Few poets in twentieth century, let alone the nineteenth, have incorporated scientific concepts into their work as purposively and effectively as Emily Dickinson.[1] She possessed an amazing comprehensive scientific and technical vocabulary.[2] More than 200 of her poems touch on scientific themes (see Appendix); she draws on most of the sciences, from physical sciences such as physics, astronomy, chemistry, and geology, to biological sciences such as botany, physiology, medicine, and even psychology, to science in general (the largest category), plus mathematics and applied science or technology.

Why did Dickinson devote such attention to science? We know that she studied the subject in school, apparently with considerable enthusiasm. Writing to Abiah root from Mount Holyoke Seminary in January 1848, Dickinson expresses her enthusiasm for "`Silliman's Chemistry' & Cutler's Physiology" (L 20)[3]; shortly thereafter she writes to her brother Austin that his last letter found her "all engrossed in the history of Sulphuric Acid!!!!!" (L 22)--a humorous exclamation, to be sure, but in view of Mary Lyon's stringent curriculum, probably factual nonetheless. Even earlier, at Amherst Academy, Dickinson had almost certainly fallen under the spell of the naturalist and Christian mystic Edward Hitchcock, who taught geology at the college (later he became its president) and who believed that close study of nature was a way of coming to know God.[4]

One must also consider the widespread scientific and technological developments that were taking place during Dickinson's childhood and adolescence in the 1830s and 40s. To cite a few examples: Joseph Henry discovered electromagnetic induction and electromotive force, the massachusetts inventor Samuel Guthrie discovered chloroform, and John Bull established the first steam railway in the United States, all in 1831; Samuel Morse invented the telegraph in 1832 (it was put to commercial use in 1844); in the same year, cadaver dissection was legalized in Massachusetts; Henry Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre invented photography in 1839; Crawford Long used ether in surgery in 1842; a new planet--Neptune--was discovered in 1846; and the American Association for the Advancement of Science was established in 1848. During the same period Johannes Muller (1801-58) and Gustav Fechner (1801-87) were pioneering the science of psychology.

As someone whose "Business is Circumference," as she proclaimed in her fourth letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson (L 268), Dickinson must have regarded science as a basis for testing the outer boundaries of human understanding and experience. On the one hand science was transforming the world around her in astonishing ways, sending locomotives charging into the New England garden like Boanerges in "I like to see it lap the Miles" (P 585),[5] or sending lightning 'singing ... with Insulators ... upon the Ropes--above our Head--/ Continual--with the News" (P 630). On the other hand science was fast becoming civilization's new Holy Grail in the quest for certainty,and seemed to be undermining the validity of religious and aesthetic modes of knowing.

Understandably, many poets expressed alarm at this development. John Donne had a been among the first: "[The] new Philosophy calls all in doubt / The Element of fire is quite put out," he laments in "The First Anniversary" in 1611--the year after Galileo's momentous astronomical discoveries (lines 205-06). Romantics such as John Keats and Edgar Allan Poe echoed the sentiment. "Do not all charms fly / At the mere touch of cold philosophy?" keats wonders in "Lamia" (229-30). Poe portrays science preying upon the poet's heart as a vulture "whose wings are dull realities," ("Sonnet: To Science" 4).

Dickinson's attitude toward science is subtler than this, even though she may superficially resemble Donne, Keats, and Poe in a few of her poems. In one of them, the speaker tells us that the secrets of nature are everywhere revealed, to be plucked like berries--but it is important to resist the plucking because. "It;s finer--not to know--/ If Summer were an Axiom / What sorcery had Snow?" (P 191). The point is that those phenomenological secrets--the "facts" of science--are meaningless by themselves. Unlike Donne and the others, Dickinson is suggesting that it is the scientistic impulse, not the scientific, that is monstrous in its negation of the human spirit. She makes this even more explicit in P 70: "I pull a flower from the woods--/ A monster with a glass / Computes the stamens in a breath--/ And has her in a `class'!"

The epistemological dilemma--the struggle between certainty and uncertainty--is central to Dickinson's poetic vision. She uses poetry to perform, in effect, experiments in language, her counterpart to scientific experiments, which she accepted as equally valid efforts for apprehending essential Truth.[6] "Experiment" becomes an emblem of human daring, a venturing out to the limits of experience:

                 Experiment to me
                 Is everyone I meet
                 If it contain a Kernel?
                 The Figure of a Nut

                 Presents upon a Tree
                 Equally plausibly
                 But Meat within, is requisite
                 To squirrels and to Me. (P 1073)

Moreover, a great many Dickinson's poems are set up virtually as mathematical equations--or as Sharon Cameron describes them, "metonymic equations" that "serve as links between the poet's interior world and the external phenomenon taking place" (27). These poems typically follow (sometimes in the negative) the paradigms X Y, X Y, or X Y. For example: "`Nature' what we see" (P 668); "it<'s> like the Light--/ A fashionless Delight--" (P 297--on e of the "riddle poems" in which the solution is found at the end, just as in a mathematical equation); "It death, for I stood up: (P 510); "The heart narrow banks" (p 928); "A wounded deer highest" (P 165). Other "equation" poems are framed as hypotheses: "If you were coming in the Fall, / I'd brush the summer by" (P 511).

Dickinson's poetic equations perform the opposite function to that of their scientific counterparts: they are designed to heighten mysteries, not solve them, They work to counteract scientific reductionism, which tempts us into thinking that science can present reality whole and undistorted. Cameron (27) offers an especially fascinating example: P 967. In this poem Dickinson establishes two equations regarding pain that ironically contradict each other:

                   Pain--expands the Time--
                   Ages coil within
                   The minute Circumference
                   Of a single Brain--

                   Pain contracts--the Time--
                   Occupied with Shot
                   Gammuts of Eternities
                   Are as they are not--

Unlike Ralph Waldo Emerson, in whose universe the soul of the individual flows like a tributary into the cosmic soul, and for whom regarding deeply in the book of nature brings us to a transcendent understanding of and harmony with the cosmos, Dickinson points to an insurmountable gulf between out finite selves and the infinite cosmos. Emerson write that "the lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other" (1989) and that ?Nature with spirit to emancipate us" (209), but Dickinson cannot accept the possibility that one can be emancipated by nature. Instead, she squarely confronts the gulf, painfully aware that crossing it, even if it could be done, would constitute death. For Dickinson the essence of life is its finitude, its "fording the mystery" while "the rendezvous of Light" remains in the unreachable distance (P1564). In another poem (3010 she dismiss with aloof indifference any attempt at drawing conclusions about life's ultimate purpose--or purposelessness.

                      I reason, Earth is short--
                      And Anguish--absolute--
                      And many hurt,
                      But, what of that?

                      I reason, we could die--
                      The best Vitality
                      Cannot excel Decay,
                      But, what of that?

                      I reason, that in Heaven--
                      Somehow, it will be even--
                      Some new Equation, given
                      But, what of that?

Why even try to transcend our human perceptions of nature? Any attempt to solve the equation of life pulls one out of life's circumference, out of experience. Indeed, whatever is experienced--and that includes empirical science--remarks nature in human terms. Human existence limits "finite infinity" (P 1695), not only according to our sensory capacities for pleasure, pain anguish, or transport, but also according to our own individual life experiences, as she demonstrates in P 285: 'The Robin's my Criterion for Tune--/ Because I grow--where Robins do--/ But, were I Cuckoo born--/ I;d swear by him--."

Just as William Wordsworth, in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, calls for an infusion of sensations "into the midst of the objects of ... science itself' (456), Dickinson wants to experience nature with her entire being, not with her intellect alone. She wants the magic and the beauty of nature to be at one with her own nature. Positivist science "murders to dissect"; and Dickinson clearly echoes the Wordsworthian admonition when she writes in P 108, "Surgeons must be very careful / When they take the knife! ? Underneath their fine incisions / Stirs the culprit--Life!" There is an ironic undertone her: no matter how exacting the surgeons' incisions, "life" will always elude them--and yet the body, along with the entire phenomenal universe, is intimately linked to the deepest mysteries of existence. What we observe scientifically, taxonomically, can suddenly blaze forth as a thing of beauty whose essence is intuited, groped for, but never grasped. To put it another way: science itself enables us to transcend science. "Split the Lark--and you'll find the Music" (P 861); observe the moon, and like the speaker in the following poem, we might well see it as

                . . . a Head--a Guillotine
                Slid carelessly away--
                Did independent, Amber--
                Sustain her in the sky--

                Or like a Stemless Flower--
                Upheld in rolling Air
                By finer Gravitations--
                Than bind Philosopher...

                The privilege to scrutinize
                Was scarce upon my Eyes
                When with a Silver practise
                She vaulted out of Gaze--

                And next--I met her on a Cloud--
                Myself too far below
                To follow her superior Road
                Or its advantage--Blue--(P 629)

The moon is one of those "Finished creatures" (P 954; see note 4) indifferent to human concerns--which is precisely why Dickinson tries to grasp her with such extravagant metaphors. The poet, through her creative perception, captures the moon in a way the astronomer never could.[8]

Dickinson wishes to make the scientific angle of vision, complete with scientific and technical language, amplify rather than reduce the mystery of what is being dwelt upon--because this way of seeing is being used to describe human attributes.[9] Thus "Hope is a strange invention--/ A Patent of the Heart--" (P1392), and Faustian scientists will one day "find the Cube of the Rainbow" (in other words, explain away the rainbow's magic and beauty--but only to discover such knowledge to be a grotesque distortion, a "cubing," of the rainbow's essential reality). What is more, "the Arc of a Lover's conjecture / Eludes the finding out" (P 484). Without any philosophizing, Dickinson brilliantly allows the scientific concepts--inventions, patents, cubes, arcs,--to demonstrate their own limitations.

What science achieves for Dickinson, then, is a clearer sense of what human beings can and cannot know. Indeed, the more deeply we probe that "arc" of love, the deeper the mystery will become. Unlike Nathaniel Hawthorne's Aylmer in "The Birthmark," Dickinson acknowledges the inaccessibility of ultimate reality. She is free to do with human circumference what she will, given her purely human resources; and so language takes primacy over phenomena.[10] Science is at the mercy of language--language as it radiates from the poet's creative vision, triumphant because of its limitations. Beyond circumference lies an inhuman reality. Far better to "dwell in Possibility--/ A fairer House than Prose--," a universe in which the poet reigns supreme over her creation, celebrating "The spreading wide my narrow Hands./ To gather Paradise--" (P 657). Once acclimated to this interior universe, the reader begins to notice that the poet is indeed the analogue of the scientist.

Dickinson's poetic experiments, then, inevitably result in clashes between intellect and heart--and of course they neither can be nor should be resolved. After all, she reminds us, "Wonder--is nor precisely Knowing not--/A beautiful but bleak condition / he has not lived who has not felt--" (P 1331). Not only emotion-based wonder, but intellect-based skepticism--the driving force of scientific inquiry--is essential to being fully alive:

              Sweet Skepticism of the Heart--
              That knows--and does not know--
              And tosses like a Fleet of Balm
              Affronted by the snow--
              Invites and then retards the Truth
              Lest Certainty be sere
              Compared with the delicious throe
              Of transport filled with Fear--(P 1413)

Certainty is no prize; it brings no transport, no experience of either joy or dread, but a shutting down of vital life forces of continual discovery and movement. In one of her most powerful poems, Dickinson makes her premise startlingly clear:

                 This World is not Conclusion.
                 A Species stands beyond--
                 Invisible, as Music--
                 But positive, as Sound--
                 It beckons, and it baffles--
                 Philosophy--don't know
                 And through a riddle, at the last--
                 Sagacity, must go--
                 To guess it, puzzles scholars--
                 To gain it, Men have borne
                 Contempt of Generations
                 And Crucifixion, shown --
                 Faith slips--and laughs, and rallies --
                 Blushes, if any see--
                 Plucks at a twig of Evidence --
                 And asks a Vane, the way --
                 Much Gesture, from the Pulpit --
                 Strong Hallelujahs, roll --
                 Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
                 That nibbles at the soul--(P 501)

We struggle to find closure, plucking at any "twig of Evidence" that comes our way, but closure eludes us, and not even narcotics can quell our need to keep on searching. That, of course, is what life is all about for Dickinson. The "nibbling at the soul," the "sweet skepticism of the heart," is what keeps one moving ahead: "A doubt. . . / Assist the staggering Mind (P 859). Indeed, doubt begins to resemble faith in Dickinson's universe--the kind of faith the leads one to hold off "conclusion" in order to experience the intangible without the skeptic's need to keep on searching for more evidence: "`Faith' is a fine invention / When Gentlemen can see--/ But Microscopes are prudent / In an Emergency" (P 185). To speak of the importance of "seeing" in the context of faith suggests the follies of believing without understanding or even wanting to understand. In that case, it is better to see with microscopes than to be sightless with faith; for microscope, those preeminent icons of positivist science, ironically will reveal new wonders, give even more evidence that "this world is not Conclusion."

The following tabulation is meant to give a general overview of the range and frequency of Dickinson's poems that invoke a scientific concept, either to illuminate that concept or to give insight into a nonscientific concept by way analogy. Poems that employ generic terms alone ("stars," "flowers") are not considered. Poems invoking more than one scientific discipline are categorized under the science that seems dominant, or that is treated first. P 1753, for example, focuses upon a psychological theme (and has been so classified), although chemical metaphors are used. No poem appears under more than one heading. Science in general: 2, 3, 41, 70, 89, 97, 100, 101, 122, 168, 185, 191, 285, 290, 301, 327, 351, 415 420, 433, 501, 534, 600, 668, 780, 782, 812, 835, 836, 859, 860 861, 883, 970, 972, 1071, 1073, 1077, 1084, 1116, 1129l, 1163, 1170, 1202, 1228, 1229, 1247, 1329, 1331, 1386, 1389, 1400, 1411, 1413, 1417, 1431, 1434, 1455, 1482, 1603, 1770

Biology: 354, 986, 1099, 1011, 1128, 1244, 1387, 1405, 1448, 1475, 1524, 1575, 1685

Botany: 66, 128, 142, 180, 314, 811, 978, 1047, 1058, 1080, 1082, 1097, 1241, 1288 1298, 1422, 1424, 1716, 1744

Chemistry: 422, 689, 838, 954, 1063

Geology: 128, 175, 245, 320, 356, 601, 1146, 1302, 1677, 1705, 1748

Mathematics: 69, 88, 125, 257, 269, 545, 728, 769, 798, 802, 928, 1158, 1184, 1295, 1484

Medicine and physiology: 108, 177, 396, 559, 786, 1261, 1274

Physics and astronomy: 6, 240, 287, 378, 429, 591, 611, 629, 700, 851, 889, 906, 909, 958, 985, 997, 1057, 1106, 1286, 1315, 1336, 1419, 1581, 1605, 1638, 1672

Psychology: 165, 241, 252, 280, 281, 301, 341, 419, 532, 556, 650, 689, 733 744, 894, 937, 967, 998, 1046, 1299, 1333, 1453, 1714, 17171, 1737, 1753

Technology: 187, 365, 585, 630, 789, 983, 1392, 1630

[1] An earlier version of this paper was presented at the society for Literature and Science Annual Conference, Albany, New York, October 1988.

[2] William Howard has determined that out of the 770 words Dickinson uses from specialized disciplines (law, military science, the natural sciences, agriculture, philosophy, and so on), 328 are drawn from the natural sciences and technology (230).

[3] All citation of Dickinson's letter refer to The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward. Likewise, citations of Dickenson's poems are taken from the variorum Poems, edited by Johnson.

[4] According to Richard B. Sewall, Hitchcock "set the educational tone for the whole [Amherst] community [and] . . . inspired a whole generation with a love of nature that combined a sense of its sublimity with an accurate knowledge of its parts and processes" (342-43). Hitchcock delivered his lectures at the college in 1845 (as well as 1847-49), and "hence [they were] open to students in Amherst Academy during Emily's years there" (344). A few of Dickinson's poems have a distinct Hitchcockian flavor, such as the following, which alludes to the law of conservation of energy, brilliantly making it work as a counter-metaphor for life's fragmented relationship: "The Chemical conviction / That Nought be lost / Enable in Disaster / My fractured Trust / The faces of the Atoms / If I shall see / How more the Finished Creatures / Departed me!" (P 954). Jack L. Capps notes, too, that Dickinson drew upon Hitchcock's Elementary Geology (1840) for place names, especially names and sites of volcanoes (106).

[5] When the railroad reached Amherst in 1852, Dickinson> shared the town's excitement. "Nobody believes it yet," she writes to Susan Gilbert; "it seems like a fairy tale, a most miraculous event in the lives of us all" (L 72).

[6] Johnson states (with reference to P 835, "Nature and God--I neither knew"), "God, man, and nature [Dickinsonharply differentiates. Nature cannot be explained any more easily than God can be explained, but both can be personified" (184). Dickinson made her point most succinctly when she wrote to Higginson, "Nature is a Haunted House--but Art--a house that tries to be haunted" (L 459A).

[7] See also P 1770: "Experiment escorts us last--/ His pungent company / Will not allow an Axiom / An Opportunity."

[8] W. T. Jones would extend this assertion to typify poetry in general: "A poem," Jones writes, "is . . . the pursuit of perceiving beyond the capacities of common sense[:] . . . the attempt to render some affect precisely, not to designate some fact precisely" (197; emphasis mine). That is, "affect" is the counterpart of "fact" in the context of ultimate reality Joanne Feit Diehl makes a similar point, according to her, Dickinson "perform[s] a solipsistic usurpation of nature in which the imagination assumes complete control. Repeatedly Dickinson makes the distinction between the poem over which she exercises power and the natural world which retains its unpredictability" (50). Likewise, "The objective reality attains its fullest meaning in the vision of the artist," asserts Inder Nath Kher (40). Kher refers here to P 451, "The Outer--from the Inner," but the assertion can apply to Dickinson's intent in most of her science poetry.

[9] According to Daniel J. Orsini, Dickinson anchors "her transcendent vision upon concrete verifiable data" (60); science serves to validate her spiritual ideals, even though they may appear contrary to them on another level.

[10] Cristanne Miller sees Dickinson's distortions of grammar and syntax examples of her desire "to make [language] less instead of more nature" (153).

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------. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. 3 vols. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward. Cambridge: Belknap (Harvard UP), 1958.

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