---
title: An introduction to the poetry of Emily Dickinson
layout: post
image:
  feature: header_poetry.png
doi: "https://doi.org/10.59348/y97r7-9sk53"
archive: "https://wayback.archive-it.org/22123/20241101171236/https://eve.gd/2025/02/06/an-introduction-to-the-poetry-of-emily-dickinson"
---
This text is derived from a lecture I gave to first-year undergraduates about a decade ago. It was languishing on my computer and I thought it better to put it out there for general educational benefit, in case it helps anyone starting out with her poetry. I am, of course, by no means a Dickinson specialist, but this may prove a mode condensed introduction than, say, the excellent _Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson_, which was a guide to everything that is here. I also note that the formatting of the poems may be "off" here. I would recommend finding the originals for study alongside this.

Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts and led a privileged life. Her family were financially well off and well respected within the strongly Calvinist community within which they lived, an aspect to which we'll return. Beyond her education at Amherst Academy and the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, however, Dickinson spent the majority of her life in secluded isolation within her family home, writing her poetry and running the house. As I suggest in the first fragment of this lecture, her poetry deals with death, with laughter, but also with her difficulties regarding faith and with the trouble that she faced in both being a woman and woman who wrote poetry.

Presentations of Dickinson in the popular imagination are fuelled by the enigma of her life. How was it, the fevered speculation runs, that this female genius was secluded and unknown to the world? What of her eccentric character wherein she is caricatured as isolated in the upper rooms of her house, supposedly locked away from neighbours and unaware of the cultural and historical events of the time? This leads to a conflicting presentation where Dickinson is depicted as an agoraphobic, somebody who is afraid of open spaces and society, or as Wendy Martin puts it, “deeply afraid of her surroundings” while simultaneously being acknowledged as a founder of American poetry and a courageous woman. In short: these two sides of Dickinson's character seem to be in utter conflict with one another.

The first important aspect to note about Dickinson, though, is that she published very few poems during her own lifetime. Dickinson primarily showed her poetry to the writer and editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson (who has a fantastic name and sounds like a character in an outrageous postmodern novel) but she did not seek publication. In fact, from 1858 onwards she organized her poems in folded pages that were hand bound with string, so called fascicles, but left instructions to her sister, Lavinia, to destroy the poems after her death. As is the case with many writers who leave instructions for their work to be destroyed after their death – most notoriously Franz Kafka's instructions to Max Brod that all of his work should be burnt and never see the published light of day – Lavinia ignored this aspect of Dickinson's will and instead organized Dickinson's poems for publication when the poet, her sister, died in 1886. This publication history is extremely important. Dickinson's poetry and its power are predicated upon ambiguous punctuation and capitalization, dashes of differing lengths, placement of text in specific locations on the page and insertion of variant word choices. At various points in the publication history, different editors managed to mangle these important aspects, altering the punctuation, the line breaks, deciding on determinate singular words where Dickinson had indicated multiple variants and standardising the length of dashes in the poems. In recent days, this problem has been compounded. In the era of digital publication and presentation, how can we accurately convey the diagrammatic and picture-like quality of Dickinson's writing? The print copies that you have probably have standardised the length also – this is not, however, how it appears if you consult Dickinson's handwritten manuscripts. So, the question becomes, is it possible to fully “encode” the nuance of Dickinson's work in a digital environment? Yes, it probably is, but it takes a high degree of attention and effort to do so and most editors/typesetters will not bother. In short, what I'm trying to say here, is that the publication history of these poems matters, but what also matters is the unique stylistic, on-the-page representation of the poetry.

Before we drill down into the poetry itself, let me put forward the suggestion to you that Emily Dickinson was a poet out of her time. Her work is extremely experimental and feels more akin to Modernist experiment and fragment than to the Romantic traditions that preceded them, as David Porter argues in his book, Dickinson: The Modern Idiom. A good instance of this can be found if we look, as does Christopher Benfey at a more prolonged example, in Dickinson's poem “I taste a liquor never brewed” (Dickinson's poems are frequently referenced by their first line as she did not usually title them separately, although this particular poem was first published under a different title, “The May Wine”):

<pre>I taste a liquor never brewed –
From tankards scooped in Pearl –
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!</pre>

Reviewers of this poem at the time complained that Dickinson's rhyme was off; “Alcohol” does not, strictly speaking, rhyme with “pearl”. Mabel Loomis Todd, who wrote the preface to the second series of Dickinson's Poems, mounted a defense of this kind of practice, however, noting that her “lines are always daringly constructed, and the 'thought-rhyme' appears frequently, – appealing, indeed, to an unrecognized sense more elusive than hearing”. I'd like to suggest that we can go one better than Todd and identify this elusive sense; antici– pation. (Rocky Horror Picture Show jokes always welcome, I thought.) It is clear that, when reading this poem, one does not simply read in a linear fashion, but mentally reads ahead. This is made possible through the alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter that the poem deploys. In other words, we have eight syllables in the first line, consisting of four iambic feet, where the stress falls upon the second syllable of each foot.

Da-Dum da-Dum da-Dum da-Dum

The second line of each pair is formed of iambic trimeter; three feet, so six syllables, of iambs: Da-dum da-Dum da-Dum

This kind of metrical analysis is important and I want to give a trite counter-example for how this lends to an understanding of Dickinson's “thought rhymes”. How many of you know Dr. Seuss' poem “Green Eggs and Ham”? OK, well, let's look at two sections of that:

<pre>WOULD / you LIKE / them HERE /or THERE? 
WOULD / you LIKE / them IN / a HOUSE? 
WOULD / you LIKE / them WITH / a MOUSE? 
I DO / not LIKE / them IN / a HOUSE. 
I DO / not LIKE / them WITH / a MOUSE. 
I DO / not LIKE / them HERE /or THERE. 
I DO / not LIKE / them AN- / yWHERE. 
I DO / not LIKE / green EGGS / and HAM. 
I DO / not LIKE / them, SAM- / I-AM.</pre>

Although the majority of Dr. Seuss' poetry is written in trimeters, this block alternates between trochaic tetrameter (in which each foot consists of a stressed syllable, followed by an unstressed syllable: DUM-da DUM-da DUM-da DUM-da) and a stanza of the iambic tetrameter that we recognise from Dickinson's poem (da-Dum da-Dum da-Dum da-Dum). These meters are extremely basic forms and mirror many of our everyday speech patterns. Indeed, it's probably the reason that many people punctuate their sentences with “errs” or the ubiquitous “like” idiom: “I was, LIKE, you CAN'T be, LIKE, serious”. In any case, in Seuss' setup, we are given a clear pattern to follow and one segment mirrors the other.

The same is true of Dickinson's poem:

<pre>I taste a liquor never brewed –
From tankards scooped in Pearl –
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!</pre>

We know, rhythmically by line four what to expect; we want a line of iambic trimeter, preferably one that rhymes so as to close the loop. In the traditional alternation of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, this is called the “common meter” and it has the rhyme scheme abab. 

SO, if this was common meter, in a crude rewriting that I put together this morning,it might sound like this:

<pre>I taste a liquor never brewed –
From tankards scooped in Pearl –
Not all the Vats that I'd eschewed
Would make you want to hurl</pre>

In the scheme that Dickinson sets up, however, we are hoping, by line four, for what is called “ballad meter” where we are given the rhyme scheme abcb (ie the second and fourth lines are the only ones that rhyme). This is a rhyme scheme that you'll see frequently throughout Dickinson's poems. Consider this example:

<pre>Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The Carriage held but just Ourselves
And Immortality.</pre>

Once more, ballad meter – lines two and four rhyme whole lines 1 and 3 do not.

We can come back to “Because I could not stop for Death”, but for now, let me finish what I was saying about “I taste a liquor”. In this poem, the half-rhymes, or “thought rhymes” are possible because we, as readers of poetry, have a desire to be satisfied with forms that fulfil our future wishes. This is one of the fundamental functions of rhyme; to create anticipation and then fulfill it with a word that meets our expectations. If, however, the poet chooses not to, the result can often be humorous or frustrating. Consider the following:

<pre>The limerick, peculiar to English,
Is a verse that's hard to extinguish.
Once Congress in session
Decreed its suppression
But people got around it by writing the last line without any rhyme or meter.</pre>

OR

<pre>Mary had a little lamb
She also had a duck
She put them on the window sill
To see if they would fall down</pre>

OR

<pre>Religion makes beauty enchanting;
And even where beauty is wanting
The temper and mind
Religion-refined
Will shine through the veil with sweet lustre.</pre>

Just a few examples I managed to find through basic searches. In fact, a quick look online for “limericks that don't rhyme” reveal a series of pages where people have collected these together – and I particularly recommend the page called “odd limericks” that come up first on that search if you are interested in seeing more of these forms that try to “frustrate” the reader.

So, when you have a well-known, established verse form, there is an anticipation effect; we want the rhyme and, when Dickinson only half supplies it, the reader engages to make it work. Pearl and alcohol are near enough, especially if you apply a certain manner of Souther drawl to achieve the effect so the consciousness of the reader synthesizes them. Dickinson was aware of this because, in some of her poems, she deliberately gives verses that frustrate the form entirely. One of the best examples of this is “I felt a funeral in my brain”:

<pre>I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.</pre>

<pre>And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought 
My mind was going numb.

And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead,
Then space began to toll

As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,
And I and silence some strange race, 
Wrecked, solitary, here.

And then a plank in reason, broke,
And I dropped down and down--
And hit a world at every plunge,
And finished knowing--then--</pre>

As the plank in reason breaks, the rhyme scheme falls apart, frustrating the synthesizing reason of the reader. Indeed, the last verse here doesn't rhyme at all and that's the point, presumably, at which reason has been totally buried. This seems a deliberate effort on Dickinson's part to mirror the effect upon the reader that she is describing within the poem; the breakdown of reason and ability to think and interact. The slanted rhyme in “I taste a liquor”, however, is more interesting in the context of the whole poem, and I'd like to explore that further to give you an idea of how you can use metrical analysis to perform thematic readings and how the spheres of metrics interact with other general reading practices.

The whole poem reads:

<pre>I taste a liquor never brewed --
From Tankards scooped in Pearl --
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!
 
Inebriate of Air -- am I --
And Debauchee of Dew --
Reeling -- thro endless summer days --
From inns of Molten Blue –
 
When "Landlords" turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove's door --
When Butterflies -- renounce their "drams" --
I shall but drink the more!

Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats --
And Saints -- to windows run --
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the -- Sun --</pre>

This poem begins by giving us a description of a drinker, seemingly in rapture as a result of what he or she is drinking. Ah ha, thinks the reader, this is a poem in praise of alcohol. Verse two disabuses the fan of inebriation of such notions: “Inebriate of Air -- am I – / And Debauchee of Dew --”. Damn, so she isn't talking about alcohol, but more of an intoxication on air, on life, and on nature; a sort of worship of nature and drunkenness on the richness and spirituality of life. This chronology of unfolding and revelation (which carry a certain type of religious connotation that seems to chime with previous works we've studied, such as the transcendental aspects of Whitman) gives us a clear logical reason for the rhyme in the first stanza being unstable; at this point, the poem seems to be speaking of worldly intoxication, of unsteadiness. The poem appears to be drunk, so the rhyme scheme is off. By the second stanza, however, we realize that this intoxication is not a real drunkenness, but is a metaphor for spiritual fervour, so the rhyme scheme also solidifies; Dew, blue, door, more, run, sun. In other words, you need to pay attention to the rhyme and meter as they pertain to the content of these poems. And, let me encourage you, if you write about poetry in your essays, never just to point out aspects of form and meter but to always ensure that you are doing so to further your analysis. In short, you need to pay attention to this type of formal approach – it's an integral part of poetry and often marks the feature that distinguishes it from prose, so you can't really get away without good analysis of poetry without mentioning aspects of meter. Conversely, though, do not just turn it into an exercise whereby you go feature spotting. Like the warnings I've given my seminar groups of essays without an argument, it's very easy to go on a sightseeing expedition where you simply point out various features without every concretely linking it to a reason for its presence; remember, we're dealing with the whys and wherefores of the poetic construction. Right, end of that particular piece of advice/rant!

Let's move on from this particular poem, and its excellent example of Dickinson's half-rhymes, to look at the poem to which I've already made reference, “The Chariot”, or “Because I could not stop for death”:

<pre>Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality. 
 
We slowly drove, he knew no haste, 
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
 
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.
 
Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.</pre>

As Benfey points out, following and critiquing Allen Tate, this poem has an air of the Southern American Gentleman about it. Death stops by in a carriage, the traditional mode of transport for a certain form of wealthy Southern gentleman. He is “kindly” and he drives “slowly”, indeed, he “knew no haste” and demonstrates his “civility”; in short, Death, the gentleman, is well mannered here and knows how to behave towards a lady of the time. Furthermore, the title of the poem has connotations of the American South also; the Chariot evokes the Negro spiritual song, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” with which I'm sure many of you are familiar. Also note how the image of progress into the ever-after are shown as peaceful, not violent; the “setting sun”, the centuries “feel shorter than the day” that she realised that this was death – in fact, death here is courteous, kind, considerate and gentlemanly, not brash, violent or to be feared, which gives a very stoical take on dying here that perhaps accords with certain strands of Christianity. Indeed, the drive with death comes somewhat as a relief because the female companion is now able to “put away” her “labor”, albeit also her “leisure”. She is simultaneously freed from work, but barred from leisure. A middle pathway in the scheme of labour vs. leisure, perhaps. Furthermore, the “Southern Gentleman” image is furthered by the Southern rural setting that the poem depicts, the “gazing grain” being the key image here for that context, showing us rural plantations and an agrarian setting.

All is not quite what it seems, though. There are, as ever when death comes into poetry, also strong erotic overtones in this poem, most prominently set up by the fact that there are not two, but three characters here: “The carriage held but just ourselves / And immortality”. There is a famous line about this by Randall Jarrell where he says that this is as though the poem was saying “We have a nice hotel room. The girl, myself, and the Sphinx.” More to the point, though, this character, eternity or immortality, seems to fulfil the chaperone function; immortality is present to ensure that nothing untoward of a sexual nature happens between the Southern Gentleman, death, and his female rider. This is an aspect that Dickinson writes into poem in the landscape that she describes. Consider the stanza:

<pre>We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.</pre>

The literal sense that we're given here is a house that has been buried by the years; it is practically underground now. Note, however, the terms “swelling” and “mound” carrying sexual connotations in conjunction with the ironic marital aspect of the poem; it is not “till death do us part”, but rather an eternity spent with death as a spousal figure, or at least one on a perpetual, eternal “date” with immortality as the chaperone. The subversive stance towards marriage that this presents (sexuality hinted within an inverted, but still monogamous, anti-marriage) is an interesting counter-part to the reading of the Southern Gentleman figure of Death in the poem. Indeed, there is a total inversion of the traditional stance of marriage here that seems very alarming for a traditionalist and that is just one of the reasons that it seems surprising that Emily Dickinson should be a recluse within a deeply religious community when often her poems are saturated with ambivalent (meaning, multi-faceted, not “uncaring”, by the way) sexualities and subversions of traditional societal structures such as marriage.  This beginning of an unearthing of sexuality in the poem leads nicely into a consideration, which I'd now like us to undertake, of how Dickinson has been perceived within twentieth-century feminist contexts.

Emily Dickinson's poems are what can be classed as “lyric poetry” in the broadest sense. By this it is meant that they are poems that deal with personal feelings and responses, with emotion and with the here and now, often cast in the present tense. Dickinson writes lyric poetry. Lyric poetry, however, is a predominantly male form; certainly for much of its history it is a form dominated by men. Consider the most famous representatives of the form for our current thinking; the Romantics. The 19th Century lyric form is almost synonymous with the Romantic movement, consisting primarily of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon, Lord Byron, and the later Alfred Lord Tennyson. Indeed, among these “greats”, only Christina Rossetti is female. Now, while Modernist work attempted to demolish the history of the lyric form (and there were female modernist poets such as HD and Mina Loy), and it is also worth bearing in mind the way in which Dickinson can be considered an experimental modernist, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in their influential book on the history of women's writing, The Madwoman in the Attic, have some rationales for why the form was traditionally so masculine, a problem that for them is related to notions of self-assertion. In their take, this is framed across two contexts for the female poet. The female poet is, first-and-foremost, a woman, and therefore denied self-assertion at the same level as her male peers. Simultaneously, the female poet is attempting to write in a form that demands self-assertion; the lyric poem. In the case of Emily Dickinson, this problem seems to be circumnavigated by a series of “dramatic” personae; Dickinson shifts her voice from speaker to speaker that are not synonymous with her real-world self. This thereby allows for the possibility of assertive/aggressive and/or impassioned lyric poetry, while also dodging the problem of the female being unable to fully speak. This comes with its own set of counter-problems, of course. If Dickinson is not really the speaker in these works, then is it truly lyric poetry – it doesn't express the poet so much as a fashioning of the poet by herself; a crafted self-image that is presented through dramatic poetry that is very different to the idea of an umediated poetic access to emotion, experience and selfhood, the tenets of the Romantic lyric.

This idea of self-fashioning is key to Gilbert and Gubar's reading of Dickinson and has several late-twentieth-century theoretical parallels that are worth exploring. Indeed, Gilbert and Gubar argue that, through her poetry, Dickinson transformed her own life into a gothic tale, a fictionalised narrative re-working of her lived experience. They write that “Dickinson’s attitude toward the powerful male Other who ruled women’s days and lives is at the heart of the gothic ‘Novel’ into which she transformed her own life”, they argue that through the writing of her poetry, her life itself “became a kind of novel or narrative poem in which, through an extraordinarily complex series of maneuvers, aided by costumes that came inevitably to hand, this inventive poet enacted and eventually resolved both her anxieties about her art and her anger at female subordination”. Critics are split on where exactly this transformative life-narrative is to be located. Some, such as Allen Tate, read Dickinson's reclusive life as a symptom of a patriarchal society. They believe that Dickinson was forced into reclusion by a system that would not tolerate women who spoke their minds and, therefore, she went into effective “hiding”. Alternatively, this type of narrative could be said that society drove Dickinson mad and she was forced into a reclusive lifestyle. Another way to think this through, however, is to ask whether Dickinson purposefully cultivated a specific aesthetic of herself. The white dresses that she wears are exemplary of the gothic novel and her withdrawal from society could be read, not as a forced segregation or result of a nervous disorder, but rather as a deliberately crafted move to project a specific identity formation outward.

There are multiple stances on this that are worth considering, even if one believes that Dickinson's reclusivity was a deliberate effort. For example, in one take, that I've just outlined, Dickinson's withdrawal can be seen as an undertaking to ensure that the female poet has the space she needs, carved within a refuge within patriarchal culture itself, to be assertive and so engage in the lyric form. Conversely, it can also look like a withdrawal that simply reinforces patriarchy by rejecting any signs of emerging female liberation and instead confining the woman to the home, re-enshrining extremely conservative views on the role of the female. An excellent counter-example to this, however, is to be found in Dickinson's poem, “My life had stood – a Loaded Gun”, which reads as follows:

<pre>My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -
In Corners - till a Day
The Owner passed - identified -
And carried Me away -

And now We roam in Sovereign Woods -
And now We hunt the Doe -
And every time I speak for Him -
The Mountains straight reply -
 
And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow -
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through -

And when at Night - Our good Day done -
I guard My Master's Head -
'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's
Deep Pillow - to have shared -
 
To foe of His - I'm deadly foe -
None stir the second time -
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye -
Or an emphatic Thumb -
 
Though I than He - may longer live
He longer must - than I -
For I have but the power to kill,
Without--the power to die--</pre>

As is immediately clear from this piece, the poem is a powerful piece of writing rooted in intense anger; the unused loaded gun of the title. There is, however, no straightforward interpretation of the poem. Consider, firstly, that although Dickinson sees herself as a loaded gun, which would imply that she is the active agent and capable of inflicting great damage upon her enemies, she relies upon the hunter figure to “[carry] [her] away”. That sounds, however, a lot like the “guns don't kill people, people kill people” line of argument, which, although true in spirit, is far from sound. Furthermore, if we're going to view this metaphorically, as indeed we must – the author cannot literally be a loaded gun – then the masculine nature of various components of the metaphor must be discussed, particularly with regard to Dickinson's stance as a poet.

The loaded gun of the poem “had stood in corners” for most of its existence, which tallies with Dickinson's reclusivity and seclusion in a religious community that facilitates the repression of emotion and female sexuality and expression. In this sense, reading Dickinson biographically, an aspect against which I'm also shortly going to caution, the male “Master” hunter figure could be read as a force of poetry itself. It cannot be said that it is poetry pulling Dickinson out of seclusion and into a realm of self-assertion and expression because she “speaks for” the hunter, in which her force of voice is also the report of the rifle – indeed, we hear the “Mountains straight reply” as the echo of the gunshot that is also the perspectivized narrator of the poem and, in this reading, Dickinson. So, if Dickinson is the speaker of the poem – a gun who has been secluded – but who gains the power to speak by being pulled out into the world of self-assertion (and who gains the power to be violent), who does the extraction? The resonance of the term “Him”, with a capital “H” should give us a hint (although, note that, as with many Nineteenth-Century conventions, all nouns are capitalised). It seems to be that Dickinson believes her poetic force to come from a religious, or at least supernatural, source.

This reading is not straightforward though. Firstly, consider that the liberation that comes from this master-servant relationship is not one that traditional Christian doctrine of the time, and certainly not of the type within which Dickinson was situated, would have advocated. The narratorial figure in this poem becomes a violent character. Secondly, the poem's ending such a reading is complicated and appears to question the world that God has created. Consider the stanza:

<pre>Though I than He - may longer live
He longer must - than I -
For I have but the power to kill,
Without--the power to die--</pre>

So, in this stanza, note the deployment of “may” as opposed to “must”. The world itself, the accidental set of situations that compose reality here, “may” cause Dickinson to outlive the force that is driving her outward, whatever kind of spiritual entity or Platonic poetic core that could be. So, in the real world, there is a chance that Dickinson will outlive the spiritual force. However, in the right world that Dickinson is attempting to will into existence, this would not be the case. Indeed, she takes on the creating role and states, in relation to living and length of life, that “He longer must – than I”; she says that the force/poetic drive/spiritual entity must live longer than her because it is implied, through the use of the term “must”, that it is wrong that a being with “the power to kill, Without – the power to die” should be allowed to outlive that controlling force. 

In this sense, Dickinson inverts, in the last stanza, the relationship between any kind of creating deity figure because she tries to dictate how the world should be. The loaded gun ends up, as in all cases of weaponized violence I would contend, controlling the figure who wields it. Or, at least, in this case, asserting the right to question and to posit an alternative, otherwise world. This has, as I have already intimated, some interesting gender consequences. Like the sports car, the gun has an extremely masculine history; the military connotations were, for most of its history, entirely male. Dickinson, therefore, enact a curious initial inversion for the female poet; she casts herself in the role of the traditional penis extension. This, in some senses, seems to turn the way we think about the poet upside down; she appears to be reclaiming the space of masculine aggression – and, thereby, poetic self-assertion. The interesting turn, though, is that the rifle, the loaded gun, has to serve a still overwhelmingly male “master”; “his” and “he” being the dominant, and, as already noted, capitalised pronouns. Let's think through two ways in which this relation of subservience sits within different interpretations of the poem. If we think of this in terms of some kind of spirituality, then the poem does not go to the ultimate step and cast its God figure in the feminine form. In fact, although it has the strange inversion of authorities in the “must”/”may” divide, it still casts one figure in priority to the other and this tends towards the masculine. There is, however, something suggestive about the lines:

<pre>And when at Night - Our good Day done -
I guard My Master's Head -
'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's
Deep Pillow - to have shared -</pre>

It is notable, here, that the female loaded gun figure holds back from sharing the bed of the master; not sharing a pillow, but instead guarding the head. This seems somewhat conservative. However, in its very denial it seems to suggest the possibility; a kind of transgression that Hegel calls the false infinite. As Hegel puts it in his work, The Science of Logic: “[w]hat is lost track of in [the] claim [that there are limits that cannot be transcended] is that something is already transcended by the very fact of being determined as a restriction”. The premise here is that, by setting out the boundary between being able to sleep on the master's pillow and, instead, preferring to guard, the boundary line has been crossed. To say “I didn't sleep with X” implies that the speaker has already thought about the boundary being crossed, or how could they state the boundary? To know there is a boundary implies that one must know the negation that sits on the other side of the line. This line at once holds back from sexuality in a theological context while also tacitly implying it. 

Returning from this front, though, if we instead read the poem as representing the Master figure as some kind of inner poetic essence, then something interesting happens. Dickinson seems, in this sense, to split her personality into various masculine and feminine components, with a masculine core (perhaps self assertion) encased in a feminine exterior that extends the masculine (the weapon). If this sounds too meta- then it's worth bearing in mind that the poem is self-consciously poetic, with seeming allusions to other poets in the lyric tradition, such as John Donne, whose “the foe oftimes the foe in sight” from the Holy Sonnets seems to be present here in “To foe of His - I'm deadly foe -”. In short, what we have here is an instance of meta-poetry; poetry speaking about its own status of poetry, the nature of poetry in relation to the emotions and life of the speaker (ie the lyric form), and the relationship of poetry to gender imbalances and societal problems. Indeed, as you'll recall from our discussions on this poem, many aspects of the feminist readings are only possible because of Dickinson's personal situation (including her difficulties of being a female poet) in conjunction with the poem's angry sentiments.

Let's now do a final recap of the aspects that we've covered today. Emily Dickinson's life can be a valuable tool through which to read her poetry. Her retreat into a reclusive lifestyle in which, at one extreme stage, she only speaks to other people through a closed door, can be used as an interpretative device in multiple senses. The first is in the way in which this very phenomenon can be seen as a performance. Dickinson's life can be seen as a work of art that performs the specific image function that she needed; indeed, we all do this – we project the image of ourselves that we think others want to see. In Dickinson's case, as I've argued here today, this is to do with self-assertion and her status as a poet. There are only certain environments, at the time in which Dickinson lived, within which women had the ability to be self-assertive. One of the predominant areas was the gothic novel, so Dickinson seems, in some degrees, to perform this. Furthermore, this is linked to the tradition of lyric poetry and the ability to express oneself. However, we also need to sound a note of caution. There is a dangerous tradition of reading women's writing, and particualarly women's writing, purely in terms of biography. Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, for example, are reduced to being writers about depression, the implication being that their work was, therefore, a symptom of their life, which is then pathologised. So, we do need to be careful of reading Dickinson in purely biographical terms.

Conversely, though, there are, as I hope I've shown, many areas in which a purely textual approach to Dickinson can be fruitful. I hope, in your seminars, that you will discuss the ambiguities introduced by the dashes and the inability of the typeset versions to replicate the handwritten manuscripts and, more generally, the importance of presentation for poetry. What is lost in the mass transmission of material? Is poetry, more so than prose, dependent upon presentation, in its uniqueness and exact specificity? Can this link to what Walter Benjamin calls the declining aura of a text?

Furthermore, even beyond these broader questions about poetry, I hope that you will also consider the role that meter plays in Dickinson's poems, and the more general interactions between the oral tradition of poetry and its formal place. How do we read the meter? Is it enough to simply note that these forms are present? (Hint: no) How can we construct readings that look at the verse forms used and then intersect these metrical readings with the thematic or content concerns of the piece?

And last but not least: what is the role of the reader in these pieces? How much does the poet have to pre-anticipate the desires of the reader in order to frustrate or fulfil them? (think back to our earlier metrical analysis and concepts of wish fulfilment there) This has a bearing on how we situate Dickinson because different discourse communities, or groups of readers, will have very different expectations. This will, of course, vary over time. How do we, as perhaps post-postmodernist readers, situate Dickinson's poems? Are they lyric, proto-modernist or something that entirely defies our systems of classification? What, even, does modernist mean in this sense? Are we talking purely about radical experiment, or are we referring to concerns about what we can ever “know”, which Brian McHale sees as central to this form? If religion and spirituality play a role, is this also integral to Dickinson's modernist concern with epistemology (the study of knowledge)? In any case, I hope this provides some food for thought.