901.1865.The Soul’s distinct connection

The Soul’s distinct connection
With immortality
Is best disclosed by Danger
Or quick Calamity—

As Lightning on a Landscape
Exhibits Sheets of Place—
Not yet suspected—but for Flash—
And Click—and Suddenness.
……………………………………………………………

Most folks have experienced Stanza 2, a flash of lightning on a dark night, when the scene stays frozen in short-term memory for a few seconds.

But Stanza 1 challenges and may be the proverbial experience of life “flashing before your eyes”, a well-documented phenomenon that can happen during sudden, extreme physical danger, near-death experiences, or severe stress. AI explains what happens:

Rapid Memory Recall: Instead of playing out like a literal movie, it often feels like an instantaneous, panoramic burst of memories, intense emotions, or distinct life snapshots, or in ED’s case, a brief mystical experience which she equates to “Immortality“.
Time Distortion: During a crisis, your brain goes into hyper-alert mode, making time feel like it slows down while your mind rapidly scours stored experiences.
The Science: Neuroscientific studies—such as recordings of brain activity during cardiac events—show a surge of neural oscillations associated with memory retrieval and deep processing as the brain faces trauma or oxygen deprivation. (Google AI)

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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.