"A Slash of Blue!": An Unrecognized Emily Dickinson War Poem

In the Emily Dickinson canon, the seven-line "A Slash of Blue!" is an overlooked poem. Thomas Johnson dates it approximately as "c. 1860" but R.W. Franklin dates it "about 1861," probably in late spring. Possibly because of that early dating, not much is expected of it and it is read literally, at its surface level. At first glance, it seems to be only a colorful depiction of an evening and morning sky, a tour de force of word painting.¹ On closer inspection, however, "A Slash of Blue!" is a poem about war. If the 1860 or spring 1861 dates for composition stand, it is a remarkable and bitterly ironic anticipation of the coming Civil War. But there are reasons from internal evidence to suspect that the poem might have been written slightly later, possibly after July 21, 1861, when Bull Run, the first major battle of the Civil War, was fought. If this is the case it is still remarkable and still bitterly ironic, both as a realistic contrast to romantic notions of war and as a reduction to absurdity of the notion of subordinating human suffering to some abstract conception of beauty. Apart from the importance of its topical allusion to the Civil War, it is also another, and very persuasive, piece of evidence of how unexpectedly sophisticated and imaginative Dickinson's poetic powers were at this early point in her career.

Not until very recently has much been written on Dickinson's war poetry. Before the 1980s, Dickinson specialists would have been hard put to it to identify more than a small sprinkling of poems that might have even hinted at the Civil War. Thomas Ford was one of the earliest critics to aver that the Civil War was reflected in her poetry, but he claims that this was accomplished mainly through a heightened and more frequent awareness of death, as news of local boys killed in the conflict filtered back from the battlefields. Ford therefore suggests that such poems as touched on the war were related to the lugubrious genre of funerary poetry that was popular during the century. Leigh-Anne Marcellin, more recently, returns to and expands this approach with careful readings of additional poems ("Singing Off").

Daniel Aaron briefly touches on Dickinson's relationship to the Civil War but the few poems he mentions in this respect are quite powerful and show her to have had an uncannily "realistic" view of warfare not matched by non-combatants until Stephen Crane (355-56). Later, Karen Dandurand cites three poems as being directly related to the war effort, but their relationship was only that the poems were published in a short-lived pro-Union journal entitled Drum Beat; the poems themselves had nothing to say about war. Another poem that Dandurand mentions is J67 ("Success is counted sweetest/ By those who ne'er succeed"), whose composition Johnson dates as 1859. Johnson lists 1878 as its date of publication, but Dandurand found it in print in 1864. Even still, it is somewhat romantic, treating war in the abstract. If the date of composition is correct, it did not need an actual war to inspire it.

Not until 1984, when Shira Wolosky's Voices of War was published, did a full-scale treatment of war in Dickinson's poetry appear. She argues that the Civil War played a more pervasive role in it than had been suspected. Wolosky contends that whereas Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville responded to the war with ambivalence, Dickinson reacted by using it to criticize the assumptions of theology (47-49, 63). ² Barton Levi St. Armand appears to be in accord with this view when he argues that Dickinson progressed from a fondness for martial imagery in her early poetry to finding herself split between one view of Christ as a mild and loving figure and another as Calvinism's militant divinity "who crushed...