Emily Dickinson as the Un-named, Buried Child

Emily Dickinson's poems have sometimes been marketed as literature for children, a publishing tactic that not only de-claws her, excising her sharper lyrics, but also reflects that the child speaker was a gesture Dickinson at times pointedly used. Portraying Emily Dickinson as a writer of sublime nursery rhymes, the collection Poems for Youth, edited by Alfred Leete Hampson, presents Dickinson as if she unambiguously found voice in the sphere of infancy. ¹ Some of the lyrics included in Poems for Youth are printed together with drawings of a beguiling little girl who enacts the dramas described in the poems. Excluded from the gently admonitory Poems for Youth, others of Dickinson's child-freighted poems incorporate a child speaker who is already dead, a maneuver that lends a permanent child's eye view to the text. A condition of stymied force typifies these troped-posthumous lyrics, a perspective of entrapped insight. By the phrase "troped-posthumous," I indicate a narrator who speaks from the premise of already being dead when she begins to speak. She is not necessarily speaking about mourning, but rather is speaking from the place of death. Posthumous publication, a striking aspect of Emily Dickinson's oeuvre, has no strict correlation to the trope of the posthumous voice, which occurs within text itself. ² Powerfully observant, these dead speakers cannot do anything with their knowledge of death, however near omniscience it brings them.

In this essay, I consider Dickinson's assumption of the narrative posture of a buried child who does not leave the legacy of a name. ³ This defeated child Dickinson dramatically opposes to the biblical David whose juvenile prowess secured his name. In "I took my Power in my Hand -" the comparison of the lyric's speaker with David implies by analogy that the poem is spoken by a child, or at least presents a child's perspective (Fr660). The speaker questions his or her own stature, his or her own power, asking "was myself - too small?" Through readings of the following poems: "'Twas just his time, last year, I died," "I took my Power in my Hand -," "Because I could not stop for Death -," and "Ample make this Bed," I suggest that Dickinson's poetic effort to speak through the child's voice is a mode of reclaiming the spent self, and perhaps also a critique of domination refracted through the prism of the voice deemed too small to be heard. There is a poignancy granted many of Dickinson's more powerful child-spoken poems which belies the notion that she took up the child's voice mainly as an ironic commentary on woman's place in culture. Rather, the poems engage a palpable erasure of the self, both as name and as body.

A voice hidden behind death presents a speaker who attends to the trauma of death not by coming through that trauma but rather by inhabiting it, by making it homey. For example, in "The grave my little cottage is," Dickinson graphically fulfills the sentimental notion that the dead child awaits her parents in heaven (Fr1784). The speaker in this poem continues to practice housekeeping in preparation for Judgment. Of course, the traditional belief about being raised on Judgment day holds that the dead sleep the sleep of death until that day. Dickinson's out-of-bounds speaker is not asleep but rather, uncannily, her body facilitates the corporeal aspects of the grave, its marble nature, its function as a boundary between bodies seen and unseen. Inhabited by a dead, still-speaking child, the domestically charged grave persists as a border territory, a bed both cozy and made with awe, awful. The un-named, buried child speaker positions herself across thresholds. She is not named but, in narrating her poem, she names things difficult to name. She is dead but not silenced. She is a child who has skipped adulthood and gone straight to eternity.

Elizabeth Petrino...