"Tender Pioneer": Emily Dickinson's Poems on the Life of Christ

Abstract

MILY Dickinson's poems on the life of Jesus Christ, written from early to late in her canon, reflect a poetic concern spanning her entire creative life. When read together as a group allowing each to illuminate the others, these meditations on Jesus' birth, life, Crucifixion, and Resurrection form something like a nineteenth-century American Gospel.1 By recreating the Gospels, often with wit and American colloquial language, Dickinson assumes the role of that warbling, typic Teller her supposed person observes the Bible needs to captivate readers.2 As little 'John,' her persona in one of many poems addressed to Jesus, she stresses the Gospels' contemporary relevance and makes them freshly available to her Sweet countrymen (497, 44I). But while spoken New Englandly (285) and in her unique voice, the deep structure of her Gospel poems places them in the poetic tradition of Christian devotion, a tradition extending from the Dream of the Rood and Pearl poets, through the medieval lyricists, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, and Hopkins, to Eliot and Auden in our own day. The salient feature uniting Christian poets in a single identifiable poetic mode is their reverential attention to the life of Jesus Christ and their