"The name--of it--is 'Autumn'--"

The name—of it—is "Autumn"—
The hue—of it—is Blood—
An Artery—upon the Hill—
A Vein—along the Road—

Great Globules—in the Alleys—
And Oh, the Shower of Stain—
When Winds—upset the Basin—
And spill the Scarlet Rain—

It sprinkles Bonnets—far below—
It gathers ruddy Pools—
Then—eddies like a Rose—away—
Upon Vermilion Wheels—

--Emily Dickinson

How many people do you know who would associate the spectacular red displays of fall color with blood?  The conventional view would be of nature in red apparel putting on a vivid show of beauty.

But Emily Dickinson did not see the world conventionally.  Her poems are more likely to disrupt and challenge our conventional views of reality.  (See blog posts September 2009)

“The hue of" Autumn “is Blood”; the tree line upon the hill is “an Artery”; and “along the Road” it is “a Vein.”  Fallen leaves “in the Alleys” are “Great Globules,” while falling leaves are a “shower of Stain” and “Scarlet Rain” (which, like blood, is spilled).  Is it the blood of violence and death?  Menstrual blood that sheds potential life? Is it the “stain” of human sin and guilt?

In the third stanza the imagery becomes more innocent, as leaf fall “sprinkles” ladies’ “Bonnets”; it “eddies like a Rose and whirls away “Upon Vermilion Wheels.”  But even here “It gathers ruddy Pools.”

Is this representation of fall an image of that ancient “fall” from innocence that recurs in nature and in every human life?  Is it a harbinger of the death of nature in winter yet to come?  Written in 1862, is it an image of bloody civil war?

Regardless, even the more playful images of leaves sprinkling bonnets and wheeling away on the wind, cannot save this poem from suggestions of the dark side of human experience—violence, death, evil.

Even if we interpret references to arteries and veins as images of life coursing through our bodies, this life leaves a stain when it is spilled in falling leaves.

What are we to make of this virtual riot of red?

It certainly seems to suggest that, just as Dickinson explored psychological pain as no other poet before her had done (see Sept. 19, 2009, blog post), she also explored the dark underbelly of nature’s beauty—nature red in tooth and claw, violence, death, the “fallen” side of creation (including human nature).

Another poem about Autumn, “These are the days when Birds come back,” treats Autumn as a “fraud” that can sometimes fool us into thinking summer is still with us.  She compares the reprise of summer warmth in Autumn to a “Sacrament of summer days” and a “Last Communion,” a remembrance of summer’s death, just as holy communion commemorates Christ’s sacrifice.

While Dickinson has many poems that celebrate nature, it seems the dark side was never far from her mind.

However spectacular the displays of fall color, she seems to have been ever cognizant of the coming winter.

Ten Books That Have Stayed With Me

Almost two months ago some of my Facebook friends started challenging me to name ten influential books that have stayed with me.  I ignored these challenges because I’ve been reading books for 60+ years of life, 19+ years of school, and 30+ years of teaching literature.  It was just too overwhelming to pick ten books on short notice and have it mean anything significant at all.

I did give it some thought, though, and here are my ten books.

1.        Alice in Wonderland.  My parents read this book to me before I could read it for myself.  More than any other children’s book it stirred my imagination and stoked my love of literature from an early age.  I even remember having childhood dreams that sprang from the characters and episodes of this children’s fantasy.  Only later did I come to appreciate the adult themes.

2.       Silver Pennies (http://www.amazon.com/Silver-Pennies-Collection-Modern-Poems/dp/B0037A5UFK).  I remember spending hours as a child poring over this children’s poetry collection, memorizing poems, reciting them, acting them out, even taking notes in the margins.  This little book did more to stimulate and develop the early love of poetry that has stayed with me to this day.

3.        Emily Dickinson’s Poetry.  Having been introduced to Emily Dickinson’s poetry in Silver Pennies, I went on to read her collected poems in depth, mesmerized by both the style and content.  Many of the poems were cryptic riddles, but that only whetted my appetite for the joy of analyzing and interpreting literature, as well as enjoying its sensory and psychological pleasures.

4.       The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  I read this in ninth grade English at my all-white high school in Lynchburg, Virginia, where schools were still segregated in 1960.  Having learned about the civil rights movement at the family dinner table, where my father frequently held forth on the evils of racism, Jim Crow, and segregation, I was struck by the bond between Huck, the runaway white orphan, and Jim, the runaway black slave.  Later I came to understand the racist elements of the novel, but at the time I was most impressed by the possibilities for interracial friendship and loyalty.

5.       To Kill A Mockingbird.  I read this novel in tenth grade English at the same white high school and have never forgotten the lesson in social inequality and injustice based on race.  My class at E. C. Glass High School was the last all white class to graduate from the school, as it was integrated in my senior year.

I look back in amazement that I read both these books in a segregated high school in the South at the height of the civil rights movement, and, as we studied these novels, we never once had a classroom discussion of how they related to the history unfolding around us.

6.       Catcher in the Rye.  As a teenager I was captivated by Holden Caulfield’s raw adolescent honesty and aversion to adult “phoniness.”  Although I was fairly conformist in those days, I had a secret admiration for the misfits and rebels of society that has stayed with me to this day.

7.       The Sound and the Fury.  More than anything this novel embodies my sense of southern regionalism, especially in the multiple voices of characters that seemed to echo members of my own family.  Though I have now lived longer outside of the South than in it, I still carry with me that underlying burden of Southern history—the loss, the guilt, the love and loyalty, the shame, as well as the enduring sights, sounds, smells of the South—its food, its climate, its landscapes, its flora and fauna, its accents, all of which are bound to my earliest memories.

8.       The Marble Faun.  Despite my roots in the South, I learned to love the literature of 19^th century New England and the mid-Atlantic, going on to write my Master’s thesis on Henry James and my doctoral dissertation on Nathaniel Hawthorne.  The theme of Americans in Europe, the Old World and the New World, has always drawn me in, and in none more hauntingly than The Marble Faun, in which New England Puritanism and Old World Catholicism are strongly bound up together in ways that have led me to an abiding interest in history, religion, philosophy, human psychology, and ethics.

9.       Nature.  When I renounced my Southern Baptist upbringing I rejected religion in general.  My World and English History professor in college did succeed in sparking my interest in Anglicanism, but it was Transcendentalism that really made an impact.  This book-length essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson transcends all Christian denominations and all world religions to achieve a kind of religious philosophy or philosophical religion that eventually led me to Unitarian Universalism.  In addition, while most philosophers would laughingly dismiss Emerson as a philosopher, I think his writings show how philosophy and literature can meet and merge.

10.   Moby Dick.  My love of both literature and philosophy makes me a sucker for the philosophical novel or novel of ideas.  This novel is the ultimate smorgasbord of adventure, drama, poetry, comedy, tragedy, allegory, symbolism, psychology, religion, and philosophy, all somehow tied together by unforgettable characters, an unforgettable narrative, and an unforgettable epic style.

Creating this list has accomplished exactly what I thought it would—made me painfully aware of all I have left out.  So many books that have made me who I am, enriched my life, and opened my eyes to worlds beyond my own paltry experience.

Walt Whitman

Along with Emily Dickinson Walt Whitman was the most experimental and technically innovative American poet of the 19^th century (see blog post Sept. 20, 2009).  While Dickinson disrupted conventional metrics, rhyme, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar, Whitman basically threw conventional poetic meter out the window and invented a whole new form—free verse.

Many readers think free verse is verse that doesn’t rhyme, or they get it confused with “blank verse.”  Blank verse is actually unrhymed iambic pentameter.  Shakespeare used it a lot.  Free verse may or may not rhyme, but it is completely free of meter that can be scanned, counted, and labeled as iambic, trochaic, anapestic, or dactylic.  Whitman created a completely new way of achieving rhythmic effects in poetry.  He actually used grammar instead of the stressed and unstressed syllable patterns used in the conventional poetry of his time.

In 1855 he published Leaves of Grass and revolutionized the writing of poetry, dispensing with rhyme, as well as meter and regular verse forms.  Yet his poetry still had rhythm, as well as other sound effects, such as assonance, consonance, and alliteration.  What was revolutionary was his use of parallelism or repetition of grammatical structures to create rhythm.

It sounds so tame, but readers and critics alike were shocked, saying that his sprawling lines bore no resemblance to anything recognizable as poetry.  Ironically, later critics have traced Whitman’s use of parallelism to the Bible, a text that those shocked readers would probably have been very familiar with.  But in those days Biblical “prose,” no matter how rhythmic, was not considered to be in the same category as “poetry.”

Lest anyone think Whitman’s innovation was a matter of chance or accident, the opening poem in Leaves of Grass reveals Whitman’s consciousness, whether his use of parallelism was Biblically-based or not, that he was doing something different, new, and “modern.”

One’s-Self I Sing

One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person,

Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

Of physiology from top to toe I sing,

Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far,
The Female equally with the Male I sing.

Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,

Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine,
The Modern Man I sing.

The kernel structure of the poem is the inverted sentence “_________I sing,” which is repeated four times, establishing a pattern, not of meter, but of grammar.  Each separate sentence features its own extension or modification, thus creating grammatical variety, as well as repetition. 

The content of the poem asserts the modern ideas of individualism and democracy and expands those ideas to include the equality of body and “brain” and of male and female.  While individualism and democracy were well established values in 1855, the elevation of the body and of women was highly controversial, even more so when associated with “laws divine.”  Whitman uses a revolutionary poetic form to reinforce revolutionary ideas.  And he reveals his conscious intention in his final line, “The Modern Man I sing.”

If Dickinson challenged conventional views of reality (see blog post Sept. 19, 2009), Whitman challenged conventional values, especially when it came to gender and sexuality.  Not only did he assert the equality of the sexes, he celebrated the human body as much as he did nature and openly expressed both heterosexual and homosexual attraction, attachment, and desire.

While Dickinson could barely get published, Whitman’s published poems were reviled, not only as unpoetic but as obscene.  Both were too far ahead of their time to be fully appreciated in their lifetimes, but, together, they have exerted more influence on modern poetry than any other pair, and they did it by writing poetry as it had never been written before.

Emily Dickinson's Poetry II

So how did Emily Dickinson critique conventional views of reality? (See previous blog post.) Numerous examples could be given of her challenges to the dominant religious world view and prevailing attitudes toward marriage, domesticity, gender, sexuality, and human psychology. However, her most influential challenge was perhaps to the poetic conventions of the 19th century.

For all of her poems she used a very standard four-line ballad stanza (4 beats, 3 beats, 4 beats, 3 beats), with second and fourth lines rhyming). This is also known as common meter, folk meter, and hymn meter. Most of her poems can be sung to the tune of almost any church hymn or folk song. Try it!

However, Dickinson experimented with multiple variations on this stanza, such that it is not always recognizable until you scan its meter and compare it to the standard form. She used a popular, conventional form and adapted it to some highly esoteric uses, thus inviting general readers in and then stretching them beyond their familiar expectations. Instead of relying on standard rhymes, she experimented with what is called slant rhyme, approximate rhyme, or off rhyme, to the point where, again, it is not always immediately recognizable. As one critic said, “For Emily Dickinson, the world didn’t rhyme.” Her variations on the ballad stanza and experimentation with rhyme served to reinforce in a formal way the questioning of conventional views that can be found in the content of the poems.

Dickinson is also known for her unconventional punctuation (liberal use of dashes) and capitalization. She did not use titles or standard grammar. Her use of ellipsis and grammatical truncation again reinforces the unconventional content, but also contributes to obscurity. These technical idiosyncrasies and her use of highly unusual imagery and metaphors often create a cryptic opaqueness, which almost defies interpretation. Her riddle poems (“I like to see it lap the miles,” “A narrow fellow in the Grass,” “A route of Evanescence”) are playful versions of her penchant for seeing the world as a cryptic mystery.

Her experimentation with persona, sometimes speaking as a child (“I’m Nobody!”), a male (“A narrow Fellow”), a wife (“I’m ‘wife’—I’ve finished that”), a male lover (“Wild nights--wild nights!”), a voice from the dead (“I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—“) further disrupts our conventional expectations of identity and social role-playing.

Along with Walt Whitman, Dickinson was the most experimental and technically innovative American poet of the 19th century.

Emily Dickinson's Poetry I

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that Emily Dickinson introduced psychological realism into poetry. Earlier poetry elegized, lyricized, sentimentalized, gothicized, and romanticized psychological states. Dickinson unflinchingly confronted psychological suffering, exploring in depth the emotional experiences most of us seek to avoid: grief, sadness, fear, doubt, loss, instability, and psychic pain. The only negative emotion that she rarely expresses would be anger, though that too can be detected in some of her biting satire.

Yes, she wrote "happy," playful poems, but even they were tinged with negative notes: "I'm nobody!" She rejoiced in nature but was always alone. Her love poems were painful expressions of unrequited feelings, loss, or unsatisfied longing.

General readers and critics have pathologized her as suffering from some kind of mental illness: seasonal affective disorder, depression, agoraphobia, bipolar disorder, suicidal tendencies. Certainly she was eccentric; her fellow townspeople in Amherst (MA) referred to her as "the Myth." She was known for her solitary ways and for wearing white.

Truthfully, we don't know if she was mentally ill or not. We do know that our cultural environment stigmatizes mental illness, making it possible to dismiss her poems as "symptoms" of mental illness or neurosis and therefore less credible.

If she was mentally ill, perhaps that condition was a gift, an alternative consciousness which made possible her brilliant critique of conventional views of reality. On the other hand, perhaps she was a perfectly sane, if eccentric, pioneer of the psychic frontier, able to confront directly the mental states that we all experience but prefer to deny.

Poems like "There's a certain slant of light" (about seasonal sadness); "I felt a Funeral, in my brain" (about mental instability); "After great pain a formal feeling comes" (about grieving); "One need not be a Chamber to be Haunted" (about the frightening hidden self) all courageously explore the darkest recesses of the human psyche. The gothic poems of Edgar Allen Poe exaggerated this terrain in an appeal to popular sensationalism, but Dickinson showed realistic restraint, representing our psychic world in terms that we can all recognize as a part of our common human experience. Who has not felt "zero at the bone"?