"Earth's Most Graphic Transaction": The Syllables of Emily Dickinson

American Poetry Review, The, Mar/Apr 2007 by Felstiner, John

"Emily was my patron saint," said William Carlos Williams. This essay comes from the manuscript of So Much Depends: Poetry and Environmental Urgency, a field guide or handbook for the common reader. Essays on Williams and John Clare ran in the January/February issue. Four more drawn from the 43 in this book-on Millay. Swenson, Haines, and again Williams-will appear in APR during 2007. My aim throughout this series is to face a crying need of our time by bringing alive the environmental imprint and impetus in familiar and surprising poems.

"IF I READ A BOOK AND IT MAKUS MY WHOLE body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. IfI feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, 1 know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way." This could be William Blake in delirium, or Sylvia Plath, but not the "Belle of Amherst," as she once jokingly called herself, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). In 1870 she gave her sense of poetry to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, man of letters, former Unitarian minister, champion of women's rights, and gun-running abolitionist who'd led the Union Army's first Negro regiment. After meeting the poet, the Civil War hero told his wife: "1 never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much."

They'd corresponded for years, since 1862 when out of the blue, Dickinson sent him four poems, asking "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?," because "Should you think it breathed, ... I should feel quick gratitude." Higginson wrote back asking for a picture, and her response let him see an uncommon spirit: "I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut bur-and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the guest leavesWould this do just as well?" A wren's small quickness, bold burr-like hair, and sherry eyes already seem vivid and peculiar. But sherry "that the guest leaves"? This signals a very rare bird.

About her writing experience, she also replied elusively (and slipping, as it happens, into her habitual four-beat three-beat iambic measure): "I made no verse, but one or two-until this winterSir." In fact she'd written almost 300 lyrics by then, including these lines transplanting the Holy Trinity into her garden: "In the name of the Bee- / And of the Butterfly-And of the Breeze-Amen!" Dickinson tells her mentor that her family are all religious "except me-and address an Eclipse, every morning-whom they call their 'Father'." And in this letter: "You speak of Mr Whitman. I never read his Book-but was told that he was disgraceful."

Even before striking up a correspondence with T. W. Higginson, Dickinson had seen his judgment on poetic eccentricity: "It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote 'Leaves of Grass,' only that he did not burn it afterwards. A young writer must commonly plough in his first crop." She herself was nothing if not eccentric, and Higginson was unequipped to see how these audacious midcentury poets, like Hawthorne and Melville in the novel and Thoreau in the essay, were breaking new ground for American writing.

Emily Dickinson in Amherst could have missed seeing Leaves of Grass by "Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son," which hardly sold at first. But there's one poem she must have encountered. Her household took the recently founded Atlantic Monthly, whose February and May 1860 issues it's known she read. That April the magazine published Whitman's "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life":

Nature here in sight of the sea taking

advantage of me to dart upon me

and sting me,

Because I have dared to open my mouth to

sing at all...

Ebb, ocean of life, (the flow will return,)

Cease not your moaning you fierce old mother,

Endlessly cry for your castaways, but fear not,

deny not me,

Rustle not up so hoarse and angry against my

feet as I touch you or gather from you.

Voluble as ever, this sounds like nothing in Dickinson, yet by 1860 she'd already "dared ... to sing," sounding her own breathtaking depths, as in "I taste a liquor never brewed":

Inebriate of Air-am I

And Debauchee of Dew

Reeling-thro endless summer days

From inns of Molten Blue

While it's easier to picture Walt tramping Long Island shoreline than Emily staggering home soused, that's not the point. Her language, her reeling imagination, gets something unheard-of out of summer's "Molten Blue."

The popular view of Dickinson gives us a wraith in white, seldom descending from her small wooden desk in the upstairs corner bedroom. Yet she had passionate friendships, and was no stranger to uncultivated nature around Amherst. "When much in the Woods, as a little Girl, I was told that the Snake would bite me, that I might pick a poisonous flower, or Goblins kidnap me, but 1 went along and met no one but Angels, who were far shyer of me, than I could be of them, so I hav'nt that confidence in fraud which many exercise."

Nor was she a stranger to the names of things. As an adolescent she kept a herbarium, a bound book with dried flowers labeled in English and Latin. Later she writes to young cousins about discovering a witch hazel shrub: "I had never seen it but once before, and it haunted me like childhood's Indian pipe, or ecstatic puff-balls, or that mysterious apple that sometimes comes on river-pinks." Puffballs, a mushroom-like fungus, do burst at the touch and discharge brown powder. But "ecstatic"? That sprouted from her own odd lexicon. At home she kept her conservatory in bloom all year long. One day she called someone in to see a chrysalis that "had burst its bonds, and floating about in the sunshine was a gorgeous butterfly," says the neighbor. "I did not understand all she said about it, but it was beautiful to see her delight and to hear her talk."