My final

For the final, I chose to write a personal reflection on my experiences reading Dickinson this semester. I wanted to post it here (mostly to prove to myself that I wasn't afraid to do so) but it does need a trigger warning for discussion of death and grieving.

In her piece on Emily Dickinson, Vesuvius at Home, Adrienne Rich described the “ancient concept” of the poet, who is “endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who—for whatever reasons—are less conscious of what they are living through.” These past few months, I have been one of these people: one who lacks the language, or the understanding, of what they are experiencing. It’s an unusual role for me. Anyone who has had a conversation with me, or heard me speak in class, knows that I have never lacked for words. And when it comes to the creation and understanding of art, I have always seen myself in the role of the artist, not the audience. I work in theatre, bringing stories to life for other people to see and find meaning in. With poetry, I have a hard-wired instinct, taught to me by my father, a professor of poetry, to understand the mechanics with which a poem creates a feeling. Rarely am I so overtaken by a poem that I can do nothing but experience it. And never have I needed a writer to speak for me the way that Emily Dickinson has ever since I began reading her poems this semester. 

Last October, my best friend died. It wasn’t due to illness or any other preexisting circumstance that would have given us warning. Her death was sudden, jarring, and frightening, destroying everything that I thought was possible within a normal life. My best friend didn’t go to Wellesley, she was a senior at UCLA. No one on campus had ever met her, and few even knew of her existence. Although everything had changed, nothing was different in the outward routine of my Wellesley life. It was hard--impossible, really--to find a space in conversation to mention my loss. The news travelled covertly between my friends, so I never knew who knew what or how much. Most of my friends had no idea what to say to me. None of them, thankfully, had lost anyone yet, let alone someone their own age. So they decided to say nothing at all. They treated me like everything was totally normal, and never even mentioned her name. In my more charitable moments, I believe it’s because they thought that’s what I would want. When I am feeling less kind, I think it’s because it was easier for them to avoid the difficult conversation. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. 

But without anyone to talk to, mourning was even harder. I felt trapped in my head, just me and my anger and my grief. A very Dickinson feeling. It only increased my helplessness to know that even if I could force someone to listen to me, I wouldn’t be able to communicate with them. How can you explain grief to someone who’s never lost anyone? How can you explain how raw and unbearable it is at the beginning to adults whose own losses have been tempered by time? And even if I could tell them exactly what I was feeling, even if they understood, I could never explain Angela to them. I could tell a thousand stories and they could never come close to capturing her humor, her intelligence, her kindness, and how lucky I was to know her.

But grief? People have written a lot of words trying to capture grief.

My therapist tells me that each grief is individual: even if it’s for the same person, everyone experiences it a different way. That’s true, of course, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t commonalities. I needed to find words that articulated even part of what I was going through. Alone as I was, it didn’t just feel like I was the only person grieving for Angie. It was like I was the only person who had ever grieved at all. Like I was charting new territory in the human experience, and throughout all of time no one had ever felt the things I was feeling, or felt them as much as I felt them. 

I remember the first poem where it hit me that maybe the person whose poems I was holding in my hands might be one who would understand me. Oddly, it wasn’t even one of her poems about death. It was “I could not live with you.” But I didn’t care whether Dickinson meant the poem to be about a lover. What I cared about were a few lines in later stanzas, which hit me like twin punches to the gut as I made the mistake of reading them out loud. 

And were You lost, I would be—

and,

And I—condemned to be 

Where You were not—

That self—were Hell to Me.

This was exactly how I was feeling: lost, condemned--I loved that word, rolled it around in my mind, condemned, condemned, condemned--to be stuck here without her. “That self--were Hell to Me.” I liked that part too. My grieving was so unpleasant, so uncomfortable, so ugly. I liked having an eloquent, evocative little phrase to condense it into. 

How understood these passages made me feel, regardless of their context and intention, made me hungry for more. It was addicting to have words I could say out loud that captured some small piece of the enormity that I kept trapped in my brain and heart. To just look in the subject index for “death” or “grief” seemed too easy, like it would cheapen what the poems made me feel. So I went about it the long way, flipping through each page and scanning it for keywords that would get me what I wanted. I was looking for poems that would speak to my pain, but I was also wary of how much it hurt to read them. Turning each page felt like peering around a dark corner, unsure and frightened of what was on the other side. When I found one that was particularly on the nose--”If anybody’s friend be dead/It’s the sharpest of the theme” leaped out at me from the bottom of page 247--it was like being hit in the chest. 

I amassed a little collection of her most obvious death poems, at first trying not to fold down the corners of the pages and make it easier to go back to them, but eventually giving in. A few I returned to again and again. 

509: 

If anybody’s friend be dead

It’s the sharpest of the theme

The thinking how they walked alive--

At such and such a time--

561: 

I measure every Grief I meet

With narrow, probing, Eyes—

I wonder if It weighs like Mine—

Or has an Easier size. 

586: 

We talked as Girls do--

Fond, and late--

We speculated fair, on every subject, but the Grave--

Of ours, none affair--

They made me feel like I wasn’t going completely crazy. Here was a girl from a hundred and seventy years ago, putting into words what I was feeling today. I wasn’t looking for an inspirational tack, like, “other people have grieved and survived it!” I didn’t care about that. I only cared about that first part, that other people have grieved.

I’m self-aware enough to admit that the narrative of Emily Dickinson, Perpetual Waif played to my advantage here. Regardless of how old she was when she wrote the poem I was reading, in my mind’s eye I saw an early 20-something brunette (probably Hailee Steinfeld), writing about her dead friends. Some reading or lecture explained that people died more frequently in the mid-1800s. That in one year, Dickinson had lost multiple friends in short succession. It was unthinkable to me. I had only lost one, and it was barely survivable. But knowing of that experience made her writing authentic. I felt that she would understand what I was going through, even if none of my friends my age did.

Of course, just knowing that Emily Dickinson had grieved wasn’t enough. It was the fact that she was so damn good at writing that made the whole arrangement work. I could never have said the things she said. My brain doesn’t make those leaps of logic, isn’t capable of finding the words and assembling them in just the right order. But that’s why we need poets. They have that gift, that magic, that makes them “endowed to speak” for us, as Rich would put it. It’s obvious, but I was so used to my analytical view of poetry that I wasn’t prepared to be humbled by so much feeling. When I read these poems, I can hardly think about their construction. I can only think about what they remind me of, and what they make me feel.

That isn’t to say that every poem that I identified with was one of Dickinson’s best. As was pointed out in class when we read “The last night she lived,” the poems where she plainly describes death tend to be some of her most literal. Dickinson tells us her precise actions and feelings, with none of the unexplainable imagery which she tends to be known for. But this itself comforted me. I imagined Dickinson, unable to unlock that artistic spark, as buried by her grief as I was. However, I still appreciated her more eloquent, fanciful depictions of grieving. There is something to be said for a poem which offers you distance from your feelings by hiding them in metaphors. That’s what I found in “I dreaded that first robin so,” which I read a few weeks before what would have been Angela’s 22nd birthday. I had been afraid of that day since spring started, and here was Dickinson, yet again writing my words down for me. And she did it again in another poem a few pages later, which I termed,“I dreaded that first robin so: the first draft.”

364:

The Morning after Woe--

‘Tis frequently the Way--

Surpasses all that rose before--

For utter Jubilee--

As Nature did not care--

And piled her Blossoms on--

And further to parade a Joy

Her Victim stared upon--

The Birds declaim their Tunes--

Pronouncing every word

Like Hammers--Did they know they fell

Like Litanies of Lead--

On here and there--a creature--

They’d modify the Glee

To fix some Crucifixal Clef--

Some Key of Calvary--

I don’t know if the unhappiness Dickinson was experiencing in the spring of 1862 even had anything to with grief. But the sentiment of these poems, and my gut feeling of what they meant, comforted me as I approached a painful anniversary.

My experience with Dickinson’s mourning poems isn’t always this in sync. On one of my flip-throughs, I stumbled across a poem from 1868 that particularly infuriated me:

1121:

Time does go on--

I tell it gay to those who suffer now--

They shall survive--

There is a sun--

They don’t believe it now--

Dickinson was right in one thing: I didn’t believe it. At this point, I hated anyone who suggested that things would get easier, since thinking that way felt like a betrayal. Emily was supposed to be a companion in my loss, not one of the people trying to hurry me past it. I didn’t fold down that page corner, and I never reread that poem. 

Still, although I wasn’t ready for that particular piece, I do try to find a compromise, and not always bury myself in the most painful poems I can find. It’s not so much out of self-preservation, but the thought of what Angie would want me to do. When I succeed in following those better instincts, I read this poem instead:

1013:

Too scanty ‘twas to die for you,

The merest Greek could that. 

The living, Sweet, is costlier—

I offer even that—

The Dying, is a trifle, past,

But living, this include

The dying multifold—without

The Respite to be dead. 

It’s far from Dickinson’s best work—rhyming “that” with “that” is pretty unforgivable. But it carries shades of my old favorite, “condemned to be Where You were not—That self—were Hell to Me.” Living with grief is like this “dying multifold:” a repeated agony you experience each day that you go without them. But that promise to live is what the poem is actually about. And I don’t interpret “living” here to mean staying alive and conscious and breathing. I read it as “living” as in “having a life,” one where you have fun and enjoy things and don’t feel completely guilty about it. I appreciate Dickinson’s commitment to the process, even as she acknowledges that it can be really, horribly, painful.

Having these poems doesn’t really make it easier--nothing makes grief easier except time, and even that is hearsay. But having Dickinson means that I have words to turn to when what I’m feeling is too big for me to hold. Adrienne Rich said that “it is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.” I’m grateful that Emily faced her grief, that age-old risk of existence, the way that she did. Because she put pen to paper, when I’m on the phone with my friend and I don’t have the words, I can tell them, “Wait, hold on.” And I find the poem. And I start reading.