satiety. But satiety, conviction Of necessity.

Of an austere trait in pleasure. Good, without alarm, Is a too serene possession— Danger deepens suns.

She dealt her pretty

SHE dealt her pretty Words like blades; As glittering they shone, And every one unbared A nerve Or wantoned with a bone.

She never deemed she hurt; That is not steel's Affair. A vulgar grimace in The flesh How ill the creatures bear!

To ache is human, not Polite; The film upon the eye Mortality's old custom— Just locking up to die.

Revolution is the pod

REVOLUTION is the pod Systems rattle from; When the winds of Will are stirred, Excellent is bloom.

But except its russet Base Every summer be The entomber of itself; So of Liberty.