Poems—Emily Dickinson

Schrödinger’s Poet

Sorry about the week’s delay. I spent four days at the Prindle Institute for Ethics, hosted by the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, where I worked closely with eight other writers to draft seventeen ethics cases for debate at the 2025 Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl. Since my Emily Dickinson collection weighed too much for me to carry comfortably on the plane, poor Emily had to stay at home. But I knew she wouldn’t mind.

How to approach Emily Dickinson’s poetry? The words she uses resemble English well enough, but they function and mean in alien ways. So her poems could not speak to me without my knowing more about her life and times. However, I didn’t read about her life to answer any questions or explain any poems. My goal was to gain a starting point for my own direct questioning of the poetry. I didn’t look to these books to tell me “What she really meant,” or “What she tried to say,” or, horrors! “Which traumas in her childhood prompted her to write as she did.” Rather, they made me attentive to puzzling features of the poems. They also reminded me that every poem emerged at a given moment in time, out of a mind that had a before and an after, and that, each poem, despite a lack of date, has its own secret pedigree.

Any attempt at paraphrasing or interpreting these poems would do violence to them—precisely the violence I suspect Dickinson knew would befall them had they ever escaped into the general public. The leisurely, nineteenth-century American reader often expected poetry to entertain with comforting messages or instructive morals. And a rational reader, confounded by her koan-like poems, would either dismiss them as nonsense or “explain” them down into plain words. Her unique language would not survive such a collapse into clarity, but she needed a reader. So instead of publishing, she sent certain poems to friends or relatives and picked as her main confidant, not a great thinker like Emerson or an editor like James Russell Lowell, but the kindly, sympathetic, and perpetually baffled Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Unitarian minister, abolitionist, and proponent of women’s rights, whom I suspect she found as essential to her creativity as the straight man in a comedy duo.

Popular treatments of her poems now appear in many places, tempting readers to pigeonhole her into some category, such as a religious poet, or a nihilist, or a stay-at-home spinster who favors the society of bees and snakes. I think it wrong to try to pin her down or translate her private language into an impoverished literalism. I see her poems as delicious yet elusive pools of meaning that retreat from us as we stoop to drink from them, and I think their ability to promise deep answers only to snatch them away as we approach constitutes their charm and allure.

Scholars, far more competent than I, have tackled some of the more famous poems. Harold Bloom, while unraveling some of the symbolism in “From Blank to Blank–,” marvels at the headache-inducing density of the poem, “To pack this much into forty-one words and ten lines ought not to be possible.” He also says, “Except for Shakespeare, Dickinson manifests more cognitive originality than any other Western poet since Dante.”

Glenn Hughes in his book, A More Beautiful Question, calls her, “the poet of the in-between,” referring to the philosophical concept of metaxy which captures the peculiarly human state of existence between two incommensurables: materiality and consciousness (or divinity). In our in-between state, we live out our material lives and long for comprehension of some sort of beyond. In a later work, From Dickinson to Dylan, he gives a brilliant account of her lifelong spiritual quest in all its lighter and darker shades. Both books open our eyes to an often neglected spiritual side of modernism, starting with Dickinson, whose real audience would not appear for more than fifty years after her death.

So, join me in a naïve and puzzled scrutiny of a short poem that few people have bothered with.

I heard an Organ talk, sometimes

In a Cathedral Aisle,

And understood no word it said –

Yet held my breath, the while –

And risen up – and gone away,

A more Bernardine Girl –

Yet – know not what was done to me

In that old Chapel Aisle.

(dated around 1860 and first published in 1935)

At first, this seems like a simple account of how the poet sometimes attends a church service and, although she may come away “improved” by the sermon, the organ music somehow affects her more deeply. But when I mulled over this poem, a couple of odd features began to nag at me. First, the “Cathedral Aisle” of the first quatrain becomes a “Chapel Aisle” in the second, suggesting a descent or diminution of some sort. Here, some biographical details helped me start puzzling over the first two lines, without resolving anything. Amherst, Massachusetts, where Dickinson lived for all but one year of her life, had no cathedral. In fact, Amherst lies within the diocese of Springfield, Massachusetts, which Pope Pius IX only established in 1870, a decade later than the poem’s presumed date. Congregationalism, an offshoot of Puritanism, dominated that area of the country during the poet’s lifetime. The only two schools she ever attended, the Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, both originated as Congregationalist schools. When it comes to houses of worship, cathedrals and chapels occupy opposite extremes on the grandeur scale, and “chapel” may even point to a totally private place of worship. So, if we take the poem’s “I” literally, we must take its “Cathedral” symbolically.

Second, she describes herself when she leaves the place of worship as “a more Bernardine Girl.” Bernardine? Why not “dutiful,” “reverent,” or “virtuous”? In the midst of vague mentions of organs and cathedrals, she interjects a unique historical figure. St. Bernardine (or Bernardino) of Siena, a Catholic priest born in 1380, famously took his preaching outside the cathedral, directly to the people. He urged his listeners to give up frivolities and live simply. He often held a “Bonfire of the Vanities” at his outdoor sermons, onto which the devout would toss frivolous possessions that might tempt them to sin, such as mirrors, fine dresses, or playing cards. He taught that women should confine themselves to their houses under the protection of a father, husband, or brother. Dickinson probably heard many such messages, particularly from her father. When I reflect about this poem, I see an adult woman playfully describing her younger self as a girl, ascending from a cathedral, well, actually only a chapel, and going forth into the world promising herself to live as St. Bernardine ordered, but yet subverted by something else.

Interestingly, though, by shifting from generalities like cathedrals or organs to one specific saint, she shifts from vagueness to ambiguity. St. Bernardino did not teach just one thing. Besides his advice to keep women in gilded cages and consign vanities to the flames, he also railed against homosexuality. Modern ears perk up at the suggestion of an erotic theme. So, since we’ve started down the path of questioning everything, let’s also wonder why this experience she describes takes place in an aisle of a cathedral or a chapel? One might find the organ in a loft or in the choir, and the penitents belong in the nave. But an aisle divides the pews. So just what kind of organ? An organ, apparently, that speaks to the poet in ways she doesn’t understand, takes her breath away, uplifts her, yet leaves her unable to tell “what was done to me.” Should we understand this as a homoerotic scene, or autoerotic? Or have we merely brought our modern voyeuristic gaze to bear on a moment of pure spiritual transport? Those who have encountered transcendence often employ erotic imagery, so it shouldn’t surprise us to find this poem suspended between spirit and flesh. At this point, I suspect, the reader has reached the edge of a chasm of personal associations, caught a dizzying glimpse of what might dwell inside, and perhaps backed away.

I’ve found with all her poems I looked at, the closer I examine them, the more suggestive, ambiguous, tantalizing, dark, and mysterious they grow. At the same time, we can still enjoy them at face value, if we don’t ask too many questions. As she says with her characteristic humor,

Faith is a fine invention

When Gentlemen can see–

But Microscopes are prudent

In an Emergency.

(But even here, “Emergency” could mean a panic, making this a clever little nonsense poem, or it could mean something emerging only upon very close examination….) In the end, I don’t think we should try to interpret her poetry at all—we should, however, attend to it and let it lift us on its resonances of meaning.

Her poetry’s questioning shouldn’t let us rest with comfortable answers. Once committed to paper, of course, and observed by others (seen by Gentlemen), they would prompt interpretations, analyses, reductions to some satisfying message or meaning. So, I perfectly understand why she would hide them away from the public—perfected, collected, bound in hand-sewn booklets, but concealed from profaning eyes. She instructed her sister Vinnie to burn all her poems and letters when she died. Vinnie did destroy the letters, much to the chagrin of biographers, but didn’t have the heart to burn the poems. Over the following half century or so, the family released some of these treasures, some more tampered with than others, leaving scholars the task of restoring or reconstructing Dickinson’s idiosyncratic punctuation, spelling, and so forth.

I would agree with other critics that Dickinson’s poetry often conveys a hopeful expectation—though never fulfilled—of finally grasping something beyond mortality’s cage within which we pace and pace the anxious circles of our lives. Everyone around her had pat answers to the ultimate questions—confident, smug, domineering answers—but empty. So how could she expose her deepest metaphysical fears and epistemological doubts to all those “Gentlemen who see” the world through their simplistic faith?

Much Gesture from the Pulpit–

Strong Hallelujahs, roll–

Narcotics cannot still the Tooth

That nibbles at the soul–

(from “This World is not Conclusion”)

§ § §

After Dickinson, I need something lightweight. So I think I’ll enjoy Tartuffe or, the Impostor, by Moliere. Please share your current or next-up reading in the comment section. I’d love to know. I do appreciate the interest you show in these ramblings by subscribing. Feel free to share with others.

Amazon links to works mentioned in this post.

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson

The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, by Harold Bloom

A More Beautiful Question: The Spiritual in Poetry and Art, by Glenn Hughes

From Dickinson to Dylan: Visions of Transcendence in Modernist Literature, by Glenn Hughes

My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson, by Alfred Habegger

Tartuffe or, the Impostor, by Jean-Baptiste Molière, translated by Donald M. Frame

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