Journal Entry on Emily Dickinson, part 2

Stephen Greene

English 48B

March 15, 2011

Journal #27, Emily Dickinson

 "I died for Beauty - but was scarce / Adjusted in the Tomb / When One who died for Truth, was lain /In an adjoining Room - / He questioned softly "Why I failed"? / "For Beauty", I replied - /"And I - for Truth - Themself are One - / We Bretheren, are", He said - /And so, as insmen, met a Night - / We talked between the Rooms - / Until the Moss had reached our lips - / And covered up - Our names -"(448, p.86)

"That Emily Dickinson published almost no poems while she was alive yet became enormously popular when her first book appeared four years after her death is a well known fact.¹  The 1890 volume went through eleven printings and led to a Second Series in 1891 and a Third Series  in 1896; an edition of her letters appeared in 1894 (Sewall 707, n.1).  Today she and Walt Whitman are generally regarded as the two greatest American poets of the nineteenth century.  In Jungian terms, she is a "visionary" artist who compensates for collective psychic imbalance through an archetypal vision of another possibility (see Snider 6-7).  What Jung says of visionary literature clearly applies to the best of Dickinson’s work:          " [. . .] it can be a revelation whose heights and depths are beyond our fathoming, or a vision of beauty which we can never put into words. [. . .] the primordial experiences   rend from top to bottom the curtain upon which is painted the picture of an ordered world, and allow a    glimpse into the  unfathomable abyss of the unborn and    of things yet to be" ("Psychology and Literature" 90)."(Emily Dickinson and Shamanism, http://www.csulb.edu/~csnider/dickinson.shamanism.html).

 This poem I found to be particularly interesting, although somewhat dark.  I first read this poem and heard a negative social commentary.  From the very first lines, "I died for Beauty, but was scarce".  Beauty was scarce in the world, disappearing, dieing, and being died for.  Then one who died for truth, as all the precious and supposedly innate human rights and core values are threatened, believer's dieing for their cause.  She paints a bleak world, but this is not where the two subjects of the poem reside, they have departed that world and speak to each other from adjoining tombs.  One does not recognize it at first, but the other announces that they are the same thing, beauty and truth.  They are brothers, they are sure friends, as they have died for the same cause.  Perhaps this is a hint at saying that there was a lack of unity and acceptance between people, leading to less than successful, full lives, and to divided failure.  He asked why she has failed, as if dieing, the only entirely inescapable universal theme, was a mark of failure.  Perhaps, they have both failed, and he asks the question as much of himself.  But soon they spoke between the walls, until slowly a moss began to grow.  This may be some comment on how beauty and truth were seen to the people of her contemporary time.  Not only has the struggle to maintain beauty and truth died, but the very names, definitions, and idea of them has faded and been covered by natural growth and time, leaving the new generation with nothing to even compare the current society to.