Nature as a substitute for human social intercourse in Emily Dickinson's poetry

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1 Jeff Tibbetts: Bluford Adams 008:105:001 November 14, 2005 Nature as a substitute for human social intercourse in Emily Dickinson's poetry Emily Dickinson's poetry is populated with few human voices, save the persona; instead most of her poems deal with nature, or the natural environment. Her self-imposed seclusion limited her social connections to family, a few close friends, and family acquaintances who might call on the house. Instead of characters, her poems are filled with references to nature, ranging from Emersonian deification to casual references; but we often see an anthropomorphizing of nature and a pseudo-social interaction within it and between the persona and nature. In her life, she spent a great deal of time in the natural environment of the Dickinson homestead, and her connection to it replaced some of the need for a diverse and wide-ranging social world in her poetry. Dickinson augments and enriches her human social environment by using natural environments as allegory. Dickinson's well-documented social isolation limited her connections in the social realm to just her family and some close friends. She rarely left the grounds of her home, and the social contacts that she did keep were conducted primarily by mail and notes, even though the person she corresponded with the most lived next door to her. Her human to human contact was quite limited; the introduction in the Heath Anthology tells us that attenuated doses of society were enough for Dickinson. She found the electricity between two individuals quite overpowering. (McIntosh 3043). The lack of human characters in her poetry is conspicuous, and it s no surprise when her peculiar lifestyle is considered. Most of her poems deal with the persona addressing either the natural environment or an unnamed other. In some, the natural world is given its own voice and characteristics in lieu of other human subjects and characters. Many poets use their observation - 1 -

2 and interaction with a social environment as a source of material in their work, but this avenue was largely denied to Dickinson; to replace it she turned to what she was more familiar with: nature. Dickinson often anthropomorphized nature, and she also invested her experience of human society with natural characteristics or talked about it in scientific and natural language. The line between the natural world and a social human world are blurred in her poems, until the distinction is no longer important. This distortion is manifested in several ways. One example of the blur is when she takes a natural event or environment and gives it human will, action, and motivations; such as when the sea becomes a man and chases her home where bowing with a Mighty look / At me the Sea withdrew (P 520). It is very characteristic of her poetry to give these human traits to items in the environment. As readers, we are free to interpret these poems as nature taking the place of a person she knows or imagines, or the environment may indeed become a character in its own right. In another poem, she describes the act of revolution in natural language, where it becomes a plant, and Summer be / The Entomber of itself, / So of Liberty (P 1082). The reader must in this case make the logical step from the language of vegetation and the weather to the abstract concept of revolution and liberty. Emily Dickinson herself seemed to blur this line quite consciously when she sent a version of poem 1400 to her sister-in-law Susan, in which she replaced the line But nature is a stranger yet; with But Susan is a Stranger yet. This replacement and several others in the following stanza serve to remind the reader that, even though Dickinson is using the language of nature, she is drawing parallels between nature itself and the social world that she lives in. In much of her poetry about nature, the reader is asked to question whether she is really talking about nature itself, or if she is only using natural language to talk about human society

3 A natural setting in a Dickinson poem sometimes stands in for a human body (and by extension, human society) and aspects of that natural world resonate with meaning in a human way. "Winds, in Dickinson's autumn, do not 'blow,' they 'upset,' an arbitrary accident rather than a natural, hence predictable occurrence." (Diehl). While the wind may be a simple natural occurrence to a casual observer it takes on new meanings for Dickinson when she applies human actions and motivations to the natural environment. As in the Sea in poem 520, the wind here is open to levels of interpretation. In many of her poems, the natural environment either becomes a character in its own right or it stands as a substitute for human society. Dickinson's view of nature cannot simply be explained in terms of her anthropomorphization of it, of course; it is also given all of the complexity of the discourse typically reserved for mankind. Many critics have noted Dickenson s Emerson-like deification of it, and have compared her view of nature to his. This is a somewhat simplified view of her treatment of nature, and it fails to take into account the many cases where nature is not deified at all, but treated as an almost mundane or at least unremarkable environment. Because nature takes on such a primacy of topic in her body of work, it is explored quite thoroughly from many angles and perspectives, and a reader must recognize this scope and avoid pinning her view of nature down or simplifying it. While Emerson had a hierarchy in his view of nature beginning with the lowest forms of usage, he believed that the highest use of it was as a spiritual allegory for the human condition. Dickinson makes some allusions towards this concept of nature, but it is rare in her poetry and differs in some important ways with Emerson s transcendental philosophy. Fred White asserts in his essay Sweet Skepticism of the Heart that "Unlike Ralph Waldo Emerson, in whose universe the soul of the individual flows like a tributary into the cosmic soul, and for whom regarding deeply in the book of nature brings us to a transcendent understanding of and harmony - 3 -

4 with the cosmos, Dickinson points to an insurmountable gulf between our finite selves and the infinite cosmos." Dickinson believes that the only way to truly unite with nature is to die. Instead of Emerson s desire to merge with and ultimately transcend nature, Dickinson acknowledges the inherent divinity of nature while maintaining that humans are only a part of it, not above it or in control of it. She reveals in her poetry a profound respect for nature, but most often it is simply described in human terms. Dickinson treats nature in much the same way that other poets treat their human subjects. They explore the range of the human condition; from the base and simple, sometimes wicked or frightening, sometimes good, sometimes a stand-in for the divine, and nearly always complicated. George Monteiro states in his analysis of poem 764: "The presentiment inheres in the natural imagery, that is to say, in Nature. It does not, in contrast to... Emerson, offer a presentiment of some other thing or things that can be discerned to be confidently detected... Dickinson's poem does not come out unequivocally on the Emersonian side of things." Sometimes nature is much simpler, and more human, than Emerson would like. Dickinson s concept and construction of nature leaves ample room for the simple, scientific, and mundane sides of nature while also allowing the reader to layer larger meanings into it. Dickinson mixes and exchanges the discourse of nature and human society freely. Her nature is no less or more complex than the lives of men; in fact the two are often difficult to distinguish. Because nature is one of the primary subjects of her poetry, she deals with it on several levels simultaneously. We can read it as at once a social network in its own right, an allegorical substitution for her real human connections, a simple character, and a manifestation of the divine on earth. It can be all of those things at once in her poetry, and there is little indication that there is one supreme overall view of it, or any sort of formal structure to the several levels. This is in - 4 -

5 contrast with Emerson, who did believe that "Nature" could mean different things to different people, but that there was one pure highest level that only the poet or the enlightened could access. In many of Dickinson's poems, she focuses on just one side of the multifaceted natural world, and the most common view is the anthropomorphized one, where it takes on the aspect of humanity most directly. Emily Dickinson had limited social connections, but she made up for this by describing a rich interaction with her natural environment that takes on many faces for her poems. It is her friend, her access to God, and her view of a world that made sense to her. By anthropomorphizing it, she was able to imagine interpersonal relationships between the elements of nature and her self. Dickinson was able to make up for her lack of face to face interaction with her world by substituting nature in its place. This gives her poetry a wide range of interpretation, and helped to establish her as a master in the use of layers of meaning within her poetry

6 Works Cited Diehl, Joanne Feit. Poem 656 Terrains of Difference: Reading Shelley and Dickenson on Autumn. Women's Studies; 1989, Vol. 16 Issue 1/2, p87, 4p. McIntosh, Peggy. Emily Dickinson. Heath Anthology of American Literature: Volume B, Early Nineteenth Century: Fifth Ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Monteiro, George. Dickinson's presentiment. ANQ; Jan91, Vol. 4 Issue 1, p17, 3p. White, Fred D. Sweet skepticism of the heart': Science in the poetry of Emily Dickinson." College Literature; Feb Feb92, Vol. 19 Issue 1, p121, 8p