86 PA RT O N E
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone—Cordiality gives way to anguish (angstas in narrow, constricted), when tighter
breathing cramps the chest. Dickinson’s handwriting, often expressive, has a
ripcord stroke across both t’s in “Transport of cordiality” and again in “tighter
breathing.”
“And Zero at the Bone”: her most stunning line. After “breathing” catches
at the break, this final line feels absolute, fastening “alone” to “Bone” in the
poem’s only perfect rhyme. Frozen at sight of a cold-blooded creature, the
marrow goes null, “Zero at the Bone.” At this depth opposites fuse, pure recog-
nition with blank dread.
Another chilling Dickinson lyric comes to mind, “After great pain, a formal feel-
ing comes,” where “Nerves” and “stiff Heart” have grown “like a stone.” It ends,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—
First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—“Snow” sinks into “letting go,” like “alone” into “Bone.” Such moments are
not some reportage after the event. “In a poem, what ’s real happens,” says her
German translator Paul Celan.
Dickinson wrote about choosing words, “as I can take but few and each must
be the chiefest... Earth’s most graphic transaction is placed within a syllable,
nay, even a gaze.” Transaction—between Earth and her? Her own syllables act
on us: “His notice sudden is ... And Zero at the Bone.”
Spasmodic, uncontrolled, wayward, T. W. Higginson called Dickinson’s
verse. Yes, her genius was wayward and she ’d the strength to tell him so: “My-
self the only Kangaroo among the Beauty.” To herself she says, “Tell all the
Truth but tell it slant,” which means omitting, disjoining, perplexing words,
syntax, knowledge. Unknowing can rivet her, or it can amuse, so that facing
caprice in nature she goes jocular:
Apparently with no surprise
To any happy Flower
The Frost beheads it at its play—Or not so jocular, since “an Approving God” likes that “blonde Assassin,” she
says. Dickinson (in her words) “keeps Believing nimble.”
The young woman who told Higginson her family worships “an Eclipse,
every morning” was not likely to share nineteenth-century sacramental ideas
of nature, of skylark and sycamore and daffodil embodying divine spirit. Our
ignorance and mortality, she said, make us “as exempt from Exultation as the
Stones.” Yet “A Word that breathes distinctly / Has not the power to die,” so
we keep turning to her finely tuned and timed lines.