Poignancy & Playfulness in The Poetry of Emily

POIGNANCY AND PLAYFULNESS IN
THE POETRY OF EMILY DICKINSON

What Emily Dickinson wrote of Elizabeth Barrett Browning is equally true of herself....

This was a Poet…………It is that
Distills amazing sense
From ordinary meanings
And Attar so immense.

‘Poetry is not her task-master, but her playmate, she approached it with a spark.
in the eye and mischief on her lips......

This poet who brings out “Attar so immense” of the events of ordinary life, casts off the robe of an austere personality in a single moment and wittily appeals to her readers “For love of Her sweet countrymen / Judge tenderly of me” This is the essence of Emily Dickinson as a poet. Her keen perception, extra-ordinary poetic sensibility, remarkable power of registering feeling and experience and critical acuteness were always tinged with humour and wit. She is indeed a serious poet with a trace of childish school girl. This is a peculiar trait, which qualifies her wit and conceit with remarkable ease. She indulges in contradictory terms and paradoxes in her poetry. Like those of the metaphysical poets, her paradoxes explode with inner meaning by the end of each poem, but at the same time the reader is left with a feeling of jest, an unexpected pleasure in the recognition of a child (a prodigal daughter as Cynthia Grifiin Wolff would call her) and a mystic in the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

The poetry of Emily Dickinson abounds in paradoxes. She has indeed believed in her own axion to tell the truth, but to tell it slant so that the brightness does not dazzle the eyes of the viewer to blindness. According to her success lies in circuit. She touches the chords in the heart of every reader reminding them of their own experiences in life, when she says “Victory comes late”. The razor-sharp pain in the realization that victory is left at the door of “freezing lips/too rapt with frost/to take it” comes to a shocking twist with the rhetorical question “was God so economical”? But the process does not stop at that; the poet visualizes a small girl stretching hard to reach a dining table, too high for her on tip-toe. “His tables spread too high for us/unless we dine on tip-toe” Only an Emily Dickinson can conceive of a poem beginning with frost and freezing lips and ending with a child on tip-toe. But the readers may rest assured that even for a single moment the complexity of the situation is not marred by the sharp contrast of the details given.

G.F. Whicher compares Emily Dickinson with Eamily Bronte and Christina Rossetti and says that Emily Dickinson would not be her own unless she converts her heart-break into mischief and calls hers a whimsical conception of a buggy-ride to the Day of Judgement in her poem. “Tie the strings to my life, My Lord/Then I am ready to go!” But Emily Dickinson conceives of a buggy-ride in one of her most famous poems “Because I could not stop for Death……..”            When compared to the poem discussed in the previous paragraph, the process of posing contradictory veins of thought is reversed in this poem. This poem starts on a light note of a woman, too busily occupied to stop even for death and death kindly stops for her in the guise of a gentle young man. His civility is such that the poet puts away her labour and leisure and gets into his carriage to be accompanied by immortality also. The journey smoothly passes through children at play, gazing grain and finally setting sun. The images lulling us into sleep with an underlying meaning of childhood, maturity and evening of life give us a jolt, as it were when she says “we passed the setting sun…./or rather….he passed us”. Here we are no longer on our familiar terminology. The bridal dress, ill-­equipped or facing the frost of death, is indeed a reflection of the reader also as ordinary interpretation fails here, where the ordinary linear concept of time is rejected. It is no longer past, present and future after the pause before “A swelling of the ground”. But this is not all. The reader has yet another twist in the final lines as she has envisioned centuries to be shorter than a day since the moment that she has recognised that the direction of her chariot’s ride is towards “Eternity”. Here the extra­ordinary idea of dubbing eternity into a single moment of experience is thrown at our face in the dangling and swinging rhythm of buggy-ride. At such moments she is with Emerson and Eliot in composing a “Forever” out of “nows’ in her own words.

If wit and conceit are the tongs with which Emily Dickinson approaches the fire of emotion to be poetized, we may call them just her poetic techniques. But it is not so. The playful child is so imbued in her poetic personality that it emerges as an inevitable part in the most serious moments of pain or despair or earnest emotion. For instance in a “A wife….at…..Day break I shall be……” a dramatic moment, love for God, a possible vision and an ineffable experience of recognizing the Saviour’s face is portrayed. The poem starts on a poignant note of separation, spending the night as a maid and facing the morning victoriously as a wife. The gratification of desire shown in the thrill and excitement of the second stanza is typical of Emily Dickinson’s portrayal. In an ascending order, the poet changes from a maid, to a bride and then to a wife; the bustling of Angels in the Hall is heard throughout the soft climb over the steps of future. But at this moment the child and the mystic complete with each other to come to the foreground....one fumbling at the childhood prayer and the other at the recognition of the Saviour, whose face she has already seen.

In a personal, experience, where emotion is the strongest and God is also visualised as a personification of her own emotions, a projection of her own mind, Emily Dickinson is both a mystic of love and a child. But when it becomes an all-absorbing experience of the all­inclusiveness of Heaven, the playful girl is still there, though in a dormant form. Heaven is a void for the Buddhists with the qualities of being both full and empty. The Hindu Upanishads conceive of Heaven as an immortal Brahman before, behind, to the right, to the left, below, above and all pervading and infinite. But for Emily Dickinson it is a pit “Pit…..but Heaven over it……/ And Heaven beside and Heaven abroad. The playfulness doesn’t end in the choice of the word “Pit”. “It is consistent throughout the poem, always muffling the poet’s inability to find proper word and phrase in relating an experience, which is beyond words. The gaiety does not loosen the grip of control the creative process, but brings home the fact that what the poet is relating is not an idea, but an experience. The realization of Heaven is like balancing before a pit, where one can neither afford to slip or see beneath; nor can one dream for the fear of losing everything. Here in this state of equilibrium, a crucial balance, all the nuances of keeping in abeyance, the past, the future and the dreamy state, imposed by religious teachings are brought home. This is a lone fight of an alone to the Alone. The third and final stanza measures the depth of the pit, in fact the size of it, if it can be measured. It is the spaceless and timeless one...to be inferred in two jam-packed lines. “Its Circuit just the same/seed…..summer ... tomb”. The plight of a human life, measured by a body’s dimensions and compressed into the span of a lifetime, loses all its limitations in the realization of a space-­time continuum in the last line, “Whose Doom to Whom”. Here the identity of an individual is lost : who is the person to be doomed and to whom is he going? Each individual is part and parcel of the self-same God. God is integral and dissolves in Himself every individual or human soul is a dot on a disc of snow after the merger with the Oversoul.

Emily Dickinson is a poet, who considered herself a mischievous child of God. The same person, who hid herself in a small outer apartment of the house to save herself from her father’s command that everyone in the house should go to the Church, is to be seen in her poetry. Her development from her religious ground into a poet of universal appeal is clearly evident in her poetry. As Gelpi says she was an early rebel. But the rebel is always in and out of the situation. Just as she puzzled her father by being in and out of the house, she entertains the reader also. At one moment the poignancy grips the reader into a serious and an all-­engrossing experience; the next moment the playfulness brings home the awareness that after all this is a piece of art….the construction of a master­-craftsman, who is both a sufferer and a spectator at the same time, indulging in the “dynamics of paradox”, which prevented her from drowning in the “Syllableless Sea”.