Thoughts
Emily Dickinson . . . the murmur of a bee
The mind is wider than the sky. That was the way Emily Dickinson looked at the world outside her. Or you could say it was the way the soul worked in her. Weigh that statement. There is something of the metaphysical about it. There is a linkage of ideas which comes into a working out of the imagery. Consider the universe you are part of. Or think of yourself, the essential you in whom the universe comes to epitomize itself. That is what comes through in Dickinson, in her use of words, the words shaping a thought, the thought leading you on to a wider ambience of experience. That is how Dickinson's poetry comes to us. It is different from the way we have perceived poetry through the ages. The different emanates from the fundamentally reclusive which Dickinson has personified, indeed held up as a model for herself in her lifetime. It is also in the mode she employed in her poetry, in the sense that the poems did not have titles, indeed the formulation of her verses employed such grammatically unconventional forms as the use of unexpected capital letters where small letters would have sufficed. But that, you will likely argue, is liberty poets are perfectly within their rights to take advantage of. Dickinson did it, in all her eighteen hundred or so poems composed over a creative lifetime spent in fashioning ideas. Was Emily Dickinson drawn to conventional faith? The answer to this kind of query comes in a rather simplistic manner. Like men and women of her generation, she comprehended the place of religion in life. And yet there was, once she had outgrown youth and was well into deeper communion with the world around her, the feeling in her that faith was not merely to be discovered through a conventional observance of its basic tenets. It was also to be spotted in the beating of the heart. People went to church, thought Dickinson, to find God. For herself, God was in the heart, right in her home. She did not wear her faith on her sleeve. She simply felt it in all her consciousness. And that was the way things were in her native Amherst, Massachusetts. It was New England ambience that mattered. In the early to late nineteenth century, it was intellectual liberalism which underscored the pursuit of education, of anything, in Massachusetts. At Amherst Academy and then at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, Dickinson was part of the air of academic freedom New England then symbolized. And yet there was something more, something greater in terms of desire that tugged at her heart. It was always home that beckoned her. She kept going back home, eventually making it a point not to leave it again. Amherst provided the perfect backdrop to a flowering of her poetic genius. It came in association with her aloofness, with her isolation if you will, from her surroundings. She was forever uneasy dealing with people or making small conversation. In her aloneness, though, she was endlessly in conversation with herself. The conversation was with her poetry. Or conversation for her was poetry. Think back on the profundity of the thoughts in the poem beginning thus: Safe in their alabaster chambers / untouched by morning and untouched by noon / sleep the meek members of the resurrection / rafter of satin, and roof of stone. Light / laughs the breeze in her castle of sunshine / babbles the bee in a stolid ear . . . There is certainly a quality of the arcane about the poem and you wonder at the deep religiosity which pervades it. She speaks of death. Mortality was always a poetic preoccupation with her, the underpinning of which happens to be this poem. Alabaster is symbolic of beauty; and it is cold. Death, if you must know, is a cold affair. But then there is the matter of the resurrection. How do those expected to resurrect themselves lie still in death? In Emily Dickinson, you run into a panoply of thoughts, perhaps of the kind you stumble into in modern poets. Difficulty of understanding is what you experience, all the while knowing that the difficulty is compounded by the poet's own questions about the mystery of life and death, of the process of Creation itself. Reflect on the following: The murmur of a bee / a witchcraft yieldeth me / If any ask me why / 'twere easier to die / than tell / the red upon the hill /taketh away my will / if anybody sneer / take care, for God is here / that's all. A romantic spirit was what Emily Dickinson was constituted of. The lyrical came in beautiful tandem with the spiritual in the poems and, doing so, lifted the poetry to heights rare in the annals of literature. Feel the throbbing sense of life and death, of beginning and end, in these thoughts: If I should die / and you should live / And time should gurgle on / and morn should beam / and noon should burn / as it has usual done . . . / it make the parting tranquil / and keeps the soul serene . . . The soul, said Dickinson in one of her usual reflective moments, should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience. It is ecstasy you dip into and stay in . . . as you take in the warmth of Emily Dickinson's poetry.
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