800.1864.I never saw a Moor

I never saw a Moor
I never saw the Sea –
Yet know I how the Heather looks
And what a Billow be –

I never spoke with God
Nor visited in Heaven –
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the Checks were given

That second stanza seems completely out of character for ED. Poem after ED poem has put her in last place as a person “certain” about “Heaven. She’s got to have an ulterior motive for this stunner.

I think she’s trying to get well meaning Christians off her back with a superficially strong statement of faith. Most Christians would read the second stanza as if it were literally true. Rarely would a perspicacious reader smell a “whiff of artifice”, as Adam DeGraff did on The Prowling Bee.

ED learned to cover her tracks first hand. Apparently, many Amherst tongues wagged when she mailed her first letter to Charles Wadsworth at the local post office, where a gossipy post mistress spread the word. After that embarrassment, she had Dickinson employees or friends mail her letters in nearby towns, or, to be safer, she mailed her private letters by sending them in innocent-looking cover envelopes to trusted friends in more distant towns for forwarding.

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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.