Emily Dickinson offers significant subtlety in her short poems, and capturing the precise tone can be challenging, especially when she writes about death or mental illness. In this poem, the figure of Death begins as a personification of a gentleman who comes to call on the speaker. The first two stanzas seem almost flirtatious, as she "puts away / [Her] labor and her leisure" to go on what seems to be a Sunday drive, as would befit a couple courting.
The ride takes the couple past scenes of civic and natural life, befitting a casual drive that a courting couple might take on a Sunday afternoon.
In many Emily Dickinson poems, the final stanza offers a deepening of meaning and a complexity that adds nuance to the simple ballads her lyric poems seem to be. In this poem, we discover that the ride described happened long ago, and the speaker speaks from the grave. The horses heads are capitalized, and while typography can be elusive in a Dickinson poem, it seems to have intentionality. Here, the simple horses we might have envisioned while reading the poem take on a metaphysical quality, as transporters to an afterlife.
The urbane quality that Death seems to possess early on remains but takes on a chilling (yet not entirely unpleasant) quality. The surprise with which we find ourselves at the grave may be most disturbing of all, for the poem clearly introduced Death immediately. In that in-betweenness—between the naming of Death and the unfolding of the implications of the poem—lies the poem's power to provoke a response.
No comments:
Post a Comment