Emily Dickinson Thinking

Abstract

It is natural that Emily Dickinson should come to mind when one reflects on the evidence for thinking in poetry. Her work has been called metaphysical, philosophical, theological. Vocabularies have been invented to describe her style of thinking-its cryptic ellipses, its compression, its enigmatic subjects, its absent centers, and its abstractions. These qualities indeed are her "carbonates"-the residue of the fire that preceded them: "Ashes denote that Fire was" [1097; 1865].' But equally intrinsic to her verse is Dickinson's invention of structures that mimic the structure of life as she at any moment conceives it. By those structures she channels our reactions, adjusts our pace to hers, and molds our thinking after her own. Any detailed assertions about her work must be partial ones in view of the almost 1800 poems she composed. Nonetheless, I believe there is something to be said about her thinking as she invents ways to plot temporality.' The larger ideas in Dickinson are not recondite ones: She satirizes received religious thought, while retaining its metaphysical dimension and much of its compensatory solace; she continues the European lyric tradition of an erotic adoration coming to grief-, and she dwells much on nature's appearances, death's certainty, and an uncertain immortality. If it is not Dickinson's themes that determine her style of thinking, what does? Her well-described grammatical, syntactical, and metaphorical idiosyncrasies certainly play an important role in conveying her style of thought to us, but to understand her imaginative thinking we also need to perceive how, in her poems, over time, she altered "normal" temporal organization. I take for granted the usual critical account, derived from the poetry, of Dickinson's emotional crises, in which a soul of intense sensitivity, hoping to find stability in religion or love, is brought to grief by some unidentifiable calamity, sometimes represented as an inner death, which leads almost to madness. After each such crisis, she experiences a long aftermath' marked by new traumas, punctuated by forms of denial, stoicism, and regressive idealization. I will be paying particular attention to how Dickinson orders the inner structure of her poems to represent the way such life-events reshape a person's conception of serial existence itself Dickinson's original and "natural" style of thinking about serial plot-by which I mean a plot of events in chronological succession-- aimed at a temporal exhaustiveness: Her poems unscrolled, like her sun, 'a ribbon at a time," and wished to project, by displaying one "ribbon" after another, a complete coverage of temporal experience from beginning to end. Her early poems tend to believe not only that all roads have an end, but also that "all roads" have "A `Clearings at the end," as she says in the 1859 poem "My Wheel is in the dark" [61]. En route to the denouement at the clearing, the poem strings out experience phase by phase, aspiring to leave no gaps in event or perception before arriving at the end of the sequence. The 1861 poem "I'll tell you how the Sun rose - " [204] generates four such "ribbons," each characteristically possessing a strong active verb: The Steeples swam in Amethyst! The news like squirrels ran! The hills untied their Bonnets! The Bobolinks begun! Dickinson paid out her successive ribbons of such verbs again in her 1862 poem on the locomotive: "I like to see it lap the Miles / And lick the Valleys up," [383].4 Because the train is said to complain "In horrid - hooting stanza" we can see this early exercise as an ars poetica: "I like to see it do X and Y . . . And then . . . And then ... And then... Then ... And ... Then." The poet's work of thinking fills up with serial incidents the extended journey of the train, just as it had filled up the rising of the sun with serial "ribbons." In each case, the impression is given that all of the manifest phenomena have been noted, since the rising of the sun is followed in the poem by its setting, and the beginning of the trains journey is completed when it stops "At its own stable door. …