Tag Archive - Emily Dickinson

How it looks from the cheap seats

September 16, 2011 in Faith and Culture, General, Staff Posts with 4 Comments

Brad Fruhauff

EIC Brad Fruhauff capitalizes on his own course content to generate a few thoughts to share with the masses about Emily Dickinson and being honest about faith.

In an earlier post I drew attention to the under-appreciated humor of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, something I myself had previously overlooked. This past week we’ve been reading Dickinson in my American Lit II class, and we got on the rather frequently-discussed question of her faith. There is some controversy about just what Dickinson believed, with voices claiming her for one “side” or another much the same as people do with Shakespeare or Dickens, and even in our class discussion there were different takes on what heaven, faith, and God meant to her. But I most appreciated the argument one student, Cindy Benz, had made on our (public) course blog that day to the effect that Dickinson wrote about faith with “unflinching honesty.” For Christians, people who value truth, this is no small thing in itself, but it may also be an important thing for all Americans these days.

Benz is less concerned with pronouncing upon Dickinson’s actual beliefs (hard to get at in the mere 109 poems we read) than in examining the poet’s way of describing faith from the inside out, as it were. This insight frees her to read seemingly heterodox poems charitably, appreciating the “pure humanity” of the sentiments. Benz argues that if we are all as honest with ourselves as Dickinson is with herself (and whatever audience she may have been writing to), then we can sympathize with moments where God seems dark or distant (on that note: ever read a psalm?) or where values like love seem fleeting.

I’ll let you read for yourself how Benz works through these things. I think she offers a great example of a kind of reading that is informed by Christian values of both charity and truth, as well as a humility to open oneself up to another and to really learn something – which is a way of pursuing truth.

It’s also just a good insight into reading Dickinson. It helps, for instance, to not be scandalized by the apparently heretical love of “I cannot live with you,” in which the poet describes a rapturous romantic love that challenges her love of God. We all know the right answer to such a conflict: we’re supposed to love God above all else. But, again, if we’re honest, we know that romantic love can sometimes feel all-consuming – it’s precisely what establishes the familiar analogy between marital love and spiritual love (which is biblical, after all).

One of the great rewards of Dickinson is just how honest she is – and never smug. Christian culture often encourages us to assume a confidence that is really a mask for self-righteousness, that is, presuming a God’s-eye-view (thus, significantly, the need for Relief). Dickinson takes off her own mask – or refuses to don it – writes from our common human perspective – from the “cheap seats” of faith – and offers us the consolation of knowing we are not alone in experiencing some of the conflicts and paradoxes of love and faith.

For ten years or so, now, we’ve been talking about the increasing polarities in American civil discourse. Charitable reading, and, by extension, charitable conversation and argument, are surely practices that can help us overcome division by focusing on our common humanity, if nothing else. If, as Image editor Gregory Wolfe argues in his new book, beauty will save the world, it strikes me it will be, at least in part, through poetry like Dickinson’s and readers like Benz (yay for my student!).

That’s a Good One, Emily Dickinson

July 8, 2011 in General, Staff Posts with 3 Comments

Poetry Editor Brad Fruhauff, pictured with flower

Brad Fruhauff

Editor-in-Chief Brad Fruhauff just figured out that Emily Dickinson was a funny lady. Sometimes.

The Dover edition of Emily Dickinson’s Selected Poems contains only 109 of her 1,700 known “poems.”1 The other night, I sat down to select those I thought my students should study for the first week of our American Lit class this August. Mind, 109 poems by Emily Dickinson only amount to 49 pages of poetry, all of which features her idiosyncratic style of deceptively simple diction warped into complex syntax within a simple song-like meter. That means you could read it in about an hour and feel pretty good about yourself.

But if poetry is good for anything these days, it teaches us to slow down. The condensation and ordering of language in poetry requires more thought and attention than reading a blog or watching most a film. My need to cull the collection for the “gems worth studying” was additional incentive to take my time and pay attention.

What I found was a new side of Emily Dickinson. I tend to think of her as the poet of death – “I heard a funeral in my brain,” “I heard a fly buzz when I died,” for instance. But she also writes on nature, love, and the spiritual life, and, most surprisingly, is occasionally even funny.

Granted, it’s often a Coen brothers kind of dark humor. Take this poem, for instance, in which a meditation on how death takes us beyond our decadent desires turns suddenly into a biting satire on our vanity:

The dying need but little, dear, –
A glass of water’s all,
A flower’s unobtrusive face
To punctuate the wall,

A fan, perhaps, a friend’s regret,
And certainly that one
No color in the rainbow
Perceives when you are gone.

Or, in another poem, the speaker imagines being carried through town in her coffin, thinking on all the things and people she’ll miss:

‘Twas just this time last year I died.
I know I heard the corn,
When I was carried by the farms,–
It had the tassels on.
……………………………………..
I wondered which would miss me least,
And when Thanksgiving came,
If father’d multiply the plates
To make an even sum.

But since that upsets her, she switches tactics and imagines those she’s leaving from another perspective:

But this sort grieved myself, and so
I thought how it would be
When just this time, some perfect year,
Themselves should come to me.

In yet another she apostrophizes the letter she is writing to a lover, asking it to tell him everything that went into the composition of the letter – or, almost everything:

“Tell him the night finished before we finished,
And the old clock kept neighing ‘day!’
And you got sleepy and begged to be ended–
What could it hinder so, to say?
Tell him just how she sealed you, cautious,
But if he ask where you are hid
Until to-morrow,–happy letter!
Gesture, coquette, and shake your head!”

For you good Christians out there, she’s implying the letter will be kept “next to her heart” (i.e., her breasts, if you’re still lost).

I was quite pleased to discover Dickinson’s playful side; it gave me license to imagine even the darker poems being written with a certain twinkle in her eye. This is the joy of really studying something–each new approach can reveal something new even in a poem you’ve read a dozen times.

Incidentally, I think I’ll assign the whole book to my students, in two chunks. I want them to look for the patterns and develop a more sophisticated picture of Dickinson than focusing on a few popular poems can accomplish. Plus, it will be a good introduction to the challenge of reading well while reading widely, a skill so hard to practice in our hypertext world.

I’ll end with one more poem that I haven’t decided whether it’s playful in this way or not. If it’s not, then it tends toward didacticism. If it is, then it’s in that human comedy way.

So proud she was to die
It made us all ashamed
That what we cherished, so unknown
To her desire seemed.

So satisfied to go
Where none of us should be,
Immediately, that anguish stooped
Almost to jealousy.

Brad Fruhauff is Interim Editor-in-Chief of Relief. He has published fiction in The Ankeny Briefcase, poetry in Relief, Salt, and catapult, and reviews in Burnside Writers’ Collective and The Englewood Review of Books. He teaches English at Trinity International University.

1. Many of her poems were actually lines from letters that editors extracted, lineated, and published as we now know them. Incidentally, the Dover edition is a great sampler, but if you’re more ambitious, the authoritative complete works is the one edited by Thomas H. Johnson.

White Sheep, Black Sheep: The Literary Kinship of Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay

March 11, 2010 in General with 1 Comment

Brad Fruhauff (pictured in hat)

Brad Fruhauff considers the ways unlikely things can come together in the works of two American poets.

It’s possible to look too closely at a poem. As Billy Collins exhorts his students, one should “waterski / across the surface of a poem” rather than tie it down and “torture a confession out of it.” When I teach a new poet I’m just as likely as my students to become consumed with understanding “what’s going on” in a poem; it takes some cultivating to give yourself the freedom to hear and feel a poem at the same time as you’re deciphering its explicit content.

The atrophy of our culture’s ability to range freely within a poem is perhaps a topic for another blog (you might read Dana Gioia’s essay, “Can Poetry Matter?”). My thoughts turned to this while seeking a subject for this blog. I started paging through my Norton Anthology of American Literature, from which I’ve been teaching this semester, and read over the selections on Edna St. Vincent Millay. These poems had caught my attention already for their ability to combine a modern candor and explicitness (e.g., female sexuality) withing the traditional form of the sonnet. But reading them again I found myself improbably comparing them to none other than Emily Dickinson.

This is an unlikely matching in terms of personality. Millay was a bohemian of the early-20th century while Dickinson was a proper Puritan of the mid-18th century. Millay apparently had a sexually “open” marriage while Dickinson lived a hermitic, single life and hardly had any male friends outside her father and brother. Millay was a kind of “bad girl” of American poetry even as Dickinson was being blessed as one of its most important early voices.

But I think there is a more than intuitive connection between the two. Consider these lines from Millay:

I, that had been to you, had you remained,
But one more waking from a recurrent dream,
Cherish no less the certain stakes I gained,
And walk your memory’s halls, austere, supreme,
A ghost in marble of a girl you knew
Who would have loved you in a day or two.

(“I Think I Should Have Love You Presently”)

There’s a powerful, assertive “I” speaking, and yet that self is not so stable or concrete that she can’t inhabit another’s consciousness or see herself as if from a distance. Then there’s the surprise ending that has a tinge of sadness to it; one could almost see one of Dickinson’s characteristic dashes setting it up, as in “I heard a fly buzz – when I died.” Like Millay’s, Dickinson’s spirit roams at whim between worlds (the physical and metaphysical, in this case) yet remains a powerful “I,” capable of dying and resurrecting, communing with nature and with other souls. And just as Millay plays with the sonnet, Dickinson plays with the sing-song meters of hymns:

I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

(“I died for beauty”)

Both poets find it unremarkable that they should be ephemeralized, that their minds and bodies might be divided – in fact, they own it and find agency in it: Millay “cherish[es] . . . the stakes I gained” and Dickinson goes on to speak with the other body and to find common cause. Body and mind join up again at poem’s end in an image as melancholy as Millay’s:

And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.

The moss silences the bodies and erases their names, removing them from the human world, just as Millay’s woman who would have loved the man “in a day or two” only lives in a possible world other than this real one.

Millay also shares a certain allegorical imagination with Dickinson, exploring the imaginative potential of a metaphorical comparison or personification. In “I Too beneath Your Moon, Almighty Sex,” Millay apostrophizes “almighty Sex” itself, something often associated with odes. She admits that she “go[es] forth at nightfall crying like a cat” and abandoning “the lofty tower” that she labored to make of her life. Desire and character conflict in this odd juxtaposition of medieval architecture with an urban alley at night, and that tension motivated an explanation or defense:

Such as I am, however, I have brought
To what it is, this tower; it is my own;
Though it was reared To Beauty, it was wrought
From what I had to build with: honest bone
Is there, and anguish; pride; and burning thought;
And lust is there, and nights not spent alone.

Whatever we might think of Millay’s personal life, we can appreciate her candor even as it is restrained by her choice of form and allegory. Indeed, Millay’s honest admission of the power of sex and lust is just the kind of thing that makes us Reliefers feel at home. Literature, after all, as C.S. Lewis said, reminds us we are not alone (though maybe not in Millay’s sense).

Dickinson treats something similar when she writes, “The Soul selects her own Society – / Then – shuts the Door – .” We seek intimacy in many forms. And again Dickinson’s poem ends with a surprise heaviness that hits with a similar emotional power as Millay’s as she explores this personification of the soul (“her,” below):

I’ve known her – from an ample nation -
Choose One -
Then – close the Valves of her attention -
Like Stone -

Millay’s tower “To Beauty” is made of less than beautiful things, and the soul’s intimacy in Dickinson becomes a kind of stone tomb. The differences between the two woman are still marked – Millay’s voice is far more personal, more desperate, more borne down upon by a chaotic world without a center, while Dickinson begins her adventures with some sense of having a safe home to return to – but both wrestle with the tensions between different worlds they belong to and compellingly represent this through putting pressure on inherited forms.

The result in reading both is a sense of something both familiar and wonderfully strange, something ordered and yet brimming with an anarchical energy that thrills us even as we are glad it is contained.