Volume 10 71
work is highly prized for its crystalline compact-
ness in Japan, where haiku reigns supreme. Even
in translation, her poetry comes across as almost
native to the Japanese. Understanding Dickinson’s
technique of using select words and phrases to elicit
a scene or to penetrate to the core of human expe-
rience helps us to appreciate such a tidy gem as
“The Bustle in a House” with a sense of profound
wonder. There are absolutely no wasted words in
this short poem! Each reveals the depths of an emo-
tional experience that we who live in the twenty-
first century seldom encounter. Much in the tradi-
tion of the meditation poetry that Dickinson so
admired in George Herbert, a seventeenth-century
Metaphysical poet, “The Bustle in a House” med-
itates on the figures of a “grief delayed” in com-
pressed language, syntactical “elision,” and choice
imagery. It is a poetic achievement that in many
ways anticipates Imagism and other modern poetic
movements because of its use of single words and
phrases to tell its story through pictures that reveal
so much about the human condition with an econ-
omy of language.
Today dying is often hidden from us, obscured
behind the facade of high-tech “life-support” sys-
tems in alien clinical environments. And death is
disguised, cosmetically “sanitized,” and made un-
real in corporate “funeral parlors.” But in Dickin-
son’s day, death was “up close and personal,” an
entirely domestic affair. The dying often remained
in their own beds at home during their illness and
later “lay in state” in the family’s front room or
parlor. Given the tightness of living quarters at the
time and the socially required Puritan ethic of self-
control, grieving survivors in Dickinson’s social
circle often had nowhere to “hide” emotionally
from their inward torment. But according to thana-
tologists, the psychologists who study the phe-
nomena of death and dying, denial is usually the
first of many stages in the grieving process in most
cultures anyway. It is logical, then, that retreat into
the everyday details of domestic life would be, es-
pecially for women of that era, the safest place to
hide from the pain of losing a loved one.
Indeed, Dickinson creates an image of quick
and efficient domesticity in the poem’s very fist
line, “The Bustle in a House.” The repeated sibi-
lants in “Bustle” and “House,” occurring in the first
and third stressed syllables of the trimeter line,
onomatopoeically produce the swishing sounds of
skirts and petticoats moving swiftly about the
house. And the second line immediately discloses
the reason for all this activity by locating its time
and circumstance, “The morning after Death.” No-
tice, however, that the circumstance under which
the “Bustle” occurs (“after Death”) and the time at
which it occurs (“The morning”) are really the same
because “morning” homophonically echoes
“mourning,” the real circumstance under which the
housekeeping takes place. The “Bustle,” therefore,
is part of the “mourning” due to the “Death” of the
beloved.
But the third and fourth lines of the poem ac-
tually exalt the housework beyond the pale of
merely mundane labor and simple psychological
denial, asserting that it “Is solemnest of industries
/ Enacted upon Earth.” With characteristic irony,
Dickinson plays with the multiple meanings of
words in the dictionary. Consulting Random
House’s Unabridged Dictionary(Second Edition),
we discover that cleaning house is aptly named an
“industry” in this line, for it is indeed an ancient
“systematic work or labor,” traditionally performed
by women. But “industry” also means “energetic,
devoted activity ... ; diligence.” As such, it implies
“application, effort, assiduity, [and] industrious-
ness.” Dickinson, of course, had all these meanings
in mind. But as an industrious effort performed in
dedication to the dead, this particular housework
reveals an assiduity that approaches spiritual de-
votion. By calling it the “solemnest of industries,”
Dickinson also invokes an older meaning of
“solemn” to portray this house cleaning as a “sa-
cred,” even a “ceremonial,” activity. In fact, the
choice of the word “Enacted” completes the val-
orization of housework from “just woman’s work”
to a sacramental office of religious devotion.
But note that at the end of the first stanza, we
find one of Dickinson’s characteristic dashes. Usu-
ally used to slow the reading of her poetry’s hymn
meter for verbal emphasis, it acts syntactically here
to list the contents of the “solemnest of industries”
enumerated in the last stanza. Part of the “Bustle
in a House / The morning after Death” lies in “The
Sweeping up the Heart.” In this, Dickinson playsThe Bustle in a HouseShe can conjure up
an entire scene with a
single noun and tell a
whole story in a mere
phrase.”