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CHAPTER-II

MYSTICISM IN EMILY DICKINSON

Emily Dickinson, widely regarded as one of America's premier poets of the

nineteenth century, is in many ways a poet more of our time than of her own. In

both style and content, her verse was, "revolutionary" in her day. Her carefully

crafted, often cryptic and elliptical poems voice a deep concern with life's most

profound questions, many of them centered upon the nature of God, life, death,

immortality and love.

Dickinson lived an introverted and hermetic life. Although she wrote, at the

last count, 1,789 poems, only a handful of them were published during her

lifetime. Some of these published anonymously and some may have been

published without her knowledge.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, and lived

almost all of her life in her family's house in Amherst, which has been

preserved as the Emily Dickinson Museum. In 1840, Emily was educated at the

nearby Amherst Academy, a former boys' school that had opened to female

students just two years earlier. She studied English and classical literature,

learning Latin and reading the Aeneid over several years, and was taught in

other subjects including religion, history, mathematics, geology, and other

things. She died on May 15, 1886. The cause of death was listed as Bright's

disease (nephritis).

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After her death, her family found 40 hand-bound volumes containing more

than 1,700 of her poems.

Emily Dickinson was modern in that she dared to question "the faith of her

fathers" -- the rather complacent orthodox tradition of the isolated, conservative

community of Amherst, Massachusetts, where she spent her days. She was

unable to emulate her neighbors' easy acceptance of the patterns of traditional

faith inherited from their Puritan forebears even though she was marked by the

Christian ethic, the Biblical traditions preached from the pulpit, the cadences of

the hymns sung in church, and the Puritan habit of self-scrutiny. These things

not unexpectedly became part of the fabric of her poetry.

In writing about faith, she could be, by turns, puckish, irreverent, defiant,

resentful, wry, and anguished. Throughout the body of her work, some 1,775-

recorded poems, she appears to be testing a variety of stances. As shown in

her poems, Dickinson's spiritual journey led her from naive nature-mysticism

through disappointment, to a sacramental approach to God and further

discouragement, culminating in a mature attitude of faithful unknowing.

Indeed, one might say that Emily Dickinson embarked upon a lifelong

journey, which was her search for a new creed, a new "faith" of some sort to

take the place of the Connecticut Valley Congregationalism, which she could

not accept. The record of her search -- her poetry -- invites, perhaps even

compels, the modern reader to abandon his or her own religious complacency.

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Dickinson's expression that the underpinnings of her faith were rather

tottery began appearing in her letters at age fifteen. A letter penned to her

friend Abiah Root records how profoundly discomfited she was by community

pressure to have the conversion experience which was expected in the revival

atmosphere prevailing in Amherst. She was almost persuaded to become a

Christian but then admits to backsliding. One by one, her old habits returned to

her and she cared less for religion than ever. . She was continually putting off

becoming a Christian. Evil voices lisp in her ear.

The next year, when Emily was attending Mount Holyoke Female

Seminary, she was subjected to Founder Mary Lyon's somewhat coercive

policy of categorizing each girl according to her spiritual status: a professing

Christian, a person "with hope;" or one "without hope." Not surprisingly, Emily

fell into the third category and became a target for Miss Lyon's program of

reclaiming the "lost.”

These early experiences established a pattern, which dominated

Dickinson's thinking and art for the rest of her life. She could not embrace

conventional religion, but neither could she cast off its influence. It filled her

poems, dictating the form and rhythm of the verses, providing her with a

vocabulary, furnishing her with imagery, and giving her a point of view. She

explored the Puritan ethos from her unique perspective, daring to question the

fundamental tenets her family, friends and community embraced without the

doubt she herself felt. With a temerity remarkable for a retiring New England

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maid of her day, Dickinson forged her way through a thicket of human and

theological questions about life, death, God, immortality, love, and nature.

Henry W. Wells opines:

Emily believed in the rectitude of the human soul; she had

no truck with the orthodox Christian doctrine of the fall. Her

faith clung to the individual, man, with all his inherent or

potential beauty and integrity. In this life she knew

immortality, eternity, infinity, heaven and God. She had

suffered and overcome. Her dominant chord is one of

personal triumph (112).

Most of all, she sought to know and understand God, and the avenue she

chose was the world of nature. All her life, she was attuned to the rhythms of

the natural world and was known in Amherst for her fine gardening skills.

Nevertheless, her interest in the phenomenal world went beyond what could be

observed; it reflected her obsession with what lay "beyond;" her desire to bridge

the gulf between humanity and God. Richard chase opines:

Emily Dickinson presents man, nature, and God as radically

distinct. She does not share the forms of nineteenth-century

naturalism which attempt to reconcile the claims of human nature

with the claims of cosmic nature (164).

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Her passionate aim is not to diversify but to unite humankind. Her choice

of the lyric in preference to the dramatic form is here significant. Although she

wishes to assert and to sustain her own character, she shows small interest in

characters in the plural. Her utmost will is employed in a spiritual quest for the

attainment and expression of whatever is profoundly and centrally human. Her

active quest is to shuffle off restricting bands of time and space, merely local

customs, pedantic fields of knowledge, and all specialized learning, in order to

attain instead the bedrock of humanity. Richard Chase comments:

The three realms of being, then, are separate but not absolutely

closed and self-contained; they remain “ajar” and, in so far, open to

each other. They may join forces, as when nature becomes the

agent of God’s will that man shall die and when the human soul

becomes the agent of God’s will that nature and death shall be

transcended by immortality (165).

When she died, in her coffin were placed vanilla-scented heliotrope, a

Lady's Slipper orchid and a "knot of blue field violets". Emily Dickinson is one of

the most well known poets of her time. Though her life was outwardly

uneventful, what went on inside her house behind closed doors is unbelievable.

It was not until her death of Brights Disease in May of 1862, that many of her

poems were even read. Thus proving that the analysis on Emily Dickinson’s

poetry is some of the most emotionally felt works of the nineteenth century,

sunsets, dawns, birds, bees, and butterflies were sufficient companionship for

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Miss Dickinson. She dealt with a lot both physically and psychologically and in

the end she still came out on the top.

Emily Dickinson’s most vivid symbol would be nature, and this is where

she allows so many of her deepest feelings to run free. Nature allows Miss

Dickinson to be herself and to find herself. This is her only connection to her

God, and it is in nature that she finds her strengths. She believes that there is a

God, but where he is, she does not know. The only thing she feels sure about is

the fact that she is going to die, and when she does, her soul will live on in

some way. Her seclusion is a main factor because she wishes to separate

herself from the outside, creating in her a more simple heart. She believes that

once a person is alone from the world they are separated from the corruption.

Salamatullah Khan opines:

She points out further that sages had called this life of seclusion

‘small’ but in spite of her initial misgivings. she had found it vast as

horizon. As the years went by, she gained self-control and she

could hear his name without. She goes a step further to assert that

she could not live with him because that would be life (45).

Miss Dickinson made this choice to deal with her own depression in this

way. Miss Dickinson may have been very psychologically disturbed, but the

impact she has left on our society is amazing. No other poet could compare

with the deep emotion that is so carefully placed in her works. She has amazed

many critics with her forms and she will continue to do so as long as people will

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take the time to not only read her poems in their heads but also with their

minds, hearts, and souls. Richard Chase comments:

Nature is aggressively a fact-so consequential and inclusive, a fact

that it symbolizes itself. Nature is both reality and symbol, both

house and ghost. The ‘simplicity’ of nature consists not in its

essence but in its function, which is to act as the condition of man’s

death. We cannot know nature by getting close to it, because the

closer we get to nature the closer we get to unconsciousness and

death (166).

The transcendental doctrine of correspondences doubtless made an

impression on Emily Dickinson’s thinking, and it may have given her some

warrant for talking about the symbolic and typifying function of nature. Richard

Chase opines:

Nature is merely frolicsome and harmless. “Nature, the gentlest

mother” in which nature’s government of her household is “fair” and

“mild,” one notices that her tenderest office is to put “her golden

finger on her lip” and to “will silence everywhere.” The most

poignant and beautiful moment of the day is evening or sunset or

the return of the robin to its home or the extinction of the butterfly

and the hay makers in the sea of night (169).

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Thus, nature is both symbol and reality. This paradox, together with the

irreparable estrangement between man and nature, renders nature

unintelligible in its final essence, though there is no doubt about its function in

relation to man.

Emily Dickinson always maintains her distinction between nature and God.

She says that God does seem sometimes to be identified with nature. He is to

be seen in the sunset or heard in the wind. According to Chase Emily Dickinson

does not see God in nature:

Nature does not symbolize God. It is true that in the sun or the

lightning one may see a mode of His action, as in darkness one

may see a simulacrum of His leisure or as in the ocean one may

sense His width and depth. But on the whole one does not see

God in nature (166).

. The beginnings of a philosophy of life based on confronting pain and

suffering emerges as a theme, together with love of nature and the cultivation

of solitude. Dickinson's love of nature expressed itself early as an appreciation

of plants and animals in her own spacious garden, which she tended avidly

throughout her life. Dickinson's spot of nature was a great teacher. She

observed the patterns of the seasons, the cycle of generation, growth, decay,

and rebirth. This cosmic pattern lay right before her, before anybody who

wanted to observe it, yet it went unnoticed. Emily Dickinson saw her and life,

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inseparable from this process, and characterized by a profound solitude. Emily

Dickinson writes:

Growth of Man, like Growth of Nature --

Gravitates within --

Atmosphere, and Sun, endorse it --

But it stir -- alone --

Each -- its difficult Ideal

Must achieve -- Itself --

Through the solitary prowess

Of a Silent Life ...(CPED 367).

Ultimately, Dickinson may have experienced a quiet mysticism akin to

philosophical transcendentalism at the least. Intense artists close to nature

have often expressed such a sense of union with the universe. The

preoccupation of literary commentators with Dickinson's morose preoccupation

with death and the grave and her eccentric reclusion has obscured a revelatory

facet of Dickinson's life and art.

The most impressive aspect of Dickinson's life and struggles is seldom

emphasized: the philosophical, almost mystical insights that she boldly terms

ecstasies. They are so sharply drawn, so contextually genuine, that one can

venture to believe that Emily Dickinson's solitude bore a wonderful and sublime

spirituality. She was possessed of a desire to seek out infinity and immortality,

and they presented themselves to her.

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With Emily Dickinson’s views on death her views on all the other major

problems of her life are intimately concerned, especially those on reality. When

leaning the most heavily upon her mysticism, she found time unreal, and the

real wholly within the human mind and adhering to ‘the now’. In short, reality

was a property of the present tense. Hence, immortality, when more seriously

understood, possessed no objective reality but only an inner reality. This is the

conventional mystic doctrine, to be considered more fully in later sections of

this book dealing specifically with her mysticism and with her analogues to

earlier mystical poets. Ordinary sorrow or separation would not, she assumes,

have been powerful enough to open her eyes to this supreme and mysterious

truth. Henry W. Wells opines:

The only effectual angel of spiritual truth is death. In his presence

the mysterious reality becomes clear, and the true or esoteric

meanings of immortality, eternity, heaven, and infinity are

disclosed, Thus death becomes the supreme teacher of esoteric

truth (97).

For Emily, death is symbol of reality, it becomes not the bitter dead-end of

the grave-though on one level it remains that- but the gateway to reality and

hence to life, joy, and ecstacy. Emily had a passionate devotion, if not a normal

urge, for three men who died during her lifetime. Sealed by death, they became

doubly real, If she found herself still short of complete happiness, this was less

because she had not as yet been reunited in a future heavenly existence, than

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because her mind was still to some extent earthly and dull, as yet in capable of

complete self-sufficiency and imaginative mastery. Henry W. Wells opines:

The ultimate ideal lay beyond her, as, in her opinion, beyond all

human beings. This ideal was perfection, an hypothesis of the

human mind, and one of her nearest approximations to a vital

concept of God (98).

She felt herself morally and spiritually strengthened by the emotional trials,

which she had survived. She felt that she had drunk of certain of the waters of

immortality, and had reached certain definite heights in the progress of her

mystical experience. She generally declared herself happy. A tonic quality

makes itself strongly felt in her poems. Her immense vitality in itself ensured a

resilience and optimism. Henry W. Wells comments:

The life and vision which is the mystic’s fruition consequently lies,

ideally speaking, in a transcendent present only. With the same

thought she insists that her lies only news lies in daily bulletins from

immortality. She declared that “Eternity is now”. In the same spirit

she insists that “earth is heaven, whether heaven is heaven or not”

(160).

Three poems of Emily Dickinson are built around or contain the theme of

the mysterious visitor, in order to suggest the range of meaning that Emily

Dickinson attributes to it.

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A Bee his burnished Carriage

Drove boldly to a Rose-

Combinedly alighting-

Himself - his Carriage was-(CPED 579).

Intimations of the future state Emily Dickinson constantly felt. Almost any

moving experience might summon immortality to her mind. She says:

Immortality as a guest is sacred, but when it becomes as with you

and with us, a member of the family, the tie is more vivid…This

extraordinary generalization of immortality, outside of history,

church, and dogma, clearly has the quality of Gnosticism (Qtd. in

chase 183).

Emily Dickinson’s intimacy with the bee, the butterfly, the robin, the hills,

and the sundown–the objects of phenomenon, is an attempt to plunge into the

essence of existence to experience fellowship. The connection between the

intuition of immortality as an immediate experience and the imaginative

perception of an invisible supersensuous order becomes clear. The

imaginative experience in the heat of poetic inspiration compares with the

experience of love in respect of experiencing immortality in time and mortal

state. Mohammad Mansoor Khan opines:

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At the height of her intuitive vision, Dickinson too enters into direct

communion with God and the modalities of her experience are

eternity and immortality. The reality of immortality that is

incommunicable through language except as a conceptual

representation, is directly experienced by intuition as a real

“Presence” rather than an abstraction or intellection (125).

Tracing the poet's concern with nature reveals that Dickinson's view was

not static; indeed, it evolved rather rapidly from a quasi-mystical approach to a

symbolic or "sacramental" view to a skeptical one. The evolution took place

over a lifetime, a period during which she experienced a profound spiritual

upheaval.

The earliest -- and shortest -- stage involved a quasi-mystical approach,

characterized by her deep yearning for a metaphysical experience in which the

eternal in humanity is united with the divine in nature. She saw Nature as a

resource through which one might come to know the Deity. This was a view she

came by naturally -- through Puritan orthodoxy. The universe, created and

ordered by God, reflected the divine mind and will. Human beings might learn

of God not only through the Word of God but also through the Book of Nature.

Dickinson looked to the natural world because it seemed to have the

peculiar power of awakening mystical-like moods. She also seemed to be fully

aware of the "peril" of taking such an unorthodox stance. Indeed, it was almost

as if Dickinson felt compelled to roam the border area between the temporal

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and the eternal, hoping to transcend the artificial divisions of this world and

achieve union with the One. In addition, Nature became the key. Through its

agency, she thought a person might achieve a mystical union with the deity,

losing oneself in the divine spirit immanent in the natural world. Spiritual

renewal and divinity are then available here and now if one learns to tap the

wellspring of Nature. However, to embrace such a view, one has to throw over

the Christian concepts of sin, grace, forgiveness, and justification. From the

perspective of traditional religion, the poet was indeed sailing into "dangerous

waters" in flirting with such an idea.

During this early period, she may have done no more than "flirt may" but

she clearly yearned for a mystical experience and even, on occasion, wrote as

if she had attained it. Poem 122 shows how deeply Nature could stir the poet,

and the language ,she uses -- references to light, ecstasy, wonder, grace -- is

typical of a mystic. Emily says:

A something in a summer's Day

As slow her flambeaux burn away

Which solemnizes me.

A something in a summer's noon

A depth -- an Azure -- a perfume --

Transcending ecstasy.

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And still within a summer's night

A something so transporting bright

I clap my hands to see --

Then veil my too inspecting face

Lest such a subtle -- shimmering grace

Flutter too far for me – (CPED 57).

Dickinson combines in this one poem both the language of the "old"

religion (solemnizes, grace, veil) and the language of mysticism, her new

"religion;" (transcending ecstasy, transporting bright, shimmering) as she tries

to articulate a sense of the ineffable "something" in Nature. As is typical of

mystics, the poet struggles with the difficulty of expressing what is

fundamentally inexpressible -- all at a time in life when her poetic expression

was still in its formative stages. She had thus taken upon herself a doubly

challenging task: developing her craft while also attempting to give ineffable

experience verbal expression.

Her poems similarly confront the difficulty of interpreting a vision that

defies description in words (ironic indeed for a poet!). The rarity of the mystical

experience is the focus of her poem. C.N. Srinath opines:

When the experience is at an end even as she must be wishing that

it should last longer she feels cheated-as the Gopis are when their

divine lover Krishna plays hide and seek with them-and the gullible

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young woman in half love, half resentment lets out a sigh: “the

juggler of the day is gone!” The retrospective account of the playful

lover is concretized in the verbs commanded to enact the setting of

the sun, one of the favourite themes of Emily Dickinson (21).

In a series of early poems, Emily Dickinson reiterates her sense of the

eternal shining through the images of the natural world so often that one is

tempted to conclude that she had replaced orthodoxy with a kind of natural

religion. Her poems came to be balanced by her growing conviction that the veil

between man and God cannot be penetrated. The experience of the divine is at

best fragile and tenuous. Contributing to Dickinson's disenchantment with this

mystical view was her awareness of the dark side of Nature, something which a

keen observer like herself could scarcely ignore. Emily says:

I find myself still softly searching

For my Delinquent palaces --

And a Suspicion, like a Finger

Touches my Forehead now and then

That I am looking oppositely

For the site of the Kingdom of Heaven (CPED 449).

Admitting her waywardness, Dickinson retreated from mysticism to explore

a less dangerous path: Nature as symbol, Nature as hieroglyph. God, having

written His designs in the natural world, could be discovered in part by reading

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its symbols. Thus, in embracing what can be termed a "sacramental view," she

was retreating, moving back toward a more traditional approach to finding God.

If Nature constitutes a vast symbol, by which God informs us of His plan,

then studying its forms might disclose something of the Infinite Being even if it

could not provide a means of direct contact. This became the basis for the

poet's revised reading of Nature. A number of poems of this period reveal that

she regarded Nature as being invested with symbolic and sacred meaning,

indeed, that it could be the symbolic instrument of spirit, capable of conveying

grace and assurance of spiritual regeneration.

Her poems about the cycles of the seasons (birth-death-rebirth) best

illustrate her symbolic view. They seem to posit her conviction that if one

participates in Nature's "rituals," then one may be able to read one's own

destiny in them. In the next poem about Indian summer, the poet's use of the

language of conventional ritual conveys her hope that this "natural" sacrament

will impart to her an assurance of immortality: It is clear that the poet hopes

that Nature as Sacrament will convey the assurance of immortality, the special

grace she seeks. What is more, she comes in the guise of a child, as if in

obedience to Christ's admonition that we must "become as little children" in

order to enter the kingdom of heaven.

A number of other poems express a similar hope that one can derive

meaning for one's life in Nature, particularly in its rhythms and stability. In Poem

1077, Dickinson writes of the "Signs" and "rites" of Nature's House. For a time,

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Dickinson clung to this symbolic view of Nature, seeking to decipher the

meaning it held. Clearly, her motivation was strong. It was especially in

Nature's forms that she tried to read an assurance of immortality. The principle

of rebirth and renewal she witnessed in Nature each spring she sought to apply

to her own fate after death. Still, her poem reflects the poet's growing

ambivalence: her impulse to doubt clashes with her desire to believe in a

symbolic reading of Nature.

She wrote of the indifferent and destructive power of Nature that she found

impossible to reconcile with a sacramental view. Death loomed larger than ever

in her life, especially given the frequency with which it claimed the lives of those

near and dear to her. "The Frost of Death" could not be resisted, but what was

worse to the poet than its inevitability was its seeming "endorsement" by God:

She writes”

Apparently with no surprise

To any happy Flower

The Frost beheads it at it's play --

In accidental power --

The blonde Assassin passes on --

The Sun proceeds unmoved

To measure off another Day

For an Approving God (CPED 667).

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This rather dark picture of an unfeeling and automatic natural process

suggests something of how the poet views the relation between humanity and

God. Death just as easily "beheads" people, and afflictions strike them while

"an approving God" looks on. One recalls Dickinson's bitter remark on the

affliction of a friend's child that "frost is no respecter of persons."

In her poems about the harsh and naked power of Nature as she had

witnessed it in storms, one can see the clearest indication of her shift away

from the "sacramental" view. In these verses, Nature is not a source of comfort

or rapture or reassurance of immortality. Instead, it wears a fearsome and

sometimes savage face. She saw that her early aspirations were illusory and

concluded that human beings can never achieve a full understanding of God

through the Book of Nature or revealed Word. Humanity is fallen, and God is

wholly other.

Dickinson had sought to understand "the Astounding subjects" (God,

eternity, death, immortality) by means of the only objective channel available to

her -- the natural world. However, when the mystical and sacramental

approaches failed, she inevitably came face to face with the grim realization

that Nature could not impart significant clues that would bring her to an

understanding of the universe, humanity's place in it, or its fate. Nature, she

concluded, can be experienced but not expounded by the finite mind. Indeed, it

is sheer folly for anyone to imagine that he has grasped its meaning: Emily

writes:

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A little Madness in the Spring

Is wholesome even for the King,

But God be with the Clown --

Who ponders this tremendous scene --

This whole Experiment of Green --

As if it were his own! (CPED 577).

"Nature is a stranger yet," She concluded.

It is idle to expect poetry to assume the role of philosophy as a system of

thought, though it may be philosophical in the highest degree. Phenomenology

and evolution, therefore is the context of Dickinson’s poetry may be understood

only as broad referents and approximations of her poetic thought on

phenomena. Emily Dickinson’s poetry, notwithstanding its otherworldly

leanings, has a typical geocentric tendency. Dickinson’s mockery of the

Calvinist tenets of faith is a part of strategy against perfection. Mohammad

Manzoor Khan opines:

Dickinson drives home the point that the religious belief in the

continuance of life after death might be just a fraud. Death is

invincible and in “I never lost as much but twice” her diatribe

against God over irreparable loss in death comes to the fore (99).

Dickinson was a liberated puritan, and it was her delight to observe the

traditional resurrection confirmed in the revival of spring. Her poems on the

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butterfly show her profound interest in the morphogenesis of evolution though

her phenomenology in some of these poems takes venturesome leap

immortality from becoming to being. Mohammad Manzoor Khan comments:

Dickinson sees the miracle of instinctive consciousness: the

change from caterpillar to butterfly exemplifies the unique nature of

life driven by the vital impetus. It is as though Elan vital is rolling

through the species in its larval, pupal, and insect stages of

morphogenesis (105).

Emily Dickinson evolved into a mystic of the first order, the most important

part of her life being the realm of inner spiritual experience. Her poems with any

comprehension, realizes that she deliberately chose the life she lead, creating

an inner spiritual existence far richer than mere fame, romantic love, or

popularity. The wealth of her poetic gift would have been an overwhelming

spiritual fortune for any person. Emily Dickinson’s mystic life was founded upon

no system of thought or discipline comparable to the theology and practises of

the Church. In her dealings with the Church she appears in relation, even

though hostile, to an institution; in her participation in mysticism, she appears

as an individual secluding herself from society and from tradition in the strictest

sense of the word. Henry W. Wells opines:

All mysticism begins with the personal life. It transcends

individualism only as it progresses to its fruition through the

personal to the universal. The leading aspects of mysticism prove

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strangely recurrent. Even though Emily herself may have thought

little of her place in one of the most venerable movements in the

history of the human spirit, such a role she does play (158).

She herself recognized the distinction between the Christian theology, with

its emphasis upon the atonement through an objectively conceived Savior or

Deity, and the mystical vision, with its preference for development and growth

within the soul. To Emily as a mystic the brain was “just the weight of God.” At

an early age, she knows that her poetry carried another religious message than

that of the Church. Henry W. Wells comments:

The God whom she addressed was beyond all else a “God of

width.” She states her difference with the Church most tersely

when she observes that her aim is not merely to sight the Savior

but to be the saved. The Church commonly accuses mystics of

pantheism. Emily plays perilously with this heresy when in

describing the glories of the sun at dawn, noon, and evening, and

the splendor of the stars, she exclaims that “in the zones of

paradise of the stars, she exclaims that “in the zones of paradise

the Lord alone is burned.”(159).

Emily grasps all the cardinal features of the mystics’ dream, as its privacy,

quietism, anti-intellectualism, universalism, and super-naturalism. The familiar

world of human activity, buying, selling, arguing, traveling, does not appeal to

her. With unusual acume Emily analyzes her own soul and especially those

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experiences casting light upon her allusive ideal, to be captured, of at all, not

by reason but by metaphor. With strange felicity, she describes the mystical

experience in terms of light. Wells comments:

The mystic light is truly the light of discipline and not that of chance,

with various types of opportunism. The opportunist is at once near

the goal of the mystically enlightened and yet subtly removed. He

stands, as it were, upon the brink of eternity. The atheist may be

closer to the mystic way than the orthodox believer. But he is still

deficient. Nature does not know the supernatural light, nor is it

disclosed to the genial lover of the casual and the idle (163).

The doctrine of the supremacy of the individual to herself, of her

originality and, as regards her own character, unique quality, must have had a

great charm for people living in a society in which introspection, thanks to the

want of other entertainment, played almost the part of a social resource. There

was much relish for the utterances of Emily would help to take a picturesque

view of internal possibilities, and to find in the landscape of the soul all sorts of

fine sunrise and moonlight effects.

Emily Dickinson's poem, "The Brain - is wider than the Sky," compares

and contrasts three entities with the human brain: the sky, the sea, and God.

Emily contrasts the brain with the sky and shows that the brain is wider,

because it can think about the sky and at the same time can think about the

person who is thinking about the sky, and it can perform this operation easily.

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She also contrasts the brain with the sea and claims that the brain can absorb

the sea as a sponge absorbs a bucket of water, again referring the vast thinking

ability of the brain. Then she contrasts, as well as compares, the brain with

God. This causes the problem of interpretation: She made a blasphemous

parallel by asserting that the brain is the same as God.

She believes that God is not limited to any one item of His creation. God is

considered to be above and greater than all His creations, and the human brain

is only one of His many creations, so to claim that "The Brain is just the weight

of God" sounds that they are equal. Emily is not claiming to offer direct

knowledge of God but instead is offering her conclusion that the brain and God

are similar because of their vastness. The sky and the sea are huge creations,

and yet the brain can conceive of them as ideas, which mean that the brain can

hold them—or at least hold the ideas of them. The point of her speculation is to

celebrate the importance and vastness of the brain's abilities. Emily asserts

that the brain and God are similar; after all, it is the brain that conceives the

idea of God. However, God remains greater than the brain, because while the

brain is a syllable, God is sound, or the brain is a representation of God, as a

syllable is a representation of sound. Emily writes:

The Brain-is wider than the Sky-

For-put them side by side-

The one the other will contain

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With ease-and You-beside-

The Brain is deeper than the sea-

For-hold them-Blue to Blue-

The one the other will absorb-

As Sponges-Buckets-do-

The Brain is just the weight of God-

For-Heft them-pound for Pound-

And they will differ-if they do-

As syllable from Sound- (CPED 312).

Emily Dickinson, in her resistance to the authority of a standard meter,

used strategies. The idea of metrical code illuminates some of the historical

pressures on her work and clarifies some of resultant poetic tactics. Emily

Dickinson’s time, iambic pentameter had been in uninterrupted and nearly

uncontested standard use for five hundred years. Dickinson’s early poetry had

an ironic component in her use of the hymn stanza. David Porter comments:

Inherent in the hymn form is an attitude of faith, humility, and

inspiration, and it is against this base of orthodoxy that she so

artfully refracts the personal rebellion and individual feeling, the

colloquial diction and syntax, the homely image, the scandalous

45

love of this world, and the habitual religious skepticism (Qtd. in

Finch 168).

A more hidden irony, reflecting the ambivalence of Dickinson’s position as

a powerful female poet, can also be seen in her choice of the hymn stanza.

Her Hymns belong to a religious orthodoxy. By using the meter of the song

sung rather than iambic pentameter-the meter of the poet as priest, the

traditional singer-Dickinson’s poems self-consciously present themselves as

harmless objects. Finch comments:

Several feminist critics have discussed the thematic process by

which Dickinson adopted idealized, constricting nineteenth-century

images of women-the rosy child, the virgin bride- as poetic

personae, in effect undermining them from within. In an age when

images of women as angels were rampant, the poet’s hymn stanza

could have had an analogous function. It made the poem an

angelic object with an original voice, not a singer but a song

singing, an implicit comment on the extravagant subjectivity of the

pentameter tradition at that time (169).

The aesthetic and emotional power of her verses on her preferred theme,

when all are read consecutively without dilution of her lighter materials,

becomes overpowering. There is a unity here resulting not from a philosophical

system but from a sensitive and subtle personality.

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Jesus Christ is a major figure in the Dickinson canon, as he is in the

writings of all Christian devotional poets. In at least seventy Dickinson poems,

he is specifically referred to or addressed by such names as “Jesus,” “Christ,”

“Savior,” “Redeemer,” “Son,” “Lord,” “Master,” and “Deity.” In many other

Dickinson poems, though he is not named, he is clearly intended. In an undated

meditation on the Crucifixion, for example, his is clearly the “highest head” that

wore the “crown” of thorns. Emily writes:

One crown that no one seeks

And yet the highest head

Its isolation coveted

Its stigma deified

While Pontius Pilate lives

In whatsoever hell

That coronation pierces him

He recollects it well (CPED 703).

Emily Dickinson chose to begin the fascicles with a poem about the result

of the protagonist’s debate with Christ, rather than with the debate itself.

However, this is a close, painstakingly careful reading of the reveals. Dorothy

Huff Oberhaus comments:

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Jesus provides a particularly fine example not only of Emily

Dickinson’s way of painting her protagonist into a biblical scene she

has created by varying and synthesizing biblical texts, but also of

the crucial import of the Bible to comprehending the forty fascicles

and the structural principles underlying them (18).

Mysticism is not, like the Church, an institution: and clearly, her own

mystic life was founded upon no system of thought or discipline comparable to

the theology and practises of the Church. In her dealings with the Church, she

appears in relation, even though hostile, to an institution: in her participation in

mysticism, on the contrary, she appears as an individual secluding herself from

society and from tradition in the strictest sense of the word.

Emily herself recognized the distinction between the Christian theology,

with its emphasis upon the atonement through an objectively conceived Savior

or Deity, and the mystical vision, with its preference for development and

growth within the soul. To Emily as a mystic the brain was “just the weight of

God”

Emily Dickinson‘s discourse is most clearly that of Christian devotion are

crucial to understanding her other poems on the life of Christ. One better-

known poem whose secular interpretations are called into question when read

in light of dramatization of Peter’s denial of Christ. Dorothy Huff Oberhaus

comments:

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Emily Dickinson recreates the first Easter. After announcing the

enormous import for all time of Christ’s gift of Himself, the narrator

recounts the aftermath of the Crucifixion, the disciples discovery of

the empty tomb, their despair when believing their Master dead,

and their ultimate joy when He suddenly appears among them

(354).

Emily’s philosophy is electic, her poetry organic. Massive and difficult to

conceive aesthetically as the whole is, we perceive it as forming one entity.

Louise Bogan comments:

True mystics do not indulge in diffuse pantheism or hold to the aim

of “the occult,” which wishes to wrench supernal power to human

uses. In the words of another commentator: “The aim and content

of Christian mysticism is not self or nature, but God.” (137).

Emily Dickinson might well have said something like this: God is the

unmoved mover: He wills that we should die: He sends the imperial affections

which gradually call us to His bosom: He moves nature, which is the concrete

expression of His action and His will: yet He remains distinct from nature

because nature is perpetual process and God in His essence is perpetual

leisure. Richard Chase comments:

In his essence God is eternal repose, but the imagination, when it

conceives the fate of human beings, pictures God as a Father. Her

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phrase “Burglar, banker, father” indicates that she imagined God to

be a Father who behaved like both burglar and banker. In His bank,

one may suppose, is love, redemption, grace, and of course above

all, immortality (179).

She was neither a professional poet nor an amateur; she was a private

poet who wrote as indefatigably as some women cook or knit. Her gift for words

and the cultural predicament of her time drove her to poetry instead of

antimacassars. Emily Dickinson’s poetry is considered as a springboard to a

more specific account of spirituality. While not conventionally religious, she is

arguably among the most spiritual of poets in as much as her themes of God,

love, beauty, and especially death and suffering all depend upon the jarring

juxtaposition of embodied human experience and transcendent human

significance. Her poems suggest a complex view of the ambiguous relation of

suffering to human action and meaning.

Emily Dickinson is indeed probably the greatest American poet and a most

original voice, and the fact that she never published or intended to publish her

poems is a strong statement of "art for art's sake," of creativity for personal

transcendence versus fame and the need for external forces to validate her

identity and values. This motive is enough to put Dickinson in an estimable

status.

It was at this point in her life that she determined to pursue her art the

more vigorously, eventually producing 1,775 poems up to her death at 55, but

50

unawares to anyone, even to her closest kin, and with the perfection of her art

followed the perfection of reclusion.

Dickinson suffered real physical pain and mental anguish is clear.

However, she identified suffering as a component of spiritual growth. Emily

writes:

The hallowing of Pain

Like hallowing of Heaven,

Obtains at a corporeal cost --

The Summit is not given

To Him who strives severe

At middle of the Hill --

But He who has achieved the Top --

All -- is the price of All – (CPED 377).

This sentiment is far from that of a helpless victim of illness and

circumstance. Dickinson expanded on the theme of suffering in one poem by

linking suffering to the paragon of pain, Jesus, suffered with "straight

renunciation" by the "son of God" but not by Jesus' followers, who endorse the

way in their own fashion. Emily Dickinson uses diction, syntax, imagery,

denotation, and tone to convey the strength that the grievous must possess in

order to overcome the bleak and oppressive nature of grief.

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Emily Dickinson had seen Reality with her own eyes, had been in living

contact with it. Emily Dickinson sees that beauty, pure existence is worship of

God. Emily Dickinson can consider her environment to be heaven. This is

especially true because Emily Dickinson referred to herself as a pagan.

Powers ultimate strength as mystic for twenty-first century readers,

however, rests in her potential to set forth in relatively brief lyrics the meaning

found in the deep interior landscape where God abides. Powers lived the

pattern of spirituality that understood the spiritual journey is movement from

darkness into light. Her lyric poetry affirms the paradoxes of the journey. Her

mystical life is both the most normal and the highest expression of the spiritual

life. It involves the highest levels of participation in the intimate. God is the

primary source and active agent of this divine transformation. Emily Dickinson,

could have been speaking of the difference between a mystical (God-oriented)

and a non-mystical (God-alienated) world-view.

Mysticism and poetry, like dreams, bear a close relation to the

unconscious. In general, Emily seeks union with God, and she finds God within

and without the self. As Emily speaks simply and directly about wisdom

discovered within the self in the intimate presence of God, takes the particular

shape of the relationship between the Lord and his beloved. Indeed, in some of

this poetry -- including the Bible’s “Song of Songs” and the work of Indian bhakti

(devotional) poets -- God is portrayed as lover and Beloved in language that is

openly erotic.

52

Emily discovers the light of God by confronting the darkness within, letting

go of the passing show of ordinary life, engaging “the dark night of the soul”.

She abandons --- which in the deeper unconscious is the same as: is

abandoned by --- the ordinary compasses of life. The only way out is through.

Henry W. Wells opines:

Her mysticism and her homebred metaphysics encouraged her to

find virtually a religion in art. She discovered a god, having lost the

God of the churches. Her poem, “I reckon when I count at all”,

frankly prefers poetry to heaven, to nature, or to God. “This is a

blossom of the brain”, another lyric, refers to a poem, or other work

of art, as a seed mysteriously fructified within the spirit. A few

persons rejoice in it. The wise carry it home, since other flowers,

that is, other works of art, may spring from the same source. A lost

poem signifies “The funeral of God.” In short, Emily in this

instance, as elsewhere, specifically makes a god of art (203),

Emily Dickinson’s eschatological cast of mind, on the whole a departure

from New England Puritanism, was entirely a personal vision of life and has no

direct historical or social implications. Yet it places her in distant spiritual

kinship with those revolutionary movements within Christianity, which have

justified social radicalism by their vision of future things. Richard Chase

comments:

53

Emily Dickinson constructed her private poetic convention of

redemptive status. Having observed somewhat how an “imperial”

status comes to the woman who domesticates grace, to the “wife”

who loves, and to the justified soul which puts on immortality (187).

In the emergence of the butterfly from its cocoon, Dickinson sees the

miracle of instinctive consciousness: the change from caterpillar to butterfly

exemplifies the unique nature of life driven by the vital impetus. It is as thought

the Elan vital is rolling through this species in its larval, pupal, and insect stages

of morphogenesis. The joy of Butterfly at the newly discovered liberty of dying

is described in her poem. Thus, the butterfly phenomenon is for Dickinson a

miracle of evolution. Mohammad Mansoor Khan opines:

The aptitude of the soul to transcend corporeality finds an analogue

in the aptitude of the butterfly to fly, and “cocoon” is an analogue for

body. The inability of the cocoon to contain the larva in chrysalis

form or its tightening marks the beginning of the growth of wings

which Dickinson calls “Parasol” and “Numidian Gown”. The release

from the tensions of corporeality in the moment of death requires

preparedness on the part of the soul. Dickinson’s fondness for the

freedom of the butterfly in its flight and in its idleness or jib is

expressed in her poems (110).

Emily Dickinson centers round her doubt about God-especially His

treatment of man. She cannot bridge the gap between her personal nihilistic

54

apprehension of God and His puritan image inherited by her. As the critical

moment, she is left all alone with the unexplained discrepancies in life. In utter

desperation, she attributes these discrepancies to God. She accuses Him as a

“Thrifty Deity” unconcerned with man. Emily writes:

The Perished Patterns murmur-

But His Perturbles Plan

Proceed-inserting Here-a Sun-

There-leaving out a Man- (CPED 355).

Finally, the God who emerges from Emily Dickinson’s poetry is quite similar

to Aristotalian God who is not interested in the world though the world is

interested in God. This aristotalian God, who is loved by all men but who is

indifferent to their fate, is cold impersonal and from our modern religious

standpoint “perfectly” unsatisfactory type of Supreme Being. Thus, the God

who emerges from these poems is a God who does not answer, an unrevealed

God whom one cannot confidently approach through Nature or through the

doctrine.

Dickinson's attitude to God was, at times, suspicious, fearful and

resentful. In the latter stages of Dickinson's life, 'the pearl' comes to occupy the

symbolic centre-stage of her poetry. Dickinson seems to deal more effectively

with existential loss in her latter years.

55

A large proportion of her poems deal with death has inevitably been

remarked, but it may be received little scrutiny, especially from her ablest

biographers. It presents a major issue: many of her finest poems are involved.

Death became for Emily the supreme touchstone for life. As a subject, it holds

an equally dominating position in the field of her verses.

At least a quarter of all her works deals chiefly with this theme. Nearly a

fifth of them or, to be more explicit, two hundred and ninety pieces, are included

within the separate garners. Henry W. Wells opines:

Death becomes a gateway to vitality, lifelessness to life. The

ultimate of the positive hinges upon the ultimate of the negative.

From a simple formula comes a bewildering riddle, and from a

riddle proceeds an emotional solution. A problem is resolved more

by an act of defiance than by philosophy. Emily outstares death;

she looks so intently and piercingly upon it that its terrors vanish, as

fog before sun. Intellectually she leaves death exactly where she

found it, namely, a mystery. Emotionally it has lost its venom, but

not its awe (95).

Death becomes for Emily the mountain of vision. Through the clarifying

experience of death she reaches, a pragmatic solution of life is other problems.

Death is the revealer. Emily sees and experiences much that lies far beyond

the vision and understanding of the average of humankind. The only effectual

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angel of spiritual truth is death. Death is also the supreme incident in life.

Henry W. Wells opines:

Death, which is a spiritual crisis, set them for her within a new and

superior realm of being. Sealed by death, they became doubly

real. If she found herself still short of complete happiness, this was

less because she had not as yet been reunited in a future heavenly

existence, than because her mind was still to some extent earthly

and dull, as yet incapable of complete self-sufficiency and

imaginative mastery. The ultimate ideal lay beyond her, as, in her

opinion, beyond all human beings. This ideal was perfection, an

hypothesis of the human mind, and one of her nearest

approximations to a vital concept of God. Death still remained in a

metaphysical sense the fulfillment of Love (98).

Death was Emily Dickinson’s closest and dearest friend. Emily did not

believe in the God of her Calvinistic fathers. A God whom she did believe in

was the Death who was also the Lord of Life, the God whom she came to know

much less from books than from experience. Her own book was dedicated

largely to him. Although there were no idle or vulgar familiarities possible

between such a God and a mortal woman, her intimate knowledge of him made

him her special favorite. Henry W. Wells opines:

Death was not altogether so simple for her as he has been thus far

described. Her fascinating friend was capable not only of infinite

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mercies but of infinite duplicities and betrayals. He was neither

wholly good nor evil. Indeed he was virtually a pantheistic

conception, from whom all human and non-human reality

proceeded; god of man and of nature, of good and of ill, of the

divine and of the physical. If he was the gateway to the eternally

true, he was also the gateway to the eternally false. He was both

God and the devil (100).

In her universe, death all but replaces God. For death is a free agent,

itself beyond the necessity it imposes on human and natural life. Larger than

man or nature, it transcends the boundaries which separate them. The

patterns of ruin and disintegration are the archetypes of form. The gradual

encroachment of death upon living beings imposes the only philosophically

meaningful relationships between man and nature, the soul and the body, the

forms of spiritual value and the forms of material value. Emily writes:

Death is a Dialogue between

The Spirit and the Dust.

“Dissolve” says Death-The Spirit “Sir

I have another Trust”-

Death doubts it –Argues from the Ground-

The spirit turns away

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Just laying off for evidence

An Overcoat of Clay (CPED 456).

The principle of death is, however, Emily Dickinson’s most strikingly

characteristic and original theme. It is the idea upon which her mind most often

turns. It is the idea, which illuminates better than any other she does most

particular as well as her most general poetic statements. Philosophically

considered, this principle of death is not supportable by logic. However,

poetically considered it is her indispensable leading idea. At the heart of Emily

Dickinson’s vision of death, then, is the sensation of motion and rest. Almost

any persistent motion, in nature or human existence, was likely to summon up

in her mind this beautiful and menacing power. Richard Chase opines:

Death is protean divinity, a universal power whose insinuating

presence is to be felt, seen, heard, touched, and smelled in nature

and human life. As he appears in Emily Dickinson’s poems, he is,

as an image of nature, one of the most impressive concepts in

English poetry since the seventeenth century and, as an image of

man, one of the original and enduringly interesting characters of

literature (235).

The work of women mystic, Emily Dickinson, reflects something of

women’s experience both homely and profound – something captured by

Roman Catholics when they refer to nuns as brides of Christ. As these women

59

speak simply and directly about wisdom discovered within the self in the

intimate presence of God, the “‘joy of the One”’ takes the particular shape of the

relationship between the Lord and his beloved. Indeed, in some of this poetry --

including the Bible’s “Song of Songs” and the work of Indian bhakti (devotional)

poets -- we also find the seeker and God portrayed as lover and Beloved in

language that is openly erotic. Each of the two kinds of experience of union

serves to illumine and enlarge our understanding of the other.