Wonderful analysis -- thank you, Sally! I spent a fair amount of time with Dickinson back in grad school and revisit her periodically, and of course taught some of her poetry whenever I could in my intro to lit classes. I do think the dashes she used were quite deliberate, and much prefer to read with them, as I think it makes a difference in the emphases we find, as well as the capitalizations she used.
"Her poems, including this one, read as the hymnody for a faith of her own devising." Yes! It is so important to acknowledge that 'faith of her own devising.' Also, the act of revolt in submission. How difficult to create and sustain that tension! Yet, she gracefully, assuredly does it over and over again.
Sometimes, I find myself half-believing that she was truly not of this world, but a Visitor observing and engaging with her brave, unpredictable, and utterly original poems.
There is an intensity, a visceral quality in that first stanza with this "and carried me away." Blame it on Freud, but at first read, I thought, "erotic:" there is this intensity in the hunting including that Vesuvius light. And then there is the head on the bed, the shared pillow. With modern eyes and ears I pick up this urgent, physical subtext, a fueling of poetry through the body.
Yes. This time through I noticed the related imagery in the third stanza: smile, light, glow, Vesuvian, pleasure. Each word increasing in intensity and specificity until…pleasure?
Worst poem ever. Not even the explanation helps. I like many of ED’s poems. My fav: ‘There is a certain slant of light on winter afternoons, that oppress like the weight .of cathedral tunes.’
I’ve felt those. It touches SADNESS in my soul. Daune
This poem is available to view in the online archive for Emily Dickinson's original bound fascicles -- there it has the em dashes and a little check mark beside power with the alternate word "art" below: https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:43271043$5i
I was telling a friend of mine just yesterday how much I love your analyses, and how aptly you convey with your own metaphors.
Thanks for the link. Her handwriting is very hard to decipher, but I'm fascinated by the variants. To me they feel less like indecisions or revisions and more like a deliberate choice to allow a kind of both/and reading where the reader is invited to consider how the variant word changes the meaning of the line. It makes her poems very interactive when the variants as footnotes are preserved, like those old choose your own adventure stories that were popular when I was younger.
I wondered if she made the little marks/alternate readings on reading over her own collections and being not quite satisfied with some wordings, or if yes, she laid it out this way when she wrote it down for her collection. It's intriguing to imagine her reading things one way, then another ...
I think it's because the fascicles feel more like finished products to me, poems she's taken the time to copy out neatly and then bind together they don't feel so much like a writer caught in the middle of the act of composing or editing as much as a writer who wants to remain in the ambiguity.
To me it almost feels like it might be wrong to omit the variants, like you are making a choice, a determination of one over the other which even the poet herself refused to make decisively. Dickinson feels very much like a poet who delights in playing with language and who wants to have it both ways.
Yes, I think this is a finished poem, and it’s just down to what we might call tweaking. One question is whether she’s moving toward the variants or away from them (maybe in this copy she preserved at the bottom the words she changed).
But either way, they don’t really affect the poem any. She’s already successfully taken her great big Shakespeare-like metaphor, of life being like a gun that’s loaded but unused, and expanded it to a conclusion. Along the way she’s come up with one great image after another. No tricky syntax or vocabulary, but still very mysterious.
I just added "Emily Dickinson's Poems -- As She Preserved Them" - to my wishlist :-). It *looks* like it's a print edition of the fascicles, with her alternates preserved.
Fascinating to see her sort of thinking out loud. Can you make out the second alternative? “Cow”? That doesn’t make sense to me, although I can see why she might have considered an alternative to “deep,” which is kind of redundant given that duck down fills the pillow (perhaps from a duck the owner shot).
And “harm” might convey more than “stir” since it explains why the foe is a foe.
But I like “in” better than “the Sovreign Woods.” And “power” is probably better than “art.” Although maybe it does make sense to think of “art” as skill, meaning the gun has skill, but not the power to act.
I can't make out that word either, but the first letter looks like her 'l's above. It looks like "low" to me, though I'm terrible at making out my own handwriting on grocery lists ...
Yes, that’s surely it. I considered “Low” but was thinking capital L since it’s the first word in the line. But she’s maybe just listing alternatives, and not thinking about capitalization. And “low” then adds a rhyme and alliteration with “pillow” and makes a more arresting image than “deep.”
This might be a case where the meter is practically forcing a descriptive adjective that isn’t really needed. “Eider Duck’s / Pillow” is sufficient, but that breaks the meter.
The information about the fascicles here says these are mostly her fair copies, though some have these alternate word choices. Makes me wonder what her draft(s) of this one was/were like, and how many iterations it might have taken to get to these minor indecisions ... https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/24/resources/2698
(-- minor -- not relative to these words' significance, but to the vast possibilities of indecision in drafting a poem...)
I have wondered (although without any evidence to support my meandering and wayward speculation) if "Emily", as a name, didn't prompt Dickinson's poetric imagination to think: [e]military. For this fully loaded poem, at any rate.
That “emphatic thumb” always gets me, bringing to mind the drawing back of the hammer of a rifle or musket with the thumb to cock it. And while a gun doesn’t have a body like its owner, here it does, in a sense, at least have a “thumb” and an “eye.”
It’s been a while since I’ve looked at this poem, and this time it’s the capitalization in the restored version that strikes me as interesting. It’s not the convention of Shakespeare or, say, Defoe, where most nouns were capitalized, but something else entirely: to also capitalize all pronouns (perhaps per the example of “I”) and most adjectives. But not all nouns. Non-specific nouns (pleasure, foe, power) are left uncapitalized.
If not a secret code or a joke, perhaps it’s just stubborn eccentricity. Although the editors’ substitution of “art” for “power” also seems eccentric and eliminates the rhetorical zing (paromoiosis?) of her repetition. As in “Is it a mystery to live or is it a mystery to die?” (“Spanish Mary”), the repetition is kind of the point, right?
Stanza 2, what do you make of the missing rhyme doe / reply? Can't be read as 'slant rhyme'! Some crass editorial amendment? More seriously, do other Master poems enlighten as to the gun owner? Is the poem's narrator Emily's poetic power, with E herself as the mortal owner able to die and also to live on after death ?
It all gets very knotty! I thought of the Master letters chiefly because nobody knows who or what the "Master" was supposed to be, though poetry is one guess. IF that's the case, then yes, there seems to be a connection between them that illuminates how she articulated, to herself, her relationship with her art.
As I read this poem --- and I do not trust that my own reading is any kind of definitive reading! --- the poet herself is the narrator (or an artist-figure, anyway), and the master is the art that commands and makes use of her. We might possibly read that bit about death as saying that she's relinquished her own power even to fade away gracefully into nothingness, that her art holds her in life, whether she wills to be held there or not.
As for the rhyme pattern in stanza 2, that "doe/reply" pair is in her original. My guess is that she *did* intend it for a rhyme --- that basically any two end-vowels could be construed as rhyming, as long as they didn't have different end-consonants. It's a stretch, but that is what she wrote, and the pattern overall would indicate that she meant those sounds to conform to that pattern.
You're likely right about the "pow pow." But am I right, too, in thinking that "power," at least in the English-speaking world, was typically used more casually and generally (as in "ability") in D's day--I'm vaguely recalling passages in Austen, for instance--than it is today, when "empowerment" is so much in mind? If so, here D's usage does seem very purposeful, as if she might have intended the reader to understand italics, but restrained herself from actually using them.
For that matter, I have no idea whether somebody in the 1860s would have said "pow" for a gun sound --- it seems unlikely! (and very Batman) We hear it now, but I doubt that was actually her intent --- though in her own ear the repeated plosive might well have had the effect of a discharge.
And yes, I think you are right that she is thinking of her own potency as a poet, in that sense of "ability," rather than our latter-day sense of empowerment . . . but that she sees that ability as a power, what we might think of as a "superpower," or a magic, with unlimited and frightening potential, whose servant she is.
The creature and its master aren't clear to me but still she fully conveys the creature's loyalty & deadliness. What an art - to be opaque and clear in tight language. FWIW I prefer her original. The extraordinary relationship is better grasped. Were the various editors frightened by this poem?
I think that they were unsettled by a lot that her poems seemed to reveal about her, and that their overriding instinct was to say, "Oh, she couldn't possibly have meant to say that!"
Wonderful analysis -- thank you, Sally! I spent a fair amount of time with Dickinson back in grad school and revisit her periodically, and of course taught some of her poetry whenever I could in my intro to lit classes. I do think the dashes she used were quite deliberate, and much prefer to read with them, as I think it makes a difference in the emphases we find, as well as the capitalizations she used.
Hmmm -- I'll have to come back to this one. Not immediately accessible to me.
"Her poems, including this one, read as the hymnody for a faith of her own devising." Yes! It is so important to acknowledge that 'faith of her own devising.' Also, the act of revolt in submission. How difficult to create and sustain that tension! Yet, she gracefully, assuredly does it over and over again.
Sometimes, I find myself half-believing that she was truly not of this world, but a Visitor observing and engaging with her brave, unpredictable, and utterly original poems.
There is an intensity, a visceral quality in that first stanza with this "and carried me away." Blame it on Freud, but at first read, I thought, "erotic:" there is this intensity in the hunting including that Vesuvius light. And then there is the head on the bed, the shared pillow. With modern eyes and ears I pick up this urgent, physical subtext, a fueling of poetry through the body.
Yes. This time through I noticed the related imagery in the third stanza: smile, light, glow, Vesuvian, pleasure. Each word increasing in intensity and specificity until…pleasure?
Worst poem ever. Not even the explanation helps. I like many of ED’s poems. My fav: ‘There is a certain slant of light on winter afternoons, that oppress like the weight .of cathedral tunes.’
I’ve felt those. It touches SADNESS in my soul. Daune
This poem is available to view in the online archive for Emily Dickinson's original bound fascicles -- there it has the em dashes and a little check mark beside power with the alternate word "art" below: https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:43271043$5i
I was telling a friend of mine just yesterday how much I love your analyses, and how aptly you convey with your own metaphors.
Thanks for the link. Her handwriting is very hard to decipher, but I'm fascinated by the variants. To me they feel less like indecisions or revisions and more like a deliberate choice to allow a kind of both/and reading where the reader is invited to consider how the variant word changes the meaning of the line. It makes her poems very interactive when the variants as footnotes are preserved, like those old choose your own adventure stories that were popular when I was younger.
I wondered if she made the little marks/alternate readings on reading over her own collections and being not quite satisfied with some wordings, or if yes, she laid it out this way when she wrote it down for her collection. It's intriguing to imagine her reading things one way, then another ...
I think it's because the fascicles feel more like finished products to me, poems she's taken the time to copy out neatly and then bind together they don't feel so much like a writer caught in the middle of the act of composing or editing as much as a writer who wants to remain in the ambiguity.
To me it almost feels like it might be wrong to omit the variants, like you are making a choice, a determination of one over the other which even the poet herself refused to make decisively. Dickinson feels very much like a poet who delights in playing with language and who wants to have it both ways.
Yes, I think this is a finished poem, and it’s just down to what we might call tweaking. One question is whether she’s moving toward the variants or away from them (maybe in this copy she preserved at the bottom the words she changed).
But either way, they don’t really affect the poem any. She’s already successfully taken her great big Shakespeare-like metaphor, of life being like a gun that’s loaded but unused, and expanded it to a conclusion. Along the way she’s come up with one great image after another. No tricky syntax or vocabulary, but still very mysterious.
I just added "Emily Dickinson's Poems -- As She Preserved Them" - to my wishlist :-). It *looks* like it's a print edition of the fascicles, with her alternates preserved.
Fascinating to see her sort of thinking out loud. Can you make out the second alternative? “Cow”? That doesn’t make sense to me, although I can see why she might have considered an alternative to “deep,” which is kind of redundant given that duck down fills the pillow (perhaps from a duck the owner shot).
And “harm” might convey more than “stir” since it explains why the foe is a foe.
But I like “in” better than “the Sovreign Woods.” And “power” is probably better than “art.” Although maybe it does make sense to think of “art” as skill, meaning the gun has skill, but not the power to act.
I think the mystery word is "cozy".
I can't make out that word either, but the first letter looks like her 'l's above. It looks like "low" to me, though I'm terrible at making out my own handwriting on grocery lists ...
Yes, that’s surely it. I considered “Low” but was thinking capital L since it’s the first word in the line. But she’s maybe just listing alternatives, and not thinking about capitalization. And “low” then adds a rhyme and alliteration with “pillow” and makes a more arresting image than “deep.”
This might be a case where the meter is practically forcing a descriptive adjective that isn’t really needed. “Eider Duck’s / Pillow” is sufficient, but that breaks the meter.
The information about the fascicles here says these are mostly her fair copies, though some have these alternate word choices. Makes me wonder what her draft(s) of this one was/were like, and how many iterations it might have taken to get to these minor indecisions ... https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/24/resources/2698
(-- minor -- not relative to these words' significance, but to the vast possibilities of indecision in drafting a poem...)
I have wondered (although without any evidence to support my meandering and wayward speculation) if "Emily", as a name, didn't prompt Dickinson's poetric imagination to think: [e]military. For this fully loaded poem, at any rate.
That “emphatic thumb” always gets me, bringing to mind the drawing back of the hammer of a rifle or musket with the thumb to cock it. And while a gun doesn’t have a body like its owner, here it does, in a sense, at least have a “thumb” and an “eye.”
It’s been a while since I’ve looked at this poem, and this time it’s the capitalization in the restored version that strikes me as interesting. It’s not the convention of Shakespeare or, say, Defoe, where most nouns were capitalized, but something else entirely: to also capitalize all pronouns (perhaps per the example of “I”) and most adjectives. But not all nouns. Non-specific nouns (pleasure, foe, power) are left uncapitalized.
If not a secret code or a joke, perhaps it’s just stubborn eccentricity. Although the editors’ substitution of “art” for “power” also seems eccentric and eliminates the rhetorical zing (paromoiosis?) of her repetition. As in “Is it a mystery to live or is it a mystery to die?” (“Spanish Mary”), the repetition is kind of the point, right?
Stanza 2, what do you make of the missing rhyme doe / reply? Can't be read as 'slant rhyme'! Some crass editorial amendment? More seriously, do other Master poems enlighten as to the gun owner? Is the poem's narrator Emily's poetic power, with E herself as the mortal owner able to die and also to live on after death ?
The doe/reply in stanza 2 rhyme with foe/eye in stanza 5.
Is it a form of rimas dissolutas? (I just learned that term from Jane Greer this week.)
Well spotted!
I was just coming to say that!
It all gets very knotty! I thought of the Master letters chiefly because nobody knows who or what the "Master" was supposed to be, though poetry is one guess. IF that's the case, then yes, there seems to be a connection between them that illuminates how she articulated, to herself, her relationship with her art.
As I read this poem --- and I do not trust that my own reading is any kind of definitive reading! --- the poet herself is the narrator (or an artist-figure, anyway), and the master is the art that commands and makes use of her. We might possibly read that bit about death as saying that she's relinquished her own power even to fade away gracefully into nothingness, that her art holds her in life, whether she wills to be held there or not.
As for the rhyme pattern in stanza 2, that "doe/reply" pair is in her original. My guess is that she *did* intend it for a rhyme --- that basically any two end-vowels could be construed as rhyming, as long as they didn't have different end-consonants. It's a stretch, but that is what she wrote, and the pattern overall would indicate that she meant those sounds to conform to that pattern.
You're likely right about the "pow pow." But am I right, too, in thinking that "power," at least in the English-speaking world, was typically used more casually and generally (as in "ability") in D's day--I'm vaguely recalling passages in Austen, for instance--than it is today, when "empowerment" is so much in mind? If so, here D's usage does seem very purposeful, as if she might have intended the reader to understand italics, but restrained herself from actually using them.
For that matter, I have no idea whether somebody in the 1860s would have said "pow" for a gun sound --- it seems unlikely! (and very Batman) We hear it now, but I doubt that was actually her intent --- though in her own ear the repeated plosive might well have had the effect of a discharge.
And yes, I think you are right that she is thinking of her own potency as a poet, in that sense of "ability," rather than our latter-day sense of empowerment . . . but that she sees that ability as a power, what we might think of as a "superpower," or a magic, with unlimited and frightening potential, whose servant she is.
Merriam-Webster says pow was used that way as early as 1580!
Aha! Thank you!
The creature and its master aren't clear to me but still she fully conveys the creature's loyalty & deadliness. What an art - to be opaque and clear in tight language. FWIW I prefer her original. The extraordinary relationship is better grasped. Were the various editors frightened by this poem?
I think that they were unsettled by a lot that her poems seemed to reveal about her, and that their overriding instinct was to say, "Oh, she couldn't possibly have meant to say that!"