Poetry for Students Vol. 10

70 Poetry for Students

nally introduces a pronoun. But in the choice of

“We,” she nevertheless keeps the housewife hid-

den from view while insisting beneath the surface

that the reader make the housewife present. The

poem’s concluding lines suggest that the one do-

ing the sweeping and putting away does so for the

benefit of others, the “we” who will not want to

use them “until Eternity.”

Dickinson scholar Griffin notes that “the

speaker’s deep insight is that this is no daily chore

of dusting off and throwing out. Instead it is sea-

sonalwork with cyclicalimplications, the careful

folding and putting aside of summer or winter

clothes we shall not ‘want to use again’ until a new

year has begun.” By suggesting that the rituals of

grief are like the rituals of domestic duty, Dickin-

son offers a measure of consolation: death is a stage

in a cycle, not an end; love will return in time. But

the poem strains against its own imagery and in-

vites readers to reconsider housework as much as

it illuminates the cyclical nature of death and grief.

The result is a poem that uses housework as a

metaphor, but which also distances itself from the

work itself and she who would do it.

This attitude toward housework reflects what

we know about Dickinson herself, who often ex-

pressed resentment at the feminization and futility

of domestic duty. According to Ellen Louise Hart

and Martha Nell Smith, scholars who edited Dick-

inson’s intimate letters to her sister-in-law, the two

women shared a resentment toward housework be-

cause it impinged on their intellectual, artistic, and

private lives. Hart and Smith assert that Susan

Huntington Dickinson spoke for both women when

she wrote to Emily about the burden of “the Spring

siege of sewing” that had put her “quite in despair.”

In the letter she complains, “I find no time to read

or think, and but little to walk—but just go re-

volving round a spool of ’Coat’s cotton’ [thread]

as if it were the grand centre of mental and moral

life.”

Dickinson and her sister-in-law share the dar-

ing view that housework—traditional and compul-

sory women’s work—is an enemy of “mental and

moral life” of the independent and creative lives

they would choose. Because she never married,

Dickinson was able to give to her art much of the

time and energy she would have been compelled

to devote to sweeping and putting away if she had

had a family. When housework appears in Dickin-

son’s poems, therefore, it must be understood as

more than a handy metaphor. As Wolff argues, do-

mestic imagery does act as a stabilizing and

grounding force in Dickinson’s despairing poems

about death. But metaphors work both ways, illu-

minating and complicating both terms in the pair.

“The Bustle in a House,” and others like it, can also

be read as poems about housework in which death

is a metaphor. For Dickinson, who used domestic

imagery in so many poems, housework was no mi-

nor annoyance. It represented the entire complex

of social and economic constraints under which

women labored and which both literally and figu-

ratively deprived them of intellectual and artistic

opportunity.

Source:Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton, in an essay for Poetry

for Students,Gale, 2001.

Michael Lake

Lake holds an MA in English and is a poet re-

siding in California. In the following essay, Lake

examines Dickinson’s use of the “exact” word and

how her style infuses her poetry with its “subtle

power.”

Among people who really know little of Emily

Dickinson’s work, there are two predominant prej-

udices: her poetry is morbidly preoccupied with

death, and her style is grammatically and syntacti-

cally confusing. As with some prejudice, there is

at least some basis for making these complaints.

Dickinson was at once fascinated with and appalled

by death. Out of her own misgivings about the

meaning of life and death, she thought often and

deeply about the mysteries of death’s seeming ex-

tinction of the self. As much as she longed for the

comfort of traditional Christian belief or Romantic

pantheist mysticism, she found she lacked the abil-

ity to believe with simple faith in either. She was,

in other words, the consummate nineteenth century

agnostic. But she still struggled ceaselessly with the

ultimate contradiction death seemed to pose to life.

And she was also a keen student of human behav-

ior, having observed death and dying and their ef-

fects on all concerned many times first-hand. And

as far as Dickinson’s linguistic peculiarities go, her

style was unique and arose from her self-developed

style of poetic meditation. Early exposed to Web-

ster’s dictionary and his unusual linguistic theories

about the relationship between verbs and nouns,

Dickinson spent her life searching for the “exact

word” to express her insights into the human con-

dition.

In fact, the magic of Dickinson’s poetry lies in

its ability to say so much with so few words. She

can conjure up an entire scene with a single noun

and tell a whole story in a mere phrase. In fact, her

The Bustle in a House