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

life’s conflicts and near misses. Slant rhyme can also be a way to express the pleasure of messiness, the joy of not being able to “Tell all the Truth” once and for all:
    To tell the beauty would decrease,
To state the Spell demean,
There is a syllableless sea
Of which it is the sign. (pp. 316-317)
    Appropriately for a poem about how not “telling beauty” only increases beauty’s strength, the near-rhymes “demean” and “sign” mirror the inexactness that Dickinson applauds. (The coinage “syllableless” is a good example of Dickinson’s fondness for making up new words when the old ones are not adequate to her needs.)
    Dickinson is as ardent a revisionist of syntax as she is of form, as is evident in the following single-stanza poem:
    Adventure most unto itself
The Soul condemned to be;
Attended by a Single Hound—
Its own Identity. (p. 264)
    Here, by reordering a statement that we might have expected to begin, “The Soul is condemned,” Dickinson can start her poem with her true subject: the terror and the necessity of the soul’s “Adventure.” Similarly, by stripping the poem of verbs (“[is] condemned,” “[It is] attended”), and by boldly capitalizing its final word, “Identity,” she increases its starkness and strangeness. Isaac Watts would be appalled by such stylistic departures from tradition, but it is precisely these quirks that make Dickinson’s poems so continually exciting.
    Her liberties extend even further. Rather than begin her poems with elaborate contexts or settings, Dickinson plunges us right away into the pulsing heart of things. Her poems often start with a bold proclamation or definition that the rest of the poem explores : “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul” (p. 22); “Heaven is what I cannot reach!” (p. 53); “Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn” (p. 124). Other poems lead us straight into an extreme situation without warning:
    My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me. (p. 56)
     
    I felt a cleavage in my mind
As if my brain had split;
I tried to match it, seam by seam,
But could not make them fit. (p. 61)
     
    Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury! (p. 168)
    Her endings can be just as abrupt. Whether a poem takes the form of a riddle, proverb, or narrative—for her genres are just as varied as her use of common measure is uniform—it often ends with a terrifying lack of closure. Two of her most well-known poems make this clear. In “Because I could not stop for Death,” the speaker rides with Death in most leisurely fashion past children at play and the setting sun; but at the poem’s end, time rushes suddenly forward, and the speaker looks back on the scene just described from the sudden vantage point of one who has been dead a long time:
    Since then ‘tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity. (p. 201)
    In “I heard a fly buzz when I died,” Dickinson again assumes the role of a dead person and imagines the “stillness” of the scene around her, then brings the poem to a crashing halt with the following lines, horrifying for their utter absence of comfort or conclusion : “And then the windows failed, and then / I could not see to see” (p. 253).
    Point of view in Dickinson’s hands is an unstable thing, too. The majority of her poems feature an “I” who tells stories, describes nature, or dissects belief (142 of them even begin with “I”), and her use of first-person perspective is every bit as innovative as is her handling of form, language, and structure. Writing to Higginson in July 1862, Dickinson remarked, “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse—it does not mean—me—but a supposed person” (Selected Letters, p. 176). Thus, in the two poems described above, Dickinson’s narrators are not actual people who