Paul Scott Derrick Grisanti - Lines of Thought

Considered in this manner, language actually brings the world—everything that human sentience can grasp, “alles was der Fall ist”—into existence. For it is language which allows the things of the world to emerge from the undifferentiated ground of being, to come forth and stand out, to “ex-ist” as themselves. And poetry is the purest form of language. It is the poet who stands between the Unknown and the Known, who, in the practice of her visionary art, expands the unconcealedness of language where the things of the world discover themselves to man. Poetry is the creation of language, not its appropriation. Poetry establishes the world: it “[...] never takes language as a raw material ready to hand, rather it is poetry which first makes language possible. Poetry is the primitive language of a historical people. Therefore [...] the essence of language must be understood through the essence of poetry” (Heidegger: 283-4).

We have now found a place from which to question the language of Dickinson. Is it a poetry that dwells on the “borderline” between the unknown and the known? Is it a language that pushes back the darkness and allows the world to take its place around us as it is? Does it make us, at the same time, aware of ourselves and our mysterious involvement in the world in which we move?

Perhaps we can begin with some perceptive advice from Allen Tate, from a series of essays on four American poets. There he says of Dickinson’s work that “The two elements of her style, considered as point of view, are immortality, or the idea of permanence, and the physical process of death or decay” (Tate: 22). He also tells us that the recurrent symbol of death in her work represented, for Emily Dickinson, an attitude toward nature which was implicit in her puritan heritage. “Now the enemy,” he says, “to all those New Englanders was Nature, and Miss Dickinson saw into the character of this enemy more deeply than any of the others. The general symbol of Nature, for her, is Death, and her weapon against Death is the entire powerful dumbshow of the puritan theology led by Redemption and Immortality” (11-12). This is certainly a very subtle observation, which implies more than it declares. Although her “general symbol” for nature may be death, it is obvious that she considered neither one to be a personal enemy. We all know that Emily Dickinson was not a believer in, nor a practitioner of Puritan theological doctrines. It seems more probable that, like all persons of innate genius, she used those intellectual tools which were available to her—in this case the terms and concepts of the Puritan tradition—to express the more fundamental truths that lie beyond all doctrine and cant.

One of those truths is the paradox which Heidegger has revealed for us: that time and eternity are complementary opposites which depend, for their existence, on the exercise of words. These are the polar elements of permanence and decay to which Tate alludes. The realization that language is the arbiter of immortality is the painful essence of much of Dickinson’s best poetry. J1593/Fr1618 of is a noteworthy example:

There came a Wind like a Bugle –

It quivered through the Grass

And a Green Chill upon the Heat

So ominous did pass

We barred the Windows and the Doors

As from an Emerald Ghost –

The Doom’s electric Moccasin

That very instant passed –

On a strange Mob of panting Trees

And Fences fled away

And Rivers where the Houses ran

Those looked that lived – that Day –

The Bell within the steeple wild

The flying tidings told –

How much can come

And much can go,

And yet abide the World!

What is the uncanny mystery that lies at the heart of this poem? What characteristic of the world is it trying to expose? The entity, or quality, that passes like a wind through this world is never really identified. The poet pointedly avoids an outright naming of her subject through the use of simile and metaphor.

We know that it shows the qualities of a piercing, military wind; yet at the same time it quivers through the grass. It inspires a “Green Chill” over the heat of life, as ominous as some “Emerald Ghost.” And the thing itself is only referred to as “The Doom’s electric Moccasin.”

With this strategy of evocative evasion, the poet, in effect, places a mold of concrete words around the abstract soul of her poem. As Tate so aptly remarks: “[...] she does not separate [abstractions] from the sensuous illuminations that she is so marvellously adept at; like Donne, she perceives abstraction and thinks sensation ” (13). The subject of this poem is not some palpable quantity, some object of experience. Instead, it is an indefinable quality of experience itself. It is the transitory character of the world, as subtle as the quivering of the wind and as irrevocable in its ultimate implications as the final voice of doom.

So we are brought, once again, to consider those two essential qualities of her language, “immediacy, or the idea of permanence, and the physical nature of death or decay.” As Heidegger proposes, it is just this paradoxical aspect of language—that it brings permanence out of the process of change—which allows us to experience time, which lets time “open out” for man. Only against the permanence of the word can we measure the transience of the world.

But such is the delicacy of Heidegger’s thought that the relationship is necessarily reversible. Only against the transience of the world can we measure the permanence of the word. To enjoy the luxury of changelessness, we must be painfully aware of the depredations of time. Emily Dickinson seems to have guarded this elemental wisdom in the deepest part of her soul. It must have been an awareness of this mutual dependence between the sharp pain of loss and the victory of language that led to her reclusion. As John Crowe Ransom put it: “Her sensibility was so acute that it made her extremely vulnerable to personal contacts. Intense feeling would rush out as soon as sensibility apprehended the object, and flood her consciousness to the point of helplessness. [...] The happy encounter was as painful as the grievous one” (Ransom: 100). This agonizing sensibility bound her into an intimate complicity of love for the experiences of life; and yet, at the same time, it made her almost pitifully vulnerable to the transitory quality of that experience. For such a sensibility even the slightest event can yield a universe of recognition. To hold on to this glorious recognition, to make it permanent in language, she had to withdraw from the world of experience which occasioned it.

But this is the true nature of renunciation. It does not simply mean to sacrifice the pleasures and satisfactions of the world. It means to go beyond them, for a greater satisfaction of which only the highest sensibilities are capable. Emily Dickinson’s excruciating sensitivity to life forced her to renounce all outward participation in experience. But this very act of renunciation freed her to exercise her love of experience in the fullest manner possible, by bringing it into permanence through words. That she was fully aware of the price she paid, and the complicated blessing that she won, is made clear in any number of her poems on the problem of renunciation. One good example, for our purposes, is J306/Fr630:

The Soul’s Superior instants

Occur to Her – alone –

When friend – and Earth’s occasion

Have infinite withdrawn –

Or She – Herself – ascended

To too remote a Hight

For lower Recognition

Than Her Omnipotent –

This Mortal Abolition

Is Seldom – but as fair

As Apparition – subject

To Autocratic Air –