Outlandish Powers: Dickinson's Capsizals of Genre and Tone

That Emily Dickinson's poems defamiliarize the English language is, I think, evident to all her readers. Her work transports native speakers to an alien realm that exists like a parallel universe within our own snug terrain. We experience the mother tongue as an other tongue. When the homely linguistic sphere in which one felt complacent shows its extrinsic face and force, the effect is unsettling. It's a bit like being stopped by a customs agent who informs you of the need to change your currency before entering your own driveway. The domestic made foreign partakes of both feral and intimate domains. But what exactly do I mean by the word foreign? In the context of Dickinson's poems, I'm focusing on the connotations ofwrongness or insubordination that surround the strange. I'm also interested in the tendency of the foreign to violate cultural and aesthetic assumptions concerning propriety, cohesiveness, and proportion. For my purposes, foreigness implies treason against the accepted codes of communication. Its tactics are guerilla; it puts an undermining spin on received ideas.

It seems to me that the uncanny quality of Dickinson's work is attributable in large part to its grammatical subversions. However, rather than analyze the poems' syntactical aberrations, I'd like to consider the ways in which the tonal range of poems 287, 1524, and 1437 disappoints certain conventions and in doing so creates a powerful sense of oddity. I'm particularly interested in the poems' interrogations and revisions of the elegy, ballad, and allegory. In addition, I'll consider the tonal contributions of personification and objectification; the poems' discordant registers of diction; and the speaker's stance, which sometimes violates cultural expectations.

Here is poem 287, which I am reading as a subversion of elegy:

A Clock stopped—Not the Mantel's—Geneva's farthest skillCant put the puppet bowing—That just now dangled still—

An awe came on the Trinket!The Figures hunched, with pain—Then quivered out of Decimals—Into Degreeless Noon—

It will not stir for Doctor's—This Pendulum of snow—This Shopman importunes it—While cool—concernless No—

Nods from the Gilded pointers—Nods from the Seconds slim—Decades of Arrogance betweenThe Dial life—And Him—

First let's consider the ways in which this poem approaches the norm. The "Clock" of line one seems to be an emblem of both the human lifespan and the heart. There is nothing immediately foreign in this personification, just as there is nothing odd in the poem's overall trope: the clock-like, limited measure of human life is replaced by a "Degreeless" or immeasurable eternity when the human dies. In death, the human is removed from a trivial mortality that was akin to being a puppet or a Trinket. It makes logical, intellectual sense. And yet! It doesn't make any familiar or conventional emotive sense. The detached tone increases the poem's ability to horrify and thrill. But the speaker's stance—by its clinical coolness—also disrupts the expectation that an elegy should lament and offer consolation. (Consider by way of contrast Whitman's "When Lilacs Last In the Dooryard Bloom'd.") In Dickinson's poem, the speaker's tone seems closer to a coroner's than to that of a bereaved friend or relative. To use the poem's own metaphor, the dead man is a mechanical thing, and the speaker is the Shopman/watchmaker who "importunes" the mechanistic clock/heart to "stir" or beat. But a Shopman's way of importuning would be to try to fix the clock by dissecting it, so the importuning is itself a kind of autopsy. It also is disturbing to think of the bereaved as a merchant and the deceased as an object in need of repair. We expect the tropes of mourning to be heroic if public and emotive if private. But this poem uses a conceit that objectifies and commercializes—rather than praises or mourns—the honorable dead. On the whole, the poem avoids feelings in favor of a detached stance that mimics the powerful...