710.1863.Doom is the House without the Door—

Doom is the House without the Door—
‘Tis entered from the Sun—
And then the Ladder’s thrown away,
Because Escape—is done—

‘Tis varied by the Dream
Of what they do outside—
Where Squirrels play—and Berries dye—
And Hemlocks—bow—to God—

English inherited the word “doom” from Germanic languages predating Old English. OED gives ten related definitions of “doom”, eight of them obsolete. Its universal thread through time is death and judgement, usually but not always with negative connotations.

ED Lex gives four definitions of “doom”:

1. Fate; death; tomb; life of sufferings; end; determination affecting the outcome.
2. Final days; last judgement; doomsday.
3. Ruin; destruction; death; final fate.
4. Condemned; damned; destined to death.

Both OED and ED Lex equate doom with death, but not necessarily Hell. Stanza 1’s “House without the Door” could be Heaven or Hell. Neither allows return, “Escape -is done –”.

Stanza 2 states as fact that life after death “Tis varied by the Dream / Of what they do outside -”. In other words, both Heaven and Hell are boring, varied only by memories of Life on Earth: watching squirrels play, berries dye fingers, and hemlocks bow gracefully. Is ED having second thoughts about hurrying to Heaven to meet Wadsworth?

It’s hard to imagine ED having “Hemlocks – bow – to [a Judeo-Christian] God”, but all things are possible. Maybe this is a poem for children. Or is Line 8’s “God” an alias for Mother Nature or Gaia, the personification of Earth and ancestral mother of all life? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia)

New twigs on a hemlock tree or sapling (Tsuga canadensis) bend gracefully downward, but the species is not poisonous. Poison hemlock (Conium maculatum) is an herbaceous biennial in the carrot family and can induce illness or death by ingestion or even by handling. Socrates committed suicide by drinking hemlock poison.

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After commenting on Poems 1-763 (Franklin) on The Prowling Bee’, I am convinced that (virtually) all of Emily Dickinson’s (ED’s) poems have a factual historical level in addition to their various poetic levels of meaning. The reason for her instant and continuing public adulation (1890 - present) was and is, by far, poetic. She is one of the "Greats" that she always dreamed to be, despite her lifelong refusal to publish. That refusal freed her from criticism and allowed her to explore the outer boundaries of poetic power.

More than a century of scholarly research has resulted in somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 books and published academic papers about ED. A large majority of these publications focus only on the “poetic levels” of one or more of ED’s poems. Publications that consider both the “historic level” and “poetic levels” comprise a small minority. Publications that focus only on the factual history of her life probably number less than 100. (All numbers in this paragraph are my estimates.)

Unfortunately for ED’s universe of readers, these two basic levels (historical and poetic) cannot be separated into two ivory towers. Every history-level publication that I know of includes at least some discussion of the poetic level(s).

The reverse is not true. In fact, authors of the “poetry-level” school seem to avoid commenting on the historical level, sometimes admonishing that a poem must stand on its own, without concern for its historical roots. To my knowledge, there are (virtually) no published “history-level” books or articles that totally ignore ED’s poems and their poetic levels.

Of course, ED’s refusal to publish her poems was only possible because of lifelong financial and daily social/housekeeping support by her family, especially her father and sister, respectively. In addition, throughout her life, the Dickinsons hired servants, first Negro and later Irish, some of whom became much more than housekeepers for ED.

My point is that our appreciation of ED's poems can be enhanced by understanding both poetic and historical levels of her sound and sense. We impoverish ourselves if we ignore their historical base.