The Poetics of Emily Dickinson

Abstract

I put on my bonnet tonight, opened the gate very desperately, and for a little while the suspense was terrible-I think I was held in check by some invisible agent, for I returned to the house then without having done any harm. 1 That night Emily Dickinson, after trembling at the gate, by her own choice closed it and went back to her father's house, which she was almost literally never to leave again. The moment was, for her, not only decisive, but archetypal, for it embodied in miniature the drama of her life-a house she would not leave, a gate she desired yet feared to pass, a belief that renunciation was an elevation, the piercing virtue which both skewered her soul, and yet, as the Puritan mind conceived it, punctured the tissue of mortality and let in the light from eternity. That round point of radiant light, beacon and wound, is the center of a poetry and a life obsessed with death, fixed on the mysterious gate to an equivocal beyond, driven by a powerful will-to-closure, a drive that punctuated her life, like her poems, with the dash, that verbal sign which both divides and connects, which rushes forward and yet, simultaneously, arrests. Death, she wrote, is the Hyphen of the Sea, 2 the sign dividing off what came before, yet carrying the eye, as death does the soul, into the place where the sea of eternity opens up, if indeed the eye be not deceived. This equivocal moment of closure -impetus and hesitation-was to be the focus and to determine the form of her poetic genius. It will help explain the peculiar hieroglyphic quality of her language, the acute compression of her poems, the particular emblems which obsessed her, and the tendency toward opposition and negation which enlivened her syntax and diction. Consciousness, she wrote, is the only home of which we