Post by ekswitaj on Oct 27, 2008 5:39:00 GMT 2
SUFFERING LOVE: The Calvary Poems of Emily Dickinson - Theresa Ann White
Among the 1800 poems of Emily Dickinson is a distinct group of about two dozen identified by a shared motif - the biblical story of the crucifixion of Jesus. Most were written circa 1862, Dickinson's most prolific year, although a very few are undated or have been identified as written a few years before her death. Collectively they have become known as the Calvary of Love poems. Among the single lyrics that have gained recognition are "Title divine is mine," and "I dreaded that first Robin, so." Less familiar poems adhering to the Calvary trope are "How brittle are the Piers," and "Spurn the temerity," both attributed to 1878.
The Calvary poems can be read as literal invitations to the poet's spiritual beliefs or as reflections of her epistemology. But this approach could easily lead religion and reason on a wayward path. For as Harold Monro noted in his otherwise scathing review of the poet, Dickinson "gives the impression of wanting to keep some secret." (122) Indeed she did. We cannot expect anything less from the poet who wrote "Dungeoned in the Human Breast / Doubtless secrets lie" and "Big my Secret but it's bandaged - / It will never get away."1 That tenacity for camouflage, for the veiled allusion and the double entendre, gave Dickinson her earned stature as gnomic poet. At the same time, this mystery subjected her lyrics to misunderstood encounters. The Calvary poems must be read between the lines and behind the lines; the literal is only a platform for the story.
To navigate the depths of that surface inscrutability calls for a wide circumference of research. Likewise, a holistic perspective is needed to unravel the Calvary poems - one which allows for context within the narrative opus of Dickinson. To treat each poem as a separate and disconnected entity will evolve a sense of the poet's meaning, yet it also circumscribes. To read single poems without the umbrella of context denies that the twenty-one Calvary poems were crafted as a piece of fabric, the whole of which parallels the forty fascicles that Dickinson stitched together with such deliberateness.
Sharon Cameron sees this interconnectedness among the poems when they are viewed as elements of individual fascicles:
Connections, while not possible to illustrate in all the poems of a given fascicle, are demonstrable in a sufficient number of the poems to give the fascicle as a whole the appearance of a structure. This structure consequently affects our understanding of the subjects of the poems. (Cameron 143)
When the Calvary poems are read in this way, as a deliberately composed sequence, penned with deliberately woven images, the mystery of Dickinson begins to make sense. Again Cameron adds to this aspect:
... I mean to ask how reading a lyric in a sequence is different from reading the lyric as independent, for to do the latter is to suppress the context and the relations that govern the lyric in context — a suppression generating that understanding of Dickinson's poems as enigmatic, isolated, culturally incomprehensible phenomena which has dominated most Dickinson criticism ... (143)
Dickinson pointed to this unity of purpose and her insight can be applied to uniformity in the body of her work, a developing scheme focused on a unique objective:
Each Life Converges to some Centre —
Expressed — or still —
Exists in every Human Nature
A Goal —
(680)
Her critics have also pointed to the meta-language of Dickinson's work. In a 1965 essay Hyatt Waggoner says of her poems: "They are inter-dependent, a body of work, no one of them attempting to present ‘the Whole Truth,'..." (318) Allen Tate coincides with that view. "Like Hardy and Whitman she must be read entire; like Shakespeare she never gives up her meaning in a single line." (213) Cameron references this inclusive pattern of the Dickinson poems when she states that "the experiences recorded by these poems are insular ones, subject to endless repetition. Indeed, it sometimes seems as if the same poem of pain or loss keeps writing itself over and over." (Lyric Time, 14) Cameron implies a totality of experience which reverberates throughout the poet's writing and which spanned four decades. As can be seen in her correspondence, the topics, metaphor and in many cases, the audience of Dickinson's work is echoed in her poetry. In fact, a fair number of the poems collected by Johnson, et al are derived from her personal letters and brief missives. To encompass such a meta-language, her work is best reviewed as unbroken but evolving. Dickinson chose tropes such as Calvary, the crucifixion and Paradise. She dipped these in intentions that began at one point and successively migrated to a series of others.
An essential companion of the Calvary Poems is the King James Version of the Bible. Johnson named the book as the "key to meaning" and "the metaphor of her thinking," claiming that "in almost every poem she wrote, there are echoes of her sensitivity to the idiom of the Bible, and of her dependence upon its imagery for her own striking figures of speech." (Emily Dickinson 153) But Dickinson chose scripture for her own purposes. In the words of Adrienne Rich, she "used the Christian metaphor far more than she let it use her." (172)
Her refusal to convert is an accepted fact of her biography. Within hours of her death, Dickinson's sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson, wrote her obituary. In the final paragraph, after celebrating her "intellectual brilliancy," her "unselfish consideration" of townspeople and friends, and her "intimate and passionate" love of Nature, she describes this perspective with an eloquent incongruity reminiscent of the poet herself. "To her life was rich, and all aglow with God and immortality. With no creed, no formalized faith, hardly knowing the names of dogmas, she walked this life with the gentleness and reverence of old saints, with the firm step of martyrs who sing while they suffer." (Hart and Smith 266-268)
That Susan Dickinson would close the life of Emily Dickinson with a parallel to martyrdom encompasses the third periphery of Dickinson, her biography. Enmeshed in that life story and crucial to a comprehension of the Calvary poems is the individual who knew her most intimately. She is the person that Dickinson called "Only Woman in the World," "a vast and sweet Sister," and "Siren." Dickinson endowed this woman with creative power, naming her "My Maker," and avowing in one of her scores of tenderly loving notes that, "To be Susan / is Imagination." Written in the 1880s, a few years before her death, that poem-message reveals the depth of affection that the poet maintained for Susan Dickinson throughout her life. Martha Nell Smith in Rowing in Eden clearly defines the nature of this relationship, calling it "an emotional devotion of a lifetime," and documenting it as "lesbian." (25) Girlhood friend and eventual sister-in-law, Susan was her neighbor "a hedge away" and the most intimate companion of Dickinson's being. The import upon her poetic livelihood is indisputable, and serves as the key to the poetic account produced by Emily Dickinson. That intimate relationship in particular provides the framework for comprehending the Calvary poems.
Hart and Smith record the often fervent, occasionally lighthearted, quotidian correspondence between the two women in Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson. "These intimate letters tell the story of a passionate and sustained attachment between Dickinson and the beloved friend who was the central source of her inspiration, love and intellectual and poetic discourse." (XI)
The authors document how this "pivotal relationship" was expunged by the poet's family and ignored by her initial editors. In censoring this relationship, Dickinson's Big Secret was effectively hidden. Yet, the consequence was much wider: it extended to generations of myth-making and marred the scholarship of America's foremost poetic genius. Hart and Smith summarize the results: "Understanding of Dickinson's life and her utterly original and daring poetry has been obscured by a combination of deliberate suppression, easy stereotyping, and convenient but misleading categorization." (XVII)
In reproducing the extant letters between Emily and Susan, the authors overwhelmingly refute "much of the common Dickinson lore served up for decades..." and in particular, correct the notion that the poet was "probably undone by unrequited love for any or all of several male suitors whose identities have been the stuff of speculation for countless readers." (XIII)
Tate and others have argued against incorporating Dickinson's biography in the cont
ext of her writing. For him, Dickinson "mastered life by rejecting it." To bolster this premise, Tate adds that, "It is dangerous to assume that her ‘life,' which to the biographers means the thwarted love affair she is supposed to have had, gave her poetry a decisive direction," and he makes the general claim that a poet's personal life "will never give up the key to anyone's verse." (202) This aseptic outlook is rebuffed by Dickinson herself in an 1877 verse addressed to Susan wherein she says: "I have no Life but this - ... / The Realm of you." She merges these two essentials even more intimately in a poem received by her sister-in-law in the late 1860s: "This — would / be Poetry — Or Love — the / two coeval come -." (Hart and Smith 140) Dickinson's own words give evidence that her "Life" or "Centre" focused on two interdependent vitalities: her poetry and her love for Susan. By her own words, the poet weds the two and critics (or readers) who split one from the other are imposing a literary and biographical divorce.
The immediate irony of the Calvary poems is contained in their contextual frame, which at first sight, presents an ambiguous splitting. Dickinson succeeds in protecting her Big Secret. But as a result, the reader must look through a shroud of Christian allegory to discover the poet's cloaked references to her passionate love. Dickinson balanced on the blade of this contradiction — the primacy and the privacy of her singular devotion to Susan. It was a delicate and excruciating poise, one that she trod in "the firm step of martyrs who sing while they suffer."
Before looking at the Calvary poems, a prefatory question needs to be addressed: why would Dickinson employ the language of the Bible? By all accounts, she refused conversion and rarely attended church in the village of Amherst. In countless poems, she mocks the Christian liturgy and claims a heretical and pantheistic attitude toward the prevailing beliefs of her New England neighborhood. Regarding the sanctity of the Bible, Dickinson was firm. It was "... an antique Volume — / Written by faded Men." Countless critics have sought to subvert the poet's own testimony by perceiving her as spiritually deprived and pursuing a fruitless journey toward conversion. These misdirections are plentiful and began soon after Dickinson's first posthumous collections were published. Scheurich is a more recent example, who claims that her "suffering is unavoidably tied to spirituality," and asserts that her poems acted as a therapeutic vehicle to resolve her "struggle with God" and her suspected "mental disorder." (191)
I propose that Dickinson be used as the authority. Her repeated rejection of Christian dogma more than sufficiently determines her spiritual belief structure. I also propose that the foremost authority of Christianity, the Bible, became the metaphoric vehicle for Dickinson's Big Secret. It was her poetic tool, used to safely transport information. The Bible may have been "the metaphor of her thinking," but it was a functional device, no less effective than the novels, plays and newspaper accounts that frequent both the poetry and the correspondence of Dickinson. Hart and Smith support the proposition that biblical references fulfilled a cryptographic purpose and were used as a code to relate the "secrets" of Susan and Emily. (XVIII)
Thus Dickinson indulged frequently in biblical allusions even though she considered its dogma alienating. That she was capable of transforming this contradiction into powerful poetry is a testament both to her brilliance and her perseverance. The tool deepened in its usefulness over time. It was employed not only as code but as language identifiable to the primary recipient of her writing, the "Only Woman in the World," Susan Dickinson.
The layers of obstacles forbidding her love for Susan were both external and transpersonal. On one side, the forces of family, neighborhood and Puritan-derived faiths combined to make erotic love between women a taboo akin to invisibility. But it may have been an internal wedge that would loosen Emily and Susan's relationship. Both women held distinct and opposing beliefs in the realm of "spiritual matters." (Hart and Smith 71)
In a letter to Sue predating the first Calvary poem, Emily says: "Sue — you can go or stay— There is but one alternative— We differ often lately, and this must be the last." She clarifies one of those differences when she continues: "...I shall remain alone, and though in that last day, the Jesus Christ you love, remark he does not know me —... " (Hart and Smith 67)
Susan's response is not available since she burned all but a few of her letters to Emily after her death. Whether Susan perceived and enacted her affection in a manner synonymous with Emily's passion cannot be answered definitively. However, the content, quantity and duration of Emily's writings to Susan give ample leeway to assume that the gates of affection remained open. As Cristanne Miller points out: "The poet's cryptic notes and longer chattier letters both give clear evidence of participating in an ongoing, two-way correspondence, and whatever the level of Sue's response, she clearly did not dampen the poet's ardor." (237)
Nonetheless, it is likely that this division of belief over faith catapulted Dickinson toward the Bible as a means of relaying not only her love but her suffering love for Susan. The Calvary poems are the most unified sequence of that thematic purpose.
The Calvary Poems
One of the first, if not the first poem using the Calvary motif, "To fight aloud, is very brave," was written in 1859 when both women were a mature 29 years of age. Emily and Sue already had been corresponding for nearly ten years and Emily had begun to fashion her fascicles. By this time, Susan and Emily's brother Austin had concluded their long engagement with a wedding. They set up residence in the Evergreens, next to the Dickinson Homestead where Emily resided. After six years of marriage, Susan had not yet birthed her first child. That event was not to happen for another two years. Whether the eight year lapse in childbirth reflected a dispassionate state of conjugal relations between Susan and Austin, whether it indicated the practice of abortion as has been interpreted by some, or whether it served as a testament to Susan's emotional and erotic fidelity to Emily — all this is conjecture. But there is documentation on behalf of the poet. Within a quite brief period of time many of the Calvary poems were written, along with other lyrics and letters expressing erotic desire, yearning, suffering and despair. Dickinson's poetic output was frenzied. If Susan was "Imagination," then it is plausible to believe that she served as Dickinson's stimulant during these years of heightened productivity. It is equally implausible to believe that these poems were composed in a vacuum without some corresponding emotional, physical or mental contribution from Susan.
Treated as a whole, the Calvary poems serve as a measure of the distance between one woman's longing for the other. That desire is cast in a religious motif, in which the implications would be easily absorbed and abundantly clear to the other. This perspective encourages the proposition that Emily was not seeking conversion; she was seeking to convert. Her faith is her love for Susan, proselytized through the Calvary poems.
To fight aloud, is very brave —
But gallanter, I know
Who charge within the bosom
The Calvary of Woe —
(126)
The first quatrain contains a war song. It is a private rather than public conflict and thus the "charge" occurs "within the bosom," that center of emotional being. Dickinson signals familiarity with this emotional struggle with the simple phrase, "I know." She qualifies this "charge" by conferring upon it the emphatic modifier, "gallanter," a chivalric sentiment which marked her attitude toward those she loved. In 1915, long after both were gone, Susan's daughter Martha Dickinson Bianchi would comment on her Aunt Emily in the Atlantic Monthly: "Her devotion to those she loved was that of a knight for a lady." (Hart and Smith 13)
What is most wrenching in this first stanza is the reference to "The Calvary of Woe" in which Dickinson intensifies the nature of this internal conflict by combining it with the Crucifixion of Jesus and the anguish of mourning. Both "Calvary" and "Woe" are interchangeable terms. A lexicon based on the 1844 edition of Noah Webster's Dictionary gives "Calvary" multiple definitions. It includes the execution of Christ as well as the following figurative terms: "agony; anguish; misery; pain; unhappiness; woe; wretchedness" and "sacrifice on behalf of another." (Emily Dickinson Lexicon) In that single line, Dickinson confers upon her struggle grievous pain, active torture within the heart and the sentiment of ultimate loss.
The struggle represents both past and present. Leaping time, it becomes both an equation for the biblical act of suffering and a grief that actively exists. Whereas the antecedent of Christ's biblical death is resurrection, Dickinson's crucifixion is followed by mourning. Paradise is denied as Dickinson rewrites dogma. She furthers this inconsistency by locating the suffering internally — it is a private crucifixion, as seen in the next stanza.
Who win, and nations do not see -
Who fall — and none observe —
Whose dying eyes, no Country
Regards with patriot love —
We trust, in plumed procession
For such, the Angels go —
Rank after Rank, with even feet —
And Uniforms of Snow.
By assigning the Angels their "even feet," the poet works to relegate these beings to a status of parity. In doing so, she questions their immortality. There is no hierarchy of virtuous creatures in Dickinson's credo: they are simple participants in grief rather than a welcoming committee at the gates of Paradise. The "Uniforms of Snow," calls to mind the "Stalctite" image in another Calvary poem. (571) The shared imagery of the Calvary sequence helps to demonstrate Dickinson's internal unity of purpose. While purity is the more usual figurative association for snow, Dickinson also invokes frigidity on both the emotional and physical scale. The entire conceit evokes a chilly dimension, a funeral procession of angels who are cold, impersonal companions.
Dickinson lets us wonder about her intention with the collective pronoun "We" which introduces the final quatrain. Did the word designate a universal identity or did it refer to specific individuals? Either entity will fulfill the purpose of this stanza. It can be read as a literal reference to the desolate Calvinist doctrine of predestination. And when seen in this light, the quatrain resolves itself with a futile gasp of impotence. Personal struggle of the highest order of suffering, such as that recorded of Jesus on the cross, has no face, no hope and no voice except through the artiface of liturgy which declares a predestined reward in the afterlife. Dickinson did not embrace this creed of hopelessness, of course. But there are indications that Susan did. The poet would reveal her own doctrine — but she would tell her truth slant.
A look at that 1844 Lexicon shows how Dickinson orchestrated her words. For "plume" is defined as a "bunch of ostrich feathers carried in a funeral procession," and "mourning clothes; sign of grief; symbol of heartache; token of suffering." The term can also designate a "sign of wealth; symbol of rank; mark of royal station." The final association, "mark of royal station," is highly suggestive of "Title divine - is mine" which I will shortly examine.
In "To fight aloud, is very brave —" the movement is from public to private, from martial metaphor to religious reference to metaphoric plight. The struggle is solitary and victory is reduced to unresolved suffering.
But Dickinson transmutes that suffering in this second Calvary poem, dated 1861:
Jesus! thy Crucifix
Enable thee to guess
The smaller size!
Jesus! thy second face
Mind thee in Paradise
Of ours!
(225)
The attitude here is of an ekphrasic rendering, as if the poet looked upon a crucifix and spoke to the form embodied on it. There is a sense of dimensionality, "the smaller size," which infers a contrast between Christ's suffering and that of the poet. Yet, Dickinson has climbed beyond the aspect of crucifixion. Her mention of the "second face" and "Paradise" refers to a rebirth. The poem is thus a useful parallel for the Christian belief in Paradise after mortal death; it has a tint of optimism while accepting the present reality of a life of pain. But that light-bodied thing called hope cannot be sustained.
In the next poem, "I should have been too glad, I see- ," Dickinson continues to revise the Crucifixion trope. Her gaze upon its significance alters. Biblical allusion turns heretical as she places herself on the cross, names her "Savior" and invites the crucifixion. The senseless suffering introduced in "To fight aloud, is very brave —" is transfigured, becomes more condensed and denies the hint of hope found in "Jesus! thy crucifix."
Also written in the early 1860s, "I should have been too glad, I see —" might well be an amplified response to a letter from Susan written several years prior. Susan writes: "If you have suffered this past summer I am sorry I Emily bear a sorrow that I never uncover - - If a nightingale sings with her breast against a thorn, why not we [!] (Hart and Smith 101)
Susan's permeating influence is felt not only in Dickinson's poetic echo but in the very conceit chosen by the poet. In this, it was Susan who supplied the "metaphor of her thinking." Dickinson responded with a subordinate biblical trope. The poet sang with a full crown of thorns. Her lament was both dismally poignant and ferocious in its renunciation.
I should have been too glad, I see —
Too lifted — for the scant degree
Of Life's penurious Round —
My little circuit would have shamed
This new Circumference — have blamed —
The homelier time behind.
I should have been too saved — I see —
Too rescued — Fear too dim to me
That I could spell the Prayer
I knew so perfect — yesterday —
That Scalding One — Sabachthani —
Recited fluent — here —
Earth would have been too much — I see —
And Heaven — not enough for me —
I should have had the Joy
Without the Fear — to justify —
The Palm — without the Calvary —
So Savior — Crucify —
Defeat — whets Victory — they say —
The Reefs — in old Gethsemane —
Endear the Coast — beyond!
‘Tis Beggars — Banquets — can define —
‘Tis Parching — vitalizes Wine —
"Faith" bleats — to understand!
(313)
The repeating should's of the first two stanzas reflect a paradoxical interpretation of the past. Words like "glad," "lifted," "saved" and "rescued" come unhinged from their usual connotations and are voiced in dismal irony. This perspective is juxtaposed with the future would's of the next verse, reflecting kinds of possibility, and the poem concludes in a declarative present. Dickinson's scenes slide between time, making it a manipulated unit, amorphous and open-ended. Those severe dashes bisect thought and emphasize contradiction ("Too rescued — Fear too dim to me"). The rapidity with which concepts are presented overreaches the temporal dimensions, hurtling the reader from then to now without pause.
Dickinson loads the lyric with several of the most absolute of biblical images, weaving them in a point-counterpoint, then-and-now fashion to encompass a message laden with mockery, misery and resentment.
The opening stanza is written after the fact, resenting the limitation on happiness, those determined boundaries of "Life's penurious Round." The "little circuit" repeats the image of frugality and perhaps refers to a tenure of mutually shared love with Susan. The "new Circumference," while implying something wider is actually a state of restriction, a comment on the Calvinist ethic of suspended earthly pleasure in lieu of the Heaven to come. Happiness has its boundaries and joy has its limitations. This narrowed "Circumference" acts as a mechanism for shame, and furthers Dickinson's comment on the confines of such a faith.
"Shame" adhered to Dickinson the person. This excerpt from a letter written to Susan in February 1852 shows the emerging Crucifixion metaphor and Dickinson's conflict over her ardent feelings for Susan:
Oh my darling one, how long you wander from me, how weary I grow of waiting and looking, and calling for you; sometimes I shut my eyes, and shut my heart towards you, and try hard to forget you because you grieve me so, but you'll never go away, Oh you never will — say, Susie, promise me again, and I will smile faintly — and take up my little cross again of sad — sad separation.
(Hart and Smith 11-12)
She continues in this vein, quoting scripture to illustrate the pang of denial. Then Dickinson blurts: "Susie, forgive me, forget all what I say, ... and you will sleep on sweetly and have as peaceful dreams, as if I had never written you all these ugly things." (12) Early on, Dickinson the woman was acknowledging the objectionable nature of her love. That aura of shame would be recast in her poems. Apart from the Calvary series, this acknowledgement of the damning eyes of others appears in another lyric: "They'd judge us — How - / For you — served Heaven — You know — or sought to — I could not —." (640) Those two lines also reinforce the spiritual split between Emily and Susan. But a decade after her letter to Susan, Dickinson remains steadfast in her pursuit ("Fear too dim to me") yet is halted by a lack of reciprocity. Not only is her passion one-sided, it is betrayed. The "prayer" she "knew so perfect — yesterday" remains an ever present reality.
"Sabachthani" refers to the Aramaic utterance of Jesus on the cross (Mar 15:34), his declaration of abandonment: "Thou hast forsaken me." Note that Dickinson excludes the titular address to God (Eloi") in reproducing these last words, thus requisitioning the lament personally, making it a human rather than divine plea. In commandeering this divine power Dickinson takes on the potent mantle of a deity; yet her god persona is impotent. The abandonment expressed by Jesus on the cross is transferred to an earthly realm with the concomitant emotional trait of futility. "Sabachthani" is also a variant of Jesus' prayer in the garden of Gethesmane, when he asked that his travails be removed. (Mat 27:46)
This is the prayer that Dickinson knows best ("Recited fluent - here"). The level of fervency coincides with that of a lover beseeching her loved one. It carries an amplitude of despair, sharpened by the anger of abandonment. The poem then refers to the initial stanza: "Earth would have been too much — I see — / And Heaven — not enough for me — ," exposing the dilemma. Living without love is too much to bear, too limited an existence, and yet heaven is insufficient. The metonym reverses itself.
Hung between denial of love and denial of the paradisiacal plane on the other side of death, the poet-lover is hopelessly trapped. Bitter logic demands what should have been: "the Joy / Without the Fear." The call is for unrestricted happiness. Here the poet reverses herself again, for fear has already been denied. The reference to "the Joy / Without the Fear" could be a finger-pointing directed to her recipient, Susan. If so, the beloved is undone by her own fear. The "Savior" forsakes this appointed position as she forsakes her beloved.
This is not the voice of a supplicant. It is rather, the emphatic, assertive voice of one who has shaped an individual perspective of expectation. It reveals a clear awareness of what is personally anticipated and what is "allowable" under moral code. The gap between the two is both an expansive and a limited circumference; it is situated in the individual and in the other; it is both private and public. In this last arena of awareness, Dickinson renounces the body of faith that calls for suffering and limits pleasure. In their function as analogy, the biblical images are transgressed, thrown open to derision. "The Palm — without the Calvary —," rounds out this verse, continuing the crucifixion trope by denying its necessity, calling attention to Jesus' prayer in the Garden of Gethesmane. Dickinson wants the cup lifted; she calls for the palm of triumph without the Calvary experience. The funeral plumes in the previous Calvary poem are replaced by the "Palm" of victory.
But in the next breath, this sequence is reversed: "So Savior — Crucify -" In these three words, Dickinson finishes her logic of the crucifixion motif. The Calvary experience is one of suffering and abandonment, and this is the joyless reality of her predicament. As "Savior," Susan is transformed. She is both the means of redemption and the instrument of pain. I clarify the identity of the "Savior" here with Dickinson's permission. In a letter to her sister-in-law written in the early 1860s, she addresses Susan as "Savior!" (Hart and Smith 103)
Dickinson might have ended this poem with the third stanza. And according to Hart and Smith, "Defeat — whets Victory —," was delivered as a separate poem, addressed to Susan from the early 1860s. (112) But in deference to Johnson's collection, I will include the final strophe, as it favors a decisive closure, one that fully relays her rejection of Susan's faith. "Faith bleats to understand," mimics the Lamb of God icon while casting it in impotency. Significantly, the final verse reverts to a collective "they" in which the speaker is divorced from the argument. "They" call for the "Defeat" which "whets Victory," in yet another parallel to the crucifixion saga of suffering for some greater good. Yet there is a shade of ambiguity. The poet/speaker may also be announcing her perseverance, harkening to the gallant battle within the bosom, that silent struggle that is her "Calvary of Woe."
What is most recognizable in "I should have been too glad, I see —," is how Dickinson subverts religious belief. She co-opts common dogma for the purpose of a coded message. In this representative Calvary poem, Dickinson transforms the presumed sacred into "something else, not secular but idiosyncratically sacred--a sacredness based upon a rewriting, a reinflection, a reworking of New England Puritanism." (Thompson 1)
This rewriting of the Calvary story acts to preserve the past, albeit a forlorn remembering. Taken as a whole, the Calvary poems function beyond memory's visits; they act as a re-visioning. The crucifixion trope is a plank for evolving swirls of emotion: the fluctuations of tepid faith and abject despair.
Juhasz sees this repeating trope "not as duplication but creation, using the same elements of the original, constantly destroying or breaking it down and reforming it, so that its new form is, in fact, an analogue." (25)
Dickinson's pattern of developing analogies into analogue has been studied by Weisbuch, who asks: "Where does inner analogy end and symbol begin?"(40) In pursuing his question, he looks at how the poet stretches analogy to the breaking point, at how her analogic structure merges symbols so that they become representative of a "greater pattern of ideas." (43)
Whether defined as meta-language or the recreated analogues of Juhasz or Cameron's sequential connections or Waggoner's inter-dependence or Tate's prescription to read the poems as a whole, Dickinson was cognizant of a holistic circumference when she crafted her Calvary poems. That this mindfulness would turn in various directions, present paradox and span hope and despair, recalls Whitman's admiration for incongruity: "Do I contradict myself? / Very well then... I contradict myself;..." And Emerson, who chastised against a "foolish consistency," also speaks to the divagations found in the Calvary sequence.
Dickinson engaged in a different kind of revising when she wrote "Title divine, is mine," a challenge to the traditional notions of marriage in which the Empress of Calvary reigns. Sent to Susan in the mid-1860s and signed with the familiar appellation "Emily," this often-cited Calvary poem turns punning into a dark exercise, linking a woman's marital experience with bondage and death while simultaneously claiming an extra-marital relationship. Here is the poem as reproduced from Open Me Carefully:
Title divine, is mine.
The Wife without
the Sign —
Acute Degree
Conferred on Me —
Empress of Calvary —
Royal, all but the
Crown —
Betrothed, without
the Swoon
God gives us Women —
When You hold
Garnet to Garnet —
Gold - to Gold —
Born — Bridalled —
Shrouded —
In a Day —
Tri Victory —
"My Husband" —
Women say
Stroking the Melody —
Is this the Way —
(120)
The voice here claims an immediate position as "The Wife without," implying a marital position outside the bounds of the union created by religious ceremony. Not only is the claim emphatic, it is given equal status as "Title divine." Identification as "Wife" is actively "conferred" not passively bestowed. Dickinson continues to assert this identity, infusing it with a "royal" status, for she is the "Empress of Calvary," a spousal equivalent that at once deposes the crucified Christ and transgenders the biblical saga. This reversion of genders presumably extends to the marital realm as well. Dickinson usurps the male representative of traditional Christianity and the male representative of the traditional marriage partnership. Such an outrageous challenge to the status quo predated contemporary actions for same sex marriage by a full century. It is no wonder then, that Dickinson's intentions would be challenged by her posthumous editors.
When this poem's original enjambment and punctuation is contrasted with Johnson's version, a visible directional change occurs. The original poem is seven lines longer than Johnson's (1072). With the shortened lineation, Dickinson intentionally directs the reader's eye, careful in her pacing, standing single words and word triplets on their individual lines. "Crown" and "Shrouded" stare back at the reader and force an acknowledgement of their relationship. "Crown" is quickly associated with "Title divine" and likewise with "Gold to - Gold," symbolizing the queen's diadem and the wedding band. The word becomes linked with its stand-alone neighbor, "Shrouded," creating a dualism that evokes a veiling and a death.
Woman's lot is reduced to a "Tri Victory" associated with the husband. Birth is coupled with the societal given of marriage, a suffocating, limiting state that Dickinson exemplifies with her pun on "Bridalled." Is this a bride's wedding veil or a horse's halter? Or are they the same? The third element of this triad is the shroud, posing as a funeral cloth, indicative of psychic death in the traditional marriage encounter and of the cessation of life. Interestingly, the three aspects of birth, bondage and death can be overlaid with the poet's view of the Calvary experience. There is the start of life, the limited circumference of living and martyrdom. Paradise is not an option in either scenario.
Dickinson achieves a haphazard rhyme scheme with her enjambment. But in light of the paradigm shift she avows in this portrayal of matrimony, attention to poetic tradition seems high mockery. Johnson lengthens several lines and amends the lyric with additional punctuation (three exclamation points, a question mark and italics on the final "this"). He also changes one word, substituting "gives" as in "God gives us Women" with his choice, "God sends us Women." The switch is not a casual trade. It is one that reverberates and reinforces divine intention. Dickinson's lyric can be parsed as: "Betrothed, without / the Swoon / God gives us Women -," a biting comment on the passive collapse that comes with a wedding engagement. Johnson's interpretation disunites the two and disrupts the cause and effect scenario so aptly defined by Dickinson. Johnson's emphasis is on the divine creation of the female sex, not on the religiously inspired blackout that accompanies the marriage commitment.
Dickinson's portrayal is an antithetic view of the most entrenched of patriarchal customs: marriage. Yet, despite her claim of "the Wife without / the Sign," there remains the grievous quality of suffering, the "Acute Degree" of personal crucifixion.
The only other recipient of this poem was Samuel Bowles and because of this, "Title divine" is often referenced as evidence that Bowles was Dickinson's secret lover, the supposed "Master" of her Master Letters. In Rowing in Eden, Smith counters this argument:
Yet when Dickinson sent Bowles a copy, she appended it with a note of entreaty — "You will tell no other?" — clearly asking him to keep one of her secrets. I propose that, if readers construe the poem as referring to an actual situation, then when she sent Bowles the poem, she was confiding in him, telling him about another situation, not about her feelings for him. (34)
Dickinson continues her willful inversion of the familiar with poem 348, casting the lyric in a somber tone: "I dreaded that first Robin — so -." In contrast to Dickinson's more familiar paeans to birds and bees (particularly those with an erotic pitch), here she recasts that joyful harbinger. Despite the robin's reflection of Spring, the poet makes it an instrument of dread complete with the "power to mangle me." This anxiety continues to reassign traits to the normally replenishing characters of Spring while at once negating the Crucifixion saga with its aftermath of Resurrection. In one line, Dickinson calls to mind biblical lore and repudiates it. In personifying the evidence of Spring — its robins, growing grass, daffodils, bees and blossoms - she incorporates sound and sight, the two least interpretive of sensations. These figures become emblematic of pain: the robin "hurts a little" and yellow daffodils would "pierce" her. But it is the bees which are most wounding. With Dickinson, these "Buccaneers of Buzz" are erotic associations animating her poetry, arriving as the "lover Bee" of "Did the Harebell loose her girdle" or the flagrant symbol of lesbian cunnilingus glorified in "Come slowly — Eden!" Moreover, bees are "The most important population / Unnoticed dwell, / They have a heaven each instant / Not any hell." (1746) But in 348, the poet wishes away their presence. The associative power of these vibrant beings fails to arouse her; instead they act as a reminder of unanswered passion. "What word had they, for me?"
Spring has arrived bereft of corresponding Paradise. Each of its representatives is active and yet apart, indifferent to their collective effect: "They're here though; not a creature failed - / No blossom stayed away / In gentle deference to me — The Queen of Calvary!" Acting as counterpart and counterpoint to the Resurrection tale, this parade of life might as well be the joy with the fear. The denizens of Spring are an abrasive reminder to the Queen of Calvary that she is a finite being locked in infinite pain. Metaphorically, the crucifixion has occurred (again) without the transcendence. The fully endowed Queen of Calvary witnesses nature's rebirth as a joyless voyeur, nailed to the static cross of suffering.
Dickinson's commingling of the biblical with the insectual, metonyms that develop into a tertiary connection with the physical, is examined by Landry, who finds her bird and bee imagery "decidedly queer" and prefaces that determination with this statement: "In Dickinson's writing, bird and bee images seek to co-opt the bliss and bodily transformation that conversion to Christ brings about and align it with the ‘I's sexual or emotional conversion to love of and desire for a woman." (50) In his Notes, Landry articulates his premise that Dickinson "repeats the language of Calvinism only to alter radically its meaning and destabilize the narrative emergent out of it." (52) This destabilization of Calvinism and of the Judeo-Christian triumvirate of suffering-crucifixion-resurrection is highlighted in "I dreaded that first Robin, so," as the poet crosses over into nature allegory and subsequently reverses the associations affixed to each. The Queen of Calvary reigns supreme, trumping the resurrected Christ story, and yet she commands without power, unable to stop the progression of the seasons.
Greg Miller holds that. "Dickinson's representations of human desire and love are at the center of her reaction to conversion narratives," adding that the poet "consistently blurs distinctions between the metaphorical and the literal,...". (88)
I differ with Miller's second premise. In the Calvary poems, Dickinson crafted her metaphorical language with clear vision, constantly knitting biblical allusion into the weave of her verse, and just as constantly overthrowing traditional interpretations. The metaphorical elements in the Calvary poems also agree with Cameron's sense of intertexuality. As an example, in "The Morning after Woe," (364) Dickinson repeats conceits found in 348 ("As nature did not care - / And piled her Blossoms on,") and extends this inter-connectiveness to sound imagery ("The Birds declaim their Tunes - / Pronouncing every word / Like Hammers"). The poet controlled her language, shifting its components from poem to poem, as if rearranging a word puzzle to find or expose alternate meanings.
In "There came a Day at Summer's full," delivered to Susan sometime in 1862, Dickinson again creates analogue out of analogy. In nearly every stanza, biblical diction and imagery is interlaced with familiar outdoor sights. This Calvary poem is unique in its tone. Working as part aubade, the recollection of that Summer's day holds an implicitly pleasurable memory. Yet in contrast to 348 and 364, she removes sound, allowing the recollection to float in memory.
Summer has surpassed Spring and the poet partakes in a "Resurrection," a divine experience usually attributed to "Saints." Her own status is thus heightened in a prelude to the dismal Queen of Calvary assignation. This renewal is savored experientially, across the borders of time, and quietly: "The time was scarce profaned, by speech - / The symbol of a word / Was needless..." (322)
Dickinson summons up an immediate cognizance of scriptural allusion: "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,..." (John 1:14) But here, the act of creation suffices; the "symbol of a word," that is, articulation itself, is unnecessary. Corporeality ("The Wardrobe") is all.
Here again, the original enjambment differs from the poem later published by Johnson. In the fourth strophe, the shortened lineation of the original creates a decidedly different approach in interpretation. Here is the verse as first delivered by Dickinson to her beloved Susan:
Each was to
Each — the Sealed
Church,
Permitted to commune
this — time —
Lest we too awkward
show
At supper of "the Lamb."
(Hart and Smith 115)
Dickinson's enjambment modulates the verse, regulates time and forces attention on the poet's predetermined significance, going so far as to underscore a single word. The first four lines are decidedly shared moments between the poet and another, very likely Susan, and "the Sealed / Church," transforms the sharing into a most intimate communion. That the two were "permitted" this touching speaks to the extraordinary nature of the communion and its parallel deprivation, as well as to the unmentioned others who labor to prevent their moments of togetherness — those who would "judge us."
In the stanzas that follow, the enjambment stretches, reflecting time's rapid movement ("The Hours slid past") and concludes with:
And so when all the time had leaked,
Without external sound
Each bound the Other's Crucifix —
We gave no other Bond —
Sufficient troth, that we should rise —
Deposed — at length, the Grave —
To that new Marriage,
Justified — through Calvaries of Love -
The poem is suffused with signatures from the Bible: creation and rebirth, death and eternity. Yet at its center is an eroticism: the "Sealed / Church," and the mutual union to "the Other's Crucifix," images which mock the sacredness of Scripture and which transfer divine love to an earthly realm. This fleshly union is consummated literally ("rise" conjures up the vasoconstriction at the moment of orgasm) and figuratively, evolving into a "new Marriage," mirroring the status introduced in "Title Divine."
Susan excised the final strophe when she submitted the poem to Scribner's Magazine for posthumous publication, intentionally purging the corporeal allusions. (Hart and Smith 116) Perhaps she sought to keep Emily's Big Secret inviolate. Perhaps she sought to rewrite biography in the same way she annihilated her sister-in-law's knowledge of religious dogma. Or perhaps that final verse was too intimate, too dear a reminder of their "Calvaries of Love."
Interestingly, in terms of Dickinson's unorthodox treatment of biblical legitimacy, one of her lines is culled from the Apocrypha, a collection of pre-Christian books derived from the Greek Bible and later deemed non-canonical by Protestants and Jews. Calvinists completely removed the Apocrypha books from their Scripture, deciding that the texts did not evolve from divine inspiration2. Even more interesting, Catholics retained the Apocrypha, recognizing the books as Scripture and terming them Deuterocanonicals. In her later years, Susan "considered converting to Catholicism," (Hart and Smith 69) opening up a separate discussion of possibilities regarding the influence of Dickinson upon her sister-in-law (or vice versa) in the choice of a spiritual belief system.
The Apocryphal passage used by Dickinson is an instruction on wisdom: "And being but one, she can do all things: and remaining in herself, she maketh all things new: and in all ages entering into holy souls, she maketh them friends of God, and prophets." (Wisd. Sol. 7:27)
Viewed separately from the poem under consideration, this passage with its feminine application for wisdom, conjures up the other Paradise so often populating Dickinson's poetry: Eden. The poet and the person shows a decided preference for pre-Christian authority and an equally pronounced preference for women as purveyors of wisdom, inspiration, sexual and emotional love and overall allegiance. Taken within the context of the Calvary poems, Dickinson's preference controlled her metaphor and should determine interpretation. This conclusion is simplified by Smith in Rowing in Eden: "Read with Dickinson's love for Sue in mind, Dickinson's ‘Calvary of Love' poems, replete with a rhetoric of similarity, long noticed and of late getting considerable attention, are no longer so mysterious." (34)
Of the twenty-one Calvary poems, all but a few contain the specific reference to "Calvary" and the remaining ones encompass the conceit with mention of the cross, crucifix or crucifixion. Those that refer specifically to the biblical event at Golgotha were composed between the years 1859 to 1863 with the great bulk written in 1862. After "Where Thou art — that — is Home," the only poem attributed to 1863, Dickinson ceased mentioning "Calvary" for eight years. Only one other poem ("Spurn the temerity" 1432) contained the word. (See The Calvary Poems: Index of First Lines with Associated Dates for a full list.) Dickinson would continue to write of silence, sadness, shame and despair, of departure and absence, of joy and pain, of recollection and forgetfulness. But viewed outside the domain of the Calvary poems, the tone is a fading timbre, shaded with "a formal feeling." The impetuous force of the Calvary poems is no longer a constant. The reader who concentrates on the Calvary poems as a separate, interdependent unit becomes transported by their distinct personality, galvanized by their passion and enervated by the desperate appeals. Dickinson's voice is transported. Notwithstanding the fluency of craft, it is the person of the poet that thrives; it is the echo of unrequited love, that universal prologue to suffering, which follows the reader long after the words have faded.
To conclude this review of the Calvary poems, I have selected a lyric which exceeds its confederates in the obverse mirrors of sad resignation and immortal hope. "If I may have it, when it's dead," bridges the previous apostatic rejections of biblical Paradise and in doing so, excels in unbounded endurance. Now, Dickinson accedes to the mortal separation from her beloved Sue and focuses on reunion after death. The wish for corporeal union is transmigrated into a postmortem desire. But this is no morbid yearning. "Think of it Lover! I and Thee / Permitted — face to face to be —," is a resounding expression of fulfillment. The bonds that have separated in life will be severed after death. Those "Old Times in Calvary," become a faint recollection.
If I may have it, when it's dead,
I'll be contented — so —
If just as soon as Breath is out
It shall belong to me -
Until they lock it in the Grave,
"Tis Bliss I cannot weigh —
For tho' they lock Thee in the Grave,
Myself — can own the key —
Think of it Lover! I and Thee
Permitted — face to face to be —
After a Life — a Death — We'll say —
For Death was That —
And this — is Thee —
I'll tell Thee All — how Bald it grew —
How Midnight felt, at first — to me —
How all the Clocks stopped in the World —
And Sunshine pinched me — ‘Twas so cold —
Then how the Grief got sleepy — some —
As if my Soul were deaf and dumb —
Just making signs — across — to Thee —
That this way — thou could'st notice me —
I'll tell you how I tried to keep
A smile, to show you, when this Deep
All Waded — We look back for Play,
At those Old Times — in Calvary.
Forgive me, if the Grave come slow —
For Coveting to look at Thee —
Forgive me, if to stroke thy frost
Outvisions Paradise!
(577)
While not the final Calvary poem, this one reaches toward a definitive denouement. In a voice full of mourning and joy, the lyric awaits the ultimate transgression: caressing the lifeless cheek of the beloved. Deprived of the hope and reality of physical union, Dickinson's suffering love anticipates a postmortem reunion, when she and Sue "face to face," will recall "those Old Times in Calvary."
Notes
1.Unless otherwise noted, all poems and poem excerpts are from the 1960 volume of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson.
2.See VanderKam and Flint's: The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls for a comprehensive historical perspective on the Apocrypha.
The Calvary Poems: Index of First Lines with Associated Dates (number and date assigned by Johnson in The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson, 1960.)
To fight aloud is very brave - | 126 | 1859 |
Jesus! thy Crucifix | 225 | 1861 |
I should have been too glad, I see | 313 | 1862 |
There came a day at Summer's full | 322 | 1861 |
I dreaded that first Robin, so | 348 | 1862 |
The Morning after Woe | 364 | 1862 |
That I did always love | 549 | 1862 |
One Crucifixion is recorded — only - | 553 | 1862 |
I measure every Grief I meet | 561 | 1862 |
Must be a Woe - | 571 | 1862 |
The Test of Love — is Death - | 573 | 1862 |
If I may have it — when it's dead | 577 | 1862 |
Afraid — of whom am I afraid? | 608 | 1862 |
It makes no difference abroad - | 620 | 1862 |
Where Thou - art — that is Home - | 725 | 1863 |
Title divine — is mine! | 1072 | 1862 |
"Remember me" implored the Thief! | 1180 | 1871 |
Spurn the temerity - | 1432 | 1878 |
How brittle are the Piers | 1433 | 1878 |
The Auctioneer of Parting | 1612 | 1884 |
Proud of my broken heart, since thou didst break it | 1736 | Undated |
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