Some of the Things We Mean When We Say "New England"

Meine Damen und Herren, ladies and gentlemen, I teach at a university in the tropics, and that means my classes have to read New England literature in translation. If there are palm trees and a blue sky just outside the window, imagining Robert Frost's stone walls and deserted farms requires us to forget the vocabulary of our senses. And of course words like coat and cold are only abstract concepts if you live where the air is warm twelve months of the year.

But when I teach Emily Dickinson in a warm latitude, I can take advantage of what Frost in "Tree at My Window" called inner weather. The students and I and Emily Dickinson don't exactly partake of the poems on equal terms, but during the time we're in the poem together we can at least agree on the terms of our translation. The only snake we have in Hawaii, for instance, is a tiny blind species that's usually mistaken for a worm, but for that reason it's easy to get the students to shudder at the thought of reaching by mistake for a "real" one. And of course temperature has nothing to do with imagining how excited a nine-year-old boy would be at the thought of finding some interesting junk in the road—junk like a whiplash unbraiding in the sun.

But Emily Dickinson wrote "A narrow fellow in the grass" in 1865, and of course the things in a nine-year-old's pockets are a little different these days. As E. B. White noticed when he returned to the place where one of his memories began, dirt roads lost something when they were diverted into the present. They used to have three tracks running along their course; now they have two. We no longer hear the hooves that made the middle track, and there are no horsewhips now to break and leave their tips in the dust.

So the passage of time has done to Dickinson's image of the whiplash what her poem originally did to the whiplash itself: it has defamiliarized it. We imagine the whiplash now at a second remove. First the poem came to the whiplash in 1865 and made it available on the poem's own terms; then came time and converted the poem's terms into a language that's foreign to us all. On February 14, 1866, the thousands of readers who opened their copies of The Springfield Republican had at least this in common: at the moment before they read "A narrow fellow in the grass" for the first time in history, every one of them had seen a whiplash unbraiding in the sun. That memory was actual. But in 1995 we remember differently. For us the poem's image is only an image.

Because time is short, I'd like to give this idea of an image standing in for another image a name. Just for the time this paper lasts let me call it New England, and for the purposes of getting the discussion going let me ask you to think two things about it.

The first thing is this obvious little notion: when we say New England, we are saying something whose meaning has changed over time. To a historian it will go without saying that Cotton Mather and Edwin Arlington Robinson speak the name of their home in what amounts to different languages, but for the next few minutes I'd like us to remember that for us readers those two languages coexist uneasily in the same sensorium. We can put down an old New England book and pick up a new one a moment later, and when that happens we are going to find ourselves reading ironically.

Now, one elementary thing irony does is to remind us that we know in advance how the stories of the dead are going to come out. Think of it: we are in a position to say, "Little did she know," about Emily Dickinson. In itself, that artifact of the reading process is...