350 Dickinson, Emily
range of mental suffering through images of des-
erts, ice caps, earthquakes, storms, and whirlpools, as
well as landscapes populated by predatory animals,
such as leopards, tigers, and snakes, figures for the
disturbing thoughts of consciousness that menace
one’s being. The volcano is a favored metaphor for
Dickinson’s own experience as an anguished mem-
ber of a predominantly Calvinist community advo-
cating emotional self-control. Her speakers conceal
emotional suffering that smoulders like ash just
beneath the surface (“I have never seen ‘Volcanoes’ ”;
“The reticent volcano keeps”). In “A still—Vol-
cano—Life,” the mouth of a volcano is likened to
a human mouth, with coral-colored (and fleshlike)
lips that hiss as if unable to restrain expression of
the intense pent-up pain within, a pain that con-
sumes the body like volcanic fire on rock (“There is
a pain—so utter”); alternatively, the smoking mouth
may belong to a chastising fellow citizen (“The
Solemn—Torrid—Symbol”) threatening to erupt
in disapproval of the speaker’s lack of emotional
restraint, emotions that leak out in magma-like
flickering when ruminating restlessly alone at night
when it is dark, and so safe, enough to be discreet.
Storms, however, predominate as a metaphor
for human suffering. Like earthquakes and erupt-
ing volcanoes, storms provide analogies for anguish
that can arrive suddenly and inflict severe damage;
yet their comparatively higher frequency makes
them a more appropriate metaphor for a suffer-
ing that is regular; constant; and, though painful,
not ultimately life-threatening. Nevertheless, such
emotional tempests are extremely harrowing, as
marked by the personification of storms as super-
natural beings—a monster wearing a specter’s black
coat (“An awful tempest mashed the air”) or an
emerald-colored ghost (“There came a wind like a
bugle”). The disjointed form of Dickinson’s poetry
resembles storm-damaged debris, where the abrupt,
incomplete phrases and utterances are like street
planks torn up by the winds of mental torment. In
“To pile like Thunder at its close,” poetry is likened
to a thunderstorm, a process that releases intense
pilings of emotion within the quick beat of thunder-
claps. This focus on the rhythmical sounds in nature
is found in other poems: The wind plays a bugle,
makes bell sounds from bushes, or tears through
forests as if frenetically playing a piano (“I dreaded
that first Robin so”); the attention to rhythm evokes
the powerful, melodic beat of Dickinson’s verse.
The loneliness of Dickinson’s speakers finds cor-
relation in the isolated natural subjects that haunt
her poems, from the wind, timid like a man, who
disappears from his host’s house, to the wind whose
rising goes unnoticed by even the delicate leaves in
a forest (“A Wind that Rose”), to the buzzing of
a solitary fly that provides unexpected relief at the
end of one’s life (“I heard a fly buzz when I died”).
But if nature provides analogies for human suffer-
ing, it also illustrates human contentment—and
occasionally ecstasy. Thus, a speaker finds resonance
in a small stone “that rambles in the Road alone,”
for in its independence from others it is comparable
to the magnificence of another sphere that “glows
alone,” the sun (“How happy is the little stone”). In
this kind of self-absorption comes identity and
even transcendence, Dickinson suggests: The little
stone may be small, but its fixity on its spot on the
earth has given it its color, or individuality, just as
Dickinson’s fixity to Amherst furnished her highly
individual poems.
Sarah Barnsleyspirituality in the Poems of Emily
Dickinson
Spiritual matters take a central place in Emily Dick-
inson’s highly introspective poems, which are more
concerned with the internal world of the human
spirit than they are with the external world of com-
merce, politics, and social interactions. The “soul” is
a recurrent theme in Dickinson’s verse, frequently
personified, from the aloof, goddess-like figure
dismissive of the external world (“The Soul Selects
Her Own Society”) to the excitable creature that
fizzes with energy like a bee or a bomb (“The Soul
Has Bandaged Moments”) as Dickinson charts the
vacillations of the human spirit between despair and
ecstasy.
Humans are shown to contain vast internal
mental geographies that dwarf and triumph over
the external world and tempt the self to explore
the hidden expanse within. “The Brain—is wider
than the sky” begins one poem, continuing that
it is also deeper than the sea; “Exultation is the