A History of American Literature

Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 215

The ones that cite her most

Have never passed her haunted house,

Nor simplified her ghost.

To pity those that know her not

Is helped by the regret

That those who know her, know her less

The nearer her they get.

Pushed back from nature, and from the people around her, by their irredeemable

otherness, she turns to her internal geography in the belief that it is all she can ever

really know. Her self and her feelings tend to encompass the world, and her recognition

of this explains the extraordinary intensity with which she describes pleasure,

melancholy, or despair. The eruption of pain, when it comes, becomes an apocalyptic

event (“There’s a certain slant of light,” no. 258) and exultation, joy, as and when it

occurs, seems to irradiate all existence (“I taste a liquor brewed,” no. 214). Only seems

to, however: as Dickinson is only too acutely aware, her self may be her world but that

world is in no way coextensive with reality. This awareness shadows all her work. It

explains, for instance, why in some poems she wryly compares her diminutive stature,

her literal and metaphorical tininess, with the vast unknowability of nature (“Of

bronze and blaze,” no. 290). It also explains why, in many other poems addressed or

attending to nature, she concentrates on the smaller, more elusive inhabitants of the

fields and woods: a small bird or beetle (“A bird came down the walk,” no. 328), the

cricket (“Further in summer than the birds,” no. 1068), the caterpillar (“How soft a

Caterpillar steps –,” no. 1448), a butterfly or bee (“Flowers – Well – if anybody,” no.

137; “Could I but ride indefinite,” no. 661; “The pedigree of Honey,” no. 1627), the

hummingbird (“A route of evanescence,” no. 1463), a fly (“Bee! I’m expecting you!”

no. 1035). Each is a “narrow fellow” for the poet (“A narrow fellow in the grass,” no.

986): a creature that supplies a small paradigm of the fickle, freckled character of the

human environment, its capacity for surprise, strangeness, and mystery.

The elusive, illusory nature of reality, and the radical restraints placed on the self

and its perceptions, are registered with particular force, not only in the poems about

nature, but also in those about death and love. Love and death are frequently linked

in Dickinson’s work: “Because I could not stop for death” (no. 712), where death takes

the form of a gentleman caller – taking a maiden, the narrator of the poem, on a ride

that is at once a courtship ritual and a journey to the graveyard – is only one,

particularly famous example. And even when they are not, they carry a comparable

freight of meaning for the poet because both, for her, mark the possibility of venturing

beyond the limits of the self, crossing the threshold into the unknown, into otherness.

Death, especially, is an experience that is approached with a mixture of desire and fear

because it might, as Dickinson sees it, lead to a “title divine” (“Title Divine – is Mine!,”

no. 1072), the final escape of the self from its confinement into some more expansive,

exalted state – or it might simply be a prelude to oblivion. All she can be sure of is the

simple fact that she cannot be sure; on this, as on all other matters, the verdict must

be left open. The self, Dickinson intimates, is fragile, evanescent, dwarfed by its

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