Gunfire
When you read Emily Dickinson
you enter a War Zone
Sometimes the war is over
before the poem begins
The bodies, including her own
are already dead
You just need to clear them away
so you see what happened
and sometimes the war hasn’t happened yet
You hear the gun cocked, you hear the pin pulled from the grenade
Your heart quickens
your hands start to sweat
Terror is knowing the end is coming
Horror is knowing it has come
Comment
If Walt Whitman is the father of American poetry, then Emily Dickinson is surely its mother. The influence of both is incalculable in not only poetry written in the United States, but poetry written in the world at large.
They are very different poets, Whitman with the long incantatory lines designed to be shouted from the roof tops and Dickinson with short bursts like gun fire – dit, dit. She is the poet of terror and horror. I can’t think of another poet in the English language who compresses more thought into a few lines:
632
The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside—
The Brain is deeper than the sea—
For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
The one the other will absorb—
As Sponges—Buckets—do—
The Brain is just the weight of God—
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
And they will differ—if they do—
As Syllable from Sound—
*I’ve written two extended essays on Emily Dickinson for The Antigonish Review, “A Terrible Simplicity” and “Melody for Bone”. So much of Dickinson’s strongest work divides into the terror poems and the horror poems: those poems that embody the slow creep of terror; and those poems that live with the aftershocks of horror.
