216 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865surroundings; and the worlds it creates, the knowledge it articulates must – by the
very nature of the source – remain arbitrary, temporary, and incomplete. So in poem
after poem that attends to the experience of dying, the narrator or persona Dickinson
habitually adopts, the “I” and eye of the poetic narrative, approaches the gates of
death only to stop short just before she enters, passes through to the other side
(“A Clock stopped – ,” no. 287; “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –,” no. 465; “Our
journey had advanced – ,” no. 615). The scene then goes blank, and poet, narrator, and
reader alike are left gazing at the blankness, aware only that they have arrived at the
boundaries of human consciousness. To an extent, life on the one hand and love and
death on the other are the structural equivalents of the clearing and the wilderness for
Dickinson, the one figuring the measured, constructed, and known, the other posing
the twinned possibilities of adventure and annihilation. This is perhaps why, in those
poems that map a literal geography of land and sea, she demonstrates a similar
vacillation between fear and desire: the Ishmael-like suspicion that the sea is perilously
other (“I started Early – Took my Dog,” no. 520) and the Ahab-like conviction that it
is seductively, thrillingly so (“Exultation is the going,” no. 76). To speak of a literal
geography here or elsewhere, though, tends to miss the target. Dickinson thinks
feeling and feels thought, and all her best poems are at once, and complexly, literal
and figurative. So the poems “about” the sea, for instance, are also equally poems
“about” the danger and adventure of death and love (the sea is, in fact, associated with
eros and eternity in both no. 520 and no. 76); a poem “about” death often carries
strong erotic undertones (“Death is the supple Suitor,” no. 1445); while a poem
“about” love may pursue the simultaneously thrilling yet unnerving possibility of
obliteration, self-abandonment (“Wild Night – Wild Nights!,” no. 114). What these
poems have in common, apart from their complex layering – a sense of the permeable
barriers between different topics, various levels of thought and experience – is their
open-endedness: the kind of conclusion in which nothing is concluded that, given
Dickinson’s situation and stance, is the only one available to her.
The sense of the circumscriptions imposed on the isolated self, and the
consequently random, truncated nature of human knowledge, dictates Dickinson’s
poetic practice. Her poems are not just open-ended but open, and in a way that is
interestingly different from, say, Whitman. What Dickinson’s work tends to do
is underline its own arbitrariness, its dislocated, disjunctive character: a point that
is brought out, in particularly high profile, by her disruptive use of rhythm, her
frequent recourse to discords and half-rhymes, and her preference for the paratactic
over more conventional forms of syntax. Dickinson subverts. She habitually uses
the standard hymn stanza form, but then undermines it by lengthening or
shortening lines, reversing rhythms, omitting rhymes. She opts for what might
seem to be a straightforward declarative style, by placing phrases and clauses
paratactically – that is, side by side in an apparently indiscriminate way. But what
she is doing, it turns out, is evading the kind of finished effect that is inseparable
from more sophisticated kinds of syntactical structure. Experiences, events,
expressions are set out on a level verbal landscape, separated only by the minimalist
punctuation of the dash; there is no attempt made to draw things into a net ofGGray_c02.indd 216ray_c 02 .indd 216 8 8/1/2011 7:54:44 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 44 AM