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

lived and died in a specific time and place, but emblematic figures whose deaths might just as well be ours. She also occasionally employs a “we” to narrate, as in the poem “Our journey had advanced” (p. 200).
    Perhaps Dickinson’s most radical departures from convention occur in her use of paradox to unsettle our most firmly held opinions and beliefs. As the critic Alfred Kazin writes, “She unsettles, most obviously, by not being easily locatable” (Kazin, “Wrecked, Solitary, Here: Dickinson’s Room of Her Own,” p. 164). To enter Dickinson’s world is to step into a scary but electrifying funhouse where paradoxes serve like distorting mirrors to show us new ways of seeing just about everything: love, death, solitude, the soul. Throughout her work, opposites change places: Distance is nearness in disguise; absence is the most vital form of presence; alone-ness is the greatest company. In several painful but illuminating poems, for example, she argues in favor of hunger and longing, maintaining that the lack that occasions desire makes the object of desire all the more precious:
    Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne‘er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need. (p. 6)
     
    I taste a liquor never brewed,
From tankards scooped in pearl;
Not all the vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an alcohol! (p. 16)
    Delight becomes pictorial
When viewed through pain,—
More fair, because impossible
That any gain. (pp. 29-30)
    Elsewhere Dickinson uses paradox to destroy and reassemble our notions of other states of being, as when she writes, “Much madness is divinest sense / To a discerning eye” (p. 11), or asserts, “A death-blow is a life-blow to some” (p. 210), or describes just how deep still waters can run:
    The reticent volcano keeps
His never slumbering plan;
Confided are his projects pink
To no precarious man. (p. 61)
    But for all the paradoxes, a wonderfully direct and opinionated personality emerges from Dickinson’s poems; the more of them we read, the more familiar we become with all her cranky, passionate likes and dislikes. Often she wears her disapproval on her sleeve, as in the following poem:
    What soft, cherubic creatures
These gentlewomen are!
One would as soon assault a plush
Or violate a star.
     
    Such dimity convictions,
A horror so refined
Of freckled human nature,
Of Deity ashamed,—
     
    It’s such a common glory,
A fisherman’s degree!
Redemption, brittle lady,
Be so, ashamed of thee. (p. 72)
    The poem’s opening lines prepare us for a hymn of praise to these delicate ladies. But Dickinson’s descriptions are double-edged: “Soft” connotes flimsy as well as feminine, and even though “cherubic” likens the women to angels, it also reveals their infantile, diminutive status. As the poem goes on, Dickinson’s mocking scorn becomes more evident: The women are compared to “plush”—the filling of a sofa!—and their “star”-like nature may make them celestial, but it also puts them miserably out of touch with the real world. Their beliefs are as fragile as “dimity,” a sheer cotton fabric; they are so “refined” that they cannot appreciate the rich complexity of “freckled human nature.” As the poem reaches its close, Dickinson grows even harsher, calling the women “brittle” —a far cry from the first stanza’s “soft”—and claiming that “Redemption” is “ashamed” of, and therefore unavailable to, these “creatures” in all their superficiality and passiveness.
    Dickinson also disapproves of people who are incapable of feeling or showing emotions:
    A face devoid of love or grace,
A hateful, hard, successful face,
A face with which a stone
Would feel as thoroughly at ease
As were they old acquaintances,—
First time together thrown. (p. 58)
    If soft flimsiness is a fault in the previous poem, here it is stone-like hardness that Dickinson cannot abide; the face may be a conventionally “successful” one, but Dickinson is outraged by