Disavowing Elegy: “That Pause of Space” and Emily Dickinson’s Discourse of Mourning

After Emily Dickinson’s father died in 1874, she wrote to her editor T.W. Higginson to thank him for his poem “Decoration”: it had, she claimed, “assisted that Pause of Space which I call ‘Father’- .” But just how did “Decoration,” a traditional elegy that reaffirmed the location of the dead in the graveyard and the literary work, inspire Dickinson to coin this mesmerizing construct, a phrase which reflects upon the temporal and spatial absences of the dead? That “Pause of Space,” I argue, functions as a rebuke to the ideas that inform Higginson’s poem and as a catalyst for Dickinson’s idiosyncratic discourse of mourning. I first examine theories of elegy, which define it as a form that enacts a consolatory turn from the lost beloved to the creation of a poem, a move that mirrors what Freud called “the work of mourning” and that Dickinson does not accept. I compare Higginson’s “Decoration” with Dickinson’s own version (written three years later), in which Dickinson refutes Higginson’s premise in an attack on elegy’s fixation with spatial locality. I then focus on the temporal aspect of Dickinson’s “Pause of Space” construct, analyzing “While we were fearing it, it came” (Fr1317), in which Dickinson creates a vocabulary that repeatedly undoes itself over the course of the poem and, in the process, generates a new form of elegy.