Dickinson's Misery (6 page)

As far as we know, these lines were not much read by anyone other than the envelope's addressee between their discovery in 1886 and their first publication in 1945. From 1945 until the present, they have been called various things: a worksheet, a variant, a fragment, and, once, an unfinished poem.
⁶
One thing they have never been called is a poem. Why not? If pieces of letters, riddles, recipes, notes, botanical descriptions, complaints—if almost anything Dickinson wrote has been turned by some editor into a poem, why not this? And what can the fact that this is one of Dickinson's versified manuscripts that has not been printed as a poem tell us about what it is we recognize as a lyric?

I do not (or do not simply) pose these questions rhetorically; Dickinson's scholarly editors have good answers to them. Both Johnson and Franklin publish in their collected
Poems
another set of lines on a splitopen envelope (addressed to Dickinson's sister, “Vinnie”) from the same period (
fig. 6
). I will again transcribe the lines as they were written:

Since the last lines on this envelope are the first lines on the envelope in
figure 5
, they might be read as a revision or later version. Johnson thought that they
were
written later, dating the lines in
figure 5
“about 1877” and the lines in
figure 6
“about 1881.” Johnson was allowed to see the manuscripts (then in the possession of Millicent Todd Bingham) on only two occasions, though he had photostats of them. Franklin, who had more liberal access to the manuscripts (now in the Amherst College Library) dates both “about 1881” (as had Bingham). Though roughly contemporary by his estimate, Franklin prints only the lines in
figure 6
in his Reading Edition, and prints the lines in
figure 5
as a variant of Poem 1545 in his variorum edition. In general, Franklin's understanding of the principles that guided what he tellingly calls “Dickinson's workshop” dictates his choice of the last complete version—preferably a fair copy or fascicle inclusion—for publication. His edition is guided by the assumption that “the distinction between genres was Dickinson's own” and that the text of a poem must be separable from its artifact.
⁷
This is to say that Franklin is the best and latest in a long line of editors who have assumed that what Dickinson aspired to write were individual, discrete, more or less polished lyric poems and that she wanted them to be printed as such. Yet what makes one of the envelopes in
figures 5
and
6
look later, more individual, more highly crafted, more
printable
than the other?

The handwriting on the envelope inscribed with “A Pang …” (
fig. 6
) is slightly larger than that on the other envelope, and although Dickinson's writing did become larger and more widely spaced as she grew older, within the same year there could be many variations. The text in
figure 5
might also seem more tentative than that in
figure 6
, since an entire line is given in variation, but as we shall see, the sheets in the fascicles often include several variants, and yet are considered fair copies. Both sets of lines may be scanned in the alternating three- and four-foot patterns typical of Dickinson's writing; formal criteria will not separate finished poem from draft. In fact, if what one wants to publish is a formally complete lyric, it is difficult to find in all of the Dickinson corpus a poem that closes with the repetition of its first lines, as does the text in
figure 5
: “When what they sung for is undone … when what they sung for is undone.” Such repetition could certainly be read as a refrain, one of the oldest formal devices of the lyric. If we were to continue to read
figure 5
along these lines, we could draw on such authoritative theorists of lyric form as Barbara Herrnstein Smith and John Hollander, who both point out that “the modern lyrical refrain
derives in good part from the medieval carol burden,” where the repeated lines “announce that a song will be sung and then that it has been sung.”
⁸
In contrast, the text in
figure 6
ends in what is the middle of the text in
figure 5
, and if it was written later, it does not include the variant for “they had moved a stone” (“could move a stone”). But the lines that begin the text in
figure 6
that appear nowhere in
figure 5
—

are beautiful, and so may give the impression that they were added to the lines that begin “When what they sung for” as a more developed and finished composition. I could continue to give interpretive reasons for describing either envelope as a lyric, and those reasons would participate in a phenomenology of lyric reading that moves the text into the present-tense world of the poem itself, once we decide what that is. A comparison of the two envelopes thus not only raises questions about the conventions of literary entextualization (to which we shall return), but those questions also lead to another, more basic one: if either text can be read as a lyric, then how do we recognize a lyric poem when we see one?
⁹

If my reader is by now impatient with the hermeneutic fundamentalism of that question, you are not the only one. In the section of the
Aesthetics
on poetry, Hegel seems to have anticipated a similar aversion:

To define the poetic as such or to give a description of what is poetic horrifies [
abhorrezieren
] nearly all who have written about poetry. And in fact if a man begins to talk about poetry as an imaginative art without having previously examined what art's content and general mode of representation is, he will find it extremely difficult to know where to look for the proper essence of poetry. But the awkwardness of his problem especially increases if he starts from the individual character of single works and then proposes to assert some universal derived from their character and supposed to be valid for the most varied
genres
and sorts of poetry. Along these lines the most heterogeneous works count as poetry. If this assumption is presupposed and the question is then raised: By what right should such productions count as poems? the difficulty just named enters at once.
¹⁰

Most of us would agree with Hegel that to derive a general conception—a
genre
—from a single example is a logical mistake; on the other hand, few of us have a synthetic theory of Beauty and the Ideal that would allow us to avoid such mistakes. Yet pragmatically, the difference between being able or unable to answer the question, “By what right should such productions count as poems?” is (even for Hegel) less a question of one's transcendental theories than it is a question of temporality. According to Hegel, relief from the horrors of poetic definition—articulation of “the poetic as such” as well as of “the most varied
genres
and sorts of poetry”—is allowed by an earlier moment when generic difficulties that one
would
have encountered if one had not “previously examined” aesthetic theory have already disappeared. By the time that Hegel invokes these practical difficulties, they are fortunately fictive. But Hegel's precedent, metapragmatic, temporally decisive moment seems to be exactly what is in question in both the historical determination and the figurative power of Dickinson's lines on the envelopes. Dickinson's lines return us to what Hegel identified as “the awkwardness of the problem” of reading the lyric, especially since that awkwardness is, awkwardly, what the lines that have never been published as a poem are about.

If generic recognition depends on hermeneutic promise, then the lines in
figure 5
are a poem many times over. Although these lines have never been described as a lyric, we could interpret them as an exemplary lyric—indeed, as several different exemplary lyrics. But is a lyric by interpretation made? As Hegel would say, one's answer will depend upon what theory of the lyric has been previously assumed. But as Hegel also suggests, such a theory is not assumed at will, but assumed in time. Paul de Man may be right to conclude in theory (along Hegelian lines) that “no lyric can be read lyrically, nor can the object of a lyrical reading be itself a lyric,” but, as we shall see in the next chapter, that theory is a set-up for an inevitable historical process. While de Man's false maxim seems to beg the question of what we mean by “lyric,” it leaves open the question of what it is to “read”—lyrically or otherwise—or of who reads when.
¹¹
Consider three theoretically historical readings of the lines that have never been printed as a lyric.

If we were to follow the late-nineteenth-century, aesthetic strain of reading implicit in Higginson's remarks, we might say that the first lines on the envelope in
figure 5
invoke not birdsong's full-throated ease but the pathos of the moment when the song's occasion is over. The question
(“Who cares?”) is not a question about anyone's recognition of the song itself but about whether “[t]he world should listen then—as I am listening now”—that is, about whether song has an afterlife. As my allusions to Keats and Shelley suggest, this sort of lyric reading of Dickinson assumes that by 1881 Dickinson's own lyric reading of romanticism and several versions of postromanticism may be taken for granted; a bluebird's (or a nightingale's or a sky-lark's or a bobolink's or a darkling thrush's) tune would always already have been for Dickinson (as for Higginson) a lyric poem. In the chapters that follow I will have much to say about Dickinson's preoccupation with the trope of birdsong as the strain of inhuman lyricism turned to poetic type by the romantics and “fossilized”—excerpted and contextualized—by Victorian poets.
¹²
In the condensed phrase “inhuman lyricism” I mean to recall the nineteenth century's association of birdsong with a pure expressive capacity the human poet cannot own, and also to point out that it would follow that the nineteenth-century reading of this figure would not be as a synonym for poetic voice but as a song the poet cannot voice. In the early nineteenth century, birdsong was not poetic personification but lyric antipersonification (Keats could not become the nightingale, Shelley could not pretend to be the skylark), yet by the time of Dickinson's publication at the end of the century, birds and poets were often conflated with one another. So Thomas Aldrich could remark in 1892 and 1903 that “Miss Dickinson's stanzas, with their impossible rhyme, their involved significance, their interrupted flute-note of birds that have no continuous music, seem to have caught the ear of a group of early listeners. Ashy New England bluebird, shifting its light load of song, has for a moment been taken for a strange nightingale.”
¹³
Aldrich's complaint against what he had called in 1892 Dickinson's “versicles” (“I don't know how to designate them”) is that they evoke “no continuous music”; for him, Dickinson is more bird than human rather than too human to be bird.

Yet lest that (obviously gendered) capacity be mistaken for an achievement of the romantic lyric ideal, Aldrich borrows Dickinson's own habitual substitution of the American for the British bird and turns her distinction (as well as her popularity in the 1890s) against her. Keats and Shelley may have wished for the voice of the nightingale, but according to Aldrich, readers at the end of the nineteenth century thought that Dickinson
had
such a voice—though by his critical lights, her domestic “flutenote” never reached lyric heights. While for the romantics, the nightingale's inhuman lyricism granted it transcendence, Aldrich's attribution of birdlike lyricism to Dickinson denies her the artistry of the human poet and thus his immortality (“oblivion,” he wrote in 1892, “lingers in the immediate neighborhood” [Lubbers, 94]). Dickinson could not have read Aldrich before writing the lines in
figure 5
, and Aldrich could not have
read those Dickinson lines, though he certainly did read another poem Dickinson's editors entitled “The Bluebird” (to which we shall return) in the 1891
Poems
(F 1484). Like Higginson, then, Aldrich makes a figure of natural expression out of what is already edited verse in print—and then asks his readers to mistake his figure for Dickinson's. The homology between his bluebird and Dickinson's may indeed tempt us to read Aldrich's interpretation back into the lines in
figure 5
as evidence that the answer to