Emily Dickinson ~ Poet of the Week

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but severe homesickness led her to return home after one year. Throughout her life, she seldom left her house and visitors were scarce. The people with whom she did come in contact, however, had an enormous impact on her thoughts and poetry. She was particularly stirred by the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she met on a trip to Philadelphia. He left for the West Coast shortly after a visit to her home in 1860, and some critics believe his departure gave rise to the heartsick flow of verse from Dickinson in the years that followed. While it is certain that he was an important figure in her life, it is not certain that this was in the capacity of romantic love—she called him "my closest earthly friend." Other possibilities for the unrequited love in Dickinson’s poems include Otis P. Lord, a Massachusetts Supreme Court Judge, and Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican.

By the 1860s, Dickinson lived in almost total physical isolation from the outside world, but actively maintained many correspondences and read widely. She spent a great deal of this time with her family. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was actively involved in state and national politics, serving in Congress for one term. Her brother Austin attended law school and became an attorney, but lived next door once he married Susan Gilbert (one of the speculated—albeit less persuasively—unrequited loves of Emily). Dickinson’s younger sister Lavinia also lived at home for her entire life in similar isolation. Lavinia and Austin were not only family, but intellectual companions during Dickinson’s lifetime.

Dickinson's poetry reflects her loneliness and the speakers of her poems generally live in a state of want, but her poems are also marked by the intimate recollection of inspirational moments which are decidedly life-giving and suggest the possibility of happiness. Her work was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England, as well as her reading of the Book of Revelation and her upbringing in a Puritan New England town which encouraged a Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative approach to Christianity.

She admired the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as John Keats. Though she was dissuaded from reading the verse of her contemporary Walt Whitman by rumor of its disgracefulness, the two poets are now connected by the distinguished place they hold as the founders of a uniquely American poetic voice. While Dickinson was extremely prolific as a poet and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, she was not publicly recognized during her lifetime. The first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890 and the last in 1955. She died in Amherst in 1886.

Upon her death, Dickinson's family discovered 40 handbound volumes of more than 800 of her poems, or "fascicles" as they are sometimes called. These booklets were made by folding and sewing five or six sheets of stationery paper and copying what seem to be final versions of poems in an order that many critics believe to be more than chronological. The handwritten poems show a variety of dash-like marks of various sizes and directions (some are even vertical). The poems were initially unbound and published according to the aesthetics of her many early editors, removing her unusual and varied dashes and replacing them with traditional punctuation. The current standard version replaces her dashes with a standard "n-dash," which is a closer typographical approximation of her writing. Furthermore, the original order of the works was not restored until 1981, when Ralph W. Franklin used the physical evidence of the paper itself to restore her order, relying on smudge marks, needle punctures and other clues to reassemble the packets. Since then, many critics have argued for thematic unity in these small collections, believing the ordering of the poems to be more than chronological or convenient. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (Belknap Press, 1981) remains the only volume that keeps the order intact.


Welcome to the Emily Dickinson Museum: The Homestead and The Evergreens! The Museum consists of two historic houses in the center of Amherst, Massachusetts, closely associated with the poet Emily Dickinson and members of her family during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Homestead was the birthplace and home of the poet Emily Dickinson. The Evergreens, next door, was home to her brother Austin, his wife Susan, and their three children.



The Emily Dickinson Museum was created in 2003 when the two houses merged under the ownership of Amherst College. The Museum is dedicated to educating diverse audiences about Emily Dickinson’s life, family, creative work, times, and enduring relevance, and to preserving and interpreting the Homestead and The Evergreens as historical resources for the benefit of scholars and the general public.


My personal favorite Emily Dickinson poem:

I'll tell you how the sun rose,--
A ribbon at a time.
Its steeples swam in amethyst,
The news like squirrels ran.
The hills untied their bonnets,
The bobolinks begun.
Then I said softly to myself,
"That must have been the sun!"

But how he set, I know not.
There seemed a purple stile
Which little yellow boys and girls
Were climbing all the while
Till when they reached the other side,
A dominie in gray
Put gently up the evening bars,
And led the flock away.


ABOUT THIS POEM:

Meaning:

Exemplified in this poem is Emily Dickinson's pure and beautiful descriptive talent. She looks at something simple and everyday, with the eyes of a child exploring and seeing these things for the first time.
I tend to agree with Freud's opinion when it comes to this poem. He thought that sometimes, just sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar and not a symbol for a penis. This is a poem without hidden meaning for most readers. Just a clean, bright and fresh approach to a plain old sunrise.

Imagery:

A nice and recurring image is that of the ribbon crossing the morning sky as the sun rises. This image comes back when she describes the hills untying their bonnets, in other words then streaks of the sunrise becoming brighter and filling the morning sky.
Also the color amethyst of the sunrise is used again in the description of sunset; however it has then taken on a darker color (purple).
Some religious images are used in this poem, namely the dominie (clergymen) and steeple (of a church). The dominie is described as taking the yellow children (rays of the sunset) away after they reach the other side of the stile (steps to climb over a fence). As they climb over the stile, the color of the sunset darkens since night is falling.

Symbolism:

Although I expressed my opinion of the meaning of this poem earier, there are those who want to see a meaning in everything (High School English teachers tend to have this nasty trait). Even something that is beautiful because it's simple.
For those people: Some images in this poem are used traditionally in poetry as symbols. The images described of sunrise and sunset are recurring symbols for birth and death. Emily Dickinson has been known to use these symbols in her poetry before.
Ribbons and yellow boys and girls could represent innocence, or the ribbons might also portray vanity. The frantic squirrels could symbolize the frantic pace of life we lead.

Obviously, steeples and a dominie symbolize religion. But if you want to dig deeper, you might even say that the dominie symbolizes the call of God (since he collects the children climbing over the sunset, or death, he would seem a kind person).


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