Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886)
American poet.
NEW feet within my garden go,
New fingers stir the sod;
A troubadour upon the elm
Betrays the solitude.
I TOOK my power in my hand
And went against the world;
’T was not so much as David had,
But I was twice as bold.
MUCH madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur,—you ’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.
DROWNING is not so pitiful
As the attempt to rise.
Three times, ’t is said, a sinking man
Comes up to face the skies,
And then declines forever
To that abhorred abode
Richard Chase declares, "No great poet has written so much bad verse as Emily Dickinson." He blames the Victorian cult of little women for the fact that "two thirds of her work" is seriously flawed: "Her coy and oddly childish poems of nature and female friendship are products of a time when one of the careers open to women was perpetual childhood." Dickinson's sentimental feminine poems remain neglected by embarrassed scholars. I would maintain, however, that her poetry is a closed system of sexual reference and that the mawkish poems are designed to dovetail with those of violence and suffering.
God is sitting here, looking into my very soul to see if I think right thoughts. Yet I am not afraid, for I try to be right and good; and He knows every one of my struggles.
THAT such have died enables us
The tranquiller to die;
That such have lived, certificate
For immortality.
SO proud she was to die
It made us all ashamed
That what we cherished, so unknown
To her desire seemed.
FATE slew him, but he did not drop;
She felled—he did not fall—
Impaled him on her fiercest stakes—
He neutralized them all.
How dreary — to be — Somebody!
How public — like a Frog —
To tell one's name — the livelong June —
To an admiring Bog!
LOVE is anterior to life,
Posterior to death,
Initial of creation, and
The exponent of breath.
IT ’S such a little thing to weep,
So short a thing to sigh;
And yet by trades the size of these
We men and women die!
THERE is a solitude of space,
A solitude of sea,
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be,
Compared with that profounder site,
That polar privacy,
A Soul admitted to Itself:
Finite Infinity.
FAME is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate,
Whose table once a Guest, but not
The second time, is set.
Whose crumbs the crows inspect,
And with ironic caw
Flap past it to the Farmer’s corn;
Men eat of it and die.
THE PEDIGREE of honey
Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.
Emily Dickinson is the female Sade, and her poems are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadmomasochistic imaginist. When she is rescued from American Studies departments and juxtaposed with Dante and Baudelaire, her barbarities and diabolical acts of will become glaringly apparent. Dickinson inherits through Blake the rape cycle of The Faerie Queene. Blake and Spenser are her allies in helping pagan Coleridge defeat Protestant Wordsworth.
MINE enemy is growing old,—
I have at last revenge.
The palate of the hate departs;
If any would avenge,—
GLEE! the great storm is over!
Four have recovered the land;
Forty gone down together
Into the boiling sand.
PRESENTIMENT is that long shadow on the lawn
Indicative that suns go down;
The notice to the startled grass
That darkness is about to pass.
How wrong Emily Dickinson was! Hope is not "the thing with feathers". The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.