The Wound Unbandaged
The Wound Unbandaged
Amongst the carefully stitched “fascicles” of poems which were discovered after Emily Dickinson’s death, there were a number of fragmentary texts written on scraps of paper, mostly recycled out of bits of envelopes. Dickinson had squeezed her writing into irregular shapes - the triangular portion that folds over to seal the envelope, or an oblong form cut from the side of one, or a whole envelope ungummed and unfolded - and she often changed the text orientation, running it vertically up the sides, or cramming additional words into a scraggy corner.
These seemingly haphazard, undated relics are, on closer observation, exquisite works of art. She may have created them whilst cooking - reaching for the nearest strip of paper as inspiration struck her, or kept the pieces in her pocket as she walked or gardened, pausing to pencil-in whatever suddenly gripped her - but their very evasion of completion, their ambiguity and their visual fragmentation, seem more and more planned and purposeful the longer a reader meditates upon them.
One such fragment has been dated by R.W. Franklin to 1870. It has been written down one side of an envelope which has been cut open down the edges - the interior side of the surface which bears the recipient’s address. The first stanza has alternating eight and six syllable rhythmic lines which are split in two in order to cram Dickinson’s large writing - she was troubled by poor eyesight by this time - into the space.
“A not admitting
of the Wound
Until it grew so
wide
That all my
Life had Entered it
And there
were troughs
beside -”
They are wise and heavy words to scrawl on a scrap of ephemeral postal detritus and tuck away into a box - words so applicable to the human condition in any age. That “not admitting of the Wound” - a state of denial which can only exacerbate the condition - is a monotonously common self-destroying act, justified at the time as an act of self-defence. It is the excuse an abuse victim gives for the abuser, the fear which keeps the person with cancer symptoms away from the doctor, the refusal to admit one’s own shortcomings which only leads to their embarrassing exposure, the fear of others’ loathing that closets the heart, the burying of difficult questions about race or class or sex or gender, the acquiescence in atrocity for the sake of peace, the denial of addiction. The desperate, extended attempt to “not admit” the wound only serves to enlarge it beyond control, until, like a black hole, it consumes one’s whole being and threatens to draw others into its “troughs” of despair.
“Big my Secret but it’s bandaged”, she had written in 1861, simultaneously continuing to shroud her “Secret” in cryptic references. Bandages can assist healing, but wounds can also suppurate unnoticed beneath them. They can be unwound to reveal that the surgeon has missed the onset of gangrene and it is now too late to save the limb - or the life. They can prevent the healthy granulation and drainage of the wound. The men with stumps and disfigured faces returning from the field hospitals of the Civil War could testify to the danger of hiding one’s wounds too long behind bandages, and to the efficacy of exposing rawness to the air.
Other readers, including doctors, have offered clever diagnoses of the cause of Dickinson’s own wound: she was epileptic, she was sexually abused, she suffered from agoraphobia or seasonal affective disorder, she was emotionally maimed by lost love, she was suppressing lesbian desires or gender dysphoria. We know for certain that from youth, she was witness to a remorseless procession of premature deaths of friends and family members, and that at some point, she must have become aware that kidney disease would carry her away early too. She had a lot of pain to bandage. But Dickinson, sewing together her fascicles, and carefully locking away these repurposed envelopes, never intended to publish her poems - let alone her biography - to the world. We poetry-lovers are curious creatures, in both senses of that phrase, but we don’t always have the right to pry. We should probably avoid devaluing the work by explaining it through theorised biography, and let her poems do their work of necessary excoriation on us instead.
Three words hang disconnected beneath this stanza:
“was space
room”
and Dickinson has drawn a line under them.
Perhaps as the rest of the poem was forming in her mind, she has written two other words running vertically up what was once the bottom fold of the envelope:
“Unsuspecting Carpenters”
The remainder of the text on the envelope feels relevant to - but strangely disconnected from - the text that preceded it:
“A closing of the
simple lid that
opened to the sun
Until the tender
sovereign
Carpenter
Perpetual nail
it down -”
Jesus, that “tender sovereign”, trained as a carpenter, and might easily have learned his skill for dovetail joints on coffins in his youth. Is that what he is doing here – nailing the lid on the coffin to end the suffering – or is this lid a more “perpetual” kind of bandage, sealing in the wound for all eternity? Are his tender mercies merely a hard covering which will let the unadmitted wound fester on forever? Or is the unadmitted thing precisely what he is nailing down, so that the soul can rest in peace?
We cannot know, because the line that Dickinson drew between the stanzas is a ragged hole at the middle of the poem. The stanzas have been left disarticulated, blown apart, with spare words hanging around them haphazardly, like shrapnel embedded in flesh. And this is what makes this fragment, after a hundred readings, feel so devastatingly complete in its analysis of our human weakness: a raw confession of the haemorrhage of creativity that arose out of Dickinson’s own suppression of her pain, now treasured for a hundred and fifty years, scrawled on the obverse of an address - on a scrap rescued at the last moment from the wastepaper basket.
Out of its unbandaged centre, the poem bleeds with possibility, reminding us of how we, like the dismembered envelope, are torn.
Amongst the carefully stitched “fascicles” of poems which were discovered after Emily Dickinson’s death, there were a number of fragmentary texts written on scraps of paper, mostly recycled out of bits of envelopes. Dickinson had squeezed her writing into irregular shapes - the triangular portion that folds over to seal the envelope, or an oblong form cut from the side of one, or a whole envelope ungummed and unfolded - and she often changed the text orientation, running it vertically up the sides, or cramming additional words into a scraggy corner.
These seemingly haphazard, undated relics are, on closer observation, exquisite works of art. She may have created them whilst cooking - reaching for the nearest strip of paper as inspiration struck her, or kept the pieces in her pocket as she walked or gardened, pausing to pencil-in whatever suddenly gripped her - but their very evasion of completion, their ambiguity and their visual fragmentation, seem more and more planned and purposeful the longer a reader meditates upon them.
One such fragment has been dated by R.W. Franklin to 1870. It has been written down one side of an envelope which has been cut open down the edges - the interior side of the surface which bears the recipient’s address. The first stanza has alternating eight and six syllable rhythmic lines which are split in two in order to cram Dickinson’s large writing - she was troubled by poor eyesight by this time - into the space.
“A not admitting
of the Wound
Until it grew so
wide
That all my
Life had Entered it
And there
were troughs
beside -”
They are wise and heavy words to scrawl on a scrap of ephemeral postal detritus and tuck away into a box - words so applicable to the human condition in any age. That “not admitting of the Wound” - a state of denial which can only exacerbate the condition - is a monotonously common self-destroying act, justified at the time as an act of self-defence. It is the excuse an abuse victim gives for the abuser, the fear which keeps the person with cancer symptoms away from the doctor, the refusal to admit one’s own shortcomings which only leads to their embarrassing exposure, the fear of others’ loathing that closets the heart, the burying of difficult questions about race or class or sex or gender, the acquiescence in atrocity for the sake of peace, the denial of addiction. The desperate, extended attempt to “not admit” the wound only serves to enlarge it beyond control, until, like a black hole, it consumes one’s whole being and threatens to draw others into its “troughs” of despair.
“Big my Secret but it’s bandaged”, she had written in 1861, simultaneously continuing to shroud her “Secret” in cryptic references. Bandages can assist healing, but wounds can also suppurate unnoticed beneath them. They can be unwound to reveal that the surgeon has missed the onset of gangrene and it is now too late to save the limb - or the life. They can prevent the healthy granulation and drainage of the wound. The men with stumps and disfigured faces returning from the field hospitals of the Civil War could testify to the danger of hiding one’s wounds too long behind bandages, and to the efficacy of exposing rawness to the air.
Other readers, including doctors, have offered clever diagnoses of the cause of Dickinson’s own wound: she was epileptic, she was sexually abused, she suffered from agoraphobia or seasonal affective disorder, she was emotionally maimed by lost love, she was suppressing lesbian desires or gender dysphoria. We know for certain that from youth, she was witness to a remorseless procession of premature deaths of friends and family members, and that at some point, she must have become aware that kidney disease would carry her away early too. She had a lot of pain to bandage. But Dickinson, sewing together her fascicles, and carefully locking away these repurposed envelopes, never intended to publish her poems - let alone her biography - to the world. We poetry-lovers are curious creatures, in both senses of that phrase, but we don’t always have the right to pry. We should probably avoid devaluing the work by explaining it through theorised biography, and let her poems do their work of necessary excoriation on us instead.
Three words hang disconnected beneath this stanza:
“was space
room”
and Dickinson has drawn a line under them.
Perhaps as the rest of the poem was forming in her mind, she has written two other words running vertically up what was once the bottom fold of the envelope:
“Unsuspecting Carpenters”
The remainder of the text on the envelope feels relevant to - but strangely disconnected from - the text that preceded it:
“A closing of the
simple lid that
opened to the sun
Until the tender
sovereign
Carpenter
Perpetual nail
it down -”
Jesus, that “tender sovereign”, trained as a carpenter, and might easily have learned his skill for dovetail joints on coffins in his youth. Is that what he is doing here – nailing the lid on the coffin to end the suffering – or is this lid a more “perpetual” kind of bandage, sealing in the wound for all eternity? Are his tender mercies merely a hard covering which will let the unadmitted wound fester on forever? Or is the unadmitted thing precisely what he is nailing down, so that the soul can rest in peace?
We cannot know, because the line that Dickinson drew between the stanzas is a ragged hole at the middle of the poem. The stanzas have been left disarticulated, blown apart, with spare words hanging around them haphazardly, like shrapnel embedded in flesh. And this is what makes this fragment, after a hundred readings, feel so devastatingly complete in its analysis of our human weakness: a raw confession of the haemorrhage of creativity that arose out of Dickinson’s own suppression of her pain, now treasured for a hundred and fifty years, scrawled on the obverse of an address - on a scrap rescued at the last moment from the wastepaper basket.
Out of its unbandaged centre, the poem bleeds with possibility, reminding us of how we, like the dismembered envelope, are torn.
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