YOU'VE SEEN BALLOONS SET, HAVEN'T YOU?: ON THREE OF DICKINSON'S POEMS OF DEATH

7 7 R Y O U ’ V E S E E N B A L L O O N S S E T , H A V E N ’ T Y O U ? O N T H R E E O F D I C K I N S O N ’ S P O E M S O F D E A T H F R A N C I S C O U N G E R Dickinson’s poems of death bring together two of her most disparate personae: the child naively confronting the mysteries of experience , and the skeptical, sardonic, and rather recalcitrant speaker whose sense of conscience and sophisticated wit lead her to chafe against the creeds, consolations, and shibboleths of a parochial culture and its prayer book to which she can often only bristlingly – or as she herself would put it somewhat more lightly, ‘‘stealthily’’ – belong (insisting parsimoniously on our ‘‘gross eyes,’’ and exclaiming that heaven is ‘‘what I cannot reach!’’). On one hand, death itself – its mystery, its possible sea-change, its suddenness – alarms and obsesses Dickinson. At times it can even seem that death, and the power to kill, represent, in perverse form, something of an analogue for the form of poetic power Dickinson craves: a poetry of incredible force and volatility, a poetry of sudden shock, translated into a syntax that bursts and explodes onto the page, in which lines can seem calculated to jar and unease; this is the Dickinson who can find such exploitable intensity in a cat mashing a mouse, in an imperial thunderbolt scalping a ‘‘naked soul,’’ in a loaded gun presented as a figure for poetic ease and culmination to rival Keats’s blossoming leaves or ripening grain, 7 8 U N G E R Y the Dickinson who was enamored of volcanoes, and who spoke of a great book’s taking one’s head o√, and that as the highest plaudit. Simultaneously, on the other hand, those structures of belief that would disarm death or render it anodyne, even welcome, attract Dickinson’s ire. So her poems of death often showcase Dickinson at once at her most genuinely astonished and finely arch, as she struggles to come to terms with death’s mystery – forever the child asking what has become of the disappeared, or gazing into the face of the dying while trying painfully to register the weight and the import of a last look – while all the while ironizing and parodying those structures of belief that would deprive death of its power, its horror, its alarm. In the e√orts of Dickinson’s speakers to meditate on death, we find a subtle mixture of naive wonder and sardonic flippancy. Death, we might say, brings together Dickinson the poet of innocence and Dickinson the poet of experience. It confronts the poet, on the level of sense and immediate experience, with an always replenished and urgent mystery, while also engaging, by virtue of the way it summons palliative and interpretive social rituals and beliefs, her more critical and ironizing sensibilities. ≤ You’ve seen Balloons set – Haven’t You? So stately they ascend – It is as Swans – discarded You, For Duties Diamond – Their Liquid Feet go softly out Opon a Sea of Blonde – They spurn the Air, as ’twere too mean For Creatures so renowned – Their Ribbons just beyond the eye – They struggle – some – for Breath – And yet the Crowd applaud, below – They would not encore – Death – The Gilded Creature strains – and spins – Trips frantic in a Tree – Tears open her imperial Veins – And tumbles in the Sea – Y O U ’ V E S E E N B A L L O O N S S E T , H A V E N ’ T Y O U ? 7 9 R The Crowd – retire with an Oath – The Dust in Streets – go down – And clerks in Counting Rooms Observe – ‘‘’Twas only a Balloon’’ – The question on which #730 opens hardly readies us for the horrifying imagery that is to follow – that of balloons, emblems for whatever in us is great-souled and rarified and precious, torn apart on the branches of the high trees. The question is banal in...