The Poetry of Emily Dickinson (1956)

The Poetry of Emily Dickinson (1956)
Author(s): Sergio Baldi

Source: The Sewanee Review, Vol. 68, No. 3, Italian Criticism of American Literature: An
Anthology (Jul. - Sep., 1960), pp. 438-449
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27540600
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THE POETRY OF EMILY DICKINSON (1956)
By SERGIO BALDI
IN her spiritual solitude Emily Dickinson, as Richard Chase

has perceptively remarked, recognized two moments in her
own life as being crucial, or as she defined them, sacramental,
and as dividing existence neatly into three parts: the moment of
love and the moment of death. Before the experience of love
(called indifferently "love" and "marriage") there was child
hood, an unhappy period marked by fears, by a sense of in
adequacy and of unfulfilled desires ("hunger" and "thirst" in
her symbollic language), a period only now and then illumined
by simple perceptions of the beauty of the world. After the ex
perience of love follows the "queenly" status, or, as she says her
self, the status of "wife" or "queen." Then comes the second
sacramental moment, death; and after, immortality.
This, for Emily Dickinson, was reality itself, these are the
"personal terms" of her Revelation, by which she interprets her
self and the whole of the surrounding world. The two "sacra
mental moments" and immortality are for her fundamental
truths, absolute objective and subjective certainties: as they con
ditioned her life, so they conditioned her poetic language. The
status out of which she speaks in her poems is always the "wifely"
or "queenly" status and from this wifely status she rarely looks
back at the past and at her childhood; much more often she turns
instead towards the future, toward the death and immortality
which await her.
In the certitude of immortality death has lost all his terrors.
Because she will not be leaving "life" but a "status" she feels no
regret but calmly awaits the "passing." Love and death are for
her simply two experiences of the spirit, each of which annuls the
past tract of life but opens another, and better one in the future.
SERGIO BALDI 439
The identification of death with the lover recurs frequently in

poetry, but perhaps never so beautifully as in
Because I could not stop for Death,

He kindly stopped for me; ...
Where we feel the calm of the journey, the detachment of

passing mention of the children playing, of the grazing grain,
the setting sun. Such hints do more than construct a landscap
they take on a spiritual value as symbols of the three stages o
existence. Even the identification of the grave with the house
much more than a transitory image: the "house," throughout
work, has a high emotional charge.
Emily Dickinson is as sure of immortality as she is of h
mortal life; and she anticipates how the experience of it will fe
Great streets of silence led away

To neighborhoods of pause;
Here was no notice, no dissent,
No universe, no laws.
By clock 'twas morning, and for night

The bells at distance called;
But epoch had no basis here,
For period exhaled.
The past tense, and "here" meaning "eternity" account for

effect of absolute certainty; the conscious use of abstract no
(especially "neighborhoods of pause") leads the reader to
point where reality verges on unreality; the last two lines exp
her conviction of immortality, without the aid of sensual imagery
In other attempts to do the same thing I do not feel that she
as successful.
The transition from the "wifely status" to the "immor
status" does not imply dissolution but change, even if absolu
change (almost, one would say, from chrysalis to butterf
440 POETRY OF EMILY DICKINSON
above all it does not imply the idea of union with God
Dickinson is not a Christian; she makes use of the vocabula
Christianity in the same way that Renaissance writers used
Roman mythology as cultural background. God, for Emily
son, is only the creator of a world which is beautiful but n
sant; a world governed by his legates, Nature and Death. T
lation of God to his world, and therefore also to man, is
and rigid as the laws of physics, which He has willed; the
sin, there is no redemption, and there is no love?whe
speaks with God (as Chase has rightly observed) she do
pray, but argues. Nor, I would add, is it even an argumen
God never in fact replies. More often than not she simply
in question the order of creation because of her own suffe
Very rarely does she express gratitude for a moment of f
beauty. Anyone who considers this last statement too
should call to mind the last verse of "The daisy follows so
sun":
We are the flower, Thou the sun!

Forgive us, if as days decline,
We nearer steal to Thee?
Enamoured of the parting west,
The peace, the flight, the amethyst,
Night's possibility!
Such moments, however, are rare. Under the cold eye of God,
Death has his mission, almost a loving one, to fulfill. Like Love,
he is almost human, almost understanding. Nature, instead, does
nothing but unfold its cold and inexplicable beauties, beauties
which cause us pain. Who does not remember the famous poem
"There's a certain slant of light," perhaps her best? Certainly
this is one of her most carefully constructed poems. It
has not, however, in my opinion, any theme beyond the painful
sadness of the pale winter afternoon, another of the many mo
ments of nature. We note here a tendency towards the choice of
SERGIO BALDI 441
abstract words to catch a moment of pause, a sudden vibration.

The same is true of another less famous but no less beautiful
poem:
I think the root of the Wind is Water,

It would not sound so deep
Were it a firmamental product,
Airs no Oceans keep?
Mediterranean intonations,
To a Current's ear
There is a maritime conviction
In the atmosphere.
We cannot deny the beauty of this nature, which Emily

Dickinson seizes not in its stability but in the moment of trans
ition from one form to another. Yet it remains cold, insensible,
painful to man. Here too the abstract nouns, the tenuousness of
the realistic details stress coldness and detachment. It is not
surprising, therefore, that when confronted with such a world,
Emily Dickinson should feel infinitely small, "an atom," "a
gnome," a sister to the smallest things in nature, to the robin, the
bee, the lady-bird and the daisy. Nor is it surprising that in her
poetry she takes refuge in the house as the only world in which
she can feel safe. This is one of the most striking features of her
poetry, and it was the state of mind which most affects her poetic
language, for better and for worse. In order to comprehend the
highest moments of her poetry it is necessary to understand
fully its emotional quality, to grasp the special connotations that
she gave to the humblest word. Let us look, for example, at
a poem which, although famous, has given rise to conflicting valu
ations and interpretations: "I dreaded that first robin so." It
seems to me that this poem describes the passage from "child
hood" to "wifehood" (the latter here symbolized as "the Queen
of Calvary"), and expresses the first terror of love (which is like
the terror of death) down to its miraculous sinking into the calm
of ecstasy. The robin, the daffodils, the grass and the bees
not so much "symbols" as images of the quality of the emoti
I dreaded that first robin so,

But he is mastered now,
And I'm accustomed to him grown,?
He hurts a little, though.
I thought if I could only live

Till that first shout got by,
Not all pianos in the woods
Had power to mangle me.
I dared not meet the daffodils,

For fear their yellow gown
Would pierce me with a fashion
So foreign to my own.
I wished the grass would hurry,

So when 'twas time to see,
He'd be too tall, the tallest one
Could stretch to look at me.
I could not bear the bees should come,

I wished they'd stay away
In those dim countries where they go:
What words had they for me?
Household words and her nineteenth century mundus m

bris condition Emily Dickinson's poetic language to a lesse
tent, but in the same way as natural objects. From girlhood
"house" had been her constant refuge, and it is therefore eas
find images which spring naturally from the household and
woman's world, completely feminine, foreign to our poet
cabulary, which is still mainly naturalistic and masculin
the following poem, not all of which is good, such image
significant. Through them, and through them alone, the th
of awaited love finds expression:
SERGIO BALDI 443
If you were coming in the fall,

I'd brush the summer by
With half a smile and half a spurn
As housewives do a fly.
If I could see you in a year,

I'd wind the months in balls,
And put them each in separate drawers,
Until their time befalls.
In another poem, this time a really beautiful one, the housewifely

approach conditions the vision of a sunset, which appears like a
shower of jewels:
She sweeps with many-colored brooms,

And leaves the shreds behind;
Oh, housewife in the evening west,
Come back and dust the pond!
You dropped a purple ravelling in,
You dropped an amber thread;

And now you've littered all the East
With duds of emerald!
And still she plies her spotted brooms,

And still the aprons fly,
The brooms fade softly into stars?
And then I come away.
Reading, we become aware of a certain verbal contrast between

the domestic pose of the "housewife-evening," and the colors of
precious stones, expressed in the language of jewels; a contrast
that for me is one of the most deep-seated reasons for the beauty
of this poem. Precious stones, now scattered, now set in tiaras
and diadems, are another of the striking aspects of Emily Dickin
son's vocabulary, and critics have often noticed how frequently
she unites this love of jewels with another, equally striking love
of names of far-off countries, such as "Tunis," "Potosi," "Zanzi
bar'; and "Kashmir," and many more. To this group, how

should be added the abstract words, lifted from the langu
philosophy or geometry, in which her lines also abound
omit this last category, the list is not only incomplete, but
also be misleading, as it would then be too easy to conclud
words like "emeralds," "rubies," "Tunis" and "Zanzibar"
the result of a mere sensual love of words. This would
undervalue her, even though we know for certain that sh
the dictionary and chose her words with extreme care.
ever we unite these resounding words with the no less res
words of mathematics and philosophy, and, above all, if
them against the humble names of the smallest natural ob
and household words (which occur so frequently), w
mediately see that they have more than a rhetorical v
"fine words."
These contrasting groups of her vocabulary reflect in fact two
aspects of Emily Dickinson's world: the one of immediate reality,
the other of imaginative escape. The grass, the flowers, the birds
and the insects are those of her garden; the balls of wool, the
drawers, the shawls, the half-open doors, are objects in her
house; even the sky, whether red, green or yellow, is the sky seen
from her windows. But Tunis and Kashmir, the emeralds and
rubies, the circle and eternity are her escapes, now toward a
fantastic world, rich in the most dazzling colors and the most
beautiful forms, now towards an inner world of pure intellect.
The contrast between the two moods, however, exists only for us
who propound it. Her final retirement, her ritualistic attitudes,
are simultaneously both the interiorization of her everyday life
and the exteriorization of her inner life. The same is even more
true of her poetry. The split comes about, as always, in those
lines (and there are many of them) in which she wished to ex
press something and failed. There we feel clashes in her lan
guage, halting rhymes and lines, cultural lees. But in her true
poems, in the lines in which Emily Dickinson touches the summit
SERGIO BALDI 445
of her art, there are neither clashes nor imperfections but a

form of beauty which is entirely her own.
We have to realize this in order to evaluate certain attem
at describing Emily Dickinson's poetry in terms of literary history
attempts which have been made in the past, are being made tod
and will continue to be made in the future. Right from the fir
critical reference was made to a "metaphysical" Emily Dick
son; then (and this in Italy was my fault) to a "crepuscul
Emily Dickinson; then again (this time Chase) to a Roco
Emily Dickinson; and it would even be possible to speak o
Parnassian Emily Dickinson. If these words are used as cultu
landmarks, to suggest a partial affinity in the quality of
emotion or in the technique, no one can deny their validity. W
can assert that the poem I have quoted, "She sweeps with man
colored brooms," has nothing metaphysical about it? Who
deny that "Dear March, come in" is set in a crepuscular m
which is almost comparable to the Italian poems of Corazzini,
that these images from "I know some lonely houses off the ro
are not still more in the same vein?
How orderly the kitchen'd look by night,

With just a clock,?
A pair of spectacles ajar just stir?

An almanac's aware;
or:
There's plunder,?where?
Tankard, or spoon,
Earring, or stone,
A watch, some ancient brooch
To match the grandmamma,
Staid sleeping there.
Or who can deny the Parnassian tone of this beautiful poem,

famous for other reasons?
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;
Pipe the sweet birds in ignorant cadence,?
Ah, what sagacity perished here!
Grand go the years in the crescent above them;

Worlds scoop their arcs, and firmaments row,
Diadems drop and Doges surrender,
Soundless as dots on a disc of snow.
These are, however, momentaneous affinities, chance points of

congruence of essentially different sensibilities deriving from
different cultures and tending in different directions. Yet when
we connect Emily Dickinson with metaphysical or Rococo poetry
possibly something more is intended. There is no question, of
course, of any direct source in "crepuscular" or Parnassian poetry ;
but with the English seventeenth-century metaphysical poets
such source-hunting seems possible, and has in fact been carried
out, although without success. Certainly Emily Dickinson knew
something of them (if only by reading them at school) but, so
far as I know, nothing has been found in Donne, Crashaw,
Vaughan or Herbert, which suggests any direct imitation, only a
certain "spiritual affinity," and this has been over-stressed. To
my mind, however, Emily Dickinson has not so much a spiritual
affinity with the metaphysicals as an "affinity of technical prob
lems," even though an inverse one. The English "metaphysicals"
set out from a spiritual experience and, whether this was of love
or religion, the problem was always that of rendering a meta
physical experience in concrete terms. For Emily Dickinson it
was the other way round: she wanted to interiorize, to "instress"
reality of feeling and sensation. She wanted, as she herself might
SERGIO BALDI 447
have said, "to find a meaning." This can be seen in the tre
mendous mass of her "gnomic verses" (which are not "poems,"
but definitions and maxims in verse), or by dipping at random
into her letters; yet it can be seen best, and most clearly, in her
true poems. "There's a certain slant of light" is an instance of
the way she interiorizes nature, i.e., external reality; on the other
hand, the following poem exemplifies how she interiorizes feeling,
i.e., inner reality:
Pain has an element of blank;

It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.
It has no future but itself

Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.
When Chase, recently, spoke of Emily Dickinson's Rococo

style, he went perhaps deeper than those who had pointed to
the seventeenth century "metaphysicals." He apparently fol
lows Egon Friedell, in considering Rococo as another of the
"eternal moments of the spirit": consequently he considers the
perfection of her minute details, the play of her wit, as an escape,
a flight, from the pain of life. Not only does Chase see her as
"the sole American version of Rococo," but would even define
the whole of her poetry as a combination of Rococo and of Burke's
"astonishment," i.e., "that state of the soul in which all its motions
are suspended, with some degree of horror." Burke added that
"Astonishment is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree"
(Part II, Sect. 1).
As it is only possible to admit that Emily Dickinson was "meta
physical" in a technical sense, so she can only be held to be
"Rococo and sublime" in a psychological and vaguely stylistic
sense. Poetry for her is neither a game nor conscious escapism:

it was reality itself, interiorized, conceptualized, but still reality.
Indeed the only reality that had any meaning. Moreover there
is no "horror" in Emily Dickinson's poetry, but only, to return
to Burke's definition, a certain sense of suspense.
This, naturally, refers to that part of her work which is poetry,
or, to put it simply, to her "true poems," those in which she
really succeeds. Such poems (as in an opera omnia) are few,
very few; and the others, jokes, extravaganzas, outbursts, notes,
short letters, and anything else you would like to call them, al
though they make up the bulk of her work, are not poetry but
literature. In relation to these non-poems all the classifications
of literary terminology are valid when used singly and one at a
time, as summary definitions of style, as pseudo-concepts useful
for passing reference. In this purely literary sense we can speak
of an American-Rococo Emily Dickinson?much more accurately
than of a metaphysical Emily Dickinson. Certain of her aphor
isms, certain of her observations, without being beautiful, have,
to be sure, the charm of S?vres porcelain, even if the forms are
different. Nevertheless this is true only of many of her delicate
epigrams, not of her poems.
The quality of Emily Dickinson's poetry seems to me to con
sist instead in the interiorization of reality, whether it is the
reality of her house and garden and of the things she saw in
them, or the fantastic reality of escapism, geographic or geometric.
All real objects for her are "words" of the language of God, of
God simply as the creator in whom she believed. And just as
words have a sound and a meaning, so too must created things
have a meaning, in addition to form or color, a meaning in re
lation to eternity c But the reader must be careful. The quality
of her poetry does not lie in the more or less hidden significance
which she believes that she has found in things. That is not it
at all. It lies in her sense of the meaning latent in the world and
of its constant ineffability. An abstract geometric figure, a flash
SERGIO BALDI 449
of light, the sudden presence of something which is there an

not there; the certitude that all this must have a meaning an
significance for somebody; this is her poetry, a question, no
answer. In other words it is the everlasting question of
before creation, and she poses it, with much more than ordin
sensitivity, equally before the smallest things or the grea
problems, without distinguishing between external objects
the inner moods of the soul. (This accounts for the stra
fascination of some of her unusual verbal juxtapositions.) So
poetry brings back to us that sense of suspense, of sudden illu
nation, ungraspable, inexplicable and inexpressible, yet cer
and real. To love and die are the only two acts of commun
with God and are therefore "sacramental." Those man can
prehend and therefore express ; the other acts of God we see,
fchey evade us. This is, I believe, the "message" which her poe
offers the world; and, because she is a poet, she expresses it w
beauty.

The Poetry of Emily Dickinson (1956)

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The Poetry of Emily Dickinson (1956)

Author(s): Sergio Baldi

IN her spiritual solitude Emily Dickinson, as Richard Chase

The identification of death with the lover recurs frequently in

Because I could not stop for Death,

Where we feel the calm of the journey, the detachment of

Great streets of silence led away

By clock 'twas morning, and for night

The past tense, and "here" meaning "eternity" account for

We are the flower, Thou the sun!

abstract words to catch a moment of pause, a sudden vibration.

I think the root of the Wind is Water,

We cannot deny the beauty of this nature, which Emily

I dreaded that first robin so,

I thought if I could only live

I dared not meet the daffodils,

I wished the grass would hurry,

I could not bear the bees should come,

Household words and her nineteenth century mundus m

If you were coming in the fall,

If I could see you in a year,

In another poem, this time a really beautiful one, the housewifely

She sweeps with many-colored brooms,

You dropped an amber thread;

And still she plies her spotted brooms,

Reading, we become aware of a certain verbal contrast between

bar'; and "Kashmir," and many more. To this group, how

of her art, there are neither clashes nor imperfections but a

How orderly the kitchen'd look by night,

A pair of spectacles ajar just stir?

Or who can deny the Parnassian tone of this beautiful poem,

Safe in their alabaster chambers,

Light laughs the breeze in her castle of sunshine;

Grand go the years in the crescent above them;

These are, however, momentaneous affinities, chance points of

Pain has an element of blank;

It has no future but itself

When Chase, recently, spoke of Emily Dickinson's Rococo

sense. Poetry for her is neither a game nor conscious escapism:

of light, the sudden presence of something which is there an

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