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Me Change! Me Alter!” The Changing Poetry of Emily Dickinson
THE CHANGING POET RY OF EMILY DICKINSON
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The striking words of Emily Dickinson’s poem 268 insist that she and her poetry cannot be subject to change. However, with just the briefest flick through her complete works, the reader observes not only her ascent into madness and consequently varying content, but also a change in the very structure and punctuation of her poems, most significantly with regards to her signature dash.
As the poem number steadily rises, the path becomes darker and more precarious for Dickinson. The focus of her earlier work is planted in nature and the admiration and awe that it pollinates, especially in those cherished solitary landscapes of poems 318 and 48. The cascading sunbeams, “a ribbon at a time”, glint and smile in the halcyon optimism of the speaker as she searches for idealism. Indeed this initial positive outlook of life can be summed up in the first line of poem 536: “the heart asks pleasure first”. The focus of this poem is debatable, for it can be read with reference to a fatal injury, or alternately with regards to the very lives of men. In the same way that a child tries to convince themselves that all is good and well in life, Dickinson’s poetry begins on a positive, arguably forced, note but the child soon grows to realise that there are trivialities in the world and so asks for “excuse from pain” which is perhaps most readily observed in poem 61. Dickinson here begins by addressing “papa above”, perhaps a reference to the recent death of one of her most beloved professors, and whilst this death-ridden image should appear morbid, she continues with some of her most manic and childish imagery. We can see the forced smile and gritted teeth in the overtly optimistic three exclamation marks as she exclaims “in your kingdom // a “mansion” for the rat!” The notion is so absurd, and the speaker’s desperation for normality so profuse, that the reader can feel the spurring pain that we wish could end.
In the same way that poem 536 shifts suddenly in the second stanza, Dickinson’s poetry took a sharp turn in 1874 when her father died. Death had always been a notion which fascinated and terrified Dickinson, owing to her experience of it from an early age - not only did her family house overlook Amherst’s graveyard but at the age of 14, her close friend and second cousin, Sophia Holland, died of typhus, leaving Dickinson traumatised. As a result, much over her poetry revolves around this primary fear; however, more so in her later works following the death of her father, a man with whom she was exceedingly close. In poem 1297, thought to have been written in the year of his death, Dickinson orders for her soul “to feed itself” and outrun the “Competing Death”, spoken with blatant carpe diem truth and little sensitivity. However, the true acceptance that death is inescapable is revealed in the poem’s last line where she likens dying to “a kiss”, similar to poem 536 in that death will be “the will of the inquisitor” - the will of Death himself, an individual whom she can here speak of comfortably and with numbed fear.
Her growing acceptance of death’s presence can be perceived in Dickinson’s trademark use of the dash. Use of this key piece of punctuation was originally relatively scarce in her poetry and, when it was used, it typically ended a line and thereby adhered to a more formalised structural approach. However, as Dickinson ages and begins to further understand the world, the once fairly ordered verses become fractured with caesura, in that same unpredictability which dominates human life. Poems such as 573, 452 and 1072 are positively infested with the strikes of Emily Dickinson’s black dipping ink and take up more than half of the designated space. But interestingly, her use of the dash does not increase exponentially - on the contrary, in her last poems, the dash seems almost exempt for her work, having been replaced by full stops. Dickinson, diagnosed with nephritis, a disease of the kidneys, knows that she is dying and with this definitive knowledge, she does not have to end with the unpredictability of the dash. Whilst before the future seemed out of her control, her recognition and acceptance of death allows for her to govern those things which previously scared her. She looks boldly over Amherst’s graveyard then bids “goodbye to all men” and there are neither questions nor regrets as in those final words of 536: “the liberty to die”.
The Heart asks Pleasure - first - And then - Excuse from Pain - And then - those little Anodynes That deaden suffering - And then - to go to sleep - And then - if it should be The will of its Inquisitor The liberty to die - Ruby B (Lower Sixth)
