Dickinson, 1850: Magnum Bonum, Harem Scarem

Female Seminary

Dickinson was 16 years old when she enrolled at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, which was ten miles from her home in Amherst, Massachusetts. The Seminary hoped that its students would become missionaries. Dickinson dropped out less than a year after she enrolled. She refused, as the Norton Anthology puts it, "to capitulate to the demands of orthodoxy."

The Homestead

After leaving Mount Holyoke, Dickinson returned to the home she grew up in with her older brother and younger sister. She lived there, in her parents' home, for the rest of her life. She called it a place of "Infinite power" (1247).

Magnum Bonum

Dickinson's first publication, a letter prefaced by a short poem ("Magnum bonum, harem scarem")  appeared anonymously in the Amherst College version of  ECU's Originals in 1850. Critics believe the letter was intended for the editor of the journal.

Susan

Some critics believe Emily had a long-term romantic relationship with Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, her older brother's wife.

A Prominent Family

Dickinson's father served in the U.S. House of Representatives (1853-54), state senator, helped found Amhert College "as a Calvinist alternative to the more liberal Harvard and Yale," and served as the Amherst College treasurer for 36 years (1247).

The Civil War

Dickinson wrote half of the poems we have today during the Civil War (1248).

Publication

Today over 1800 of Dickinson's poems survive. Only a dozen of them appeared during her liftetime. Her first editors "saw her formal innovations as imperfections," but Dickison "was unwilling to submit" to the changes they recommended, which she described as "surgery" (1249).

Many of her poems were published for the first time in 1890, ten years after Dickinson's death. Their republication in 1914 helped keep her work from falling out of favor (1250).

23 by Emily Dickinson

Daguerrotype taken at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (December 1846 or early 1847), when Dickinson was a student there. It is the only authenticated portrait of Dickinson after early childhood.

23

In the Name of the Bee --

And of the Butterfly --

And of the Breeze -- Amen! 

355 by Emily Dickinson

"I" created the image above using the Midjourney server in Discord by typing these words: "Emily Dickinson floating in space chaos despair photograph." I am not sure which artists had their work ripped off by this process . . . 

 355

It was not Death, for I stood up,
And all the Dead, lie down -
It was not Night, for all the Bells
Put out their Tongues, for Noon.

It was not Frost, for on my Flesh
I felt Siroccos - crawl -
Nor Fire - for just my marble feet
Could keep a Chancel, cool -

And yet, it tasted, like them all,
The Figures I have seen
Set orderly, for Burial
Reminded me, of mine -

As if my life were shaven,
And fitted to a frame,
And could not breathe without a key,
And ’twas like Midnight, some -

When everything that ticked - has stopped -
And space stares - all around -
Or Grisly frosts - first Autumn morns,
Repeal the Beating Ground -

But most, like Chaos - Stopless - cool -
Without a Chance, or spar -
Or even a Report of Land -
To justify - Despair.

122 by Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson's desk, in her Amherst, Massachusetts home. Photograph by Benjamin Norman of the New York Times (2017).

 122

These are the days when Birds come back -

A very few - a Bird or two -

To take a backward look.

These are the days when skies resume

The old - old sophistries of June -

A blue and gold mistake.

Oh fraud that cannot cheat the Bee.

Almost thy implausibility

Induces my belief.

Till ranks of seeds their witness bear -

And softly thro' the altered air

Hurries a timid leaf.

Oh sacrament of summer days,

Oh Last Communion in the Haze -

Permit a child to join -

Thy sacred emblems to partake -

Thy consecrated bread to take

And thine immortal wine!

269 by Emily Dickinson

 

"Wild Nights by Emily Dickinson." Illustration by Sarah Perkins.

269

Wild nights - Wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile - the winds -
To a Heart in port -
Done with the Compass -
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden -
Ah - the Sea!
Might I but moor - tonight -
In thee!

1666: "The Author to Her Book," Anne Bradstreet

 

"Virgin and Child" (1670s) by Bartolome Murillo

"The Author to Her Book" (1666/1678)

Writing for the Public

"The Author to Her Book" [on] its face seems to be about how writers struggle with editing first drafts of their work. All first drafts are crap, and Bradstreet describes them as “unfit for light/Thy visage so irksome to my sight.” She then describes the editing process, where she tries to make the poems flow better by stretching “thy joints to make the even feet[,]” which implies that she struggled with revising the meter of her lines. She eventually has to send her work out into the world to be read by the public and by critics, and she struggles with letting her writing go, wondering if she did well enough

Mothering Eight Kids

She calls herself a mother multiple times in this poem and as early as the second line, where she claims that she gave “birth” to the poem. . . . This whole poem shows the reader how Bradstreet feels about her writing as well as being a mother. Every parent struggles with sending their kids out into the world, hoping that they did enough to raise competent children, but this had to have been especially hard for Bradstreet. We know that she had eight children, was sickly, and that her husband was absent. She must have felt like she raised the kids on her own, a sentiment that is present in her poetry, as she writes “if for they father asked, say thou hadst none.” She had to write her poetry and raise her children alone.

Trying to Be a Good Christian?
As the title suggest, Bradstreet is speaking directly to her own book. As a result, the relationship she has with it feels conflicted. She feels almost as though she is disappointed in her writing. This idea was reinforced with the following lines, “I wash’d thy face, but more defects I saw, And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw” (Bradstreet). These lines gave me the impression that even though she has tried to correct her “defects”, all she could do was create another flaw. It feels like an endless spiral of correcting mistakes. 

"To My Dear Children" (1867)

• Contrary to popular opinion, the Puritans were not masochists who delighted in being punished; rather they knew that God is a loving Father who only ever does what is best for His children, including chastisement.  That is why Bradstreet urges her children to “take it as thankfully and joyfully as in greatest mercies.” She addresses atheism, bringing up a number of doubts and assurances until she wraps it up with a prayer, “‘Return, O my Soul, to thy rest, upon this rock Christ Jesus will I build my faith, and if I perish, I perish.’” 
• In her letter “To My Dear Children”, [Bradstreet] admits that “Satan troubled me concerning the verity of the Scriptures, many times.” Though she trusts the existence of God, she questions the various interpretations of Christianity; but, upon the “consideration of these things” she would resignedly revert to her “own religion again.”
• I saw a connection between what she writes about her experience with God and faith and that of Emily Dickinson’s work. It seems like Dickinson although she believes that a higher power exists she often found herself “with God like an untoward child.” Furthermore, she seems to have found yourself losing the battle of faith for a time, as she claims, “many times hath Satan troubled me concerning the verity of the Scriptures, many times by atheism how I could know whether there was a God.” However, she seems to be urging her children to look upon God as their anchor in hard times as she states, “that have brought you into the world, and with great pains, weakness, cares, and fears brought you to this, I now travail in birth again of you tell Christ be formed in you.” She seems to be asking her children to seek out her love through Jesus after she has gone.
• [Bradstreet] expressed that when she was a teenager and had given into more worldly things, God “laid his hand sore upon me and smote me with the smallpox.” This coincides with the idea that God brings hardships to believers when they stray from Him. Bradstreet expressed that these times of hardship were “the times when the Lord hath manifested the most love” in her life, bringing her back to Him. I think that this must have been a comforting letter for her children to read after they lost their mother.
• Bradstreet also wrote about times in which she questioned her faith and the credibility of the Bible. She “never saw any miracles” and the ones she read about could have been “feigned.” Bradstreet writing about her spiritual struggles humanized her and made her more relatable in a time when it seemed that believers wanted to project supreme piousness and righteousness.

340 by Emily Dickinson

 

"I" created the image above using the Midjourney server in Discord by typing these words: "realistic photo funeral inside Emily Dickinson's brain." I am not sure which artists had their work ripped off by this process. Still thinking that through . . . 

340

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading - treading - till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through -

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum -
Kept beating - beating - till I thought
My mind was going numb -

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space - began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here -

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then -

320 by Emily Dickinson

 

"Cathedral Rocks, Yosemite Valley, Winter" by Alfred Bierstadt

320
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference –
Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –
'Tis the seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –

124(s) by Emily Dickinson

There are five different versions of this poem. How do the changes affect their meanings?

I.

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers -
Untouched by morning -
And untouched by noon -
Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection,
Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone.

259 by Emily Dickinson

 

"A watchmaker at his bench in London" (1748) engraving

259

A Clock stopped - Not the Mantel's -
Geneva's farthest skill
Can't put the puppet bowing
That just now dangled still -

An awe came on the Trinket!
The Figures hunched -with pain -
Then quivered out of Decimals -
Into Degreeless noon -

It will not stir for Doctors -
This Pendulum of snow -
The Shopman importunes it -
While cool - concernless No

Nods from the Gilded pointers -
Nods from Seconds slim -
Decades of Arrogance between
The Dial life -
And Him.

365 by Emily Dickinson

 

"I" created the image above using the Midjourney server in Discord by typing these words: "forest landscape, in the distance a small dark-haired woman without a hat, alone in a forest , in very simple white 19th century dress, looks for something hidden, cinematic, realistic photo " I am not sure which artists had their work ripped off by this process . . . 

365

I know that He exists.
Somewhere – in silence –
He has hid his rare life
From our gross eyes.

’Tis an instant’s play –
’Tis a fond Ambush –
Just to make Bliss
Earn her own surprise!

But – should the play
Prove piercing earnest –
Should the glee – glaze –
In Death’s – stiff – stare –

Would not the fun
Look too expensive!
Would not the jest –
Have crawled too far!

236(s) by Emily Dickinson

 

Here are two different versions of 236. How do the changes affect the meaning of the poem?

236

Some - keep the Sabbath - going to church -

I - keep it - staying at Home -

With a Bobolink - for a Chorister

And an Orchard - for a Dome -

Some - keep the Sabbath, in Surplice -

I - just wear my wings -

And instead of tolling the bell, for church -

Our little Sexton - sings -

"God" - preaches - a noted Clergyman -

And the sermon is never long,

So - instead of getting to Heaven - at last -

I'm - going - all along!

[B, 1861, Fascicle 9]

 236

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church -

I keep it, staying at Home -

With a Bobolink for a Chorister -

And an Orchard, for a Dome -

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice -

I, just wear my Wings -

And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church

Our little Sexton - sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman -

And the sermon is never long,

So intead of getting to Heaven, at last -

I'm going, all along

[C, 1862, sent to Higginson]

372 by Emily Dickinson

 

"A Formal Feeling" (2014) by Phillip Hanson

372
After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

359 by Emily Dickinson

Artwork (2013) by Gavin Aung Than at zenpencils.com

For the full poem illustration, click here

 359

A Bird, came down the Walk -
He did not know I saw -
He bit an Angle Worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,

And then, he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass -
And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass -

He glanced with rapid eyes,
That hurried all abroad -
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought,
He stirred his Velvet Head. -

Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers,
And rowed him softer Home -

Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plashless as they swim.

Three versions of the 4th stanza:

I.

He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger, cautious,
I offered him a crumb

II.

He stirred his Velvet Head

Like One in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb

III.

He stirred his Velvet Head. –

Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb

18A. "Moby-Dick" (1851), Chs. 62-71

Billy Van, the monologue comedian, 1900. This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID var.1831.  For more about Blackface and Minstrelsy see this webpage at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Ideology: Stubb vs. Fleece

1) What was most difficult and thought provoking at the same time I think when Stubb was abusing Fleece on the state of his whale steak and how it was cooked. To be honest, [it] was also kind of annoying as well[, mostly] because of the abusive talk that Stubb used and how he put Fleece down on how to cook and how to act as a black man[, which] I hated when reading the chapter.

2) However jovial [Stubb] may seem, he also is self-important. His crew brings back the whale they killed, which only furthers Ahab’s bad mood. He retreats into his cabin, and Stubb becomes insufferable. He demands a "steak" be cut from the whale. He wakes the cook up to prepare it, and then criticizes the cook. The cook is a black man, and Stubb treats him with no respect. This isn’t shocking given the time period, but it seems like it goes against the previous statements made about whaling. Fleece (the cook) says that he is about ninety years old. There is no telling how many of those years he’s been a cook… yet Stubb has the audacity to tell him how to do his job. 

Ideology: Fleece vs. Enlightenment? Transcendentalism?

3) … the [text] seemed to make a satire of Enlightenment values, as Fleece the cook leaned over the ship and was forced [by Stubb] to preach to a mass of hungry sharks devouring globules of whale . . .  [an] appeal in which he was to make the attempt of calming the gluttonous mass by shouting things like “Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don’t blame ye so much for; dat is natur . . . but to gobern dat wicked nature, dat is de pint” (Ch. 64). In this line, Fleece mocks Enlightenment values by showing the non-effect its ideals on personal nature have on the hungering mass that is society. . . . when Fleece tells the sharks “Don’t be tearin de blubber out your neighbor’s mout” (Ch. 64), the sharks, even if they could understand Fleece, would ignore his request, as the creatures voracious nature requires a particluar kind of ‘self-reliance’ to even survive in their harsh, submerged world.

From: Melville: His World and His Work ( 2005) by Andrew Delbanco

"...Melville's retort to romantic dreamers whose belief in the 'all-controlling and all-permeating wonderfulness' of the world (his parodic paraphrase of Emerson) blinds them to the truth that nature is nothing but a vast blankness on which man inscribes his fantasies."

"The Gulf Stream" (1899) by Winslow Homer

Aesthetics: The Reader is a Sailor
4) The point of these chapters could simply be to innocently give the reader a better understanding of the things that whalers get up to at sea. Or it could be an attempt by Melville to prolong the story, to give the reader a similar feeling to how the characters feel. For the sailors and Ishmael, the voyage they are on is a long journey over the course of several years. Melville may be trying to give the reader a sense of this in these chapters. For the characters, this journey is not simply from point A to point B. It is full of stops along the way and other events that may be too unimportant to include in the novel. In providing these brief chapters of extra information, Melville is prolonging the story for the reader. Just as it may feel for the characters involved.

Ideology: Sailors as Sharks
5) Chapter 66 discusses how the sharks use the whale they just caught to hold a feeding frenzy that Queequeg almost loses a hand in. However, during the feeding frenzy it’s noted that the sharks “viciously snapped, not only at each other’s disembowelment… and bit their own” which could be foreshadowing that the crew will turn on one another at some point for, just a chapter earlier, Fleece was comparing the crew to wicked sharks (Ch. 66).

Ideology: A disturbing Ritual Sabbath?

6) . . . a line that caught my attention was when the narrator said someone would have thought they were “offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea gods” referring to the tale of Odysseus and the titan Helios’s prized red oxen (ch.67). In the tale when the oxen were killed to placate the sea and allow them passage, Helios was enraged and had Zeus destroy Odysseus’ ship and crew leaving him alone. This could potentially be further foreshadowing that the crew isn’t going to make this cursed voyage. 

7) Later they enter a ‘gab’ with another whaling ship known as the Jeroboam, currently under quarantine from some disease potentially causing hallucinations and delirium. One of their crew that appears to be heavily affected by the illness entered a state of “insanity” making him believe that he’s the “archangel Gabriel” (ch.71). This insanity the crewmate is undergoing makes me think of Ahab’s obsession with Moby Dick. Despite it not being a disease, it’s practically eating him alive as if it were.

Ideology: Cosmopolitanism

8) This book is often held up as an example of successful cosmopolitan ideals, but occasionally comments will pop up in the book where the reader questions some of these characters’ attitudes towards other cultures, and therefore cosmopolitanism itself. For example, in chapter 66, Queequeg’s hand is almost taken off by a shark, and he remarks that he doesn’t care for the shark or whichever god made it because “…de god watmade shark must be one dam Ingin” (Ch. 66). Queequeg had already been shown to be tolerant of Ishmael’s Christian faith, and he even says in this chapter that he wouldn’t have cared if the shark’s creator had been a “Fejee god or Nantucket god,”, but that is where the tolerance ends (Ch. 66). He very clearly does not like Native Americans, but why? How much contact has he had with the natives of mainland America? It almost makes the reader wonder if he picked up on this prejudice from the people around him rather than developing an opinion from any extensive experience with native peoples. And if Queequeg’s opinion can be swayed by the society he lives in, which we know was overall incredibly racist, does this undercut the book’s theme of cosmopolitanism?

9) Chapter 67 begins with Ishmael saying “It was a Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed!” (Ch. 67) Then he describes how the crew broke their Sabbath oath by hacking up a whale, a process which he compares to the offering of cattle to “the sea gods” (Ch. 67). I think this is a very interesting analogy, since Ishmael lives in a predominantly Christian society, and Ishmael is a Christian himself. He’s already been shown in the book partaking in a pagan ritual with Queequeg, something that would cause many a Christian at that time (and now tbh) to dramatically clutch their pearls and faint on the nearest chaise. Ishmael has some hang ups with the idea of having to stick to a rulebook when it comes to religion (much like Dickinson and [Emerson]), so breaking the Sabbath or participating in pagan rituals does not seem like sacrilege to Ishmael even though it would to some other Christians. Ishmael has the capacity to coexist alongside other [beliefs] and actively participate in them without forsaking his own. This implies a positive example of cosmopolitanism. Honestly, my first paragraph was about a failed example of cosmopolitanism and this one is about a successful example. And the quotes I pulled from the book are only a paragraph apart themselves. It’s giving me whiplash. But it has also helped me see that this book is probably meant to be less one-sided propaganda for cosmopolitanism and more of a discussion of cosmopolitanism, and how it is an idyllic society that we aim for but haven’t perfected yet (evidence in the behavior of Queequeg and the Spanish sailor).

Ideology:  Ahab's Reverence for the Whale Head

10) . . . this is how [Ahab] speaks of the whale head, “"Speak, thou vast and venerable head, which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations,” (Chapter 70)  which, ironically, is a stark contrast to the very technical, analytical ways of interaction between the crew (by majority) and the whale.