Imprisoned by Prose
Imprisoned by Prose
A meditation on Emily Dickinson's 'They shut me up in Prose –' and 'I dwell in Possibility –'
by Giles Watson
To make the decision not just to write poetry, but to be a poet, is a costly form of rebellion. Robert Graves famously observed at the beginning of The White Goddess that “Since the age of fifteen poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric.” Whatever else we may think of Graves as a poet, critic or person, there will be few deeply committed poets whose hearts do not leap in assent to that statement. My first memory of the inebriating exhilaration that poetry brings comes, I think, from a time before I could read. My father was reading me the traditional nursery rhyme, ‘The Fox’s Foray’, as I sat up in bed, sick with a cold:
“Old Mother Slipper Slopper jumped out of bed,
And out of the window she popped her head:
Oh, John, John, the grey goose is gone,
And the fox is off to his den O!
Den O! Den O!
Oh, John, John, the grey goose is gone,
And the fox is off to his den O!”
I was thrilled by the rollicking rhythm, the cramming of syllables, the tongue-twisting sibilance, the way Old Mother Slipper Slopper’s name seemed expressive of her whole character as well as of her current desperation, the image of her startled head appearing out of a first floor cottage window, the sudden eruption of dialogue into the narrative, and the implied brutality of what was happening to the goose. I think it was then that I began to understand what poetry was: an intensification of real life, concentrating it into cadence, a window on the world, the meticulous framing or encapsulation of which was precisely what brought on that sense of joyful inebriation, causing the soul to exclaim, “Yes, that is precisely it, in a nutshell!”
Our first recorded poem by Emily Dickinson was a rather self-consciously erudite inscription for a Valentine, written in 1850 when she was twenty years old. Her writing reached crescendo pitch in 1861 and 1862, when she wrote 522 poems. By then, she had chosen what most people would assume was the most prosaic of lives, confined almost entirely to her family home and its immediate environs, rarely accepting visitors outside her family circle, and even then, often entertaining them from an elaborate distance, hardly ever travelling, and eschewing even visits to church, happy in the knowledge that in her own garden, where Bobolinks were Choristers, “God preaches, a noted Clergyman - / And the sermon is never long”. Perhaps, some biographers and racy film-makers think, on the basis of some admittedly worshipfully sensual letters, she was in a passionate relationship with her brother’s wife, and she certainly enjoyed a healthy, intellectual correspondence with some of the leading literary thinkers of her time, but there was another relationship which was elevating her life from the prosaic: her relationship with poetry itself, which taught her how to find the fantastic and miraculous in the seemingly-mundane.
Being an “Inebriate of air” and a “Debauchee of Dew” is unlikely to bring one much social capital – at least not in one’s own lifetime. Recreational drugs which induce artificial inebriation or encourage socially vaunted forms of debauchery have always been in fashion, but a person who can be transfixed by a sunbeam or mesmerised by a beetle at the apex of a stem of grass will always be accounted strange. If nature itself is your hallucinogen, and you find yourself “Leaning against the – Sun!”, you are likely to only ever attract a handful of friends, and some will be openly hostile, but this strangely isolating sensitivity is a prime prerequisite for being a poet.
“They shut me up in Prose –
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet
Because they liked me “still” –”
Dickinson, too, was already marked out as a poet when she was a little girl, it seems, because she did not have the requisite stillness and social deportment. We will meet this noun, “Prose”, used negatively, again: Prose as prison or straitjacket, hemming in the ways of a poet. The principal thing about the Closet is that it only has one door, which can be locked, and no windows or skylights; phobias surrounding being shut up in the dark or buried alive are, as we have seen before, a feature of Dickinson’s work. But this is not just a childhood memory, because lines two to four are subordinate to the sentence. There has been an attempt to shut the adult poet “up in Prose”, but it has been as ineffectual as the attempt to impose stillness on the child:
“Still! Could themselves have peeped –
And seen my Brain – go round –
They might as wise have lodged a Bird
For Treason – in the Pound –”
Totalitarian regimes have tried to imprison poets – to keep them “still” – and found the same thing: their Brains “go round” regardless of the shackles, resonant with treasonous birdsong. Sometimes, incarceration actually sharpens a poet’s focus: witness the luminosity of John Clare’s asylum poems, or Irina Ratushinskaya's verse smuggled out of a Soviet prison camp, or the intensity which Dickinson herself achieved through her self-imposed isolation.
“Himself has but to will
And easy as a Star
Look down opon Captivity –
And laugh – No more have I –”
The bird himself invites comparison with a multitude of other poems by Dickinson. He is the Lark whose music is hidden from science. He is Hope, perching in the soul. He is a multitude of Bobolinks, hummingbirds, and most of all, Robins. Now, he is also the poet’s “will”, which cannot be constrained. He laughs at all the nineteenth century’s stock responses to the bird: the shotgun, the cage, the taxidermist’s bell of glass. Poets are like that, too: incorrigible little Houdinis, always escaping into the infinite realms of their own minds, and nothing pisses off some other types more than this: to see the slippery miraculousness with which the creative mind can escape the prison of prose.
*
Dickinson wrote that poem in 1862. She returned to the theme later in the same year.
“I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose”
Poetry, therefore, must be synonymous with “Possibility”: a paradoxical freedom imposed by the walls and boundaries of poetic form, which confine the poet to certain rhythms and, in Dickinson’s case, largely to the ballad metre and to a pattern of slant-rhyming. “Tell all the truth,” she wrote much later, “but tell it slant”: take circuitous routes, ricochet within a verse from centre to circumference, imply multiple meanings which scatter like spilt mercury, make it slippery just as you are pinning it down. That way lies truth, because truth is complex, multifaceted, subject to the discipline of rationalisation, the rules of communication, or the dictates of rhyme and metre, but not imprisoned by them. Poetry, more than any other form of language, opens up the possibilities inherent in truth. There are, for a start, at least two possibilities in that adjective, “fairer”: poetry is a more beautiful House than prose, but it is also a more just, egalitarian or ethical one, and in order to “dwell” in it – to inhabit it, to make it our haunt – we must maintain it: clear its gutters, fix its leaking pipes, weed and tend its garden. Compared with Prose – that darkened closet – it is:
“More numerous for Windows –
Superior – for Doors –”
Dickinson had her own personal window, out of which many of her poems were observed. She would later write about the subtle variations to the scene outside this upstairs window, which always framed “The Pattern of a Chimney – / The Forehead of a Hill –”, but which sometimes also included “a Vane’s Forefinger – / But that’s – Occasional –”, dependent on the direction of the wind. A window on the regular, humdrum circuit of her days: Dickinson was somehow able to launch her consciousness from it and soar to the circumference. The casement – the frame of reference – the self-imposed rules of the stanza – these bring access to a newer, more universal kind of freedom and truth. Windows and doors are also thresholds, liminal spaces, through which we can pass at any moment to seek our liberation. They are borders between domesticity and nature, body and spirit, life and death. Closed, they bring a solitude necessary for the poet. Opened, they liberate us from the closet. Standing in front of the window, our bodies may be static, but our minds are never still.
“Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –”
There is the paradox. A forest full of conifer trees is more space than wood, but look at it head-on as you approach it on foot, and you will see only trunks and foliage. The House of Possibility is like that: it is simultaneously all walls, yet full of windows and doors. It gives the poet a vantage point, a place of retreat, a safe haven, hidden from prying eyes, but it is open to the sky. A poem is built of rhythmical units, of syllables, of iambs, but there are spaces between these trees which disappear when you view the poem obliquely. It becomes impenetrable, unassailable. Dickinson fills her poems with liminal spaces – dashes – which let in the air and light but retain the form. Through these, truth and possibility can breathe.
“And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –”
The language of the eternal is creeping in, and the sky, which has no limits, still has structure. Those patterns of discipline and behaviour which become second nature to the poet are the architecture of her liberation.
“Of Visitors – the fairest –
Of Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –”
These Visitors – birds, insects, fairies, angels, ghosts, spirits – inhabit the superstructure of Dickinson’s poems, flitting in and out of it with a disciplined freedom. Once again, “Occupation” offers more than one Possibility: there sits Dickinson, supposedly “introverted” occupant of her House of Possibility, at her tiny writing desk in front of that single window, inviting all the little denizens of her verse to keep her occupied with praise. And then there is her Occupation – her calling to be a poet – which makes exacting claims on her, and almost guarantees that she will be long-misunderstood, neglected, viewed as obsessive or harmlessly insane. Being a chestnut redhead (we know because a lock of her hair has been preserved), her skin, like mine, scorches easily in the sun. She longs for summer but seeks the shade. Her fingers are slender, her hands “narrow”. Everyone says she is frail. She flexes those fingers, dips her pen, and in less space than a sonnet, gathers Paradise: a Herculean feat.
A meditation on Emily Dickinson's 'They shut me up in Prose –' and 'I dwell in Possibility –'
by Giles Watson
To make the decision not just to write poetry, but to be a poet, is a costly form of rebellion. Robert Graves famously observed at the beginning of The White Goddess that “Since the age of fifteen poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric.” Whatever else we may think of Graves as a poet, critic or person, there will be few deeply committed poets whose hearts do not leap in assent to that statement. My first memory of the inebriating exhilaration that poetry brings comes, I think, from a time before I could read. My father was reading me the traditional nursery rhyme, ‘The Fox’s Foray’, as I sat up in bed, sick with a cold:
“Old Mother Slipper Slopper jumped out of bed,
And out of the window she popped her head:
Oh, John, John, the grey goose is gone,
And the fox is off to his den O!
Den O! Den O!
Oh, John, John, the grey goose is gone,
And the fox is off to his den O!”
I was thrilled by the rollicking rhythm, the cramming of syllables, the tongue-twisting sibilance, the way Old Mother Slipper Slopper’s name seemed expressive of her whole character as well as of her current desperation, the image of her startled head appearing out of a first floor cottage window, the sudden eruption of dialogue into the narrative, and the implied brutality of what was happening to the goose. I think it was then that I began to understand what poetry was: an intensification of real life, concentrating it into cadence, a window on the world, the meticulous framing or encapsulation of which was precisely what brought on that sense of joyful inebriation, causing the soul to exclaim, “Yes, that is precisely it, in a nutshell!”
Our first recorded poem by Emily Dickinson was a rather self-consciously erudite inscription for a Valentine, written in 1850 when she was twenty years old. Her writing reached crescendo pitch in 1861 and 1862, when she wrote 522 poems. By then, she had chosen what most people would assume was the most prosaic of lives, confined almost entirely to her family home and its immediate environs, rarely accepting visitors outside her family circle, and even then, often entertaining them from an elaborate distance, hardly ever travelling, and eschewing even visits to church, happy in the knowledge that in her own garden, where Bobolinks were Choristers, “God preaches, a noted Clergyman - / And the sermon is never long”. Perhaps, some biographers and racy film-makers think, on the basis of some admittedly worshipfully sensual letters, she was in a passionate relationship with her brother’s wife, and she certainly enjoyed a healthy, intellectual correspondence with some of the leading literary thinkers of her time, but there was another relationship which was elevating her life from the prosaic: her relationship with poetry itself, which taught her how to find the fantastic and miraculous in the seemingly-mundane.
Being an “Inebriate of air” and a “Debauchee of Dew” is unlikely to bring one much social capital – at least not in one’s own lifetime. Recreational drugs which induce artificial inebriation or encourage socially vaunted forms of debauchery have always been in fashion, but a person who can be transfixed by a sunbeam or mesmerised by a beetle at the apex of a stem of grass will always be accounted strange. If nature itself is your hallucinogen, and you find yourself “Leaning against the – Sun!”, you are likely to only ever attract a handful of friends, and some will be openly hostile, but this strangely isolating sensitivity is a prime prerequisite for being a poet.
“They shut me up in Prose –
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet
Because they liked me “still” –”
Dickinson, too, was already marked out as a poet when she was a little girl, it seems, because she did not have the requisite stillness and social deportment. We will meet this noun, “Prose”, used negatively, again: Prose as prison or straitjacket, hemming in the ways of a poet. The principal thing about the Closet is that it only has one door, which can be locked, and no windows or skylights; phobias surrounding being shut up in the dark or buried alive are, as we have seen before, a feature of Dickinson’s work. But this is not just a childhood memory, because lines two to four are subordinate to the sentence. There has been an attempt to shut the adult poet “up in Prose”, but it has been as ineffectual as the attempt to impose stillness on the child:
“Still! Could themselves have peeped –
And seen my Brain – go round –
They might as wise have lodged a Bird
For Treason – in the Pound –”
Totalitarian regimes have tried to imprison poets – to keep them “still” – and found the same thing: their Brains “go round” regardless of the shackles, resonant with treasonous birdsong. Sometimes, incarceration actually sharpens a poet’s focus: witness the luminosity of John Clare’s asylum poems, or Irina Ratushinskaya's verse smuggled out of a Soviet prison camp, or the intensity which Dickinson herself achieved through her self-imposed isolation.
“Himself has but to will
And easy as a Star
Look down opon Captivity –
And laugh – No more have I –”
The bird himself invites comparison with a multitude of other poems by Dickinson. He is the Lark whose music is hidden from science. He is Hope, perching in the soul. He is a multitude of Bobolinks, hummingbirds, and most of all, Robins. Now, he is also the poet’s “will”, which cannot be constrained. He laughs at all the nineteenth century’s stock responses to the bird: the shotgun, the cage, the taxidermist’s bell of glass. Poets are like that, too: incorrigible little Houdinis, always escaping into the infinite realms of their own minds, and nothing pisses off some other types more than this: to see the slippery miraculousness with which the creative mind can escape the prison of prose.
*
Dickinson wrote that poem in 1862. She returned to the theme later in the same year.
“I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose”
Poetry, therefore, must be synonymous with “Possibility”: a paradoxical freedom imposed by the walls and boundaries of poetic form, which confine the poet to certain rhythms and, in Dickinson’s case, largely to the ballad metre and to a pattern of slant-rhyming. “Tell all the truth,” she wrote much later, “but tell it slant”: take circuitous routes, ricochet within a verse from centre to circumference, imply multiple meanings which scatter like spilt mercury, make it slippery just as you are pinning it down. That way lies truth, because truth is complex, multifaceted, subject to the discipline of rationalisation, the rules of communication, or the dictates of rhyme and metre, but not imprisoned by them. Poetry, more than any other form of language, opens up the possibilities inherent in truth. There are, for a start, at least two possibilities in that adjective, “fairer”: poetry is a more beautiful House than prose, but it is also a more just, egalitarian or ethical one, and in order to “dwell” in it – to inhabit it, to make it our haunt – we must maintain it: clear its gutters, fix its leaking pipes, weed and tend its garden. Compared with Prose – that darkened closet – it is:
“More numerous for Windows –
Superior – for Doors –”
Dickinson had her own personal window, out of which many of her poems were observed. She would later write about the subtle variations to the scene outside this upstairs window, which always framed “The Pattern of a Chimney – / The Forehead of a Hill –”, but which sometimes also included “a Vane’s Forefinger – / But that’s – Occasional –”, dependent on the direction of the wind. A window on the regular, humdrum circuit of her days: Dickinson was somehow able to launch her consciousness from it and soar to the circumference. The casement – the frame of reference – the self-imposed rules of the stanza – these bring access to a newer, more universal kind of freedom and truth. Windows and doors are also thresholds, liminal spaces, through which we can pass at any moment to seek our liberation. They are borders between domesticity and nature, body and spirit, life and death. Closed, they bring a solitude necessary for the poet. Opened, they liberate us from the closet. Standing in front of the window, our bodies may be static, but our minds are never still.
“Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –”
There is the paradox. A forest full of conifer trees is more space than wood, but look at it head-on as you approach it on foot, and you will see only trunks and foliage. The House of Possibility is like that: it is simultaneously all walls, yet full of windows and doors. It gives the poet a vantage point, a place of retreat, a safe haven, hidden from prying eyes, but it is open to the sky. A poem is built of rhythmical units, of syllables, of iambs, but there are spaces between these trees which disappear when you view the poem obliquely. It becomes impenetrable, unassailable. Dickinson fills her poems with liminal spaces – dashes – which let in the air and light but retain the form. Through these, truth and possibility can breathe.
“And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –”
The language of the eternal is creeping in, and the sky, which has no limits, still has structure. Those patterns of discipline and behaviour which become second nature to the poet are the architecture of her liberation.
“Of Visitors – the fairest –
Of Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –”
These Visitors – birds, insects, fairies, angels, ghosts, spirits – inhabit the superstructure of Dickinson’s poems, flitting in and out of it with a disciplined freedom. Once again, “Occupation” offers more than one Possibility: there sits Dickinson, supposedly “introverted” occupant of her House of Possibility, at her tiny writing desk in front of that single window, inviting all the little denizens of her verse to keep her occupied with praise. And then there is her Occupation – her calling to be a poet – which makes exacting claims on her, and almost guarantees that she will be long-misunderstood, neglected, viewed as obsessive or harmlessly insane. Being a chestnut redhead (we know because a lock of her hair has been preserved), her skin, like mine, scorches easily in the sun. She longs for summer but seeks the shade. Her fingers are slender, her hands “narrow”. Everyone says she is frail. She flexes those fingers, dips her pen, and in less space than a sonnet, gathers Paradise: a Herculean feat.
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