The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Free

Higginson, “I had a terror—since September—I could tell to none—and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground—because I am afraid—” (Selected Letters, p. 172). These lines certainly confirm Dickinson’s difficulties during this time, even though no one knows exactly what her “terror” was. This period, however, proved to be the most productive of Dickinson’s life; between 1860 and 1865 she wrote an average of three hundred poems each year.
    Although Dickinson never married, her passionate poems, as well as a series of letters that have come to be called “The Master Letters,” suggest that she may have been deeply in love at least once; it remains in doubt whether the object of her affection was Charles Wadsworth, Otis Lord, her sister-in-law Susan, or indeed any real person.
    The last years of Dickinson’s life were sad ones, due to the numerous deaths she experienced. Her father died in 1874, Samuel Bowles in 1878, her nephew Gilbert in 1883, and both Charles Wadsworth and her mother in 1882. In April 1884 Otis Lord died, and Dickinson herself suffered the first attack of an illness that would prove fatal; she died on May 15, 1886.
     
    With a few exceptions, Dickinson’s poems are quite short, and they consist of stanzas written in what is known as common measure, also called common meter: four iambic lines that alternate between four and three beats. They recall the hymns that would have been intimately familiar to Dickinson from her childhood on. By far the most popular writer of these hymns was Isaac Watts, whose collections of hymns and other books could be found in every New England home. Opening Watts’s Divine Songs for Children (1715), Dickinson would have encountered stanzas like this:
    Let dogs delight to bark and bite,
For God hath made them so;
Let bears and lions growl and fight,
For ‘tis their nature, too.
     
    But, children, you should never let
Such angry passions rise;
Your little hands were never made
To tear each other’s eyes.
(from “Against Quarreling and Fighting”)
    Another perennially popular example of common measure is the hymn “Amazing Grace,” which begins: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound / That saved a wretch like me.” But, although Dickinson’s poems may superficially resemble sternly moralistic or sweetly consoling hymns, a closer look reveals that they are anything but:
    The Soul’s superior instants
Occur to Her alone,
When friend and earth’s occasion
Have infinite withdrawn. (p. 275)
Faith is a fine invention
For gentlemen who see;
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency! (p. 36)
    Unfolding as predictably as a hymn, these two stanzas nevertheless show—with their preference for individuality over community, attention to detail over the “invention” of faith—how in Dickinson’s crafty hands form is an occasion for cutting ironies, allowing her poems to enact an ongoing battle between received opinion and “superior instants.” (The abrupt rhythm achieved by her characteristic use of dashes in place of expected punctuation also helps advance the battle; Dickinson’s use of dashes may not always be evident in this edition, as discussed later in this essay.)
    Dickinson’s idiosyncratic use of rhyme adds even more tension to her deceptively hymn-like poems. “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,” she famously wrote (The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, poem 1129); and she practiced this wily doctrine in almost every poem:
    The heart asks pleasure first,
And then, excuse from pain;
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;
     
    And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die. (p. 10)
    This wrenching little poem attains much of its power from Dickinson’s use of “slant rhymes,” or off-rhymes, like “pain-suffering” and “be-die,” which don’t allow the comfort that might come from exact rhymes and instead remind us of