Title: Collected Poems
Author: Emily
Dickinson
Date: 1890-1896 (3
volumes), reprinted 1982 (omnibus)
Publisher: Avenel /
Crown (1982)
ISBN: 0-517-362422
Length: 256 pages
Illustrations:
black-and-white public-domain graphics
Quote: “She sweeps
with many-colored brooms, / And leaves the shreds behind; / Oh, housewife in
the evening west, / Come back, and dust the pond!”
The traditional quote
used to introduce Dickinson is “This is my letter to the world, that never
wrote to me.” You know that one by heart (I’m guessing). You also know “A bird
came down the walk” and “I’m nobody!Who are you?” and “Because I could not stop
for Death, he kindly stopped for me.” (The narrator in Dickinson’s poems is not
necessarily Dickinson. Sometimes it’s a man; sometimes it’s a voice from the
grave.) “She sweeps with many-colored brooms” is quoted here to remind you that
Dickinson wrote a lot of other poems that haven’t been reprinted quite so
often. Some of them were as whimsical, as sad, as profound as the ones
everybody learned at school.
Quite a few of them
are written in “common meter,” which means they can be sung to several of the
tunes that were popular for hymns and songs in the nineteenth century. “Amazing
Grace,” “O For a Faith That Will Not Shrink,” “Yellow Rose of Texas,” and the
theme song from “Gilligan’s Island” are examples of common meter. If you want
to study, teach, or recite these poems, seriously, try to get this piece of
information out of your head, now that it’s in. (Book reviewers deprived of
regular cash contributions, like dogs deprived of regular walks, may become
mean.)
The “special
contents” of my copy of this classic collection consist of remarks by the editors
of the first editions, T.W. Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, memorable for
their effort to explain Dickinson to people who, shall we say, hadn’t been
exposed to her poems (and imitations of her poems) as toddlers. For a young
lady of her time, Dickinson had a decent education; she had read enough poetry
to have a sense of meter, and of when something in a poem needs to disrupt the
predictable meter. Was that what they meant by a “strange music” in these
poems? There could hardly have been anything strange about common meter. Or
were they referring to poems like “I’m nobody” or “To make a prairie takes a
clover and a bee,” which were not in common meter? Dickinson used more dashes
than other punctuation marks, and often used the quirks of New England dialect
in her poems: “I’ve known her from an ample nation choose one”; “He never had
but one”; “I know some lonely houses off the road / A robber’d like the look
of.” Did that seem strange? Ignorant? It was a period when Americans fretted
about seeming strange or ignorant.
Dickinson was…slightly strange. What seems to have
bothered people throughout the twentieth century was that her charming
quirkiness can’t be fitted into any disease
pattern, even when she wrote about pain and suffering. Sometimes writers,
like other creative artists, express ourselves by portraying other people who
are different from ourselves. When Dickinson wrote lines like “when a boy, and
barefoot” or “I heard a fly buzz when I died” or, for that matter, “Who has not
found the heaven below will fail of it above,” what we are to understand is not
that she was gender-confused, or took past lives seriously, or held several
different and incompatible religious beliefs, but that her poems weren’t
written as a memoir.
Actually, as the recipient of some steamy love letters in
prose, Higginson was qualified to comment that some of the love poems may have been “autobiographical.” Dickinson
was attracted to a married man (Higginson) and allowed herself to express her
sexuality only in letters, not even talking to the man face to face; when he
visited her father’s house she talked with him around the door of an adjacent
room. And staying at home, hardly being
seen outside the front gate for a year at a time, was what some people believed
to be a single woman’s duty; gifted writers are introverts, and the repressive
social rules of her time actually offered Dickinson more freedom to indulge
herself than many writers have enjoyed.
No, the extraordinary thing about
Dickinson’s poetry was simply that she thought of extraordinary things to say.
“A shady friend for torrid days is easier to find than one of higher
temperature for frigid hour of mind.” Dickinson didn’t think the way most of us
think, and the difference was, to a considerable extent, simply that her mind
worked…better. Oh what a subversive thought. A whole denomination of Humanists
are going to hate me for saying this: Emily Dickinson was smarter than most
people.
If you can cope with
the idea that a nice, kind, polite, otherwise “normal” person might have been
more gifted than you are, and you don’t already have the collected poems of
Emily Dickinson, this may be the book for you.
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