"I Read My Sentence Steadily" by Emily Dickinson

Topics mentioned in this episode include:

-The antitheses of Emily Dickinson

-White = Infinity in 19th century American Lit.

-Fascicles!

-The Modernist, Feminist, and Queer claims on Emily

-Magnificent and trending writer Virginia Woolf

-A secular Memento Mori

-Ballad Stanzas and Common Meter

-The Amazing Grace phenomenon

-Why Ballad Stanzas sound so ballad-y

-Slant rhyme revisited

-Matthew's podcast Sleerickets! 

-Why Big Pun and Robert Pinsky use slant rhyme differently.

-Slant rhyme modulation!

-How to stack ambiguities like a pro (it involves big puns)

-Original sin and the birth of Death

-Did you just gender my soul???

-God as Plural: Jewish and Christian takes

-The morbidity of Keats and Dickinson, compared

-The Aghori 

-One more pun as a nightcap before eternal sleep

Text of poem:

I read my sentence steadily,
Reviewed it with my eyes,
To see that I made no mistake
In its extremest clause, --

The date, and manner of the shame;
And then the pious form
That "God have mercy" on the soul
The jury voted him.

I made my soul familiar
With her extremity,
That at the last it should not be
A novel agony,

But she and Death, acquainted,
Meet tranquilly as friends,
Salute and pass without a hint --
And there the matter ends.  

Transcript

Versecraft Episode 2-7: “I Read My Sentence Steadily” by Emily Dickinson 

Hey everyone, welcome back to the show, or, if this is your first time listening, welcome to the show. As I’ve been told, this is not a podcast you can listen to while you do your laundry, but I hope you enjoy it anyway. If you do like the show, please take a moment to either recommend it to a friend who you think might enjoy it, or else leave a rating or review on the app of your choice. There’s no concrete reward for doing these things, but you can imagine that Apollo is smiling down upon you. 

            Today we’re going to talk about the poet whom many people consider the greatest the United States has ever produced. Strangely for a poet who is held in such high esteem, she is known just about as much for her imperfections as for her brilliance, even within the circle of her defenders. Even her best work is uncomfortable in how it often manages to be so dazzlingly insightful yet so puzzlingly obscure, so powerfully phrased yet so awkwardly expressed, so hauntingly resonant yet so sonically clunky. Unless one is willing to embrace her private eccentricities and amateur lack of polish as proto-modernist genius, it is difficult to love her wholeheartedly, but it is equally difficult to not love her at all—her brightest sparks of inspiration demonstrate the fascinating activity of an entirely unique mind, a mind more alien to the common reader yet more penetrating to the common soul than nearly any other in the English language. Herein is the mystique of Emily Dickinson. 

            Dickinson, who lived from 1830-1886, was born to prominent Puritan stock in Amherst, Massachusetts. Though she had several close friends and a thriving correspondence, she almost never left Amherst, and in her middle age, having suffered the deaths of many loved ones, and compelled to care for her ailing mother, she developed an acute case of agoraphobia, rarely leaving the house, and only occasionally leaving her room. Dickinson however thrived in this isolation and took advantage of the confines of her physical environment to probe the vast terrain of her mind, writing a prodigious quantity of poems in spurts of feverish intensity. Among the townspeople of Amherst, she came to be known as a kind but eccentric lady, always dressed in white (a color which she, like her contemporary Melville, associated with the infinite), and fond of tending her beautiful flower garden, which she cataloged and presided over with the expertise of an amateur botanist. She quietly published a handful of works over the years, but few in her lifetime, save for the ones closest to her, ever knew that she had in fact written hundreds upon hundreds of poems, which she stowed away in bundles she called fascicles. 

After her death from kidney failure at 55, her relatives fought over the right to publish her work, leading to a number of early editions, the differences among which scholars have debated about ever since, mostly in regard to Dickinson’s notoriously heterodox punctuation. After creating an initial splash of interest in the late 19th century, Dickinson’s work was more or less forgotten until the 1910’s and 20’s, when Modernist writers began to see in her formally idiosyncratic, conceptually dense work the kind of rebellion from conventional Victorian verse which they also hoped to achieve. Having been elevated by Modernism to the status of a major poet, Dickinson’s star only continued to rise as her work was taken up by Feminist critics in the 1960’s and beyond, who saw her fierce individuality and free-thinking spirituality emblematic of a different kind of rebellion against patriarchal, puritanical norms of 19th century New England.  More recently, some theorists have focused on the many homoerotic letters that Dickinson wrote to her sister-in-law Susan and have promoted Dickinson as a pre-modern queer icon. Like the equally brilliant Virginia Woolf, Dickinson seems to have only become more socially relevant as time goes on, and though, also like Woolf, the contemporary fixation on her personality sometimes threatens to overshadow the focus on her actual writing, she is a figure well worth the attention, who rewards those who study her carefully. 

As a poet, Dickinson is perhaps most celebrated for the way she is able to verbally capture subtleties of perception and feeling that would seem otherwise indescribable, as in her famous poems “There Is A Certain Slant of Light,” and “I Felt A Funeral In My Brain.” She is also renowned for her meditations on death, which range from poignant and precise descriptions of the dying process to incisive reflections on mortality and grief. For today’s episode, I’ve chosen a poem that falls into the latter category— one that represents Dickinson not at her most cryptic, cerebral, whimsical, or mystical, but at her clearest and wisest, yet which is still illustrative of her incredibly rich use of language. The poem concerns a favorite topic of mine—namely, the Stoic practice of contemplating death on a regular basis, so that when it comes, one is prepared to meet it. We have seen variations on this theme before, most explicitly in George Herbert’s “Church Monuments.” Here though, and in contrast to Herbert, Dickinson evokes memento mori not to humble herself before God or to motivate her own moral conduct, but simply to combat her own fear of death. Emily Dickinson numbered but never titled her poems, so for ease of reference they are usually known by their opening lines. This poem, number 412, goes like this: 

I read my sentence steadily,
 Reviewed it with my eyes,
 To see that I made no mistake
 In its extremest clause, --
 
 The date, and manner of the shame;
 And then the pious form
 That "God have mercy" on the soul

The jury voted him.
 
 I made my soul familiar
 With her extremity,
 That at the last it should not be
 A novel agony,
 
 

But she and Death, acquainted,
 Meet tranquilly as friends,
 Salute and pass without a hint --
 And there the matter ends.

In this poem we find Dickinson using her two favorite formal techniques—the first is the ballad stanza. A ballad stanza is a kind of quatrain in which the first and third lines are in tetrameter, and the second and fourth lines are in trimeter and rhyme with one another. Each of the four quatrains which make up this poem are ballad stanzas. As you can gather from the name, the sing-songy ballad stanza was commonly used in old folk ballads, as well as in many Protestant hymns, which is no doubt where Dickinson picked it up from. A very similar formal construction, called “common meter,” which is identical to the ballad stanza except that it’s always iambic and rhymes not only lines 2 and 4 but also lines 1 and 3, was also often used in the lyrics for hymns and spirituals, including “Amazing Grace.” As a result, many of Emily Dickinson’s poems, including this one, can be perfectly sung to the tune of “Amazing Grace” as well as many other simple, salt-of-the-earth songs both sacred and secular. For Dickinson in her time and place however, the use of the ballad stanza specifically creates an intimate musical association between her Puritan background and her spiritually individualistic poetry, a fascinating tension between the form of bible thumping zeal and the content of fiercely weird, personal reflection. You could not come up with a more quintessentially American idiom if you tried. 

The reason why the ballad stanza is so sing-songy, and is therefore perfect for songs that are easy to sing, is that it has an enormous caesura, an enormous pause, built right into the middle of it, which creates an unmistakable call-and-response effect between the second and third lines. The first tetrameter line tricks your ear into thinking that the four beat pattern will continue into the next line—when it doesn’t, but offers a shorter trimeter line instead, the ear lingers on that last beat of silence, roiling with unsatisfied potential energy, only to spring back into tetrameter in the third line. However, at this point, the ear desires balance, and so when the trimeter comes back around again in the fourth line, the brevity feels necessary, and the ear lingers in the final, weighty silence with a sense of conclusive satisfaction. Furthermore, the fact that the large pauses come right after the rhyming words gives the rhymes an additional musicality and resonance, and causes the listener to expect the chime of the rhyme in the fourth line even more than they would otherwise. 

Unfortunately for such a listener, Emily has other plans, and this brings us to technique number two: consonantal slant rhyme. As I mentioned what seems many moons ago on a previous episode, Emily Dickinson practically wrote the book on slant rhyme—it was a technique hardly ever used before her, and all who have used it after her have been indebted to her original experiments. To recap, a slant rhyme is a deliberately imperfect rhyme, a word which rhymes with another word only partially. This partial rhyme can take two forms: either the rhyme can maintain the same vowel sounds as the original word but not the consonants, in which case the rhyme is assonantal, or it can maintain the same consonant sounds as the original word but not the vowels, in which case the rhyme is consonantal. As Matthew on Sleerickets has pointed out several times, assonantal slant rhyme is incredibly widespread in rap and pop music, where it is common to rhyme the word “phone” with “home” for instance, whereas in fine art poetry circles, it’s far more common to see consonantal slant rhyme, such as Dickinson’s rhyme of “eyes” with “clause.” I suspect that the reason for this divergence in use is that, because assonantal slant rhymes sound more like true rhymes, rappers and singers feel that they work just as well as true rhymes for use in their lyrics, and make their songwriting jobs easier—whereas for quote-unquote “serious poets,” assonantal rhymes are more glaring on the page and could be perceived as a sign of laziness. Consonantal rhymes, by contrast, seem to add a more deliberate dissonance or ruggedness to the music of the line, and are thus seen as more acceptable, and sometimes even preferable to true rhymes. 

For Dickinson, consonantal slant rhymes were a way that she could inject her otherwise sing-songy rhythms with a dose of strangeness and surprise, a technique which proved especially powerful due to how heavily ballad stanzas land on their rhyming sounds. Setting up her listeners to expect the chime of a church bell, Dickinson was fond of shattering them out of their complacency with the clatter of a gong instead.

That being said, slant rhymes had a greater purpose for Dickinson than merely causing musical mayhem or creating an uncanny atmosphere. In what is probably her most brilliant formal innovation, Dickinson actually used the modulation from slant rhymes to true rhymes, or vice versa, for expressive, even narrative effect. 

In this poem, we have four pairs of rhymes, one pair for each stanza: eyes and clause; form and him; extremity and agony; and friends and ends. Do you notice what’s happening? Each time, Dickinson gets closer and closer to a true rhyme, until the poem ends, appropriately, with the true rhyme of “friends and ends,” creating the literary equivalent of a perfect cadence. Apart from being aesthetically satisfying, this movement toward perfection aligns with the movement of the poem as well, from the confrontation with mortality, to growing acceptance, to ultimate reconciliation with death. It is a subtle and accomplished bit of word painting. 

Now let’s return to the first stanza:

I read my sentence steadily,
 Reviewed it with my eyes,
 To see that I made no mistake
 In its extremest clause, --

This short quatrain, only 28 syllables long, already gives us much to think about. To begin with, the ambiguity of the word spelled “r-e-a-d,” which can be read as present tense or past tense, already establishes in the first line a suggestion that the action described is both past and ongoing. With the past tense of the word “reviewed” in the next line, we realize retroactively that “red” rather than “reed” is the correct pronunciation, but there’s no way to know that until you’ve already read the line. Cleverly, Dickinson is able to have her cake and eat it too, forcing us to face the ambiguity of the word, considering both options, and therefore reading both options into the poem, before she gives us a definitive solution. 

There is another kind of ambiguity in this first line as well. As we will see, this poem is littered with puns, and we encounter the first in the phrase “my sentence.” Is she referring to a sentence that she wrote, or a sentence passed upon her by a judge? In line four, she is brilliantly able to elaborate without at all lessening the ambiguity by playing on the double meaning of the word “clause,” which can mean either a grammatical structure in a sentence or a section of a legal document. As with the word “red,” but this time on the scale of the stanza rather than the line, we are forced to consider both interpretations before we get a solution, which Dickinson gives us in the second stanza. 

What are we to make of the word “extremest?” In the context of a written sentence, the extremest clause would presumably be the clause which says the most extreme thing. Certainly, Dickinson was capable of some wild expressions, and this may be a reference to the radicalism of her poetics. Alternatively, the “extremest clause” of a legal sentence would be a clause stating that the guilty party must be executed. Throughout this stanza, Dickinson conceptually marries the activity of her writing with the acknowledgement that she must die, implying a causal relationship between the two with supreme elegance: she writes sentences and extreme clauses in order to cope with her own sentence, and its own extremest clause. 

Let’s begin again, and this time read through the second stanza: 

I read my sentence steadily,
 Reviewed it with my eyes,
 To see that I made no mistake
 In its extremest clause, --
 
 The date, and manner of the shame;
 And then the pious form
 That "God have mercy" on the soul

The jury voted him.

            With the mention of the jury, our Schrodinger’s cats, the words “sentence” and “clause,” are discovered to refer primarily to a legal document sentencing the speaker to death. This stanza is the most clunky, obscure, and needless of the four—when Yvor Winters anthologized this poem in The Quest For Reality, he actually omitted this stanza, presumably not only because it was confusing and somewhat off topic, but because it erased some of the ambiguity of the previous stanza. Nevertheless, it is worth examining. 

            It is worth examining primarily because it gives some insight into Dickinson’s theological attitudes. She reads the reason why she is sentenced to death: “the date and manner of the shame.” Of course, we know that Dickinson was not literally sentenced to death, so we must assume that by death sentence she is referring to the fact of her mortality. This mortality, which is general to humankind, is not of course a punishment due to anything Emily Dickinson did. Within a Christian framework, if we are to blame anybody for the fact that humans must die, we must blame Adam and Eve, and Eve most of all. It is therefore likely that by “date” Dickinson means “the beginning of the world,” and by “shame,” the eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and the resultant shame that Adam and Eve felt at being aware of their nakedness. 

            Given her proto-feminist leanings, I cannot help but feel that Dickinson probably had a chip on her shoulder about being told that the world’s first woman was the source of human sin and death. I am therefore tempted to read the next three lines sardonically: Dickinson pokes fun at the hypocritical “pious form” of a jury saying “God have mercy” to someone they are about to execute. Furthermore, by claiming that the jury genders her soul as a “him,” she seems to be making a sly critique about the misogynistic underpinnings of the religious society in which she lived. 

            Before we move on, we would do well to ask the question: who exactly is this “jury?” I think there are two possible answers to this question: the first is that Dickinson did not mean for her analogy to have exact one-to-one correspondences, and that the jury is merely a non-referential detail within the legal metaphor. The more intriguing answer is that the jury must refer to God Himself—after all, who else could pass down the verdict of guilt upon humanity? There are a couple of interesting things about this—the first is that a jury is composed of multiple people, while God is only one being. To resolve this, we can take a Christian or a Jewish route: The obvious Christian route is to say that the jury is composed of the three persons of the trinity. The Jewish route is to point out that even though God is one, In the Torah He is often referred to in the plural, as in the word Elohim, which literally means “gods.” Though this practice was almost certainly a holdover from Levantine polytheism, it does give rise to the intriguing idea that, though God is One, He can also be conceived of as a kind of hive mind. 

            The second interesting thing is that, if God is the jury, then God is also the one proclaiming “God have mercy on your soul.” This image also paints God as a Being which contains multiplicity within Himself, much like Jesus’s cry of “God, why have You forsaken me?” implies a diversity of thought between the persons of the trinity. Given Dickinson’s somewhat pantheistic leanings, this idea of God containing multitudes may have been appealing to her. 

            Let’s now begin again, and this time read all the way through the last two stanzas: 

I read my sentence steadily,
 Reviewed it with my eyes,
 To see that I made no mistake
 In its extremest clause, --
 
 The date, and manner of the shame;
 And then the pious form
 That "God have mercy" on the soul

The jury voted him.
 
 I made my soul familiar
 With her extremity,
 That at the last it should not be
 A novel agony,
 
 

But she and Death, acquainted,
 Meet tranquilly as friends,
 Salute and pass without a hint --
 And there the matter ends.

            As we have now come to expect, the third stanza modifies the one that came before— whereas the jury had referred to her soul with a masculine pronoun, Dickinson says: “I made my soul familiar with her extremity,” thereby taking back ownership of her own soul. “Extremity” here of course calls back to the first stanza, and we now know that Dickinson is talking specifically about the prospect of her death. By meditating often on her death, Dickinson is mentally preparing herself so “that at the last it should not be a novel agony.” That is, it shall come as no surprise, nothing new to her. Of course, we could also read the word “novel” as a pun, a callback to her literary plays on words in the first stanza.

            Like Keats from our last episode, Dickinson was a poet obsessed with death, but in a very different way: whereas Keats was enamored of death, as attracted to it as he was grieved by it, Dickinson views death as a horror, but a horror from which she cannot look away, and which she must write about, over and over again, in order to come to terms with it. She must dwell on the description of corpses; she must fantasize herself dead; she must postulate conceptions of immortality, all to fight against her own dread. In this way, she is similar to the famous Aghori sadhus of India, ascetic devotees of Shiva who live in charnel grounds, meditate on top of corpses, cover themselves daily with cremated human ashes, eat and drink from human skulls, and occasionally turn to necrophagy, scavenging bodies from the river Ganges, all to better reconcile themselves to the fact of death on a daily basis. Though Dickinson of course never physically engaged in any such extremities, and would probably never dream of doing so, her intense and isolated theatre of the mind likely took her to similar mental states, states where death was as vivid to her as life. 

            Having acquainted with death all her life: in witnessing her loved ones die, in her meditations, in her poetry—Dickinson envisions meeting Death as an old friend, one whom she can salute bravely and cordially as she passes into the next world, without a hint of fear or expectation. “And there the matter ends.” In this last line, Dickinson can’t help but give us one last pun, as she leaves matter behind, enters Death’s carriage, and turns her head toward eternity. 

With all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s encounter this poem one last time, tranquilly, as friends: 

I read my sentence steadily,
 Reviewed it with my eyes,
 To see that I made no mistake
 In its extremest clause, --
 
 The date, and manner of the shame;
 And then the pious form
 That "God have mercy" on the soul

The jury voted him.
 
 I made my soul familiar
 With her extremity,
 That at the last it should not be
 A novel agony,
 
 

But she and Death, acquainted,
 Meet tranquilly as friends,
 Salute and pass without a hint --
 And there the matter ends.