Volume 10 69
use of domestic imagery in poems that also con-
cern death.
That the moment of death seems often less mo-
mentous than ordinary is one of the most disturb-
ing and powerful characteristics of Dickinson’s po-
ems. Where one expects the sublime, she offers the
mundane. Instead of grand passion, she delivers
quiet rumination. In both of these poems, for ex-
ample, the finality of death is set against the insis-
tent cycle of housework. Dickinson uses the image
of housework to suggest ways that humans can
stem the tide of decay that death signifies. The rou-
tine labors of tending to the house and family, Dick-
inson suggests, anchors women and keeps them
from despair.
In “How many times have these low feet stag-
gered,” Dickinson describes a housewife after her
death. The first stanza wonders how many times
has this humble woman failed or stumbled under
the burden of all the work she has to do. There can
be no answer, however, because only the “soldered
mouth can tell,” and it will never open again. No
one else knows because no one else paid attention.
The housework, like the woman, was invisible. In
the second stanza the poem insists that the woman
be seen and touched. It reminds observers that her
now cold forehead was frequently hot with exer-
tion or fever, and it dares those present to touch her
hair and handle her fingers. The last line of the
stanza can be read as a rebuke to those who still
see her only as the embodiment of work, remind-
ing them that in death her fingers “never a thim-
ble-more-shall wear.” As is often the case with a
Dickinson poem, the final stanza destabilizes the
meaning of the poem that had developed to that
point.
In contrast to the rather oblivious and callous
human viewers of the “low” woman’s body, the
household “spirits” in the second stanza are quite
animated and attentive. On the occasion of the
housewife’s death, they stage a kind of celebration.
Flies buzz, the sun shows off the proudly speckled
window, and cobwebs fear no retribution. The
woman can take a day off and be “indolent,” or
lazy, pampering, self-indulgent, only in death.
Dickinson uses housework to signify two things.
First, the housewife’s work represents the human
instinct to fight against death and decay, however
futile the battle. As soon as she “staggers” for the
last time, death defeats her and her efforts. At the
same time, however, it’s hard to miss the celebra-
tory note in the last stanza, as if the poet secretly
wants to endorse the victory of dust and finger-
prints over drudgery. What if, she seems to say, the
forces of entropy—represented by cobwebs and
fingerprints—have always been in sympathy with
the housewife? What if they’re not mocking her,
but are instead rejoicing because she is finally lib-
erated from the burden under which she has stag-
gered for too long?
The Bustle in a House also takes housework
and death as its subject. In this poem, Dickinson
describes the escalation of activity in a household
where someone has just died. In this poem, how-
ever, the housewife is absent. In the first of the two
stanzas, the “bustle” is the subject of the sentence.
The impersonal effect is intensified by the Dickin-
son’s word choices. She describes the deeply per-
sonal and intimate acts of cleaning up after death
as “industries.” Even more striking, however, is her
location of this solemnest of industries not in a par-
ticular house, not even indoors, really, but “on
Earth.” This is an unusual gesture for Dickinson:
in most poems she consistently chooses the partic-
ular over the general, the concrete over the abstract,
and her poems tend to take place in enclosed
spaces.
The second stanza continues to focus on the
act and not the person doing it. The subject of its
single sentence is two gerunds (verbs that represent
uncompleted action), “sweeping” and “putting
away.” In a marvelous visual pun, Dickinson al-
lows a glimpse of the material reality of this kind
of “industry” in the line “The Sweeping up the
Heart.” She knows that reader’s eyes will mistake
Heart for Hearth, because that’s the thing house-
wives ordinarily sweep. The moment of confusion
this causes allows both meanings to hang in the air
and asserts the deep connection between both kinds
of women’s work, the care of both hearths and
hearts. In the poem’s last two lines, Dickinson fi-The Bustle in a HouseThat the moment of
death seems often less
momentous than ordinary is
one of the most disturbing
and powerful
characteristics of
Dickinson’s poems.”