Ardor and the Abyss

In The Nation, James Longenbach essays about the poetess Emily Dickinson and our endless fascination with her.

From the piece...

Dickinson's reclusiveness was not a way of protecting herself from the world but a way of protecting the world from herself. Jane Humphrey was the first in a long list of people Dickinson frightened simply by existing, and frightening people became a demoralizing occupation. Even more demoralizing was the effort to speak the language of real life: poetry was Dickinson's native tongue—not a transparent sentence like "I know not how to thank you" but elusive sentences like "I have dared to do strange things" or "Thanks for the Ethiopian Face." By the time she sent that sentence to Mabel Loomis Todd, nominally in thanks for the painted jug, Dickinson knew what she was doing, and she knew that it would work. Dickinson constructed her true self in her poetry, which had to be kept secret from almost everyone, since even the slightest release of it into the real world could be explosive.

But what makes Dickinson's greatest poems even more threatening is that they blur the difference between the language of everyday life and the language of poetry, making our own lives feel explosive:

I cannot live with You—
It would be Life—
And Life is over there—
Behind the Shelf

The Sexton keeps the key to—

The language is not complicated here. Only four of these twenty-three words have more than one syllable, and the syllables are arranged in a meter and rhyme scheme familiar to us from innumerable ballads and hymns. But at the same time, Dickinson's idiosyncratic punctuation keeps those syllables from settling too happily into those familiar forms, and the poem's relationship to those forms is as edgy as its professed relationship to the restricting terms of everyday life: to live with another person, however beloved, is to be a pretty piece of porcelain, locked forever behind the sexton's shelf. The prospects of dying together or rising together after death are no less problematic, and the poem's final stanza is both witheringly stern and wildly metaphorical in acceptance of human solitude:

So we must meet apart—
You there—I—here—
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are—and Prayer—
And that White Sustenance—
Despair—

Solitude is not a state merely to be chosen. The space between any two human beings, however proximate, is as astonishing as an ocean, and Dickinson lived and wrote in order to honor that astonishment.