honesty and life in emily dickinson’s death poetry

Timothy Trayhurn

In ‘Emily Dickinson: The Poetics and Practice of Autonomy,’ Wendy Martin argues for a certain defiance in both Dickinson’s poetry and biography, writing that against the blind conviction of New England Calvinism ‘she ultimately came down on the side of uncertainty.’

Martin’s interesting turn of phrase – ‘ultimately’ deciding on indecision seems a contradiction in terms – deftly draws out the tension between what the Oxford Companion to American Literature calls Dickinson’s ‘gnomic concision of phrase’ and her death poetry’s rigorous dedication to intellectual honesty and humility. 

‘Her poems about death confront its grim reality with honesty, humor, curiosity, and above all a refusal to be comforted,’ as Robert S. Levine writes, and it this last – an ethical ‘refusal’ to draw from death any final conclusion other than the impossibility of drawing final conclusions – that underpins her intellectual approach.

Just as she refused to confirm a traditional Christian faith, with all its mysteriously divined certainties, so the certainty in a life after death – and others, such as the glory of war – is replaced by the unassailable blank of the unknowable. Under this light, her confident ‘gnomic’ posture can be seen as the Socratic Paradox’s expression in her work: the knowledge that one knows nothing; the certainty only of uncertainty.   

Going to Heaven!

It has been postulated that Dickinson left her carefully prepared fascicles to a posterity she predicted would be more open to her formal experiments and queries of sacred contemporary beliefs.

‘Going to Heaven!’ in fascicle six strikes a nakedly sceptical – ‘pray do not ask me how’ to get in, ‘I’m glad I don’t believe it’ – and insouciant pose: ‘how dim it sounds!’

Via subtle pun, the poem’s concluding stanza draws comparison between the speaker desirous to ‘look a little more | At such a curious Earth’ and the final word ‘ground’ – aptly located at the end of the poem as at the end of one’s life – to imagine a humorously dissatisfactory compromise between the unverifiable promise of eternal life and the buried dead’s verifiably permanent location in the earth.

The final line imparts a faintly paraprodoskian effect upon the meaning of ‘Earth’ so that the speaker can be re-interpreted as a buried person their self, or imagining themselves as one day being such, fated to stare at the soil like all the others who are where she ‘left them.’ The poem’s speaker does not begrudge the near-dead the palliative illusion that the ‘ground’ will not be their final abode but still lightly ridicules their certainty in the uncertifiable. She ironically ventriloquizes in a Biblical register: ‘and yet it will be done | As sure as flocks go home’ etc. The ‘astonished’ voice – signified by exclamation mark, rhetorical question, and bald statements of unknowledge – reacts to such baseless surety, preferring the physical evidence of the corpse, which invisible in the ground surrenders no conclusions.

I went to Heaven

Dickinson’s scepticism – if not actual irreligiosity – is elsewhere implied by dissatisfaction with Christian artistic representation. Relieved against the rich history of depictions of Hell like those by Dante, Milton, or Bosch, – where universal human antipathy to things like fire and torture furnish ample opportunity for vivid description – her poem ‘I went to Heaven’ appears to self-consciously play on the perhaps inherent inadequacy of paradisal imagination.

The poem’s diminutiveness in both line & overall length even, among Dickinson’s body of succinct lyric, recapitulates just what smallness defines this ‘small town,’ ‘small’ being suggestive of both selective criteria for entry befitting the Calvinist elect and a dearth of imaginative material to draw on for its description.

This struggle is intimated in the airy, yielding materials employed to draw a picture as ‘No Man drew.’ Like in ‘Because I could not stop for Death’ the speaker’s clothes become ‘Gossamer’ and ‘Tulle’ as she rides the liminal space between life and death, something and nothing, so here materials that likewise seem between solid and air are the attempt to render in concrete terms the ineffability of Heaven. The high frequency of Dickinson’s signature dashes among already limited lines fill the poem with empty space, so that like ‘Gossamer’ and ‘Mechlin’ it too becomes aerial and as near nothingness as something-ness.

Yet in this the poem cannot seem to reach beyond betweenness to embody Heaven proper, so while it achieves beguiling prettiness it falls short of a convincing description, as it knows it must when it acknowledges its deficiency in the beautiful, sad line ‘almost – contented.’ Heaven cannot be satisfactorily poetized because eternal perfection is unknowable, or at least anyone’s idea of it – unlike Hell – is bound to be disagreeably subjective.

Dust is the only Secret

As a place one can only an access in death, Heaven is beyond sensible human experience, thus beyond human imagination.  Dickinson’s poetic voice is confined to the real, even as above it attempts to conjure the unrealizable.

In ‘Dust is the only Secret’, allusion to the prayer of dust to dust reaffirms a linkage between ‘Dust’ and ‘Death’ summoned by syllabic, syntagmatic, and alliterative association. In a kind of liturgical Derridean absence, to live and perish are strictly confined to materiality. The line ‘Dust is the only Secret’ then fulfils a paradoxical function within the poem: it signals ‘Dust’ both as a stand-in for all life, therefore the only thing you might ever know, and as a stand-in for death, an unknowable nothing.

Accordingly, in another poem, Dickinson articulates the Epicurean position: ‘Afraid! Of whom am I afraid? | Not Death – for who is he?’ In the poem at hand, the personified Death is a being without being nor place. Its characteristics are disparate:

Industrious! Laconic!
Punctual! Sedate!
Bold as a Brigand!
Stiller than a Fleet!

That is not to say, of course, that any adjective here listed is not applicable. But rather, while not exactly antonyms, each pair within or across lines are connotationally distinct enough to imply themselves as somewhere far apart upon a vast spectrum, with Death’s character spread expansively over it. That is, being unfathomable, any qualities Death might have are potentially infinite, for the infinite and the unknowable are symbolically tantamount.

This comically inverts, but to the same effect, Dickinson’s usual position: instead of drawing no conclusion from death, one might draw every conclusion.

Ah, Necromancy Sweet!

The poem ‘Ah, Necromancy Sweet!’ is, according to that position, written like a riddle where one is left to contemplate just what it is the speaker attempts to gain by beguiling a ‘Wizard’ with compliments, clued in only by the mystery-object’s tangential qualities.

The anaphoric ‘Ah’ – working in conjunction with exclamation marks to impart a sense of being consciously a bit too much – signifies a comic pastiche of panegyric register. This lends the poem an overall irony, a feeling that the attempt to solicit secret knowledge from this wizard was never to be taken seriously.

So, while one may make informed guesses at what ‘the skill’ or ‘the pain’ are – the power of divination, perhaps, the power to instil the pain of grief as the dead do – the answer is finally ambiguous. Baffled, then, as one reads the riddle-poem, one becomes like the unsuccessful supplicant before the holder of ‘Erudite’ knowledge, that is knowledge of death.

It is dead – Find it

As Martin puts it, ‘her poems celebrate her deepest conviction that life should take on intense meaning in the context of mortality.’

In ‘It is dead – Find it’, the word ‘it’ encapsulates the meaning that the rest of the poem expands on: bereft of lifeforce – happiness, consciousness, or the unverifiable issue of a homesickness for the lap of God that draws the living towards death – the human body is transformed from a someone to a something. Once dead, they are literally if not emotionally nothing to the alive; hence, elsewhere, Dickinson directs the reader to ‘Endow the living – with the tears – | You squander on the Dead’ (p.312).

If I shouldn’t be alive

This sort of edict takes on a sweeter aspect in ‘If I shouldn’t be alive’, where the poem acts as an imagined Last Will & Testament.

The speaker requests the putative Executor that ‘When the Robins come, | Give the one in Red Cravat, | A Memorial crumb.’ Every robin, of course, has a ‘Red Cravat’ and so the request, being impossible, is like a very gentle practical joke that no one would fall for. The Will-poem’s playfully futile prompt bespeaks the poet’s belief in the importance of those alive in the material here-&-now, giving to her beneficiaries not money but laughter and sweetness to assuage the pain of grief, though the bequeather is non-existent to enjoy it.



It can be seen, I think, that in the exercise of intellectual honesty  – not taking religious certainties for granted but querying them, refusing comfortable answers divined from mystery – that Emily Dickinson escapes the exaggerated image of herself as a morbid recluse. Just as Wendy Martin argues for her biographical and artistic autonomy, so she defies posthumous stereotype. Far from crushed by existential fear as her reputation may suggest, the ‘gnomic’ register of certain uncertainty in her death poetry finally comes around, with both personal and social applications, to a consistent affirmation of life.

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