66 Poetry for Students
it. Popular poetry of the time was sentimental and
genteel. Not even the radical transcendentalists
(Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and
others) produced much poetry that looked or
sounded new. Women’s poetry at the time was even
more sentimental, describing emotional states or re-
iterating conventional behavior. Dickinson’s radi-
cal new lines and use of dashes would have been
jarring enough, but her unsentimental questioning,
and her often erotic imagery, would have offended
some editors and readers alike, if she could even
have reached them. It’s likely that Dickinson knew
she would be wasting her time in battling the lit-
erary establishment, especially as a woman poet;
even if she succeeded in getting her work into print,
it would bring unwanted attention that would dis-
tract her from the more important task of writing
more poems.Critical Overview.
Harold Monro, a British poet and editor whose crit-
icism of Dickinson is included in The Recognition
of Emily Dickinson: Selected Criticism Since 1890,
argues that Dickinson has been “overrated,” claim-
ing that she was “partially deaf [and] mostly dumb,
to the art of poetry.” He goes on to point out how
her poems are riddled with mistakes that a better
editor would have noticed and corrected. In spite
of this negative opinion, he does offer a relatively
positive reaction to “The Bustle in a House,” writ-
ing that the poem is “clumsy enough, but redeemed
entirely by a magic of pathos and loveliness.”
In contrast, W. D. Howells, writing in his
W. D. Howells as Critic,offers more sympathetic
critique of Dickinson’s poetic talent. Howells
writes of her poetry ’s “rarity” and “singular worth”
in his 1891 review of her first collection of poems,
posthumously. Howells’ enthusiastic opinion gar-
nered respect for Dickinson’s writing by contrast-
ing the negative opinions held by many of his con-
temporaries. Howells describes “The Bustle in a
House” and poems like it as “terribly unsparing ...
but true to the grave and certain as mortality.”Criticism.
Sarah Madsen Hardy
Madsen Hardy has a doctorate in English lit-
erature and is a freelance writer and editor. In the
following essay, she discusses the metaphors in“The Bustle in a House” in the context of Dickin-
son’s life and culture.Emily Dickinson’s poem “The Bustle in a
House” is a poem of mourning. Unlike typical po-
ems of mourning, called elegies, however, readers
do not learn from Dickinson’s poem specifically
who died and who is mourning. Dickinson instead
refers to the activities in a household where a death
has taken place and to the feelings of the deceased’s
loved ones. At first glance, the poem may seem
quite simple—a description of how, on the morn-
ing after a death, the living begin to confront the
love they still feel for the departed. However, it
uses the unconventional metaphor of housework to
describe the process of mourning. In this essay I
will explore the cultural and personal contexts of
this metaphor in order to shed light on Dickinson’s
original concept of the relationship between life
and death.
Dickinson was singularly fascinated with
death, both the experience of dying itself, and how
loss is experienced among the living. Death is one
of the most prominent themes in her large body of
work. This can be attributed to the fact that the mys-
tery of death raises questions of what it is to live,
to be, to have a soul or consciousness—questions
at the very center of Dickinson’s poetic inquiry.
But it also reflects the fact that death was far more
closely woven into the texture of everyday life in
the mid-nineteenth-century when Dickinson wrote
than it is today. Because antibiotics had not yet
been discovered, people frequently died from sick-
nesses that we now consider mild. Death in child-
birth and early childhood were common. Further-
more, less medical intervention was available at
each stage of physical decline. The majority of all
deaths took place at home, instead of in hospitals,
hospices, and nursing homes; thus, people in Dick-
inson’s time were much more likely to witness the
death of their family members. Death was an ex-
perience that was closer at hand for Dickinson and
her contemporaries than it is for most Americans
today—an experience associated with, rather than
divorced from, the intimate setting of home.
Dickinson witnessed a number of deaths in her
lifetime, describing them from the point of view of
an attendant in poems such as “The Last Night that
She Lived.” The closing stanzas of this poem de-
scribe the dying woman’s moment of passing and
the actions and feelings of her intimates immedi-
ately afterward as they handle and then contem-
plate her body. It reads, “She mentioned, and for-
got— / Then lightly as a Reed / Bent to the Water,The Bustle in a House