Dickinson's Misery (7 page)

is “We do!” But to hail the text in this way would be to repeat Aldrich's mistake and assume that the Blue Bird's tune had already become Dickinson's poem.

For Aldrich, of course, Dickinson's “versicles”
had
already been printed as individual poems, so his resistance to reading them as artistically achieved lyrics was predicated by their publication and reception as such. Though Aldrich's was by no means the common opinion of the 1890s, the fact that he had succeeded William Dean Howells (and Higginson) as editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
in 1881 made his views influential, at least for the genteel, nonacademic arbiters of literature who had begun to position their taste against that of the mass reading public.
¹⁴
For critics like Aldrich to complain that Dickinson's verse was “formless” was to register reservations not only about Dickinson as a poet but about the sudden popularity of her poetry as well as about Higginson's and Howells's enthusiastic embrace of Dickinson's published work. It was also to take a measured step away from the emerging academic criticism of scholars like Francis Stoddard (professor in the new department of English at New York University) who had begun to respond to charges that Dickinson's verse was “formless” by generating what would become a pedagogically influential model of organic poetic form. In January 1892 (the same month and year in which Aldrich's first review of Dickinson appeared) Stoddard could write that “Miss Dickinson's poems may be formless, or they may be worded to so fine and subtle a device that they seem formless, just as the spectrum of a far-off star may seem blankness until examined with a lens of especial power.”
¹⁵
Although the practice that Stoddard advocated would not be called “close reading” in the United States until the twentieth century, his assumption that interpretation itself (and, not accidentally, at least metaphorically scientific methods of interpretation) could reveal organic aesthetic spectra speaks volumes about the history of that practice in the interpretation of lyric poetry.
¹⁶
Yet, like Aldrich's resistance to what
he took to be Dickinson's lack of form, Stoddard's revelation of form was predicated by the
Poems,
already, by January 1892, in print ten times over. Whatever fine lines of the spectrum close attention might reveal, the generic identity of Dickinson's writing was not really in question for readers responding to the published poems. Of the many strains of lyricism readers discerned in Dickinson's writing, only one or two years after the publication of the
Poems
no reader could doubt that lyric poems were what Emily Dickinson had written.

This is to say that the problem of the generic recognition of the lines in
figure 5
is (as it is in Hegel) a question of time rather than a question of form. If we were to pursue the line of close reading begun in the late nineteenth century and developed in twentieth-century lyric pedagogy, we might note that recognition is also the problem and time is also the question in these lines: we could read the preposition “for” as either what precedes the bird's song (that “for” or because of which the bird sang) or as what comes after, the effect of the song (what the bird sang “for” or to). It may seem an interpretive stretch worthy of Stoddard to say that Dickinson's line condenses a central problem in the theory of poetic representation (i.e., is a poem written in response to an historical event or in view of the response of a reader?), but the lines that follow the opening rhetorical question insist on the decisive role of temporality in the interpretation of form. The temporal gap between the first cause of the Blue Bird's tune and its aftermath—the moment when the occasion of the song comes “undone”—is first made analogous to the three days between Christ's death and resurrection, an interregnum figured by the stone that must be moved in real time in order for transcendental temporality to take hold. As if that analogy were not enough to ponder (does the theological await the powers of the secular? What has the new temporal order of the Resurrection to do with the ephemerality of birdsong?), the lines add another: “As if a Drum / the Drums / went on and / on / to captivate / the slain—.” This is a difficult double analogy: on one hand the drumbeats parallel the birdsong and “the slain” parallel the ones who may no longer care “about a Blue Bird's tune.” On the other, “the slain” are the bodies before resurrection, though these bodies do not seem to await an event in historical time to be redeemed. The pun on “captivate” makes “the slain” seem captive as well as dead, and “a Drum / the Drums” that go “on and / on” play in counterpoint to “the Blue Bird's tune”: there is nothing transcendent or redemptive in the compulsive march that the drums continue to urge on those no longer animate enough to be compelled. Yet “As if” marks the perverse analogy as hypothetical; what “the slain” can no longer accomplish in history they might sustain in fiction.

The direction of the close reading I have just begun could lead us away
from Stoddard's late nineteenth-century formalist proto–close reading toward a twenty-first-century form of post–close reading, from an early attempt to take the lyric out of the confusion of history to recent attempts to return the fine lines of the lyric to the broad outline of social history. If we were to read the manuscript that has never gone public as a poem, we might observe that the notion that the redemption of history depends on a sustainable theological fiction would have been common in New England twenty years before the lines appear to have been written. We might then go on to read Dickinson's twisted and condensed version of this notion as a deferred, ironic commentary on such lines as Julia Ward Howe's in “The Battle-Hymn of the Republic”:

If we were to align Dickinson's lines with this most enduringly public of nineteenth-century American poems, we might say that Dickinson's poem is its antithesis.
¹⁸
If we were to follow the line of redemptive logic in Howe (and, by implication, in Northern liberal intellectual culture in the early 1860s), we could place Dickinson's antiredemptive vision against it, and thus place her lines back into the nineteenth-century American history that conditioned them.
¹⁹
Doing so would offer us another exemplary lyric reading: in this reading, the lines have become not only formally self-reflexive (and thus reveal the rewards of close reading) but they lyrically condense the critical (and still, in 1881, critically unresolved) theological and intellectual dilemmas that surrounded the causes and effects of the official state violence that blasted the American nineteenth century into two parts (and thus reveal the rewards of an historicist reading that can incorporate temporality into the problem of form).

Yet the historicist reading, like the formalist reading, must begin by assuming that the lines in
figure 5
comment upon history
as a lyric poem comments upon history
by freezing an historical moment into apt rhetorical form—that is, that like Howe's poem, they turn the privacy of perception toward a print public sphere. If the lines in
figure 5
stopped on the left side of the envelope, a good argument could be made that such a freeze-frame or snapshot effect is exactly what they accomplish, but don't finish accomplishing, which is why they constitute the draft of a lyric rather than a lyric complete in itself. Yet the lines on the right-hand flap of the envelope present problems for both formal and cultural interpretations, since they return us to the problem of what or when or who it is we are reading in the
first place. That question quickly becomes a question not just of rhetorical but also of quite literal context.

L
YRIC
C
ONTEXT

The literal problem in deciding whether the lines in
figure 5
are or are not a lyric poem emerges most clearly when we try to read the lines in the context of one another. When, in his variorum edition, Franklin prints the lines as variants of those in
figure 6
, he separates as a quatrain,

and notes that this “quatrain is followed by five lines that are at least related in part, since the ultimate one is a repetition of the first line of the quatrain”:

If we scan the lines as written on the envelope, it is hard to tell why Franklin would consider the lines before the horizontal line separating the variant lines a separable quatrain and would then arrange the remaining lines as two couplets followed by the single “repetition.” Yet if we recall that the lines were first printed in 1945 as an “unfinished” version of those in
figure 6
, Franklin's rationale becomes clearer. The first lines in
figure 5
seemed to Bingham in 1945 separable from the lines that follow them because they are also the last lines in
figure 6
; once
figure 6
had been printed as a finished poem, then the frame of publication itself determined that the repeated lines could be excised as a quatrain. Interestingly, unlike Franklin, Bingham printed some of the succeeding lines in
figure 5
as another quatrain:

Although only printed among the “Poems Incomplete and Unfinished” rather than as a finished lyric, Bingham's version of the lines in
figure 5
looks like the other Dickinson lyrics in her edition: two symmetrical quatrains in alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines. Beneath Franklin's printed version of the manuscript in
figure 5
, then, lurks another poem already in print—even if it was not printed as a poem. By printing Dickinson's writing on the model of the poetry already in print, Franklin decides the genre of the lines—or the genre they don't quite manage to become—in advance. Bingham made the lines in
figure 5
look like a draft of those in
figure 6
by forming them into stanzas and by deleting the most troublesome line in order to do so: “Intro without my Trans—.” Although Franklin does print that line, he does so in what appears in print as one of several scattered lines after the initial apparently intact quatrain, though in the manuscript the lines are no more or less set apart than the others. In publishing both what they consider the finished lyric in
figure 6
and the draft lyric in
figure 5
, Bingham and Franklin make print itself the context in which the genre of the text will be recognized. But how would we recognize a lyric in the lines in
figure 5
if we had not seen them first in print, or (to imagine an equally historically impossible situation) if we had not already decided that Dickinson wrote poems?

Perhaps a better question than
how
would be
why
we should take Dickinson's lines out of their manuscript and into printed contexts. One simple answer to that question is tautological: in order to print them, and we print them in order to read them. In context, many of Dickinson's lines are literally illegible. Consider for example the lines in
figures 7a
and
7b
, which run down the front and back of two pages torn from a small memo tablet. The recto lines read,

On the verso of the second sheet, we can (just barely) make out some lines that have little to do with the memo pages' series of “but …”s: