Paul Scott Derrick Grisanti - Lines of Thought

Eternity’s disclosure

To favorites – a few –

Of the Colossal substance

Of Immortality –

If her reclusion allowed her to write poetry, then the composition itself of that poetry became, for her, eternity’s disclosure of immortality. Shrinking away from a transient world, she fixed that world into amber scenes of immortality with her verse.

But here again another difficult question arises. What is the character of this impermanence that inspires her resort to words? It is a quality that lies at the heart of her “Wind like a Bugle”—at the heart, it seems, of all of her strongest poetry. And yet, it remains a mystery. Although, as critics often do, it is easiest to dismiss in the guise of that grandiose abstraction, Death, such an answer does not really satisfy the problem. What exactly is this peculiarly haunting thing called transience?

Once again, the profound thought of Martin Heidegger can shed some light into this darkness. In his inaugural address to the Freiburg Chair of Philophy, entitled “What is Metaphysics?,” he considers what may be the essential philosophical question: What is Nothing?

The answer, of course. cannot really be expressed, for nothing lies beyond, or behind everything that is, and to express any concept brings it into existence as language. But though it cannot be expressed, we do come face-to-face with Nothing when we experience the “key-mood of dread (Angst) .” What differentiates dread from the related mood of fear is the fact that we always have a fear of something. In the case of dread, though, no such object can be named: “[...] although dread is always ‘dread of’, it is not dread of this or that. ‘Dread of’ is always a dreadful feeling ‘about’—but not about this or that. The indefiniteness of what we dread is not just lack of definition: it represents the essential impossibility of defining the ‘what’” (Heidegger: 335).

What happens in dread, according to Heidegger, is that in a moment of profound sensibility, and shorn of our everyday concerns—which tend to fractionalize the world and make it familiar, we are confronted and oppressed by the totality of what is in its blunt evanescence. We realize that everything is slipping away, ourselves included. Filled with the uncanny sense of dread as everything in the world slips out of our grasp, we come face-to-face with that Nothing which is an inextricable element of the process of being.

It is, in fact, the Nothing which allows the process of being to take place; for the Nothing is vanishment, the slipping-away of what is. It is the functioning of nihilation , 2 which provides all change.

Corning face-to-face with Nothing, with nihilation, we “see” the totality of what is in its essentially evanescent character, as it vanishes from being. “Nihilation is not a fortuitous event; but, understood as the relegation to the vanishing what-is-in-totality, it reveals the latter in all its till now undisclosed strangeness as the pure ‘Other’—contrasted with Nothing. Only in the clear night of dread’s Nothingness is what-is as such revealed in all its original overtness [...] that it ‘is’ and is not Nothing” (Heidegger: 339).

Such would appear to be the character of that impermanence which Emily Dickinson addresses in “There carne a Wind like a Bugle.” Much of her finest poetry is devoted to the disclosure of this essential mystery of existence. Yet notice that she does not try to identify, to name, the mystery precisely, but works by that evocative indirection, content to let it dwell in its original character as mystery. As she says in J1129/Fr1263, reflecting on her own method of poetic composition: “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant – / Success in Circuit lies.” And she certainly follows that advice, impeccably, in her “Wind like a Bugle.” When, in line 7, she does come to name the Nothingness that inspires her dread, she uses a collage of words, “The Doom’s electric Moccasin,” which metaphorically associates it with the stealth of the Indian, the ineluctability of natural force and the inevitability of death.

But the interesting part of the poem comes next, following this metaphorical letting-be of the mystery of temporality. While the first eight lines constitute a revelation of dread, the last nine are an accurate description of its jarring effects. The mood of dread strips the world of its familiarity. In the presence of the evanescent, nihilating Nothing, we suddenly perceive that the things that make up the world are not in complete accordance with those permanent concepts which language assigns them. We perceive that everything is slipping undeniably away, beyond the power of intellect or emotion to hold it. It thus becomes uncanny, unfamiliar. We feel that the world is not that comfortable and familiar place in which we are accustomed to reside. This is the revelation of what-is in totality in its “undisclosed strangeness as the pure ‘Other’” already noted above. In lines nine through twelve we are given the uncanniness of a vanishing world.

The syntax is excessively convoluted here, but that is, after all, one way to convey a sense of unfamiliarity and discomfort. The world of nature, represented by the trees, is momentarily transformed into a “strange Mob” panting as though running in unison toward some disaster. The fences, normally stationary demarcations of space, “fled away” into the distance. And rather than the rivers running by the houses on the banks, in a reversal of normality the “Houses ran” by the rivers. This is the weird panorama that was seen by those “that lived – that Day,” those who were living in that particular moment of dread, and those who looked. But really looking at nature means seeing the passage of Nothing through the world. And only those who can really confront the protean aspect of dread are capable of fully living within the mystery of life. It is they who, alive with that awesome knowledge, can see the world in its essential “otherness,” cognizant of the fugitive disappearance of what is.

After this profound revelation, the sound of a bell strikes upon the heightened sensibility of the poet—a bell most likely activated by that same wind whose movement through the grass began this poetic chain of association. Therefore, the bell, sounding from a “steeple wild,” would be the sound of nihilation itself, the voice of disappearance arising out of the natural world. And as such, of course, it represents the poem, or the language of the poem, which speaks at the behest of the same invisible power. And the bell tells, very simply, as has the poem, “How much can come / And much can go / And yet abide the World!”

The poem is a celebration of the transience of life. And yet, in the very act of celebrating that transience, it monumentalizes it. Operating, as Heidegger postulates that all authentic language must, within the very nexus of change, it rescues permanence out of loss and thus allows us to understand them both in their most fundamental character. But the stable world of the poem is not simply founded on the shifting passage of nihilation which it reveals. That “World” which abides is the language of the poem, which accommodates the evanescent wind of nihilation much as it accommodates the transitory understanding of the reader as he reads.

Emily Dickinson’s poetry is, very often, a forthright confrontation with dread. Detaching herself from the world, she encountered it in its most essential quality, that of evanescence. Out of this encounter arose the honest creation of a language which salvaged her world from annihilation and brought it into the stable “openness” of words. This explains the power, and the importance, of her nature poetry. It is a kind of beacon of human observation which brings the world of nature into our awareness. Lavishing her own particular slant of light upon the manifold things around her, she lets them “be” for us in ways that we would never notice for ourselves. Her poetry of nature’s whims provides us with images of the world, and attitudes toward it, whose origin and validity we seldom, if ever, really bother to question.