A History of American Literature

Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 217

theory, an elaborate verbal plan or hierarchy. She even chooses what might be taken

to be conventional subjects – love, death, nature, and so on – and may open a

meditation on them in an apparently innocent, simple way, with a pretty piece of

scene painting (“The pretty Rain from those sweet Eaves,” no. 608) or a declaration

of faith (“This World is not Conclusion,” no. 501). But the scene soon becomes

darker, “Faith slips” into doubt or even despair, as the poem shifts sharply from

convention and the innocence assumes an ironic, skeptical edge, the simplicity is

exposed as fundamentally deceptive. The poems of Whitman may not end in the

accepted sense, but at least they achieve an emotional resolution – the feeling that

the ideas and impulses activating them have been granted an adequate shape,

appropriately full expression. With Dickinson, even this is denied us. What she slips

to us, instead, is the lyric account of a self that is paradoxically both circumscribed

and dynamic, engaged in a quest that not only it can never quite complete but the

precise nature of which it can never properly know.

One of Dickinson’s most famous poems about death, for example, “I felt a Funeral,

in my Brain” (no. 280), ends with these lines:

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down –

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And finished knowing – then –

Finished knowing – then – and then, what? The closing lines, and indeed the

preceding ones, undermine any claims Dickinson may try to make to an

understanding of her subject, to an adequate definition and knowledge of the

experience that is the poem’s occasion. As a result, this is not so much a poem about

death in the traditional sense as a poem about the impossibility of ever writing such

a poem – and, more generally, about the impossibility of doing much more in any

human event than measuring one’s own limits. As Dickinson puts it in one of her

lyrics, “I dwell in Possibility – / A fairer House than Prose” (no. 657). The most she

can do in this “House,” she intimates, is offer a series of provisional names for the

furniture. The names must be provisional because she is, she feels, a prisoner caught

within the circumference of her own consciousness: she is, consequently, not

describing the world as it is, or even as it might be, but merely constructing a

language-system, and by implication a system of values, acceptable to her own

individual soul. “I could not see to see –” ends another of her poems, “I heard a Fly

buzz – when I died.” Others conclude by contemplating the void, the vast gap

between life and death, being and possible knowing, the self and the threshold,

the crossover into some kind of otherness – as, say, “Because I could not stop for

Death” does, with death and the maiden coming to what appears to be an abrupt end

to their journey:

Since then – ’tis Centuries – and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

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