814.1864.Soto! Explore thyself!

814.1864.Soto! Explore thyself!

Soto! Explore thyself!
Therein thyself shalt find
The “Undiscovered Continent”—
No Settler, had the Mind.

My interpretation of Fr814:

Austin! Know thyself! The thing you are looking for is in yourself: the meaning of your life. No man, new arrived, knows the undiscovered meccas of his mind.

Emily and Austin were close siblings, apparently even in matters sexual. On the evening of March 23, 1853, Susan Gilbert, Austin’s future wife, returning from a visit with a relative in Manchester, NH, spent the night with Austin at the Revere Hotel in Boston. Susan returned to Amherst on March 24 and soon told ED about her night with Austin. On March 27, ED wrote Austin a letter full of suggestive banter, including the sentence, “Hope you have enjoyed the Sabbath, and sanctuary privileges – it isn’t all young men that have the preached word –”. Susan and Austin married on July 1, 1856.

Apparently, their marriage soon faced irreconcilable goals: Sue sought social standing and eschewed parenthood, Austin disdained soirees and wanted children. Emotional separation followed, but Austin endured.

I suspect ED composed this 1864 poem as a response to Austin’s complaints about his marriage in a letter to ED, hoping for a sympathetic sister’s shoulder. Instead, ED replied with this stoical quatrain of Emersonian advice, “Soto! Explore thyself!” (Fr814).

ED composed this poem while she was in Boston receiving eye treatments for failing eyesight (February-November 1864). While there, she lived with her cousins, Frances and Louise Norcross.

Most of the poems composed during this stay are short, probably because ED’s ophthalmologist ordered her to avoid writing and reading so her eyes could heal. Perhaps she dictated poems to her cousins and wanted to limit requests for their time.

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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.