The System of Colors in Emily Dickinson's Poetry: Preliminary Observations

While my research on the function of colors in the poetry of Whitman and Dickinson was still at an early stage, I conceived the idea that—unlike Whitman's—Dickinson's chromatic technique can be described and fully understood on the basis of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colors.¹ Wittgenstein, in fact, claims that colors are a system, a self-sufficient "mechanism" based on conventions; as he puts it, no matter how few colors we know, colors belong to our formal logic—and therefore to the grammar and syntax of our perception. This paper proposes to offer a few preliminary observations on the theme and to hint at some of the consequences that might derive from an inter-semiotic approach.

Dickinson's cognitive faculties and artistic universe do not seem to include a theory of revelation or illumination, in spite of the poet's intense epiphanic moments. According to her poetics, the poet is not supposed to reveal reality—and maybe there is nothing to reveal, or no way to reveal it at all. Dickinson's descriptions are not mimetic but almost totally self-referential.²

The poetic self observes, with a "clinical" eye, a number of mysterious operations, registering its responses or its impossibility to respond. The "inner eye" is inhabited, as in Morris Graves' paintings, by little known—and little knowing—birds, who see only through the pain of their blindness. Nature can be seen, heard, perceived, without being understood and, above all, "said."³ There is no truth, except in the slant vision which the soul uses as a protective strategy. Truth, as Nietzsche was discovering on the other side of the Atlantic, is but a "moving army of metaphors."⁴ The occasional, brief coincidence between subject and object offers no certainty: "The Angle of a Landscape . . . Accosts my open eye" (375); doubts, silences, paradoxes, ambiguities are more significant than discoveries and illuminations.

Such a dialectic of oppositions includes the language of colors, with surprising effects of seemingly absurd images—a surrealistic technique observed by critics in the early 1960s: "If White—a Red—must be!" (689), "a ruddier Blue" (756), "a purple stile / That Yellow little boys and girls / Were climbing" (318). These juxtappositions remind me of a Parnassian chromatism ("Sea of Blonde," 700) while "The Sunrise runs for Both" invents a night scene with anticipations of modern neon lights: "The North—Her blazing Sign / Erects in Iodine" (710).⁵

In general, Dickinson's long and contradictory process of experience avoids physical contact with the phenomenological world. Dickinson treats her own body as if it did not belong to her. In postmodern culture, Roy Lichtenstein claims that "looking without touching would reveal nothing about the structure of the world. The different things would remain incomprehensible colors" (Interview of 1983). Whitman, a poet of all senses, would agree: as a puer aeternus, his poetic self falls in love with the world, plays with it, comes to terms with its mysteries, sees what he touches (poet / bricoleur). Dickinson's achievements, on the contrary, depend precisely on her refusal to accept the illusion that the poet is destined to reveal the structure of the world, or even fragments of truth.⁶

Dickinson's things may well remain "incomprehensible colors"—and colors, in turn, incomprehensible things. But the interplay between colors and things never ceases to be artistically productive. As Harold Bloom observes, even in Whitman, notwithstanding the theory of adhesiveness, the poetic self is more frequently out than in the scene. In Dickinson the self can emerge like "that Cooler Host" (670) we do not dare to face. In this unheimlich dimension of alterity, colors are often used with an implicit expressionistic technique; the register employed is grotesque, black and white are raised to the dignity of colors, as in Whistler; black becomes the most sensuous of colors, as in Goya.⁷

In this context, Dickinson's habit of defining colors and shades referring to gems and hard stones (onyx, beryl, topaz, quartz, etc.) can be read as the necessary detachment, in a Weltanschauung that resists the temptation of excessive beauty...