The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Emily Dickinson · a body of short poems, written about 1850 to 1886, about eight hundred of them copied into forty fascicles she sewed herself · the poems as written, in Thomas H. Johnson’s edition, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955, 1,775 poems, with R. W. Franklin’s variorum of 1998 as the better text where the two differ · read from knowledge; no text in hand, and words quoted only where they are certain
Mode
Lyric; the short poem in the hymn stanza turned to metaphysical and psychological argument, with slant rhyme, the dash and the capitalised noun
Mythos
Death as a courteous suitor in a carriage; a self owned by a Master, with power to kill and none to die; the Bride and the Queen; Calvary and Gethsemane as names for private pain; Eden and Paradise as states, not places
Phase
Written about 1850 to 1886, most thickly about 1858 to 1865; about ten poems printed in her lifetime, anonymous and altered; first collected in 1890 in regularised form; the poems as written printed in 1955
Presentation
1,775 poems in Johnson’s order of dating; forty fascicles, hand-copied and sewn, about 1858 to 1864, with unsewn sets after; many poems with variant words marked in the manuscript and never chosen between
Register
From the riddle, the valentine and the comic snake to the breakdown, the deathbed and the theological quarrel; one voice throughout
Scale
Poems most often of eight to twenty-four lines; consciousness, the sacred, nature, love and death, with the household and the village at the edges
Governing Proposition
A poet writes some seventeen hundred short poems in the metres of the Protestant hymn, copies about eight hundred of them into booklets she sews by hand, prints almost none, and leaves them to be found after her death. The wager of the body is that the mind is a place in which events happen with the force of outer ones, that pain, despair and the approach of death have a structure that can be mapped from inside, and that the stanza made to sing the faith, slanted in its rhyme and broken by the dash, is the instrument that can map it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The poems were written from about 1850 to 1886, and most thickly from about 1858 to 1865; in Franklin’s dating close to three hundred belong to 1863 alone. Thomas H. Johnson’s edition of 1955 prints 1,775 of them, in the order he dated them; R. W. Franklin’s variorum of 1998 prints 1,789, corrects Johnson’s dating and readings, and is the better text where the two differ. Most of the poems are short, commonly of eight to twenty-four lines, in the hymn metres of Watts: common metre of eight and six syllables, short metre, long metre. The rhyme is slanted, the chief mark of punctuation is the dash, and the nouns carry capitals.
From about 1858 to 1864 she copied about eight hundred of the poems by hand into forty fascicles, booklets she sewed herself, and after them kept further sets of copied poems unsewn. Many poems stand in the manuscripts with variant words marked beside them, and neither edition fully resolves which she meant. In her lifetime about ten poems were printed, anonymous and altered by their editors, “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” in the Springfield Republican in 1866 among them. In 1862 she sent poems to T. W. Higginson, and his answer was to counsel delay. She published almost nothing more, and the fascicles were kept in a drawer.
She died in 1886. Poems, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Higginson, appeared in 1890, with titles added and the rhymes and metres regularised; a Second and a Third Series followed in 1891 and 1896, and Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s editions from 1914. The first editors unbound the fascicles, and their order was lost until Franklin recovered it in The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (1981). The unit scored here is the body of the poems as written, in Johnson’s text, with her capitals, punctuation and dashes restored from the manuscripts, poems sent inside letters counted and the letters themselves not. Poems are cited by Johnson’s numbers, and named by their first lines.
Movement II
The body’s central subject is death, and its best-known poem gives death a manner. “Because I could not stop for Death”, it begins, and the second line answers, “He kindly stopped for me” (J712). The turn is on the adverb. Death is a courteous caller with a carriage, and the speaker goes with him as a woman goes with a suitor, in a gown of gossamer, her “Tippet” “only Tulle”. The figure is the oldest one of death as bridegroom, and the poem makes it particular: the courtesy is where the chill is.
The carriage passes the setting sun, and comes to a house that is a grave, “A Swelling of the Ground”. The last stanza speaks from after the journey: “Since then”, it says, and after her dash, “’tis Centuries”. The journey has been centuries long, and the poem has said so in the common metre of the hymn, with no comment of its own.
“I heard a Fly buzz” (J465) gives the deathbed itself. What comes between the dying eyes and the light is a fly, its “Blue”, its “uncertain stumbling Buzz”. Terror is reached by understatement. Whether the poem records a failure of revelation, or a revelation of what dying is, it does not say, and the question has stayed open. Around these two the body returns to death again and again, in “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” (J216), in “Apparently with no surprise” (J1624), in “My life closed twice before its close” (J1732), and sometimes past need.
Movement III
The disclosure of the body is that the mind is a place in which events happen with the force of outer ones. “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” (J280) gives a breakdown as a rite: the service runs its course inside the head, in the common metre the service would be sung in, and the metre is the rite the mind is breaking through. When the last plank in reason gives way, the break is felt as the stanza’s own break, and the poem ends on “And Finished knowing”, with one word more and a dash after it, open on the fall.
“After great pain, a formal feeling comes” (J341) maps the aftermath in thirteen lines, and names its hour: “This is the Hour of Lead”. One line moves from chill to stupor to “the letting go”, the whole anatomy of shock, and no word in the poem can be taken away. “It was not Death, for I stood up” (J510) defines despair by exclusion, setting aside what it is not until it is most like chaos. The method is the method of a mind taking its own measure from inside.
“There’s a certain Slant of light” (J258) names an affliction that leaves no mark on the body: “But internal difference, / Where the Meanings, are”. The light is outer and the hurt is inner, and the poem holds both in one perception. The same mind turns on the faith it was raised in: “I like a look of Agony, / Because I know it’s true” (J241); “I know that He exists” (J338) is a theological quarrel. The poem that begins “The Brain”, and after a dash “is wider than the Sky” (J632), states as a proposition what these poems enact. “Much Madness is divinest Sense” (J435) turns the measure on the world that does the judging.
Movement IV
The body builds a mythology of its own, and its hardest myth is the poem that begins “My Life had stood”, and goes on after the dash, “a Loaded Gun” (J754). It builds a self owned and set going by a Master, a self with power to kill and no power to die. The poem never resolves who the Master is, nor whether the last stanza is power or curse. It is built, not alluded to, and it is load-bearing.
Across many poems the same building goes on in smaller figures. Calvary and Gethsemane become names for private pain. The Bride and the Queen of the coronation poems recur as figures of the self. Eden and Paradise are states rather than places. The Soul “selects her own Society”, and then, after the dash, “shuts the Door” (J303). The erotic poems belong to the same order. “Wild Nights” (J249) is erotic longing at full height, and “I cannot live with You” (J640) stands among the love poems weighed most.
The mythology is one person’s and often hermetic, and much of the body does not build at all: its bees, robins and seas are evoked rather than made to bear weight. Its social myth is the smallest and the sharpest. “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” (J288) makes a comedy of a voice that withholds itself, and the comedy is the condition of a woman whose poems were kept in a drawer. The village and the household enter at the edges, the neighbours, the church, a funeral seen from a window (J389); the family hardly enters at all.
Movement V
“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” (J1129) is the body’s account of itself, in eight lines: “Success in Circuit lies”. The form is the theory. The hymn stanza is the frame of a faith and is turned against it; the rhyme is slanted, from full chime to dissonance, the near assent of a doubter; the dash stands in for the comma and the full stop, the mark of a mind that cannot complete its sentence; the syntax drops its auxiliaries and turns adjectives into nouns. The same law governs “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” (J986), where a snake is taken for a “Whip lash / Unbraiding in the Sun” and met with “Zero at the Bone”, and the breakdown of J280. Each renders a perception until it reaches a limit and registers the limit in the body.
The editors of 1890, who regularised the rhymes and the punctuation, prove the point by subtraction: their versions say less. For sixty-five years the world read Dickinson chiefly in those versions. Even so the reach began. From 1890 the regularised poems found a large readership; the Imagists and Amy Lowell claimed her in the 1910s and 1920s; Hart Crane addressed a sonnet to her; Copland set twelve of the poems in 1950; her compression is felt in Moore, Bishop and Plath and in the later American lyric. Only in 1955, with Johnson’s edition, did the poems as written reach the field.
Since then each edition has made a new Dickinson. Franklin recovered the fascicle order in 1981 and in 1998 printed a variorum that changed what the body was; Susan Howe and the poets after her read the manuscripts as visual and open works, and the variants as part of the poem, a question Sharon Cameron took up in Choosing Not Choosing. The manuscripts survive at Amherst College and at Harvard’s Houghton Library, split between holdings that descend from rival families, and the body is legible whole. The poems are taught, memorised and anthologised without a break. The slant the poem asks for is the slant the body keeps.
Act III · The Twelve
Inside the great poem the subtractive test fails almost entirely. In “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” (J341) no line can go: three stanzas move from the nerves to the feet to “This is the Hour of Lead”, and the close, “the letting go”, holds the poem’s whole argument in its last words. “I heard a Fly buzz” (J465) is built so that its last line, “I could not see to see”, cancels all that came before it. But the unit is the body, and the body is a life’s output, never selected by its maker for a reader. Many of the 1,775 poems are slight: riddles of the bee and the clover, valentines, verses sent with flowers, a long run of late quatrains in the aphoristic manner. Many say again in a weaker stanza what a stronger one said, and many stand in variants she never chose between. The fascicles are a private gathering, not a sequence with an argument. That is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the necessity is in the poems, not in the body.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The disclosures can be stated, and they hold; they are meanings, not moods. Great pain produces not feeling but form, “a formal feeling” (J341). The mind can break from inside, as a floor breaks, “And then a Plank in Reason, broke” (J280), and the poem ends “And Finished knowing”, one word more and a dash. Despair leaves no outer mark, “Heavenly Hurt, it gives us”, only “internal difference, / Where the Meanings, are” (J258). Truth can be borne only indirectly, “Success in Circuit lies” (J1129), a disclosure about knowing and about the poems’ own method at once. Beside these stands a mind that will neither believe nor stop asking, “I like a look of Agony, / Because I know it’s true” (J241), and that instability is itself what is disclosed. What holds the axis where it stands is narrowness: the disclosure is of one consciousness. The Civil War, during which the great run was written, enters only glancingly, and class, labour, the town and the nation are nearly absent.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Height is reached in many poems and in more than one key. The dreadful: “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” (J280), its drum and its plunge; “Zero at the Bone” (J986), at the snake; the Loaded Gun (J754), violent power with no stated object. The cold: the slant of winter light (J258); “This is the Hour of Lead” (J341); the fly’s “Blue”, its “uncertain stumbling Buzz” (J465), set between the dying eyes and the light. Transport: “Wild Nights” (J249) and “Further in Summer than the Birds”. And the calm height of “Because I could not stop for Death” (J712), whose carriage passes the setting sun to “A Swelling of the Ground”, and whose last stanza opens the centuries: “I first surmised the Horses’ Heads / Were toward Eternity”. Across the great run the poems that rise number in the scores. What holds the axis below the top is the breath: the height comes in a flash, a quatrain or two, never sustained, and the low register of wit, riddle and diminutive fills a large part of the body.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Some figures are built, not evoked, and they recur. Death as a courteous suitor in a carriage (J712) is the oldest of journeys made particular: the bride’s “Tippet”, which is “only Tulle”, the house that is a grave, the horses’ heads toward Eternity. The Soul that “selects her own Society” and then “shuts the Door” (J303) is the archetype of election, turned from God’s choice to the soul’s. The deathbed of J465, its witnesses waiting for the King, receives a fly in his place: the old art of dying built in order to be emptied. “My Life had stood”, then after the dash “a Loaded Gun” (J754), builds a self owned by a Master, with power to kill and none to die. But these are a set of figures, not a structure. Much of the body takes up the Bible, the bride and the queen for a stanza and turns away; the Master stays private; no single pattern carries the whole. The myth is assembled by its readers more than built by the work, and that holds the axis just above the gate.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the Protestant hymn of Watts, Herbert’s conceit, Emerson’s lyric of the mind and the sentimental verse of her American contemporaries, and she kept its measure, common metre, the most proven in English. The turn is made inside it, and there it is total, because the hymn’s work is assurance. She keeps the metre and takes away the certainty: the rhyme slants where faith would close it, the dash suspends where the hymn would resolve, the syntax drops its connectives, and the stanza addressed to God or to death asks what the hymn answered. The stake was paid in the hardest coin. Higginson, to whom she sent poems in 1862, counselled delay; she published almost nothing, kept the fascicles in a drawer, and was printed after her death in a regularised form that undid the swerve for sixty-five years. Held a step short of the top because the departure stayed within the stanza, where her contemporary Whitman broke the same field by leaving metre and stanza altogether.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” (J1129) states the poetics, and the poems perform it: the slant rhyme is the knowledge that the world does not close as the hymn promised, and a true rhyme would lie. The dash holds a thought open past the point where syntax would settle it. The hymn quatrain, the most communal of measures, carries the most private of experiences, and so enacts the soul’s separation from its congregation. In J341 the metre itself goes numb until it reaches “This is the Hour of Lead”; in J465 the last stanza breaks its line into pieces at the fly’s buzz, as the senses break. The editors of 1890, who regularised the rhymes and the punctuation, are the proof, since their versions say less. What holds the axis a step below the top is the sameness of the instrument: one form across the whole body, made to know a great deal but one, and in many lesser poems a container rather than an instrument.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Evidence, over more than a century of print. The poems hold their questions open: what the Loaded Gun is and who its Master; whether the carriage of J712 carries the soul to Eternity or only toward it; whether the fly of J465 is the final truth or an interruption of one; what “the letting go” lets go; whether the variants are drafts or the poem. Each generation has found a different body: the metaphysical ironist of Allen Tate and R. P. Blackmur; Charles Anderson’s study of 1960; Sharon Cameron’s Lyric Time (1979) and Choosing Not Choosing (1992); the poet of enclosure and power of Adrienne Rich’s “Vesuvius at Home” (1975) and Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979); the poet of the manuscript page in Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson (1985); Helen Vendler’s commentary on 150 poems (2010). Franklin’s rearrangement changed what the body was. Held a step below the top because a share of the yield is decoding: elided syntax and private reference invite readings by default, and some of the labour has gone to the life rather than the poems.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The field is poetry in English of the nineteenth century, and with it the American lyric that begins there. The intrinsic force is very great: with Whitman she made one of the two founding reorganisations of American poetry, and hers showed that the short lyric could carry metaphysical and psychological argument at full pressure in a borrowed hymn metre, with the line and the mark of punctuation themselves made meaning. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: nothing in her lifetime; from 1890 a large readership for the regularised poems; Amy Lowell and the Imagists claiming her; Hart Crane’s sonnet addressed to her; Copland’s twelve settings (1950); Paul Celan’s German; her compression in Moore, Bishop and Plath, and in Rich and Howe; and an editorial history, from Johnson to Franklin to the facsimiles, that changed how poets’ manuscripts are edited. The poems as written reached the field only in 1955, and the century’s great redirection of poetry ran through free verse rather than the quatrain; both are discounted.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Weighed on form, then on presence. The span runs from composition, 1850 to 1886, and printing, from 1890: seventy years to two centuries, where the usual figure is 9.0 to 9.1 and the widest presence earns 9.2. Presence is the widest for any American poet: taught in schools and universities without a break, memorised, anthologised in every survey of poetry in English, set by composers, adapted for stage and screen. The manuscripts survive, at Amherst College and at Harvard’s Houghton Library, and the body is legible whole. Charged a tenth on form for the history of the text: sixty-five years in print chiefly in regularised versions, the fascicle order lost until 1981, the body split between rival families’ holdings, the variants still unsettled, so that what survives is in part an editorial construction. Nothing in the surface is fixed to its moment.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on her English, and at its height the making is load-bearing and exact to the syllable. The quatrain is handled with exact control of stress and pause: “Because I could not stop for Death”, then “He kindly stopped for me” (J712), the turn on the adverb, courtesy and terror held in one gesture, and later the whole poem turning on one word, “surmised”. The word is chosen against expectation and is right: “a formal feeling”, “Heavenly Hurt”, “Zero at the Bone”, “I could not see to see”. The comma set against grammar, “And then a Plank in Reason, broke”, makes the break audible. The rhyme is withheld so that the ear hangs; the line is cut short at the point of meaning. Charged: the range is narrow, one family of measures and no long breath; the compression sometimes fails to construe; capitals and dashes turn to mannerism in the weaker poems. But the test is command of the medium, and in the hundreds of poems that count she commands hers to the limit.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a bird that comes down the walk and bites a worm in halves, and the soul’s journey past the setting sun toward Eternity (J712). One law governs both: the world is seen exactly and is not let in; nature and God alike are known at a distance, at the circumference, and the mind alone measures them by what they withhold. The same law holds the snake of “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” (J986), a “Whip lash / Unbraiding in the Sun” met with “Zero at the Bone”, the breakdown of J280, the theological quarrel of “I know that He exists” (J338) and the erotic “Wild Nights”, and it governs the instability of faith: the contradiction is the law. What holds the axis where it stands is the body’s want of a designed whole. The coy register and the occasional verse lie outside the law the great poems obey, and the personae (child, bride, queen, Nobody, corpse) sometimes change the terms rather than vary them.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged at its scale, a body of short lyrics, and the orders it holds are many. Consciousness, at depth and in its breaking: pain, despair, ecstasy, memory, madness. Death and eternity, as fully as in any poetry in English. The sacred, in belief and doubt, election and refusal. The natural order, with an exactness few poets match: the bird, the snake, the bee, the winter light, the late summer crickets of “Further in Summer than the Birds”. Love and the erotic, in “Wild Nights” and the Master poems. The household, its rites of grief and a funeral seen from a window (J389). The self against society, in “Much Madness is divinest Sense” (J435); the mind against the world it holds, in the poem of the Brain wider than the Sky (J632). One mind integrates them, and the number of poems lets them recur and deepen. What holds the axis is the human order beyond the self: history, labour, the state, the city and other persons as persons are nearly absent, and the war of the early 1860s is not held as an order.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve, The Bottomless Well and The Made at 9.3, with The Living Form at 9.2. A departure made inside the most familiar metre of its culture and paid for with a lifetime unread; a body that more than a century of reading and every new edition have not exhausted; a making exact to the syllable; and a form whose slant and dash carry what the poems know.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.9, held by what the body is: a life’s output, never selected by its maker, with many slight poems, many repetitions and many variants never chosen between, and no designed order a reader can hold. Above it, The Encompassed at 8.0, one mind, with the human order beyond the self nearly absent; and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6, a set of built figures rather than a structure.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.3, The Living Form at 9.2, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.3, The Imperishable at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it governs falls below 7.9, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. Every summit condition is met; the twelve sum to 106.7, and the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the poems of Emily Dickinson as written, scored in Thomas H. Johnson’s edition, The Poems of Emily Dickinson (3 vols, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955), 1,775 poems in the order Johnson dated them, with her capitals, punctuation and dashes restored from the manuscripts. Poems are cited by Johnson’s numbers (J). R. W. Franklin’s variorum (1998, 1,789 poems), which corrects Johnson’s dating and readings and follows the fascicle order recovered in The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (1981), is named as context and as the better text where the two differ. The editions of 1890, 1891 and 1896 and the poems printed in her lifetime are not the unit. The body is bounded by the poems, not the letters; poems sent inside letters are counted. The major poems are known closely and a few hundred with confidence; the full body is known as a reader knows a large corpus, by kind rather than poem by poem, and judgments on its lesser reaches are made by kind. No text was in hand and nothing was measured on a text. Words are quoted only where they are certain, in her spelling and capitals. Her dashes are not set in this page’s type: a quotation stops where a dash falls, and where a dash bears on the reading it is named in words. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact number of poems Franklin dates to 1863, the languages into which the poems have been translated, and the critic who first argued the pressure of the Civil War on the poems of the early 1860s, are not given or are stated as contested.