Theses observations are meant to suggest a framework for reading Emily Dickinson's poems, particularly some of the more obscure ones. My basic premise--that Dickinson herself experienced a kind of surplus of plenitude, a surfeit of mystical presence that threatened at different times in her life to overwhelm her--is not, I believe, entirely original. Here I want to consider some of the consequences of this abnormally heightened mental or spiritual life for the poetry-which struggles to contain, manage, and even to diminish it.

First, some general observations about the manner in which she has been misunderstood. A wide divergence between public image and real substance seems to be the fate of the major American poets. One has only to think of the discovery of dark, even demonic strains in the supposedly optimistic Emerson and Frost, or of the disparity between Walt Whitman seen as the good gray national bard and the raging narcissistic omnisexuality of the poetry. Nowhere is this gulf between the commonly imagined persona and the poetry wider than in the case of Dickinson. Most Dickinson criticism is narrowly focused. A small number of the poems are susceptible to comprehensible interpretation; as a result, these are the ones that are most widely anthologized and discussed, while an embarrassed silence or the pall of reputed failure falls over the rest. Even her best critics--Charles Anderson, for example--treat her as a kind of eighteenth-century wit, seeing her language as more adequate to the demands of her subject matter than it is or ever could be. (Cynthia Griffin Wolff gets closer to the truth when she writes of the inaccessibility of Dickinsons strongest poetry.) I should therefore explain that when I speak here of reading Dickinson, I mean the experience of reading the Thomas H. Johnson edition of her complete poems from beginning to end.

But while biographers, anthologists, and critics share some of the responsibility, most of it falls on the poet herself. It is a necessary price that must be paid for the poetry, which everywhere puts up almost insurmountable obstacles. It is poetry that masquerades as one thing only to reveal itself as another, but this revelation is not necessarily awarded to "close reading." If there is a kind of reading that can lead to a full appreciation of Dickinson's work, how would one describe it?

Let us say that there are two kinds of reading. In one kind the reader approaches a difficult or ambiguous text, reads, gets stuck, reads over and over up to that point, is at last satisfied that the text is understood, and then moves on. This is the reading advocated in theory by a variety of formalist criticisms, although strict adherence is difficult to practice. One could also imagine, in this kind of reading, a reader who goes over and over the text, concludes that it is impossible to understand, and then gives up, refusing to continue. But whether one advances or retreats, victoriously masters the text or surrenders to its opacity in either humility or disgust, this is not the kind of reading to which Dickinson's poetry will yield its rewards. Her poems are elusive, not merely difficult.

Another kind of reading would accept the persistence of mystery that only deepens as one proceeds. One would eventually realize that this accretion of mystery, this growing, changing, unfolding mysteriousness, is the experience of the text. Kafka's The Castle is not only one of the more obvious literary works which this kind of reading best suits, but also a symbolic representation of this very reading process. Such a text both has a horizon, in Gadamer's sense of"something that moves with one and invites one to advance further," and is a horizon, to be approached through what one might call not close reading, but "reading at a distance."

It is fitting, perhaps necessary, that such a text have something elusive about it; elusiveness is the lure that draws the reader forward. This lure is different from, say, the solution to the crime that awaits us at the end of a murder mystery, an expectation that protracts (even elicits) our search but does not outwit or successfully evade it. To say that a text has an elusive quality is at once vague and highly comprehensible. Rather than rejecting it as meaningless, could we postulate a methodology for bringing a text's elusiveness into focus? I believe we can, but only through a process generally regarded as even more specious: the discovery of affinities between one text and another, regardless of chronology. If I were to assert (as I in fact believe) that Dickinson is one of the handful of truly original poets in the language, it is, I suppose, incumbent upon me to demonstrate how she so greatly differs from other writers. But this great difference is an elusive quality I cannot define but can only bang closer by saying that I find it here, and here, and so on. I have no interest in tracking down sources. Rather I want to track down something I can recognize but cannot name, something that appears intermittently, in one text and then in another. Disregarding, then, all questions of before and after, of who did or did not read whom, and positing the existence of this elusive quality in these lines:

The Grass divides as with a Comb--
A spotted shaft is seen--
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on--

we might ask if it helps in some way to remark this same quality in these lines from Marvell's "The Garden":

The nectarene, and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass
Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

Or, straying farther off well-worn literary historical paths, we might ponder the affinity between

I had not minded-Walls--
Were Universe-one Rock--
And far I heard his silver Call
The other side the Block--
I'd tunnel--till my Groove
Pushed sudden thro' to his--

and the opening of Dylan Thomas's Vision and Prayer:

If they don't help, we can drop such pastimes and move on to more productive pursuits. But if something is illuminated by such juxtapositions, perhaps it might prove worthwhile to follow whatever vector of speculation we have thereby set in motion. We might consider, for example, that Thomas, influenced both by surrealism and by T. S. Eliot's admonitions to read the Metaphysical poets, wrote a poetry that was itself an odd amalgam of surrealism and imitation-Metaphysical. Dickinson, whose affinities with the Metaphysicals have often been remarked, has yet a quality that maces it impossible to confuse her poems with theirs; can we call this a proto-surrealist quality? If so, it is not like the surrealism of Breton or of Max Ernst--it is, however, very similar to Thomas's, whose surrealist touches William York Tindall has aptly compared with Salvador Dali's.

Noon--is the Hinge of Day--
Evening--the Tissue Door--

The "Tissue Door"? Is that Thomas? No (a surprise, I would imagine, if the dashes didn't give it away), it is Dickinson. Of course, nothing is easier than to label a given writer a "proto-surrealist." But it seems to me we do a service to a misunderstood poet by calling attention in addition to poems that have, for various reasons, been virtually ignored by anthologists and commentators, ones like following:

Dropped into the Ether Acre--
Wearing the Sod Gown--
Bonnet of Everlasting Laces--
Brooch--frozen on--

Horses of Blonde--and Coach of Silver
Baggage a strapped Pearl--
Journey of Down--and Whip of Diamond--
Riding to meet the Earl--

Lovers of Dickinson's poetry often have to defend it against absurd but frequent charges of being too jingly or flighty or self-pitying. Perhaps the best defense is simply to produce a poem like this one, in many ways more typical than anthology pieces like "The soul selects her own society" or "Because I could not stop for Death." It is a wild poetry, filled with images of the body and of the countryside. Its two poles are spiritual plenitude and spatial constriction; the Nature that comes alive, reaches out and attempts to ensnare us, sod the thin-walled necropolis/nursery in which we mysteriously awaken.

The first pole may originate in Emerson, particularly the side of him that finds in nature both limitless exuberance and a language of living hieroglyphics.

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture. An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned man is a torch. A lamb is influence; a snake is subtle spite; Rowers express to us the delicate affections. Light and darkness are our familiar expression for knowledge and ignorance; and heat for love. Visible distance behind and before us, is respectively our image of memory and hope.

To which we might compare:

"Heaven" has different Signs--to me--
Sometimes, I think that Noon
Is but a symbol of the Place--
And when again, at Dawn,

A mighty look runs round the World
And settles in the Hills--
An Awe if it should be like that
Upon the Ignorance steals--

The other pole, harder to delineate, is more a feeling than an image or motif. Its principal characteristic is narrowing of space, but it sometimes has about it an odd quality of community and of waiting, as if the speaker had landed in a cubicle that was part of some larger social grid.

I plucked at our Partition
As One should pry the Walls--
Between Himself--and Horror's Twin--
Within Opposing Cells--

A conviction that this tapering space is a threshold or a limit spurs the speaker to speculate, argue, or simply establish contact with the dimly intuited forms at her side. A possible source may be another writer Dickinson loved dearly, Sir Thomas Browne, especially this sentence from Urne Buriall:

A Dialogue between two Infants in the womb concerning the state of this world, might handsomely illustrate our ignorance of the next, whereof methinks we yet discourse in Platoes denne, and are but Embryon Philosophers.

Although Dickinson herself professed complete ignorance of Poe, it is this aspect of her work, more than her somewhat morbid fascination with the deathbed scene, that most links her work with his, not only with the constriction of space in such obsessional .meditations as The Premature Burial, The Colloquy of Monos and Unos, and The Pit and the Pendulum but with the tenets of formal spatial circumscription in The Philosophy of Composition and with the confined universe of Eureka. Dickinson, then, would be the only American poet strong enough to contain both of the major antithetical major strains of American poetry that Harold Bloom traces to Emerson and Poe. (I hope I will not be misunderstood, nor do I wish to contribute to the caricature of Dickinson as some sort of shrinking violet when I speak of her being frightened and overwhelmed. The conflict in her work between the poet and the direct experience of Being is rather to be conceived in terms of a battle of olympian proportions; a weaker poet would have been crushed utterly.) In fact, as I hope to show, it is a unified experience of reality that gives birth to these two seemingly opposed tendencies.

There is nothing in Richard B. Sewall's exemplary biography to support my hypothesis of the spiritual oversaturation of Dickinson's psyche. He does speak of a period of crisis but locates it in her adulthood. I would speculate, however, that from early childhood Dikinson waged a rather desperate struggle to maintain psychic integrity against a spiritualized natural world that encroached upon her, spoke to her, and, in a sense, threatened to engulf her. What evidence there is comes from the poetry itself. While the poetry can often be one of personae (she was very fond of Robert Browning) it oocasionally adopts a heavily internalized autobiographical mode, some of whose moments should give us serious pause.

The first Day's Night had come--
And grateful that a thing
So terrible--had been endured--
I told my Soul to sing--

She said her Strings were snaps--
Her Bow--to Atoms blown--
And so to mend her--gave me work
Until another Morn--

And then--a Day as huge
As Yesterdays in pairs,
Unrolled its horror in my face--
Until it blocked my eyes--

My Brain--begun to laugh--
I mumbled--like a fool--
And tho' 'tis Years ago--that Day--
My Brain keeps giggling--still.

And Something's odd-within--
That person that I was--
And this One--do not feel the same--
Could it be Madness--this?

The scenario is cosmic; the speaker is immediately caught up in a drama of biblical magnitude. But the dimensions of the soul are not equal to the task, especially when called upon to give voice to the experience that has been endured. Moreover, this experience is not over and done with, as the speaker at first believed, but continues in waves. Initially made mute, she is then made blind, and the response to this horrific largeness is the giddy laughter of the stage bedlamite, laughter that continues until the present tense of the poem. The last two lines of the fourth stanza anticipate the close of "Because I could not stop for Death,"

Since then--'tis Centuries-and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity--

a poem which also makes reference to a single, momentous, cataclysmic day in the life. An internal change has been wrought by this experience. Would the span of time between the inner metamorphosis and the present moment be dwelt upon so insistently ("'tis Years"/"tis Centuries") if a disturbingly long period of time has not elapsed between then and now--the distance between childhood and adulthood?

I think I was enchanted
When first a sombre Girl--
I read that Foreign Lady--
The Dark--felt beautiful--

And whether it was noon at
night--Or only Heaven-at
Noon--For very Lunacy of
Light I had not power to tell--

The Bees-became as Butterflies--
The Butterflies--as Swans--
Approached--and spurned the narrow Grass--
And just the meanest Tunes

That Nature murmured to herself
To keep herself in Cheer--
I took for Giants--practicing
Titantic Opera--

In Dickinson's poetry the haunted and the holy are often the same. To be haunted is to have corridors; there is nothing capable of housing ghosts that is not in some sense architectural, except the mind itself, which she often represents with architectural metaphors. The haunted is opposed to spatial expanse; it is rather a segmentation of space. A phenomenology of the constriction of space in her work would concern itself primarily with images of architectural limitation, especially with doors and floors. Her poetry is remarkable for its way of forever drawing attention to the scene of its own composition; in this she resembles Proust, and for similar extratextual reasons. Hovering around both canons is the aura of agoraphobia, bringing into especially strong relief that which is proximate and heimlich to the author.

If the architectural structure is holy (and here we may properly think of a church as well as the poet's house), what of the area surrounding the manmade enclosure? It is not opposed to the holy in the same sense that fallen Nature is opposed to Heaven or the invisible to the visible. The two are at variance in the sense that belief is to be distinguished from vision. To believe is to subscribe to a series of tenets, a process that takes place, like communication itself, within the enclosure of a society, a polls. But to have vision is to confront an unmediated reality, an experience that occurs outside boundaries and indeed has, as one of its characteristics, the obliteration of limits.

The content of visionary experience cannot be haunted as the content of belief can be, for belief carries with it the departed ghosts of all those who have handed down a particular body of things to be believed in. Between vision and belief stands the anomalous phenomenon of the absolutely new creed, that is to say, a doctrine not as yet haunted. Kierkegaard calls religion a poetry of fixed metaphors; reversed, this observation means that poetry, at least the poetry of vision, is an embryonic religion, one that has not yet been reified. The poet, mediator between vision and belief, occupies the space of a religion's inception, existing, as Walter Benjamin would say of human life in general, for the purpose of making sonic the mute language of Nature.

So the holy is not opposed, in Dickinson's poetry, to the unholy; rather the holy that is haunted is at variance with the holy that is not yet haunted. We have the locus of the poem, usually an enclosed holy and haunted space (hence its often interchangeable status as scene of writing, church, mausoleum, womb, mind, or nursery), and the great unhaunted outside which exerts its pressure on the poet to translate it into a new creed, a new language which ghosts may inhabit. This is also to say that language itself is that which houses, that it exercises some of the enclosing and limiting functions of architecture. The exegetical method that would best deal with Dickinson's poetry would come to terms with the tension between the ineffable and the mediate, not because this is the theme chosen by her for her work (as in, say, Holderlin or Rilke) but rather (and in this she is closer to Mallarme) because her work is a kind of efFect of this tension, an ontological trauma that spills over into language.

One of the feared consequences of trying to domesticate the natural world, to invite it, as it were, into the house of language, is the jealousy and resentment the newcomer may arouse in the ghosts who already reside there. There is also a danger of overcrowding; the space of the haunted house may become even more constricted. So another option presents itself. Instead of playing host to the ineffable the poet may, like a lenient warden, release the language-ghosts into the infinite as-yet-unhaunted expanse of the silent world. Faced with the option of being haunted or being overwhelmed, Dickinson will usually choose the former, although occasionally she will try to fend of the latter by a kind of anticipatory activity (to be discussed in more detail below) in which, by being hyperalert, she tries to overwhelm Being before Being can overwhelm her. The name for direct experience of Being in its benign aspect is plenitude; in its malign or fearsome aspect it might be called too much plenitude. Dichnson's name for it is Awe.

Now if all articles of belief come about originally through an attempt to translate direct experience of Being into language, how is it that such direct experience remains possible? But there is no reason to believe that this origin is still recognizable in the creeds banded down to the people of Dickinson's day. Direct experience of Nature, in the Emersonian sense, was still a relatively new perspective on external reality (and the audience being urged into such experience--outside any established church or doctrine--was of an unprecedented size), however easily its lineage may be traced from Meister Eckhart through Goethe, Schelling, Coleridge, and others. The domestication of Nature in Dickinson's poetry has much in common with the doctrine of apocatastasis (which may go a long way in explaining her curious affinities with Blake, a writer she seems not to have read). In this doctrine, first promulgated by Origen and later accepted by Milton, Vaughan, Blake, and others, Nature was conceived as originally human, inextricably bound up thereby with the Fall of Man and consequently in need of the divine restitution promised by the Gospels. In Dickinson's work, however, the salvation of Nature is at the same time a haunting. The novelty of the direct experience of Nature must be taken into account; the percipient is a being formerly haunted by past creeds. As the ghosts and demons flee the subject in order to allow for the unmediated vision, where have they to go but into the object? And here we have another explanation for her undeniable affinities with Poe, especially his recurring evocations of a haunted landscape within a historical context where one would least expect it, the New World in the process of breaking its ties with the Old. (There is a similar working out of these themes through an architectural allegory in Henry James's "The Jolly Corner.")

In a number of poems she writes of the constriction of space created by the arrival of the new guest, the spirit of Nature reduced to the manageable dimensions of a ghost:

Perhaps the Other--Peace--
Would interrupt the Dark--
And crowd the little Room--
Too scant--by Cubits--to contain
The Sacrament--of Him--

or of learning to live under the new crowded conditions:

I got so I could take his name
Without--Tremendous gain--
The Stop-sensation--on my Soul--
And Thunder--in the Room--

I got so I could walk across
That Angle in the floor,
Where he turned so, and I turned--how--
And all our Sinew tore--

In a poem I will return to when discussing the role of anticipation in her work, she seems to have changed places with domesticated Nature. Exiled, outside the house, she returns to its threshold but fears to enter:

I leaned upon the Awe--
I lingered with Before--
The Second like an Ocean rolled
And broke against my ear--

In the curious line "I leaned upon the Awe" she is describing her newfound sense of ease with the excess plenitude that had previously frightened her. The Awe, once an immaterial presence, is now as tangible and supportive as a wall. As the poem proceeds, however, we see that the pose she is striking is a bluff; she is, in fact, terrified:

I laughed a crumbling Laugh
That I could fear a Door
Who Consternation compassed
And never winced before.

I fitted to the Latch
My Hand, with trembling care
Lest back the awful Door should spring
And leave me in the Floor--

The emotional trajectory of this poem is a familiar one in Dickinson (the best-known example being "A narrow fellow in the grass"), going as it does from a false front of self-assurance and belittlement of the feared object to an open avowal of stark terror. (One wonders about the relationship of this crumbling laugh to the giggling brain of poem 410.) What makes this poem problematic is not ambiguity, in an Empsonian sense, but rather the elusiveness generated by the inverted syntax of"Who Consternation compassed," causing it to be less than immediately apparent that it is the speaker of the poem who compassed Consternation rather than the door that was compassed by Consternation, by the speaker's hand, rather than a key, fitting the latch, by the surreality of "in the Floor" (not under or on the Floor), as if we were to envision the I of the poem at risk of somehow becoming another knot in the floorboard. Like the "way" and the "gate," doors in Dickinson's poems are narrow and straight, or, as she says in a poem which quotes the Sermon on the Mount:

You're right--"the way is narrow"--
And "difficult the Gate"--
And "few there be"--Correct again--
That "enter in--thereat"--

Entering and leaving are never simple matters for Dickinson, but neither is stasis; if doors are narrow and difficult to negotiate, floors are limits upon or into which people or objects sink or fall. To be "floorless" is to be without limits, to be at home in the uncircumscribed abode of vision.

The grass does not appear afraid,
I often wonder he
Can stand so close and look so bold
At what is awe to me.
Related somehow they may be,
The sedge stands next the sea--
Where he is floorless
And does no timidity betray

But nature is a stranger yet;
The ones that cite her most
Have never passed her haunted house,
Nor simplified her ghost.

To pity those who know her not
Is helped by the regret
That those who know her, know her less
The nearer  her they get.

The discipline of translating direct experience of Being into words makes Dickinson as much a mystic as a poet, and there is a similar tension between mystic and artist in her work as we find in Mallarme's, a similar sense that all writing is a desecration of the whiteness of the page, all speech a desecration of holy silence.

To tell the Beauty would decrease
To state the Spell demean--
There is a syllable-less Sea
Of which it is the sign--

There are, moreover, degrees to this silence (as in Heidegger's distinction between the reticence of the man who has something to say and that of the man who merely stops talking). But it is the silence of Nature which concerns her, and this may be either the antediluvian silence that is one with the expressly immediate word of God or the silence of fallen Nature. Only the latter needs translating into human language, for the former is already the unspoken word in the existence of things. While it may be true that language, as ordinarily understood, can only state mediation, that it cannot reunite the two dimensions of Being, this does not preclude Dickinson from trying to utter the ineffable, from trying to return language to its Academic state of bliss, even when faced with this ontological limit. Her famous axiom "Nature is a Haunted House--but Art--a House that tries to be haunted" affirms the vitality of this effort.

There is no Silence in the Earth--so silent
As that endured
Which uttered, would discourage Nature
And haunt the World.

Any evaluation of Dickinson's merits as a poet eventually has to face the issue of eccentricity, to take up the once lively debate (whose terms can best be seen in R. P. Blackmur's The Expense of Greatness) over just how consciously she introduced into her work those aspects of it which now strike us as innovations. Some of the shortcomings of Blackmur's essay are due to the fact that the complete poems were not available to him, a state of affairs he begins his essay by lamenting. Nevertheless his view that Dickinson "never knew anything about the craft of verse well enough to exemplify it, let alone revolt from it" assumes unfairly that because she worked in relative isolation she never mastered the rudiments of poetic craftmanship. (Sewall points out that her voracious reading of Shakespeare, whom she resembles in the wild abandon of her imagery and who arguably suffices for anyone as instructor in poetic technique, ran counter to the notions of seemly literary conduct in the Amherst of her day. ) More important for Blackmur's argument (and for almost all subsequent devaluations of Dickinson's poetry) is his preconceived idea of what a good poem is: "A good poem so constitutes its parts as at once to contain them and to deliver or release by the psychological force of their sequence the full effect only when the poem is done." This prissy, absurdly limiting notion of a good poem goes hand in hand with his rejection of any characterization of Dickinson as a mystic. Of a typical line of Dickinson poetry he writes that "its only meaning is in the frantic strain towards meaning--a strain so frantic that all responsibility towards the shapes and primary significance of words was ignored." With his New Critical perspective, Blackmur cannot see in this abnegation of "responsibility" anything interesting, anything that reaches out to extend the boundaries of poetry in a revolutionary way. With his eye for what the poem does not reach, for the standard to which it does not conform, Blackmur is at one with Higginson, Bowles, and Dickinson's other puzzled contemporaries whose combined good intentions almost succeeded in excluding her from the pages of literary history.

An equally misleading view of her work, but from an opposite perspective, comes from those who use her as a foil to the supposedly more expansive Whitman, as did Allen Ginsberg in the recent Voices and Visions television series. This misconception will probably disappear when the present cycle of simpleminded and wearisome cliches about the virtues of unrhymed and unmetered verse has finally run its course; it is therefore less pernicious, because less tenacious. But to see her form as remarkable primarily for its un-Whitmanian constriction is not only to overlook her extraordinary variations on iambic tetrameter and trimeter lines, but to underrate her own sophistication in the choice of Isaac Watts's hymn meter for a poetry so visionary as to be militantly nondenominational. What I want to stress here is a formal paradox, rather like the Orphic/onomastic tension in the style of Finnegans Wake, which races and flows even as it is arrested into absolute stillness by the density of the allusions and the double takes required by the punning. In both cases the formal paradox mirrors a thematic one; in Joyce it is the interdependence of permanence and change which is mirrored; in Dickinson it is a similar interdependence of the finite and the infinite. Why, in considering nineteenth century poetry written in hymn meter, do we automatically discount any notion that the poet envisioned the work being performed that way? When we have an entire canon--with a few exceptions--working formal variations on hymn meter it is especially absurd to discount this probability. There is indeed a formal constriction in Dickinson's poetry, but that constriction is the weight of the poem after the music has been subtracted. Poetry has no greater potential to create real presence than when it is sung by a congregation in an enclosed place of worship. Given the dialectic sketched here between the enclosed and the open, the silent and the spoken, this formal paradox bestows on her work a final and somewhat fearful symmetry.

It is in considering Dickinson's strategies for reduction that a related formal problem should be addressed. Those who doubt that she is a great or even a good poet (I am here remembering private conversations, not what is voiced in books or in academic journals) often complain of the jingly or nursery-rhyme quality of her verse. This quality evidently has the effect, for many ears, of trivializing the content, of reducing whatever potential for sublimity the poem may have. When we consider not only the themes she is willing to take up, but also the diction she is ready to employ, we should at least consider the element of bravura her choice of form entails, as if she were daring those themes and words to enter such a form and find a home there. But this trivializing effect is quite intentional; it is congruent with the course of the narrative of many of her poems. Ibis narrative involves the reduction of something grandiose and overwhelming, a biblical panorama, for example, or something so intangible as the weather. It is important to note that these attempts et reduction inevitably fail; or rather that the story of this failure, the inability of these giant forms to retain their temporarily deflated condition, constitutes whatever narrative element these poems possess. This instability is again reflected in the formal gestalt, which shifts from the trivializing nursery-rhyme sound of the spoken (or silently read) poem to the full-bodied grandeur of the choired hymn.

The best-known example of this kind of poem is "A narrow Fellow in the Grass." A synopsis of the poem might describe it as an attempt to turn the Fall of Man into a picnic. Satan, the serpent, beguiler of Eve and agent of man's fall into sin, is represented as "e narrow fellow in the grass," and in the merry singsong cadences of the poem his preference for a "Boggy Acre / A Floor too cool for Corn--" is detailed. Some strikingly beautiful and naturalistic descriptions of the snake are given by the poet, who speaks, curiously, in the persona of a man remembering his encounter with the snake "when a Boy, and Barefoot--" (Does the persona have to be male because Eve's encounter with the serpent is of a different order from Adam's?) The emphasis is on the snake's inconspicuousness (an ear. lier poem already quoted speaks of "the narrow grass"; we therefore may envision the snake as a narrow fellow in the narrow grass, doubly well concealed in that he is hidden in an element which is itself constricted), yet the poem reaches out to include the reader: "You may have met Him--did you not." The penultimate stanza connects the poet's feelings of well-being not only with encounters with the snake, but with other denizens of the natural world as well.

Several of Nature's People
I know, and they know me--
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality--

This last, almost oxymoronic phrase bears scrutiny: a transport denoting the state of being moved by strong or intensely pleasurable emotion, and cordiality denoting sincere affection and kindness. Connotatively the contrast is even more interesting; within the historical context of Transcendentalism and of the New England/ Victorian cult of domestic bliss, it is as if the poet were speaking of feeling powerful enough to lift her (him) from an earthly to a transcendental realm, but a realm characterized nevertheless by the cordiality of domestic and neighborly virtues. It is, again, the excess plenitude of the natural world driving the poet into an enclosed space where she will attempt to domesticate the natural and to make familiar the unfamiliar, only to find herself both the haunter and the haunted. Importantly, the attempt at reduction fails, for the last stanza contains that full encounter with dread so characteristic and constitutive of the peculiar courage and strength of Dickinson's poetry.

But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone--

In other words, the classic symptoms of anxiety.

Sometimes Heaven is figured as a little town, as in the very Blakean

Where tired Children placid sleep
Thro' Centuries of noon
This place is Bliss--this town is Heaven--
Please, Pater, pretty soon!

Or an ostensibly naturalistic description is filled with phantasmagoric minutiae.

A Hurrying Home of little Men
To Houses unperceived--
All this--and more--if I should tell--
Would never be believed--

One of the most enigmatic of these poems, which I quote here in its entirety, goes:

Drab Habitation of Whom?
Tabernacle or Tomb?--
Or Dome of Worm--
Or Porch of Gnome--
Or some Elf's Catacomb?

If this poem seems so condensed as to preclude any question of narrative structure, I should point out that the interrogative form is, by its very nature, open-ended, opening out, that is, on a horizon of narrative which it is the reader's prerogative to supply. This interrogative form condemns the poem's attempts at diminution to failure as well. Beginning with "Tabernacle" as a possible answer to the poem's initial question and ending with "some Elf's Catacomb," the very resonance of the poem, despite its palpably descending scale, causes all the reduced images to expand in the afterglow of the poem's recitation. It is an excellent example of how Dickinson's illusion of formal constriction and her thematic handling of enclosed space interact to create a paradoxically expanded poetry. The images linger in their instability, solidify in their fragility and remain long after images of a more positive capability would have died. This open-ended wonder is the precondition for the kind of experience she writes about, and though it may seem small it has the power to overwhelm, even to destroy.

Wonder--is not precisely Knowing
And not precisely Knowing not--
A beautiful but bleak condition
He has not lived who has not felt--

Suspense--is his maturer Sister--
Whether Adult Delight is Pain
Or of itself a new misgiving--
This is the Gnat that mangles men--

One of Dickinson's more interesting strategies for managing excess plenitude is temporal rather than spatial; it involves maintaining vigilance, even hyperalertness, against some sudden, unscheduled encounter with "the Awe." Her poems are filled with such anticipated encounters. One that I have already considered, but in an unceremoniously truncated form, begins

I Years had been from
Home And now before the Door
I dared not enter, lest a Face
I never saw before

Stare stolid into mine
And ask my Business there--
"My Business but a Life I left
Was such remaining there?"

Another speaks of the approach of a sinister visitor, this time it is the host rather than the guest who is afraid.

It's coming--the postponeless Creature--
It gains the Block--and now--it gains the Door--
Chooses its latch, from all the other fastenings--
Enters--with a "You know Me--Sir"?

If the general dynamic of Dickinson's poetry is anything like what I have sketched here, we might expect the guest/host relationship to be an object of frequent meditation. And it is. The following poem I qoute in its entirety, both because it illustrates how anticipation functions in her work and because it summarizes the themes I have been dealing with.

One need not be a Chamber--to be Haunted--
One need not be a House--
The Brain has Corridors--surpassing
Material Place--

Far safer, of a Midnight Meeting
External Ghost
Than its interior Confronting--
That Cooler Host.

Far safer, through an Abbey gallop,
The Stones a'chase--
Than Unarmed, one's a'self encounter--
In lonesome Place--

Ourself behind ourself, concealed--
Should startle most--
Assassin hid in our Apartment
Be Horror's least.

The Body--borrows a Revolver--
He bolts the Door--
O'erlooking a superior spectre--
Or More--

This is one of her few poems where full presence is most clearly envisioned as an encounter between self and the same self; it is tempting to see it as referring to that perfect alignment of self and inner voice denounced as pernicious and impossible by deconstruction. (The great problem, yet to be satisfactorily worked out by deconstructionist theory, is how it can be both.) The poet acknowledges that to be startled by one's self would be the greatest danger, the most fearful event. But this knowledge is itself protective. It serves to alert her that the self may be anywhere; it may lie concealed in the corridors of the brain, but it may also be lurking in the floorboards, in a boggy acre or a lonesome place. Her response is vigilance. The function of particulars in Dickinson>'s poetry, even in its idiosyncratic capitalization and removal of words from familiar contexts, may reflect the tendency of a hyperalert or suspicious person to sift through experience for "clues."

David Shapiro in his book Neurotic Styles attempts to describe the thought processes behind rather than the causes or pathology of such disturbances as obsessive compulsion, paranoia, hysteria, impulsiveness, and so on. In his chapter on paranoid style be makes the point that for the suspicious or paranoid mentality it is not actual danger that is dreaded most but surprise. Faced with the unusual or unaccountable, the paranoid person "must scrutinize it, cover it, or, as it were, get on top of it. He must, in other words, bring it into the orbit of his schema of things and, in effect, satisfy himself that it is not or at least is no longer surprising." Now my purpose is not clinically to diagnose Dickinson as a paranoid personality (although I think a strong argument could be made) but to shed light on what I think really is occurring in the poetry. For the most part, the dynamic of what at least looks like paranoia is precipitated not by a mere garden-variety paranoia of human plots and social conspiracies, but by that cosmic paranoia modern readers associate with Thomas Pychon. It is, in other words, the entire machinery of reality itself, of man and nature in all their permutations, that conspires against her. Given the enormity of this potential foe, the wild strength and furious recalcitrance of Dickinson's poetry is quite appropriate.

The more familiar faces of paranoia are visible as well, as any study with a concordance of the word "they" in her poems will reveal immediately. Even aside from what we know of her reclusive later life, of how paradoxically conspicuous her manner of living made her in the community of Amherst, and aside from her uncommonly bold apostasy vis-a-vis her Congregationalist peers, the poetry itself recounts a tale of peril and persecution at the hands of the "they".

I'm ceded--I've stopped being Theirs--
The name They dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church
Is finished using, now,
And They can put it with my Dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools,
I've finished threading--too--

At times she veers towards something like revenge fantasy.

They won't frown always--some sweet Day
When I forget to tease--
They'll recollect how cold I looked
And how I just said "Please.

Then They will hasten to the Door
To call the little Girl
Who cannot thank Them for the Ice
That filled the lisping full.

But what comes through most strikingly is a strangely proprietary attitude towards the vision that so frightens her.

Society for me my misery
Since Girl of Thee--

It is as if the vision were some escaped convict or runaway slave seeking refuge in her house, as if the greatest disaster for both the poet and her vision would be for Them to find out about it. Hence the reluctance to publish; hence the protective, almost maternal solicitude for this terrible vision.

Dickinson's poetry is of an obscurity which makes it not inappropriate to ask simply, What are these poems about? My observations have been largely an attempt to answer that question; any light they may shed on Dickinson as a personality is, in a sense, incidental. Even if she were quite unlike the person I have described here, I would hope that these observations fit her persona, and therefore the poetry. (That she chose this persona at all only makes it more likely that she was herself motivated by similar, if not identical impulses.)

The qualities of this poetry are, as I suggested initially, highly elusive (constriction of space being perhaps the least elusive of the three). One might think of constriction as the lesser of two fears, bearing the same relationship to "the Awe" that a good ghost story bears to something genuinely frightening, like political terror. Reduction is its idealist version; the terms belittlement or deflation might have served just as well. Anticipation is the medium in which the first two qualities operate. Like plenitude, it may have a benign or a malign aspect; what I have meant by it here is the need or the attempt to anticipate what is going to happen from one minute to the next. A major casualty of the transition from the older Calvinist theology to the less-mediated experience of Emerson and Dickinson was the doctrine of predestination; the need to anticipate is its posthumous revenge. All three of these qualities seek to manage and control what is otherwise overwhelming and disorienting; perhaps the great power of this poetry is in proportion to the poet's need to exercise such control. Regardless of motivation, she succeeds in doing what any great poet should do, and we have only begun to read her.