"Goblin with a Gauge": Teaching Emily Dickinson

For the past several years, I have had the privilege of teaching seminars on Dickinson's poetry in her house, the Emily Dickinson Homestead. The seminars are open to the community, and my students have included computer programmers, English teachers, social workers, novelists, Homestead guides, a mathematician, a neurolinguistics researcher, and a number of people who identify themselves by saying they are taking the class because they are tired of being embarrassed when out-of-town friends say, "You live in Amherst, you must know all about Emily Dickinson."

When I started teaching these seminars, I had two modest goals: to lead my students, many of whom had read little or no Dickinson before, through close readings of her poems; and to see what intelligent non-critics would make of the poetic peculiarities that have long bedeviled Dickinson scholars. As a poet and long-time student of American poetry, I felt quite comfortable with Dickinson's erratic punctuation, incomplete sentences, willful word choices and dizzying shifts of perspective. I never expected my students to confront me with problems that would require me to find a new approach to Dickinson's work.

The first two classes went more or less as expected, but when, in the third, we turned to "'Twas like a Maelstrom, with a Notch," I found myself in the middle of a heated debate between three students, each of whom, after studying the poem outside class, had come up with a reading that completely contradicted the others':

'Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch,
That nearer, every Day,

Kept narrowing it's boiling Wheel
Until the Agony

Toyed coolly with the final inch
Of your delirious Hem -
And you dropt, lost,
When something broke -
And let you from a Dream -

As if a Goblin with a Guage -
Kept measuring the Hours -
Until you felt your Second
Weigh, helpless, in his Paws -

And not a Sinew - stirred - could help,
And sense was setting numb -
When God - remembered - and the Fiend
Let go, then, Overcome -

As if your Sentence stood - pronounced -
And you were frozen led
From Dungeon's luxury of Doubt -
To Gibbets, and the Dead -

And when the film had stitched your Eyes
A Creature gasped "Reprieve"!
Which Anguish was the utterest - then -
To perish, or to live?

(Fr425)

One student, pointing to the Biblical resonances of the words "Hem" and "Sinew" and the conflict between "God" and the "Fiend," explained the poem as an idiosyncratic portrayal of Christ's ordeal on the cross. Another student vehemently disagreed. Having found that Dickinson studied German in school, he was certain that "Maelstrom" should be punningly interpreted as "male stream." Putting this together with the "delirious Hems" and monstrous male "Paws," he presented the poem as a rape allegory, whose subject, signaled by the words "Sentence," "pronounced" and "utterest," was the psychological effect of male-dominated language and literary institutions on the female poet. The third student was dumbfounded by her classmates' heavy-handed hermeneutics: to her, the poem was clearly an existential riddle, a series of arresting metaphors for a subJect which is never revealed because it is beyond the representational powers of language.

Naturally, the class turned to me to adJudicate the argument. But, to my consternation, I found all the readings too convincing to dismiss and too disparate to harmonize. Apparently, I didn't know whether "'Twas like a Maelstrom" was about Christ, the female writer in a misogynist literary world, an unnameable existential encounter, or something else completely; I couldn't even say whether the poem was a narrative, a psycho-social allegory or a riddle. For Dickinson scholars, this sort of interpretive free-for-all is a familiar spectacle. Dickinson's poems and Dickinson studies, like mutually notching maelstroms, whirl around fundamental questions -- from punctuation to poetic intention -- which can never really be settled.

My students' debate over "'Twas like a Maelstrom" taught me that since I had no definitive answers to...