731.1863.A Thought went up my mind today –

A Thought went up my mind today –
That I have had before –
But did not finish – some way back –
I could not fix the Year –

Nor where it went – nor why it came
The second time to me –
Nor definitely, what it was –
Have I the Art to say –

But somewhere – in my Soul – I know –
I’ve met the Thing before –
It just reminded me – ‘twas all –
And came my way no more –

My poet wife, Louise, once told me that a mystical experience is something our body/mind creates when our body/mind needs a mystical experience. Circular? Perhaps. ED says “it came / The second time to me”, whatever the “it” is, and then “it” came my way no more.

As a quantitative scientist, I would say that the probability the wordings of these two couplets are similar due to random chance is less than 1 in 10,000:

“Nature” is what We know –
But have no art to say”

and

“Nor definitely, what it was –
Have I the art to say” ,

In statistical language, the probability is in the neighborhood of P < 0.0001. A scientist would reject the null hypothesis that there is no relationship between the lines if the chances they were unrelated were less than 1 in 100 (P < 0.01), and P < 0.0001 is one hundred times less likely than P < 0.01.

Cutting the jargon, these two poems are extremely likely to be closely related, and, if so, their interpretations must also be closely related, which brings me back to hypothesize that “it” is one or more mystical experiences. The circumstantial evidence is compelling to me.

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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.