This dirty-- little-- Heart

This dirty-- little-- Heart
Is freely mine--
I won it with a Bun--
A freckled shrine

But eligibility fair
To him who sees
The Visage of the Soul
And not the knees.
(F 1378)

There is a child-like simplicity in this poem, one that looks to the imporant things beyond sraped knees and finds beauty and joy. The opening lines of a "dirty-- little-- Heart" surprise the reader by inverting the reader's expectations. There is no pure heart, no courtly love or lofty intentions. The prize of love is not a magnanimous deed or heroic act, but rather is a "bun"-- common place. Dickinson draws out the theme of love found in the everyday, rooted deeper than appearances.

Love is not based upon looks or first impressions. Perhaps the overlooked knees were dirty from time spent in a hothouse tending plants, or perhaps they were scraped from stumbles while wandering through fields. Love looks beyond these things, peering into the very essences-- the soul. The one who loves peers beyond the superficial and lookes out through the perspective of the core of the one who is loved. To borrow a phrase from a friend: We don't love people because they are beautiful; people are beautiful because we love them.

How ruthless are the gentle--

How ruthless are the gentle--
How cruel are the kind--
God broke his contract to his Lamb
To qualify the Wind--
(F 1465)

This is one of probably dozens of Dickinson's poems that has confuses me. I really don't know what it is "supposed" to be about, and the last line doesn't seem to make much sense at all. That said, the first two lines are intriguing. It makes me think perhaps this is a commentary on society and what is "dignified" and "proper." It seems that so much of what was socially acceptable and the "refined" behavior of the upper class could be truly cruel and brutal. Lives, physically and emotionally and likely mentally, could be pulled apart with one wrong word or move.

Perhaps it could also be a commentary about institutions like slavery. The southern states defended slavery, often claiming the Africans taken as slaves were less intelligent, not human, and that it was for their own good. The "gentle" treatment is revealed in horrifying detail in books like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and even the most well-meaning of those who keeps slaves only perpetuate a system of pain and separations, even death.

I wish I understood the last line.

An Hour is a Sea

An Hour is a Sea
Between a few, and me--
With them would Harbor be--
(F 898)


Emily Dickinson never fails in her ability to capture in a few words, even in about a sentence and a half or three small lines-- to capture an experience. It's not quite a miniature experience, because the full impact of emotion lies in these lines, rich and overwhelming. Her compression of language is superb, and I feel like I'm gushing as I write this, but her poetry is so rich in expression.


This speaker is full of longing and fear, isolation and maybe even a tinge of depression, yet there is an underlying hope. This "hour of sea" may seem unending. One could liken it to the experience of Santiago in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, when the giant fish has dragged Santiago out into the waves, much farther than he ever expected. There is no land in sight, only the swell of waves and the stars as a guide at night. In ways, the speaker in this poem seems to use the hope of the friends as a map to guide into the harbor, much as Santiago used the starts to navigate until he could see the lights of Havannah.


The moment of safety is not played out in the poem, however. And this lack of a real conclusion casts a little shadow of uncertainty upon the poem. The speaker is aware the harbor exists, but whether he or she will make whatever effort is necessary to reach the harbor-- that is another matter that Dickinson does not answer. Will the persona fall short of the harbor and sink or die at sea? Will he or she even try to reach the harbor? The answer must come from the reader, and the reader's answer will reveal far more about himself or herself than it will reveal about the speaker or the poet.

Color-- Caste-- Denomination

I took a break to do more reading/research, and yet I haven't really done very much. That said, I don't want to get out of the discipline of writing, so here I go writing with or without research...

Color-- Caste-- Denomination--
These-- are Time's Affair--
Death's diviner Classifying
Does not know they are--

As in sleep-- all Hue forgotten--
Tenets-- put behind--
Death's large-- Democratic fingers
Rub away the Brand--

If Circassian-- He is careless--
If He put away
Chrysalis of Blonde-- or Umber--
Equal Butterfly--

They emerge from His Obscuring--
What Death-- knows so well--
Our minuter intuitions--
Deem unplasusible
(F 836)

In this poem Dickinson captures not only the universal-ness of death, who misses none, but she also captures and portrays the leveling of death. In death there is no regard for class, race, religion, gender, or any other distinguishing feature that we living are so tedious to create and maintain. Often I wonder if this is why Dickinson writes so much about death and seems to fascinated by death-- because it is the humbling experience everyone faces, and no one is exempt from it. There are no kinder deaths for the rich or refined, there are no chances to name one's own death (save suicide, which is not guaranteed to be successful as some survived the attempt, often a with devastating aftermath).

Death truly has "democratic fingers," and the only ones that may have escaped death would be found in the biblical accounts of Elijah, Enoch, and Jesus. I would be curious to see a poem of Dickinson's regarding those three. Disregarding those three men and disregarding myths of similar people escaping the actual death experience, it is clear that death is fixed. We are all dying someday, and we will all die someday. Whether the coffin is fancy or plain, whether it is made of crude planks or mahogany, we cannot forever avoid death. I think Dickinson took some comfort and possibly some satisfaction in that fact. It's surprising how morbid a wren-like poet perpetually in white can be. And yet, I think she embraced death as a natural part of the life-cycle, and I don't believe this poem is necessarily dark or twisted. She understood that there is purpose in endings and in even death.

I lost a World-- the other day!

I lost a World-- the other day!
Has Anybody found?
You'll know it by the Row of Stars
Around it's forehead bound!

A Rich man-- might not notice it--
Yet-- to my frugal Eye,
Of more Esteem than Ducats--
Oh find it-- Sir-- for me!
(F 209)

One of Emily Dickinson's many remarkable gifts is her ability to see worlds and find value in what is unseen or not valued by others. She could see entire worlds in a snowflake or feel the oppression of millions in a beam of light. She found value in the things that society did not, and I think she reveled in that and probably felt at least a bit of superiority over it.

It is interesting to note that in this poem the speaker is unable to find the lost world alone. Built into this poem is a dependence or at least the inability to be independent. Also there is the iconic Dickinson polarity evident. The "rich man" the persona speaks of contrasts directly with the frugal Eye" of the persona. And while the reader would expect the rich man to be quick to spot the valuable world, the speaker is sure that such a person "would not notice" the lost world. While the lost world may be overlooked, the persona is convinced of its dear value of "more esteem than ducats." It is beyond price and holds great intrinsic value. It is of the mind and imagination, beyond the restrictions and attempts at set worth, often materialistic worth, set by society.

Over the fence

Over the fence--
Strawberries-- grow--
Over the fence--
I could climb-- if I tried, I know--
Berries are nice!

But-- if I stained my Apron--
God would certainly scold!
Oh, dear,-- I guess if He were a Boy--
He'd-- climb-- if He could!
(F 271)

This is one of those poems that I chanced upon, finding it only when I opened my anthology and looked at the first poem I saw. It seems to me that I find some of my favorite Dickinson poems this way, and today was not an exception.

I love when Dickinson writes about the limitations that we put on ourselves-- the impositions of society and our own guilt and self-made obligations to conformity. The possiblity of a stain upon the apron can be symbolic of the potential stain upon one's reputation. As one critic wrote, much of Dickinson's poetry hinges on the balance between the actual and the hoped for.

There are gender issues here, and it is open for feminist criticism. I suppose Freudian interpretation would make it that way, emphasizing the erotic in the berry and desire to act upon the suppressed desire. And feminist criticism could take issue with the Eve complex. The boy can hop the fence of propriety, sow his wild oats, and hop back into the good graces of all. Again the societal limitations become the theme of this poem, trapping the speaker in her corseted traditional role-- stifled and suppressed.

An absolute monarch overseeing an intensely private kingdom

There have been a lot of theories concerning Emily Dickinson's reclusive tendencies. Traditionally, many people have believed her to be a recluse or hermit. This stereotype, unfortunately, is very pervasive and is still sometimes taught in schools. Those who hold to this view of Dickinson, however, discount the intense relationship that she had with her family members, and it also ignores the large amount of writing she did. She wrote prolifically to her sister-in-law before Sue and Austin Dickinson settled next door, she wrote to extended family, and she wrote to a small, tightly-knit group of close friends.

Others have theorized that perhaps Dickinson had some sort of phobia of people and, therefore, shut herself inside the homestead. This could be a plausible explanation in part, but I don't think it's accurate. One on hand, Dickinson seemed to be famous for ducking out of the room when strangers visited. The reason for avoiding people could not be because of her literary skills or literary fame, since only a few of her poems were published in her lifetime and all anonymously. Sometimes I truly think she enjoyed messing with the minds of Amherst and provoking, on some level, the gossip. I wonder if she didn't mention, on the sly, to her sister Lavinia that she was going to don a white dress yet again and let herself be seen in the garden for a moment or two then disappear for a week or so inside and have laught with Lavinia later over what fantastic stories the townspeople made up in the subsequent days.

Honestly, I feel like she was simply bored by most people. Upon a visit to Washington, DC in her twenties, Dickinson is said to have reported that in DC society "everybody knows everybody and the nobodies are the most clamorous of all" (Wineapple 64). She seems to have had little regard for the games that society plays, and her poems such as "Much Madness is divinest Sense" and "I'm nobody! Who are you" seem to reinforce this. I don't think that Dickinson was afraid of society-- but I think she saw little point in the rules, games, and structures of "polite" society.

Having said all of that, I do partly blame her family for some of her strong attachments to home and growing reticence to leave. Habegger's biography of Dickinson, My Wars are Laid Away in Books, goes into great detail about Dickinson's childhood. He discusses the high child mortality rate, as well as Edward Dickinson's firm belief (that seems rather unfounded) that young Emily Dickinson was frail and his insistence that Emily remain at home, rather than going to school, any time she showed the slightest sign of sickness. Dickinson was strongly attached to both siblings-- older brother, Austin, and her younger sister, Lavinia. After one year at Mount Holyoke Seminary, Edward Dickinson decided that Emily would not stay at the school for a second. Dickinson wrote "Home was always dearer to me & dearer still the friends around it" (Wineapple 54).

Family was vital to the Dickinsons, and often they seemed to reject nearly all others in favor of one another. Much of Emily Dickinson's letters to her family reinforce this tenacious bond, as in her letter to Austin in which she claimed "We're unlike most everyone and are therefore more dependent on each other for delight" (Wineapple 61). Neither Emily nor Lavinia Dickinson ever married, and both lived their entire lives with their family. Much of these years were spent in the Dickinson homestead, which had been Edward Dickinson's home as a child. Lavinia Dickinson best characterizes the Dickinsons' need for privacy and the unity of family when she remarked that the Dickinsons "loved with greedy ardor, each in his or her own individual way, each an absolute monarch overseeing an intensely private kingdom" (Wineapple 60).