Emily Dickinson is a difficult poet for Christians because she nurtures a response to life many wish to be done with. Hers is a deliberately less sure word of prophecy and we cannot explain her choice. We would solve the mystery the poet would promote. People who prefer the certain sound of a trumpet have little patience with the sputtering sounds of telegraphic code that typify her verse.
Christians were as difficult for her. Emily thought certain people among them profane. “They talk of hallowed things out loud,” she wrote to Higginson, “and embarrass my dog.” The convinced express gratitude for trifles, she thought, while leaving the best unacknowledged. “The unknown is the largest need of the intellect, though for it no one thinks to thank God.”
As a Christian, I find myself in the middle of the debate. Because I cannot write to her, I'll write to us instead. Emily Dickinson’s case for the unseen and unknown ought to be heard. A premature rush to certitude is condemned not only by the poet, but by prophets too. Time and experience are enjoined. Beyond this, there is an aesthetic element to shadows behind the veil. Without a sense of mystery, life is diminished. Emily enjoyed mortality for the dark valley it is. Ignorance, after all, is the greater part of life no matter the spiritual assurance. What is essential to salvation may be discerned—but what is essential to awe and wonder is the unseen presence.
One can see in Emily Dickinson’s writings a brave attempt to restore the unknown to a place of honor in Western religion. With new wine, she burst the bottles of hymnal form from within, adapted biblical imagery to suit her own sense of the sacred, invoked a haunting presence and lived her life in cloistered tribute to the Invisible God. Each contribution deserves a separate consideration.
Hymnal Form
In 1955, Thomas Johnson published a three-volume critical edition of Emily’s poetry. In addition to providing variant textual readings, Johnson’s work restored the poet’s original line constructions. It became clear that Emily had employed the well-worn hymn forms of Isaac Watts as a structure for many of her poems. Given her unconventionality as a poet, Dickinson’s choice of a puritanical construct as an enclosure for her eccentric concepts is significant. Why pour new wine into these old bottles?
Watts made use of a poetic form that established pauses and allowed a congregation of untrained voices to catch their breath. Consider the hymn, “Sweet Is the Work.”
Sweet is the work, my God, my King [pause]
To praise thy name, give thanks and sing, [pause]
To show thy love by morning light, [pause]
And talk of all thy truths at night. [long pause]
Emily Dickinson defied the convenience of the arrangement.
321
Of all the sounds dispatched abroad, [pause]
There’s not a charge to me
Like the old measure in the Boughs – [pause]
That phaseless Melody
The wind does – [pause] working like a Hand,
Whose fingers Comb the Sky –
The quiver down – with tufts of tune – [pause]
Permitted Gods, and me.
This is what Anthony Hecht means when he says that Dickinson “violates the integrity of the hymnal form…with a great deal of force.” We are made to read through the established pauses. Structure is no longer containing content.
I willed my keepsakes – [pause] Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable – [pause] and then it was
There interposed a Fly –
With blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz –
Between light – and me – [pause]
And then the Windows failed – [pause] and then
I could not see –
(From # 465)
The new wine is bursting old bottles and that is the poet’s point. The unseen and unknown cannot be encased. They are the wild sea for which Emily expressed a preference.
Wild Nights – Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile – the Winds –
To a Heart in Port –
Done with the Compass –
Done with the Chart!
Rowing in Eden - Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor – Tonight –
In Thee!
To a poet out at sea, winds produce the needed wildness, Winds are of no benefit, however, to those who are done with the voyage and rest safe in the harbor of a known God. Better to anchor in an open and wild sea.
Adaptation of Biblical Imagery
The Bible, to Emily, was a lexicon of images more than words, and ‘lexicon’ was her word for ‘beloved companion.’ In contemplation of content, she became familiar with those complexities and intricacies that deepen her sense of Presence. Too much definition removed the Bible’s prophetic pages from sacred Proximity. She would rather our attention be upon its invocation.
1545
The Bible is an antique Volume -
Written by faded Men
At the suggestion of Holy Spectres –
Subjects – Bethlehem
Eden – the ancient Homestead –
Satan – the Brigadier –
Judas – the Great Defaulter –
David – the Troubadour –
Sin – a distinguished Precipice
Others must resist –
Boys that “believe” are very lonesome –
Other boys are ‘lost’ –
Had but the Tale a warbling Teller –
All the boys would come –
Orpheus’ Sermon captivated –
It did not condemn –
This idea of the Bible needing a “warbling Teller” is central to her poetic concept of scripture. To “warble” is to sing with a trill. ‘Trill’ is a fluttering of tremulous sound and ‘tremulous’ is defined as vibrating, quivering and trembling. In other words: an uncertain and indistinct sound. She is interested in the spell the Biblical tale casts upon its recipients, a charm removed by too much definition. She corrects our Lord’s brother (James 2:10).
Whosoever disenchants
A single Human soul
By failure if irreverence
Is guilty of the whole.
(From # 1451)
Of course, this poetic perception of scripture receives as little hearing from our own peers as from Emily’s. Joseph Fielding McConkie expresses the prosaic point of view rather well in an address he gave at a symposium held at Brigham Young University. The text being studied is the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible, and McConkie had been assigned Psalms, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. “I am far too good a sport,” he announces, “to mention that [my colleagues] ate the steak and left me the soup bone.” His time will not be wasted, he consoles himself, since the Prophet had spent time “in the poetic books [and made] what was a desert blossom as a rose.” He explains his antipathy to these books as he brings his lecture to a close. “All scripture is not of equal worth.” We learn from “the abuse of the poetic writings [Joseph Smith] sought to correct, [not to] establish doctrine from poetry.” Poetry “may be used to sustain good doctrine, but only after that doctrine has been plainly established in [the prose] of unambiguous revelation.” A quick analysis of the assumptions behind McConkie’s statement makes it clear that now—as it was then—a prosaic approach to scripture is an attempt to establish certainty. This is the orthodox tradition. Scriptures are “answer books” to the cosmic questions of life.
Emily Dickinson was of another tradition entirely, a tradition that does not assume revelation is necessarily unambiguous; a tradition in which poetic images and symbols are vessels of numinous Presence and divine authenticity. Rather than provide answers, they provide the soul with transport and provoke wonder and awe.
569
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 –
Their Summer – lasts a Solid Year –
The can afford a Sun
The East – would deem extravagant –
And if the Further Heaven –
Be Beautiful as they prepare
For Those who worship Them –
It is too difficult a Grace –
To justify the Dream –
By Orthodox reckoning—and they count all the time—this poem is a simple blasphemy, putting poets before the Sun. Poets, she explains, “can afford a Sun the East would deem too extravagant.” While poets place heaven on earth, the Orthodox, prosaic placement is in the “Further Heaven”—a placement that is “too difficult a Grace.” Real grace is found in the poetic realization of the unseen Presence.
Elsewhere, she defines the prosaic Heaven as
The House of Supposition –
The Glimmering Frontier that
Skirts the Acres of Perhaps –
(From # 696)
The poetic heaven is experience, not definition. So too is Hell and the experience is often a compound in one:
Parting is all we know of heaven
And all we need of hell.
(From # 1732)
Adapting Biblical Imagery
As a poet, Emily thought the Bible was hers. She took the advice of Robert Frost long before it was given. “Always fall in with what you are asked to accept; fall in with it—and turn it your way. Expression[s] like ‘divine right.’ Divine right? Yes, —if you let me make what I want of it.” Emily fell in with the Bible and turned it her way. She made what she wanted out of it. The Passion of Christ, for example:
Gethsemane –
Is but a providence – in the Being’s center –
Judea –
For Journey – or Crusade’s Achieving –
Too near –
Less obvious are the images of the Nativity in one of her most famous poems.
585
I like to see it lap the Miles –
And lick the Valleys up –
And stop to feed itself at Tanks –
And then – prodigious step
Around a Pile of Mountains
And supercilious peer
In shanties – by the sides of Roads
And then a Quarry pare
To fit its Ribs
And crawl between
Complaining all the while
In horrid – hooting stanza –
Then chase itself down Hill
And neigh like Boanerges –
Then – punctual as a Star
Stop – docile and omnipotent
At its own stable door.
The known solution to this poem is too simple: the poet is in awe of the Iron Horse and the way it overwhelms and conquers the landscape. In 1853, Emily wrote her brother Austin after hearing the sound of a train’s whistle when it first came to Amherst. “It gives us all new life, every time it plays. How you will love to hear it, when you come home again!”
“Is your house deeper off?” Emily asks in one of her letters. It is a good question. Should this poem be read “deeper off”?
Notice that Emily in her letter to her brother immediately associates the locomotive with new birth and life. The poem, written a decade later, deepens and develops the association. The first clue I would point to is her use of the word ‘prodigious.’ In context, it is usually taken to mean ‘great’ or ‘enormous.’ A prodigy, however, is also a child. The image of the “prodigious leap” is usually seen as a tunnel, but I would also suggest the poet has in mind the birth canal—a “pare” being the narrowing through which the infant must struggle to somehow “fit is Ribs / And crawl between / Complaining all the while / In horrid – hooting stanza .”
But this birth is divine. The neigh is like that of the Sons of Thunder (the translation of ‘Boanerges’), the divine witnesses of Jesus, James and John, who, like Zeus—the image in the Greek pantheon of Gods most associated with Jehovah—wanted to bring thunder and lightening down upon a city of unbelieving souls. In this reading, the prodigious step is from heaven to earth and is as “punctual as a Star.” The soul, having “chase[d] itself…stop[s] at its own stable door” where it becomes both “docile and omnipotent”—the inevitable Christian contradiction within the man who is both God and man. But the divine birth the poet gives witness to is the new birth of the soul.
These are esoteric views of the Christian story. The actual and historical are employed as metaphors for the poet’s own spiritual life. The stories evoke Presence beyond themselves. This allows Emily, without a blush, to make herself equal with God upon the cross.
875
I stepped from Plank to Plank
A slow and cautious way
The stars about my Head I felt
About my Feet the Sea.
I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch –
This gave me the precarious Gait
Some call Experience.
‘Walking-the-plank’ is a nautical execution, but the connection of “plank to plank” suggests the cross. Emily is at the intersection—stepping from one to another—stretched above the sea and beneath the cosmos. This precarious gait—length of steps (prodigious step) but also to the ear, g-a-t-e, a threshold—is the experience of heaven, more treasured by than heaven’s definition. Once again, Emily Dickinson takes Biblical imagery and makes what she wants out of it.
Invoking the Unseen Presence
In the Spring of 1876, Emily enclosed a note to Thomas Higginson, written on a separate page from her letter. The note simply says, “Nature is a haunted house – but Art – a House that tries to he haunted.” Emily wrote he poems in a way that implies—and hopefully calls forth—unseen Presence. This is what she means by haunting—the unseen ghost within.
670
One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted –
One need not be a House –
The Brain has Corridors – surpassing
Material Place –
Far safer, of a Midnight Meeting –
External Ghost
Than its interior Confronting –
That Cooler Host
Far safer, through an Abbey gallop,
The Stone’s a’chase –
Than Unarmed, one’s a’self encounter –
In lonesome Place –
Oneself behind ourself, concealed –
Should startle most –
Assassin hid in our Apartment
Be Horror’s least
The Body – borrows a Revolver –
He bolts the Door –
O’erlooking a superior spectre –
Or more.
Emily is really interesting here—the unseen Presence—like the Kingdom of God—is within! Meeting a traditional ghost is far safer than coming upon this spectre—ourself concealed behind ourself—a superior spectre, or more….
To understand the dread, we return to Emily’s planks. A final verse—restored to “I felt A Funeral in my Brain” by Johnson—reads:
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And finished knowing – then
(From # 280)
The plunge into interiority reveals a world as vast as the exterior cosmos. The depth of the inner landscape provides all we need know of terror, awe and numinous fear. “Who has not found the Heaven – below /Will fail of it above. (From # 1544)
1543
Obtaining but our own Extent
In whatsoever Realm –
‘Twas Christ’s own personal Expanse
That bore him from the Tomb –
Poetry sprang from this sudden expanse. “The brain,” she wrote, “is wider than the Sky - / …deeper than the sea - / …the weight of God (632).” She told Higginson, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Those who failed to enter the expanse of this inner heaven were safe but still entombed.
216
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers –
Untouched by Morning –
Untouched by Noon –
Lie the meek members of the Resurrection –
Rafter of Satin – and Roof of Stone!
Grand go the Years – in the Crescent – above them –
Worlds scoop their Arcs –
And Firmaments – row –
Diadems – drop – and Doges – surrender –
Soundless as dots – on a Disc of Snow –
Once more, those who wait for the other heaven miss the harvest—and the resurrection—within. The interior planets plough through their heavens, “scoop[ing]” or dislodging crowns and powers that drop silently on the chill of a still world. Without a sense of depth and mystery, an awe of the unseen and a joy in the unknown, we remain safe in a dead body, entombed beneath a lively mystery.
A Cloistered Tribute to An Unknown God
Can we now make some sense of Emily Dickinson’s withdrawal from society? Nearly complete in her mid-thirties, her solitude has given rise to legend, myth and analysis. On those rare occasions when she received visitors, it is said she conversed in darkened rooms, or from behind a drawn curtain, or sitting in a chair up on the landing, turned away from her guest. She dressed in white and—for the most part—never left her father’s grounds after her withdrawal. Higginson thought of her as “my cracked poet.” Her life eluded him every bit as much as her poetry.
The riddle we can guess
We speedily despise –
(From # 1222)
Emily would have enjoyed students pouring over her letters and poems. She would be pleased with the variety and multitude of theories, although she would find a few perplexing. She once wrote to her sister-in-law, “In a life that stopped guessing, you and I should not feel at home.” The role of an eccentric enigma suits her.
Richard Sewall, one of her more perceptive biographers, has written, “Emily Dickinson’s life, in a sense almost unique among poets, was her work.” Her “manner of life, and her way of telling about her life, were symptomatic of her sense of the mystery of things.” People who have learned little and long ago of her will nonetheless recall her white aloneness, even if they remember little else. In her withdrawal, Emily became they way, the truth of the life she espoused—the Presence she cherished.
Conclusion
By definition of the community in which I live, I am an orthodox Christian. Emily Dickinson’s failure to apprehend an historical Jesus and subscribe to the literal truth of the gospels is a troublesome thing for me. I am confident that her esoteric approach to Christianity is insufficient. Many Christians will wonder what good then is gained by listening to her. What possible meaning can Christians take from her life?
Here is my answer to that question. The Gospel is not a florescent victory. In this life it is a light shining in the midst of darkness. We remain ignorant of many things, we need to be reminded of this and we be assured that the unknown is not at war with the known, up does not attack down, within does not accuse without. While God remains invisible to us, we feel better than we see. Admitting this mortal insufficiency is not cowardice. We walk on the cusp of mystery daily and delude ourselves if we think we do not. Emily Dickinson can help Christians appreciate the unknown and the unseen as powerful conduits of God’s more certain presence.
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