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POETRY

Flights of imagination

PHOTO: SUMATI SURYA

What held the attention when I first came across Emily Dickinson was the complete lack of pretence, the absence of the desire to project a ‘literary’ persona. This was the setting of the self in which she arranged the words she had presum ably chosen earlier in a state of contemplation. This setting of Emily’s self cast a soft background light over the patterns of meaning, recognizable and yet utterly original.

The poem was:

(561)

I measure every Grief I meet

With narrow, probing Eyes —

I wonder if It weighs like mine

Or has an Easier size—

I wonder if they bore it long—

Or did it just begin —

I could not tell the Date of Mine—

It feels so old a pain —

I wonder if it hurts to live —

And if They have to try—

And whether – could they choose between –

It would not be – to die --

[….I have omitted three stanzas. Now, the last three stanzas:]

There’s Grief of Want — and Grief of Cold —

A sort they call “Despair’—

There’s Banishment from native Eyes —

In sight of Native Air —

And though I may not guess the kind —

Correctly — yet to me

A piercing Comfort it affords

In passing Calvary —

To note the fashions – of the Cross —

And how they’re mostly worn —

Still fascinated to presume

That Some — are like My Own.

I read it first about fifty years ago, and am awed even now by the effortless way Emily moves from the particular to the general, and by the genuineness of her dispassion. It arises out of a real passion for life and passes through the crucible of compassion. The poem climbs the hill of Calvary, attains the exalting final symbol of the Cross, and there, on the hill, the image of human suffering as each person’s cross still makes my hair stand on end. The purity of her vision, the fastidious yet venturesome way with words, shy and unexpectedly audacious, keep you going through poem after poem.

Some seem obscure at first reading, some seem initially to distract with her trademark capitals and dashes. How quaint, we think, and sort of sentimental…We couldn’t be more wrong. The capitals and dashes have a purpose in these poems, which are meant to be spoken out loud, or under the breath, or articulated carefully in silence. It takes a little time to realize that one’s emotional, if not actual physical breath is drawn in with each capital, and let out with each dash…and then the sound yields up its music, and finally the meaning. The process varies from poem to poem depending on the reader’s mood and capacity.

And when I say, ‘meaning’, as though it is to be extracted from the music of the poems, let me clarify: Both music and meaning are important in a poem, but in a good poem they are fused like a peepal and the neem growing together, with intertwined root, trunks and branches.

They give pleasure because they are distinct and yet have come together. In Emily’s poems meaning and music are in a state of dynamic symbiosis. They put out more shoots, tendrils, and roots in the reader’s mind.

There are poems written in a kind of drugged daze by poets who have given up trying to connect sense with sensibility, and other poems written by poets steeped in a mystic haze, who have gone beyond making such connections and have achieved might be called communion. Some mystic poets have dissolved themselves in the process and the reader who plunges in with them is drawn into their vision and accepts the blurring of language, the melding of shapes and colours, the slurring of sounds. The poem then reveals itself as a divine babble arising out of the ‘adi vayiru’, which in Tamil does not mean the literal underbelly but the seat of the emotions, the very life within. The giving of merely literary pleasure is secondary to these poets.

Whereas the drug-dazed poets are simply on a trip. Their drug is language, which they use to dull rather than to illuminate experience, and they like drawing facile, entrancing, pretty pictures and above all, tracing over and over again with cloying self-love the picture of themselves as ‘poets’. Pleasure is to be had from such poets, but it can pall. Gerard Manley Hopkins called them ‘Parnassan’ poets, that is, who hold forth from imaginary mountain tops, and he considered Tennyson one of these. There are plenty of poets today of this sort, hang-gliding from the cliffs of language shouting “Watch me!” In contrast, Les Murray the Australian poet is one of the mystics, a poet who leaps across fields of being with seven-league boots bestowed on him by some nameless ishta devataa of his.

Emily is too earnest and honest to try Parnassan tricks, and too humble to fancy herself a mystic. Yet her vision is nothing short of sublime. An ardent observer of the minute goings on in the patch of earth on which she stood, she gladly took in the whole firmament above.

(875)

I stepped from Plank to Plank

A slow and cautious way

The stars above my Head I felt

About my Feet the Sea.

I knew not but the next

Would be my final inch —

This gave me that Precarious Gait

Some call Experience.

She chooses carefully every word and syllable, as if it were a flower offered in worship, and crafts word-music that is not merely euphonious, but which echoes and amplifies her genuinely felt experience.

(643)

I could suffice for Him, I knew —

He — could suffice for Me –

Yet Hesitating Fractions –Both

Surveyed Infinity –

“Would I be Whole?” He sudden broached –

My syllable rebelled –

‘Twas face to face with nature – forced –

‘Twas face to face with God —

Withdrew the Sun – to Other Wests –

Withdrew the furthest Star

Before Decision – stooped to speech –

And then –be audibler

The Answer of the Sea unto

The Motion of the Moon –

Herself adjust Her Tides – unto —

Could I – do else – with Mine?

While a lesser poet may have flights of the imagination (and some may be enjoyable and even instructive), a great poet achieves a flight of the self.

( 683)

The Soul unto itself

Is an imperial friend -

Or the most agonizing Spy -

An Enemy could send -

Secure against its own -

No treason can it fear -

Itself - its Sovereign - of itself

The Soul should stand in Awe -

In Emily’s case, the bird is no eagle or swan, but a small, subtly coloured songbird singing its heart out.

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