I first taught Emily Dickinson's poetry many years ago when I was ABD, and had newly relocated from Southern California to Northampton, a small town in Western Massachusetts immediately adjacent to Amherst, where Emily Dickinson was herself born, and where she lived her entire life. I was in fact writing my dissertation on Emily Dickinson, having newly passed my orals at UC Irvine, and the move seemed auspicious, an external, circumstantial motivation to buckle down to the hard work of writing and, if I was lucky, draw inspiration from the same physical landscape in which the poet herself had lived. Unlike Southern California, which was newly being built, many of the downtown business buildings, and the individual houses in Northampton and Amherst, including hers, were over 100 years old, some much older than that, which I simply had never encountered.

I had talked my way into an adjunct position at a local community college, where I was younger than any of the older students who had returned to college, and launched my first class by rehearsing some of the basic historical and biographical details of the poet. This meant I spoke at some length about Mabel Loomis Todd and her crucial role in saving at least half of Emily Dickinson's poems, and who, after the poet's death, began publishing collections of them according to her own selection from among the hundreds of poems she had in her keeping, and with her own editorial decisions regarding variants, metrical 'improvements', adding titles, and so on.

I had wanted to introduce my class to the novelty of the poet's circumstances by way of easing them into the novelty of her poetry itself. My students by and large were not majoring in literature, and I thought it a wise teaching strategy to create a platform from which to preach a little patience as they tackled what at times is an obscure and difficult poetry. Dickinson herself had never readied the poems for publication, never had received enlightened editorial input, and seldom seemed to write with the idea in mind that a reader other than herself might have trouble making sense out of her cryptic verse.

That was what I wanted to do, my professional intention. But what I actually created, to my stunned amazement, was a minor, local disturbance among the Amherst community itself. The semester began on a Thursday. The following Tuesday when my class next met, one of my younger students delivered to me a note, handwritten by her grandmother, who invited me for tea, when she would set me straight on Mabel Loomis Todd, whom she identified as a 'hussy' (her word, not mine), because she did not think it appropriate for me to be praising someone with that sort of character in front of her granddaughter. As I presume we all know, Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd had been the mistress of Emily Dickinson's brother, Austin, for many years, which is the reason she had that trunk of the poet's poems to begin with. When Austin died, he deeded her in his will, as I recall, a plot of land in Amherst, which in effect legalized their illicit sexual relationship, and the reverberations had continued to resonate—not among the members of the Academy, such as myself, but among the local community of Amherst residents: the common working people, and their descendants, among whom Emily, Austin and Mabel all lived, whose friendships, enmities, and disapprovals they elicited and endured. Small town life.

Working at a community college is much closer to the earth, down among the weeds, than is teaching at a university, and accordingly I was at greater risk of stepping in shit—which I soon did a second time, equally unplanned, and with the assistance of my wife. She had written an article celebrating Emily Dickinson in a local newspaper, which attracted the attention of the sole remaining heir of the Dickinson estate: Mrs. Alfred Leete Hampson. She at this time had long been widowed. Her late husband, Alfred Leete Hampson, co-edited two books of Dickinson's poetry with the poet's niece, Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi, plus compiled an illustrated selection of her poetry that he marketed "for Youth."

Mrs. Hampson also invited us for tea, which seems to have been a thing among that generation of Amherst residents. So one afternoon that same early autumn, my wife and I drove to Austin Dickinson's house, in which Mrs. Hampson now lived, and had the privilege of sitting for several hours in the Evergreens, on the original furnishings in dusty disrepair, and listened to Mrs. Hampson also disparage Mabel Loomis Todd, which I was getting used to. But she spent time as well explaining why Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi was a better poet than her aunt, which I confess had never once occurred to me. While we were there, Richard Sewell called her to chat about Emily's letters, as far as I could make out. Mrs. Hampson not only was heir to Austin's house, but evidently she was likewise the legal executor of Emily's poetry and other effects, or those which the heirs of Mabel Loomis Todd did not possess.

She was quite elderly, and in the kitchen were two waist-high stacks of those aluminum trays on which Meals on Wheels delivers dinner. On the side table in the living room, near the phone on which she received the call from Dr. Sewell, there were stacks of documents almost that high tipping over onto the floor when she rummaged around for whatever Sewell had called to request. When the time came for refreshments, she asked if I would reach into a cabinet to pull out Susan Dickinson's tea set, buried in dust but well-preserved with none of the saucers chipped. They had not been touched in many decades. My wife washed them the way an archaeologist might wash fossils. I dried them with equal care, put the kettle on, and then as if we were long-time friends the three of us sipped Earl Grey tea together—though the tea bags were ancient as well, and had little flavor left in them.

II.

These two anecdotes may have intrinsic interest, I trust that they do, but the reason I mention them in the context of this article is the effect they had on how I conduct matters in the classroom, then and now. I most recently taught the poetry of Emily Dickinson this last fall, 2024, at the University of California, Santa Cruz. And I opened the class, as I have opened this article, by giving a version of these events, for two primary reasons. The first is the easiest to account for: they are good gossip, casually provocative regarding historical passions, and tend to break the ice.

My second reason was philosophical. The events depicted here represent the intimate, quotidian, personal interactions that moment by moment shape behavior and attitudes of unruly individuals. This is how social fabrics are woven. The jargon today calls them microaggressions, but they are nothing new, and over time they aggregate. They compose as a whole what Roland Barthes once called "the slime of primary language" by which each person is identified, the means by which behavior and attitudes are shaped according to external conventions. One hundred years after her death, and the actions of her brother and his mistress were still censored by descendants of the community in which the three of them lived.

Whereas I have narrated these events with a particular goal to entertain, in truth there was little that was charming about the repeated attempts to bully me into changing my opinion about either Mabel Loomis Todd or Emily Dickinson, nor was the attempt to change how I taught my class insincere—any more than our current national environment is insincere about imposing its strictures on education and the arts.

None of this was lost on my students, for whom identification is an actual and anxious process, and occurs in real time. And so in this way those conversations signaled an intellectual stance we might take toward the poet and her work that emphasized her personhood, that accented her identity as a uniquely embodied, thinking, feeling sentience, an atom of thought possessed by nothing else, a trace buffeted by repressive pressures attempting to write an identity upon her. Rather than approach the poet as an icon embedded in the literary tradition of 19th Century American poetry, defined at large by intellectual ideas circulating in the New England air, we would at least for the present look at her as a person with only a local social status, who wanted to write her own thoughts, describe her own experiences in unborrowed language as it occurred to her, often late at night in her bedroom, privately, at her tiny writing table by her window. We read her work as an assemblage of living poems, whose date of publication was contemporary with those of, say, Elizabeth Bishop, whose second book—North and South—was published in 1955, which is the same year that The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson was published.

I can think of no poet that better rewards this intimate particularity, this flight from foreknown generalities, than does Emily Dickinson. She pretty much forces the reader to take each poem in isolation, focusing the attention on a singular and precise subject. Indeed, she can seem perverse in her insistence on the particular. She wrote 1789 poems over the course of her creative lifespan, for instance, and titled none of them. That is to say, not once did she establish a logical or emotional generality that sums up the matters within the poem—in the way that, for instance, Lucille Clifton does in her poem, entering the south, or Wallace Stevens does in The Snow Man. That's what titles do: they establish a conceptual framework within which to approach the poetic matter. Otherwise Clifton's poem is simply about someone wearing an especially nasty jacket.

Further, Dickinson made no thematic grouping of the poems that appear of like mind, offered no superordinate association of ideas, either tacitly or explicitly. Unlike Pound or Eliot, she never wrote an essay explaining herself, never specified her poetic philosophy. Nor did she collect poems into the larger structure of a book, which could signal that one period of composition and its interests have come to an end, and another is to begin1. Nor do the poems themselves allude to each other either by explicit theme, or by differing metrical forms that can be grouped like to like. Unlike a poet such as W.B. Yeats, who developed his ideas over time across multiple poems and books as he used and reused his symbols, Dickinson was not disposed to a systematic evolution of her themes. Rather, each of her poems seems to burst from her imagination with, on the whole, remarkably few suggested revisions. They are discontinuous. All 1789 poems are simply numbered according to the chronology in which they were written, as best as that can be determined by subsequent scholarship. Nor did she even number them herself; Thomas H. Johnson did that in his 1955 Variorum Edition of her complete poems.

In Dickinson's work, therefore, lacking any given intellectual purchase from which to approach comprehension, the reader is left with the poem itself isolated in its own language, and the sense they are able to make out of it. This is the language that the poet herself imagined and chose to set down on her own to be read. So as a class, we took the hint. We proceeded inductively poem by poem by poem, and built up in sequence a gradual grasp of the shape of her thought as she laid it out over time, something like assembling the many colored tiles of a mosaic into, in the end, the recognizable face of Emily Dickinson.

III.

Accordingly, we approached the thicket of Dickinson's poetry by first choosing poems in which she presents her position in the world, and the terms of her own identity as she understands them. Her method is formally logical. The poet does not present a surface of biographical adventures, but instead confronts her themes with a rigor of thought, and a precision of language that displays a sophisticated analytical purpose. She invites us not on a personal journey, but into a logical argument. Such a strategy distinguishes itself from the majority of 19th and 20th Century American poetry, and requires of contemporary readers, in particular, a sizable mental adjustment to appreciate the individuality of her approach, the rationality of her intent, and to grow familiar with the propositions she accepts as self-evident. It takes practice to keep up with her pace of thought, and to follow the steps of her reasoning. On occasion, even to identify the referents of her pronouns can require a logical inquiry:

                                    A single Screw of Flesh
Is all that pins the Soul
That stands for Deity, to Mine,
Upon my side the Veil—

                                    Once witnessed of the Gauze—
Its name is put away
As far from mine, as if no plight
Had printed yesterday,

                                    In tender—solemn Alphabet,
My eyes just turned to see,
When it was smuggled by my sight
Into Eternity—

                                    More hands—to hold—These are but Two—
One more new-mailed Nerve
Just granted, for the Peril's sake—
Some striding—Giant—Love—

                                    So greater than the Gods can show,
They slink before the Clay,
That not for all their Heaven can boast
Will let its Keepsake—go.  (263)2

In the first stanza, 'Soul', and 'Deity' are two of those self-evident givens I mentioned above that Dickinson accepts axiomatically. The poet begins her argument by making a curious distinction between the two of them, each of which is also distinct from whatever she means by the 'Mine' to which the Soul is pinned. We are told from the outset that the Soul "stands for Deity", which suggests that it possesses qualities inherent in the divinity that it represents. Though it is not Deity, not God himself, nor in actual contact with him, the Soul is in her view the immortal principle within each human being. And as it stands, it is absent from God, separate and individuated, because of that "single Screw of Flesh". This is an Aristotelian thought in which matter is the principle of individuation, the basis of what is most concrete and actual in being. Although the Soul is the formal cause of who Emily Dickinson is, her body particularizes her. She is individuated because she is incarnate.

An important corollary of this idea is that only individuals exist which, if we keep it in mind, furnishes insight into what the speaker considers 'Mine' in that first stanza: the Soul is pinned by the Flesh to what becomes her unique identity. The possessive pronoun grammatically modifies nothing in the sentence because the poet means to indicate the principle of possession itself by which selfhood accrues its manifest qualities and attributes. The pronoun, in other words, indicates that she is self-aware, and unique. She is self-possessed in that she has accrued, and now owns the characteristic features that identify her. In this way her individuality is different from the distinctness of other existing things. Real objects have an uniqueness only of degree, a specific universality that is created by a general form manifesting itself through physical matter. One rock is materially distinct from every other rock, but is not unique among rocks. We have a congruence of the universal and the particular, but a rock is not solitary in its type or its characteristics, both of which by definition it shares with others in this classification.

Human experience of the self, however, denies such a partial identity. Insofar as she is aware of herself, observing who she is, what she thinks about, what she feels, she is also aware of her categorical sovereignty. Her independence is an axiom of her existence. Her thoughts are not possessed or experienced by anyone else, but are occurring within her separate mind, which shares nothing of itself with any existing thing. Indeed, whatever should impinge upon the autonomy of consciousness would not add to it, but would disrupt it, intoxicate it, impair it by encroaching on its unique jurisdiction. There is no Vulcan mind-meld except in fantasy, and in the hallucinations during certain forms of psychosis. So although it is her body that individuates her, her consciousness of the separation is what constitutes her identity as a soulful self, and makes her material distinction humanely unique.

In this Dickinson accepts the coordinates of the modern philosophical mind originating in Descartes' epistemological skepticism. She acknowledges the radical separation of consciousness from both the sensual and the abstract, spiritual worlds. Unlike Descartes, however, she does not find ways to argue back from that conceptual separation toward certainty. Consciousness distinguishes itself. The sovereignty of its expression is what establishes in line 4 that "Veil" between the speaker's human self and the Deity:

A single Screw of Flesh
Is all that pins the Soul
That stands for Deity, to Mine,
Upon my side the Veil—

Since the self is separate from divinity because it knows that it is, because it is aware of itself as a distinct entity, it follows that what it will take to witness Deity is some form of  trauma, some experience that will attack self-sovereignty, and contaminate or simply overwhelm its uniqueness. The risk of such an attack is doubled with the promise: whereas the hope in this poem is to perceive Deity on the other side of the Gauze of self-consciousness, and so mitigate her alienation, yet the existence of consciousness itself is risked. It cannot survive, or at least cannot function if it is denatured, and the essence of this paradox is what embitters the speaker in the second and third stanzas. She reveals that she has experienced an unspecified "plight,' and has expected to witness something of Deity. But as her "eyes just turned to see", Divinity retreated: "Its name is put away/As far from mine, as if no plight/Had printed yesterday".

"It was smuggled by my sight," she laments, which can be understood two ways. The most obvious reading has Deity sneaking into Eternity undetected by her vision. But there is an undercurrent of meaning that suggests that her vision is itself the agent by which divine process is smuggled into inaccessible realms. Here Dickinson pursues implications already present in the separation of consciousness. If whatever insight she may have into divine process comes paradoxically at the expense of the self—that is, registers to the degree to which the autonomy of identity is violated—, then that insight will remain unavailable to consciousness. Once spiritual presence is "witness of the Gauze—/Its name is put away," leaving the poet nothing by which the nature of divinity may be articulated, characterized or understood.

A pertinent question to ask at this point is, If, after all that has been risked, there is still no hope of employing for consciousness the visionary moment, then what has been gained by attempting the vision at all? Her incentive, of course, is the promise of transcending her intellectual solitude. But all that the poet actually wins from her experience is "One more new-mailed nerve" with which to relish her isolation; her failure to witness Deity results in a more intense experience of her own alienation. The intensity of this failure is felt as psychic pain, which introduces the irony that informs human identity. This pain occurs upon the self's recognition of its own distinctness as a conscious being. The self is unique and knows it, but for that very reason it also knows it is anomalous: it is aware that nothing else exists of which it is an essential part. The self is strange to the world, alien, and because anguish is a natural sensation by which such anomaly is experienced—at least by Emily Dickinson—, torment is the very mode in which the self subsists. Its pain cannot be escaped without sabotaging its own sovereignty. As she confesses in another poem, " I like a look of Agony,/Because I know it's true—/Men do not sham Convulsion,/Nor simulate a Throe—" (241). Agony is the experience by which truth is recognized.

This last thought must qualify the anguish—and complete the irony. For if pain is the mode of consciousness in the world, it is likewise the individual's most salient experience of her identity. The self is distinct, which means both that it is alienated, and that it is also sovereign and self-constituted. Without such purity, such autonomy, the self would not exist as itself. Consequently, if Emily Dickinson is to value her identity, then she must celebrate her distinguishing consciousness by preferring it to the traumatizing vision of God.

                                    So greater than the Gods can show,
They slink before the Clay,
That not for all their Heaven can boast
Will let its Keepsake—go

Regardless of the seduction of Deity's striding—Giant—Love, "Heaven can boast" of nothing that will coerce the nerves, with which Dickinson holds onto her particularity, to let their "Keepsake—go". Rather than free the Soul of its conscious separation, and to merge again into the uncreated unity of divine spirit, the poet chooses to remain consciously imprisoned within the created form of her body. The decision is not a clear choice of preferred value, but rather is a 'second-best' alternative, the lesser of two evils. If Dickinson selects her alienating, identifying consciousness, she nevertheless laments her exclusion from, on the one hand, God and spiritual certainty, and on the other his material creation.

IV.

The question that pervades her poetry is, To which condition, the spiritual or the material, if either, is she native? To take the latter condition first, her membership in the material universe invests the properties of her identity. Not only is she obligated to her bodily senses for the objects of consciousness that they furnish, but she must attend as well to the flesh itself, whose attitudes—its ebbs and floods—likewise condition her thought. She is obliged to the natural processes at large among which her body numbers her. The general character of her life, its pattern that extends from infancy through maturity into senescence and death is imaged in her biological and geophysical environments both. The issue for the poet is not that she can observe no earthly organization, but that its purpose remains mysterious to her. She is alienated from the external orders. The natural world outside her window is populated by living creatures alive with characteristic activities, and involved in natural cycles, but the purposes of it all remain opaque. The welter quashes her faculties of reason, not because there are no objects for her cognition to work on, but because there are no principles by which to evaluate what she sees.

                                    There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons—
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes—

                                    Heavenly Hurt, it gives us—
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are—

                                    None may teach it—Any—
'Tis the Seal Despair—
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air—

                                    When it comes, the Landscape listens—
Shadows—hold their breath—
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death— (258)

The slant of light that begins her poem is typical, not unique to the psyche of the poet, but instead is independent of her, and is as recurrent as the "Winter Afternoons" in which it appears. It has objective being, an ontological status to which she nevertheless imputes an important, but obscure meaning. She is certain that the light is the source of some subjective expression, not hers:

                                    None may teach it—Any—
'Tis the Seal Despair—
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air—-

The light is in fact emblematic, a "Seal" of "Despair"sent by an imperial subjectivity that afflicts her because its motives and significance remain unspecified. She writes of the Light that "None may teach it—Any—", by which she intends two readings. First, she indicates that she cannot explain to anyone (None may teach [to] any [one]) what the light might ideally signify. Though she admits that it makes an "internal difference," nonetheless there is a discontinuity between the actual "Hurt" that she experiences, and an articulate insight into the divine purpose of nature:

                                    Heavenly Hurt, it gives us—
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are—

The light makes a painful difference simply because it focuses her awareness on the distance between her internal acknowledgement of meaning, and the source of the meaning itself:

                                    When it comes, the Landscape listens—
Shadows—hold their breath—
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death—

The joy that she should enjoy "teaching" is of a personal recognition of a shadowy Deity who, despite the anticipation ("When it comes, the landscape—listens—/Shadows—hold their breath—") remains unavailable.  She ascribes to the natural environment the motives, the impulses and the temperamental qualities of a superhuman being who is orchestrating the activities, but she is nevertheless unable to make sense of them by observing the visible signs. She discovers no natural design, and fails as well to locate the purpose and harmony of her own life. The significance she attributes to the experience is Despair—the absence of any meaning that will avail her in her lifetime.

The poet's helplessness in the face of this experience is further disclosed by the second reading that anticipates the line, "None may teach it—Any—". If, in this instance, we understand the pronoun "it" as the indirect pronoun of the verb "teach", then the poet indicates that she can have no effect on the light which so disturbs her. She cannot "teach" it to stop hurting her, and her impotence aids her despair. But what she imagines here as an incapacity becomes elsewhere in her canon her recognition of a special limit beyond which she is unable to venture. The light is significant because it does not originate in her consciousness. It is separate from her, and that separation compels her to acknowledge that there may be a difference between the significance, or lack of it, that she makes of the phenomenon, and whatever it is that Deity intends by it.

Dickinson has moments in which she can, to her own advantage, entertain this possibility. She can profess, for example, "The Tint I cannot take—is best—"(627) because it provides distinct conditions and limitations to her imaginative consciousness. To observe these conditions, rather than subvert them by attempting transcendence, is to survey the extent of her powers within their natural limits. She can imagine a certain freedom because she can exercise choices amid a definite set of alternatives.

                                    A Bird came down the Walk—
He did not know I saw—
He bit an Angleworm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,

                                    And then he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass—
And then hopped sideways to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass—

                                    He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all around—
They look like frightened Beads, I thought—
He stirred his Velvet Head

                                    Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home—

                                    Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam—
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon
Leap, plashless as they swim.  (328)

This poem is one of her best efforts at discriminating among nature's phenomena. At least initially, Dickinson is less concerned here with searching for clues to human congruity with nature, or for evidence of interchanges between the spiritual and natural worlds, than she is in simply distinguishing the sequences of what nature does. She wants to see how the parts fit. And accordingly she applies herself to choosing details that she is witnessing to convey a common backyard scene as a bird forages pertly for food, finds a worm that it eats, hops around a bit: pure quotidian observation on a summer day. As she attempts to regard the world's modes of conduct, the figuration of her language attempts not to imitate the thing, but to apprehend its individuality.

And then she oversteps her limits, which discloses the underlying, insistent alienation from the subsistent reality that announces itself in the last stanzas:

                                    I offered him a Crumb
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home—

                                    Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam—
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon
Leap, plashless as they swim.

The last lines proclaim the separateness of the human speaker from the bird. The figure of the ocean disjoins the human world from the natural because it disjoins the bird's motion from our sense of how it should actually appear: the bird does not "fly", as we should expect, but "rows" home. To imagine flight as rowing does not distort the configuration of the wings' movement so much as it distorts their rate of motion. She keeps the illusion of the bird flying, but the creature wings its way unhurriedly in slow motion. Thus the poet renders almost palpable the incredible grace of the flight. We are given an impression of leisure in which to attend to the sequences of movement, to visualize the bird's physical gifts. And the images with which the poem concludes extend this leisure. The wing-beats are compared first with the stately, inevitably slow commotion of a ship's oars on the ocean. The bird's animation is likewise compared to the soundlessness of butterflies and their own "plashless" leaps into flight. With this hush, the poem ends.

This is a privileged vision of the world's legible order, whose beauty is not lessened by its strangeness. That it is strange is the poet's conscious aesthetic effect as she departs from the pedestrian, if whimsical, description of the bird's antics in the first three stanzas. And notice that the persona's intrusion on the natural world signals the departure. Prior to her attempt to feed the bird ("I offered him a Crumb"), the disunity between her and nature is not evident. Rather, the two appear as cohabitants. But her naive offer to reach across that implicit disunity paradoxically illuminates the distance between subject and object, and she is left to watch the natural world flee from her.

The poem does not care to analyze, or even to conceptualize the lack of interchange between the human and natural worlds, but aesthetically embodies the disjunction. The poet is in fact a pluralist: she finds various continuities in nature, but she lacks any sense of their common purpose, or whether they have one. From her point of view, the world is imperfectly unified, which calls forth a strong pragmatic flavor among a subset of her nature poems that we might call her riddles. Nature in these poems is a congeries of ordinary objects—like this bird coming down the walk—that are readily recognizable. They are drawn from an empirical world of common sense that reveals itself through observation and experience. As such, her riddles have much in common with those poems, such as "A Bird came down the Walk—", in which she attends to the particularity of the natural facts. But they differ importantly in the demands they make on the reader.

                                    It sifts from Leaden Sieves—
It powders all the Wood.
It fills with Alabaster Wool
The Wrinkles of the Road—

                                    It makes an Even Face
Of Mountain, and of Plain—
Unbroken Forehead from the East
Unto the East again—

                                    It reaches to the Fence—
It wraps it Rail by Rail
Till it is lost in Fleeces—
It deals Celestial Vail

                                    To Stump, and Stack—and Stem—
A Summer's empty Room—
Acres of Joints, where Harvests were,
Recordless, but for them—

                                    It Ruffles Wrists of Posts
As Ankles of a Queen—
Then stills its Artisans—like Ghosts—
Denying they have been—  (311)

This snowstorm is one of the poets best known riddles. And it is a riddle: what the poem means to identify, the phenomenon it is meant to be describing, is left unstated. There is in fact no antecedent for the pronoun "It". Rather, the pronoun grammatically is the indefinite nominative for the impersonal verbs "sifts","powders", "fills", "makes", "reaches", "wraps", "deals", "Ruffles", "stills" and the participle "Denying". The want of definition presents the primary difficulty of the poem: we must induce the particulars into the generalized percept, snowstorm.

Not all of Dickinson's riddles derive their mystery by using an indefinite pronoun. For example, neither Poem 1463 ("A Route of Evanescence") nor Poem 986 ("A narrow Fellow in the Grass") employs the pronoun. Nor do many others. However, all the riddles do have in common the need for inductive reasoning. This is the point of empiricism. We are given secondary and tertiary aspects of, in this case, the snowstorm, and we must induce the 'clues' into the generality that 'solves' the poem. Nature is therefore the subject of a probing intelligence. And as the reader unriddles the poem, they are in effect recognizing the world they have in common with the poet. In this sense the riddle is a ceremony of initiation by which Dickinson introduces the reader into worldly reality—not all aspects of it, of course, but at least various and diverse features that both she and the reader can agree define phenomena in the world common to them both.

The riddle is a peculiar social contract drawn by the poet, and extended to all of her readers who can recognize, and therefore assent to the empirical experience of the poem. The aesthetic strategy is particularly dependent upon this assent, since if it is withheld, the poem recedes into cabalistic unintelligibility. The lines never cohere into an image of experience. To illustrate the point, we have only to look at such of Dickinson's riddles as Poem 602 ("Of Brussels—it was not—"), whose difficulty suggests that the poet very nearly over-estimated the sleuthing abilities of her readers.

But if the riddle wins the assent of the reader, then, because the poem defines worldly reality through its multiplicity of perspectives, it similarly defines the grounds for a civilized community, which can be obtained only by having a world of things in common. The congruity implicit in Dickinson's riddles is not between the natural world and an observing consciousness, but between and among people. The poet can appeal to unreflective experience and worldly observation to provide a common basis for human society—and in doing so, as she attends to the individuality of the objects in the sensible world, her nature poems become a tribute to her faith in human intelligence.

V.

If we were to proceed logically from this last position, then we might reasonably ask about the basis that prompts the poet to venture into this shared social ground. What is the nature of her desire to interact with another self-conscious inhabitant of the objective world, a fellow traveler with whom she might interface, share something of herself? These are fair questions insofar as Dickinson was so famously shy of actual human interaction. One of the most well-published biographical anecdotes regarding the poet is drawn from a letter that she wrote in 1877 to Samuel Bowles. It was evidently composed the day following a visit he paid to her, and alludes to events that Thomas H. Johnson clarifies in his edition of the poet's letters:

                                    Gertrude M. Graves wrote A Cousin's Memories
                                    of Emily Dickinson, telling how Samuel Bowles
once called upstairs to ED: Emily, you wretch! No
                                    more of this nonsense! I've traveled all the way
                                    from Springfield to see you. Come down at once.
She is said to have complied and never have been
more witty.3

This particular encounter between the two friends culminates a sequence of calls paid by Bowles to the Dickinson household, during which the poet consistently refused to come from her room to see her visitor. In her written apologies mailed the next morning, she specifies her incentives for remaining aloof. They are not prompted by anger or ill-humor, but by the intensity of her desire to visit with him.  This plea for his understanding is characteristic:

                                    Forgive me if I praise the Grace—superior
to the Sign. Because I did not see you,
Vinnie and Austin upbraided me—They did
not know I gave my part that they might
have the more...My heart led all the rest—4

Though Dickinson claims to have wanted, more than anyone else in the room ("My Heart led all the rest—") to respond to Bowles' civility, nevertheless she prefers the "Grace" of his visit to the "Sign" of it—a preference that precludes her coming into the circle of friends in the parlor. The distinction she draws is that between the essence of Bowles' favor ("Grace"), which is his desire to call on the poet, and the "Sign" of that favor, which is in this case Samuel Bowles himself. His presence is the mark of his general esteem for Emily Dickinson.

The dynamics of the poet's preference are curious. If she wants the gracious essence of her friend's regard, which is the essence of his visit, then she must not enter into his actual presence. This is at best an eccentric social philosophy—one that depends upon the frustration of the desire to be social. Though the poet sincerely wants the rendezvous with Bowles, yet she willfully obstructs their satisfaction.

Insofar as that failed visit is a disappointment because it is a measure of opportunities lost, Dickinson is the cause of her own affliction. Her predilections to induce anguish are intrinsic to the character of desire itself.

                                    Art thou the thing I wanted?
Begone—my Tooth has grown—
Supply the minor Palate
That has not starved so long—                             
I tell thee while I waited
The mystery of Food
Increased till I abjured it
And dine without Like God— (1282)

The ostensible experience that this poem imagines is not especially uncommon. The poet remarks her emotional anticlimax as she acquires the "thing" that she has wanted. That she is surprised by her own frustrated expectations suggests that she reasonably had hoped to be satisfied, not disappointed, by securing the coveted thing. This is, after all, what it means to gratify desire: to procure the object of one's longing.

But Dickinson is not gratified. Her disappointment, however, does not derive from imperfections in the object itself, but from the increased intensity of her aspirations: the poet's "Tooth has grown—". This increase is a matter of her frustration. The more her desire is obstructed, the more it is aggravated, the more her longing grows. Consequently a disproportion incurs between the intensity of her want, and the real worth of the coveted object. Her appetite, unless it is immediately fulfilled, outgrows the thing that originally inspired it: "I tell thee while I waited/The Mystery of Food/Increased till I abjured it".

What results is a compelling paradox. So long as her desire is relatively feeble ("the minor Palette/That has not starved so long—"), she can fulfill her aspiration. But the more earnest her desire, the more likely will her appetite overwhelm its object, whereupon the poet is subject to insatiable longing. Nothing will suffice the desire but the desire itself. That she is dissatisfied by what she longs for, and so prefers the state itself of longing, is a matter of her own emotional investment in her own emotional sensations. No external force compels the poet to reject what she wants.

                                    Satisfaction —is the Agent
Of Satiety—
Want—a quiet Commissary
For Infinity.

                                    To possess, is past the instant
We achieve the Joy—
Immortality contented
Were Anomaly.  (1036)

Dickinson must intentionally prolong her desire since, if she appeases her aspiration, then according to the terms of this poem, she squanders her emotional investment. To be satisfied is to be satiated—which is to say, to be gratified in excess of the desire: "Satisfaction—is the Agent/Of Satiety—". The logic is inexorable. To gratify desire is to fill up the measure of her longing with the thing that she wants. Insofar as desire itself creates the value for which the object is wanted, then to satisfy the longing is to disvalue the artifact. It is no longer desirable because the appetite for it is requited. The poet thus wonders what to do with this thing she no longer wants. To be satisfied, she concludes, is to excite her loathing.

There can be no pleasure in possession.

                                    Rehearsal to Ourselves
Of a Withdrawn Delight—
Is a Bliss like Murder—
Omnipotent—Acute—

                                    We will not drop the Dirk—
Because We love the Wound
The Dirk Commemorate—Itself
Remind Us that we died.  (379)

Notice that the withdrawal of the delight is willful. Since the removal is privately rehearsed ("Rehearsal to Ourselves"), there is no externally imposed need for the sacrifice. Rather, the poet repeats (rehearses) for her own personal gratification the frustrations of delight. The irony of this repetition, which elicits a satisfaction out of her painful aggravation, is what affords her "a Bliss like Murder—/Omnipotent—Acute—". The omnipotence of the sensation derives from the intensity of Dickinson's aspiration. The more "Acute—" the Bliss, the more the extremity denudes the mind of other, lesser satisfactions.

This extremity inheres only so long as the poet chooses to withdraw the delightful object. Since the scope of her desire—her "Bliss"—depends upon that removal, Dickinson imagines her passion as the 'murderer' of the coveted object: its absence is willfully incited by her longing. The equation between death and mere absence makes sense only from the point of view of a self that claims to know solely its own mental states, and the modification of those states. As she declares in the prior poem, the self "abjures"food and can "dine without like God—". Identity, which is self-constituted, knows only itself, and is itself what it knows.

Rather than favor an acquired passion, the poet prefers to irritate repeatedly her hunger. Her ability to baffle her appetite is the "Dirk" in that last stanza: the weapon is her skill at rendering inaccessible whatever she aspires for:

                                    We will not drop the Dirk—
Because We love the Wound
The Dirk Commemorate—Itself
Remind Us that we died.

Dickinson's chosen alienation from what she desires is governed by the same ironic libretto that organizes her metaphysical alienation from nature to begin with. In both cases, pain is the most salient sensation of the self, whether it is the torment of thwarted desire, or the distress of her autonomous ignorance of the natural order. Just as the autonomy of the self is threatened by her attempts to surmount her ignorance, which entails that she transcend her individuality to conjoin with an alien, external natural world, so is the poet's sovereignty endangered if she is possessed in love.

                                    She rose to His Requirement—dropt
The Playthings of Her Life
To take the honorable Work
Of Woman, and of Wife—

                                    If ought She missed in Her new Day,
Of Amplitude, or Awe—
Or first Prospective—Or the Gold
In using, wear away,

                                    It lay unmentioned—as the Sea
Develop Pearl, and Weed,
But only to Himself—be known
The Fathoms they abide—  (732)

That the poet is required to exchange her "Playthings" for "the honorable Work/Of Woman, and of Wife—" sets the tone of the poem. There is the suggestion that, as she attains her new social position, the "rise" in status proves more expensive than she had anticipated. Her sacrifice lies in the disparate rewards that inhere in play and in work. To labor is to harness her strength or faculties in the pursuit of a particular purpose, and toward ends established by someone else—which in this case is identified generally as "His Requirement." The "honorable" prescription disappoints the poet as she compares its toil with the prior liberality of her unmarried state—a condition that granted the exercise of her energies free of constraining, external purpose. Insofar as she must drop the "Playthings of her Life," as she drops her maiden status, her opportunities for personal fulfillment ironically are delimited. What the poet expends in her marriage is the free play of all her possibilities. The potential for life, excluded by "His Requirement", evidently remains unused.

                                    If ought She missed in Her new Day,
Of Amplitude, or Awe—
Or first Prospective—Or the Gold
In using, wear away,

Given what we already understand about the nature of the poet's desire, that "The Gold/In using, wear away" is a certainty. To be used by her husband, to be possessed by the requirements of his desire, is to appease his appetite, and so the wife falls into disuse. She becomes undesirable, though without a commensurate return of the autonomy she once owned before she was sexually possessed. The terms of her marriage contract bind her to her husband, and so the truncation of her personal options is institutional.She misses the "Amplitude" of her individual self-determination, and buries her disappointment beneath a placid surface:

                                    "It lay unmentioned—as the Sea
Develop Pearl, and Weed,
But only to Himself—be known
The Fathoms they abide—

This buried life devolves into the despair of disuse. To marry, the poet imagines, is to impoverish one's life while intending to enrich it, to exchange one's independence for a servility to an external authority, and to trade the possibility of satisfied passion for an actual, loathsome disrespect.

We should note the curious symmetry of the character of erotic desire. If Dickinson cares to avoid the annihilating anguish of consummated passion, after which she will subside, demoralized, into her lover's disregard, then she will thereby tumble into the torment of a frustrated longing. To desire is paramountly to suffer. She can either thwart her passions, and be self-consciously in pain, or she can consummate passion and be in a paralyzing Bliss, which provides only the most ephemeral satisfaction, and no comfort at all. In neither instance does the poet imagine a satisfying personal gain from improving her social status. Likewise, as she explores the natural world that she and others may have in common, she discovers no lasting value to the common public ground that might improve her marginal position in her family home. In the Homestead, she has what she most values: the autonomy of her own ferocious intellect, uncompromised, and uncompromising.

VI.

On each occasion that I have taught Emily Dickinson’s poetry, I marvel anew at her unmistakable style. It would be an interesting experiment to have someone, a graduate student perhaps, choose, say, 30 poems picked at random from the history of poets writing in English, and then determine how readily her work might be distinguished from amid the uniform field of unidentified poems. My sense is that the identification would be unerring. The quatrain structure alone would be a giveaway. Her thematic choices are distinctive, as are her narrative strategies that prefer logical argument to personal revelation. There is little in her poetry that is casual or colloquial. She seldom gives in to humor. Nor is she often glib, but characteristically requires a particular and sustained attention word by word through the sequence of her lines to follow her meticulous reasoning—which is what she understands about narrative5. Even the punctuation is individual, and requires consideration about what she may be doing with all those dashes, and her frequent use of ellipsis. She is a demanding poet, and to read her with comprehension requires that we slow down our transit through every given poem to make sure we follow the sequence of her thinking.

And thus over the course of that fall quarter at UCSC, as we in our class extrapolated this effort to encompass the immensity of her poetic corpus, we had to concede that we could not accomplish everything in nine-and-a-half weeks. We in fact made it as far then, as I have made it in this present article about teaching. What we left out for lack of time are two more conceptual sets of poems whose themes Dickinson explores with her characteristic depth, and which I will simply suggest in outline here.

First, if we note that she defines her identity in such a way that she is alienated from both the spiritual and natural worlds, and is similarly unable to imagine intimacy with another self-consciousness, then she is left to contemplate poetically what the capacities of selfhood allow her.

                                    I am afraid to own a Body—
I am afraid to own a Soul—
Profound—precarious Property—
Possession, not optional—

                                    Double Estate—entailed at pleasure
Upon an unsuspecting Heir—
Duke in a moment of Deathlessness
And God, for a Frontier.  (1090)

The poet’s dilemma is that she is secure in neither her human nor her spiritual station. and to contend with this heterogeneity of body and soul, she appears condemned to live in irresolution.

Second, in the process of this irresolute contention, she can form a ‘haggard comfort’ that, as she matured into middle age, suggested a retreat from community at large into the familiarity of her family. Her sister, Lavinia, once wrote that “Emily’s so called ‘withdrawal from general society’, for which she never cared, was only a happen”.6  The simplicity of this explanation ignores with sisterly charity the many idiosyncrasies that accompanied the poet’s retirement. Nevertheless, it does indicate how the gradual seclusion suited the poet’s maturing character and the family medium that nurtured it.

                                    Had I presumed to hope—
The loss had been to Me
A Value—for the Greatness’ Sake—
As Giants—gone away—

                                    Had I presumed to gain
A Favor so remote—
The failure but confirm the Grace
In further Infinite—

                                    ’Tis failure—not of Hope—
But Confident Despair—
Advancing on Celestial Lists—
With faint—Terrestrial power—

                                    ’Tis Honor—though I die—
For That no Man obtain
’Til He be justified by Death—
This—is the Second Gain—  (522)

The first stanza presents a curious interchange. Had the poet “presumed to hope—”, she tells us, the loss of her expectations, which we might naturally suppose a source of despondence, would in fact cause an increase in her fortunes. The degree to which Dickinson values this enlarged possibility is gauged by the comparison that ends the stanza: she esteems her augmented fortunes to the same degree (“for the Greatness’ Sake—”) that she would welcome the withdrawal of a particularly ominous presence (As Giants—gone away—”). Her increase is a measure of decreased danger.

The poet elaborates on this lucrative failure in the second stanza:

                                    Had I presumed to gain
A Favor so remote—
The failure but confirm the Grace
In further Infinite—

Dickinson does not yet specify the nature of this “favor so remote—,” but she does explain why she longs for a diminished hope: to fail in her expectations is to recognize desirable Favors that exist forever beyond her powers of attaining them, though not beyond the reach of her desire. Such a perceivable limit to her power, which is the circumstance of her independence, can introduce variety in her life. For the poet apprehends that the sum of possible experiences neither begins nor ends with her own autonomous identity. If this apprehension can instigate in the poet a fearful retreat into the protection of the Homestead, it can also incite the poet’s humility, which is her willing abridgment of her autonomy. To retire will enthrone her amid her sovereignty, but will do so by truncating the circumference of her experience. She is queenly because she has only herself for a subject. But residing there, she is held safe within the circumscribed range of familial purpose.7

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Brad Crenshaw is the author of four previous poetry collections: My Gargantuan Desire, Genealogies, Memphis Shoals, and most recently Chased by Lunacies and Wonders, which won the Catamaran Poetry Prize for West Coast Poets. His poetry has appeared in a wide range of journals including Catamaran, Shenandoah, Chicago Review, Massachusetts Review, and The Common, and has been anthologized in Bear Flag Republic, The Hard Work of Hope, and California Fire and Water. As a literary critic, he has published multiple articles on contemporary poets. He worked for many years as a neuropsychologist at Baystate Medical Center, and at the Massachusetts Department of Developmental Services. He divides his time between Santa Cruz, California, and Amherst, Massachusetts. *** This essay is part of the "Teaching..." series launched by The Montreal Review in 2024 and edited by Stephen Haven and Laura Ann Reed. The series publishes essays by scholars, writers, and artists on teaching and interpreting the work, ideas, and lives of prominent authors, philosophers, artists, and political figures.

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FROM THE ARCHIVES

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TEACHING PLATO

By Marianne Janack

The Montréal Review, April 2025

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KAFKA TEACHES ME HOW TO TEACH KAFKA

By James Martel

The Montréal Review, March 2025

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“VIVAS TO THOSE WHO HAVE FAIL’D”: TEACHING WALT WHITMAN

By Stephen Haven

The Montréal Review, August 2024

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TEACHING MILOSZ: THE EVOLUTION OF A POET

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The Montréal Review, February 2025

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