63
The
Mystique of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry
“This life is the way, the long sought-after
way to the unfathomable,
which we call divine. There are no other
ways,
all other ways are false paths.”
THE RED
BOOK
C. G.
Jung
Although
I came to Emily Dickinson’s poetry late in life, despite having a copy of Emily Dickinson Selected Poems on my
shelf all these many years, it wasn’t until I was nudged to read her poetry for
a book that I was writing did my heart leap with joy when I discovered that Emily
Dickinson was an intuitive knower of
the secret way that she concealed in her poetry; and I went online and watched and
listened to all the You Tube videos and podcasts on Emily Dickinson and her
poetry that I could find.
I watched
and listened to Dickinson readers and scholars and Professors of Literature and
biographers of her life and I couldn’t get over how she perplexed them all to a
person, including the pre-eminent literary critic Professor Harold Bloom who
said, “She baffles us by the power of her mind.” But what they all failed to
grasp, and with good reason, which Dickinson hints at in her poetry (sometimes
playfully, sometimes ruthlessly, but always to protect herself), was the secret
way of life that she had made her mindful path to her true self.
“My
business is circumference,” wrote Dickinson in a letter, and by “circumference”
she meant the fullness and completeness of her life, or what Jesus referred to
as making the two into one: “For when the master himself was asked by someone
when his kingdom would come, he said: ‘When the two will be one, and the outer
like the inner, and the male with the female neither male nor female’”
(The Unknown Sayings of Jesus, Marvin
Meyer).
But this
is heady stuff, and not many people want to go there for fear of how the world
will react to the moral imperative of the secret way; which is why Dickinson
wrote Poem 1263—and with characteristic
irony, I might add—that one has to be as wise as a serpent and as gentle as
a dove as Christ would say to reveal the sacred truth of the secret way of life:
Tell all the truth but tell
it slant –
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm
Delight
The Truth’s superb Surprise
As Lightening to the
Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle
gradually
Or every man be blind –
“Poetry is an act of the imagination that transforms
reality into a deeper perception of what is,” said the American poet Adrienne Rich,
a lover of Dickinson’s poetry; and focussing on the mundane reality of her reclusive
life, Emily Dickinson transformed the simple moments of her daily routine into
such a deep perception of the truth her life that she tapped into the profound
depths of her soul’s purpose—“Adventure most unto itself /The Soul condemned to
be; /Attended by a Single Hound – /Its own Identity.”
This is the
attraction of Emily Dickinson’s poetry—the pursuit of her own Identity like
Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven. Her
poetry is her “letter to the world,” a map of her path to her true self, which
makes it endlessly fascinating because every path to one’s true self speaks the
sacred truth of the secret way, if one but have the eyes to see. This is why so
many lovers of poetry get hooked on Emily Dickinson: her poetry speaks to the soul.
How she
did it, no one knows (perhaps she revealed it in her letters, which I have not
read yet; or maybe in one of her poems which I will look for when I get her collected works), but Emily
Dickinson awakened to the secret way and made it her life’s goal to realize her
soul’s purpose. As she said, “My business is circumference,” making this the
axis of her life which superseded all of her other interests; but why the
imperative? Why the urgency? Why the drama? That’s what I’m exploring in
today’s spiritual musing…
The
curious thing about writing my spiritual musings is that they don’t always go
where I expect them to, and although I was called to write today’s musing by an
idea set free by one of Emily Dickinson’s poems, my spiritual musings have a
mind of their own.
For years
I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a spiritual musing on the “props” that people
depend upon to support their self-image—stylish clothes, nice home, winter
vacations, a never-ending supply of enervating status symbols; but the “props”
that I was called to focus on for today’s spiritual musing were those “props”
that Dickinson symbolized in one of her most esoteric poems on the moral
imperative of the secret way—Poem 729:
The Props assist the House
Until the House
is built
And then the
Props withdraw
And adequate,
erect,
The House
support itself
And cease to
recollect
The Auger and
the Carpenter –
Just such a
retrospect
Hath the
perfected Life –
A past of Plank
and Nail
And slowness –
then the Scaffolds drop
Affirming it a
Soul –
“House”
is Emily Dickinson’s symbol for what psychologist C. G. Jung called “wholeness
and singleness of self,” and “building” one’s “House” takes what Gurdjieff
called “conscious effort” and “intentional suffering,” but making the
inner and the outer into one self with no hypocrisy demands all the moral
integrity that one can muster; and when one has completed what nature cannot
finish and perfected one’s life, one can throw away the props because they have
affirmed their soul’s purpose. But this can take a lifetime, if one is ready.
“Many
are called but few are chosen,” said Jesus,
addressing the hard reality of one’s evolution through life; and only when life
has made one ready for the secret way will one hear their soul’s cry for
“wholeness and singleness of self,” which Emily Dickinson did and shared in her
“letter to the world.” But her “letter’ can be puzzling.
“Dickinson
waits for us perpetually up the road from our tardiness,” said Professor Bloom,
humbly confessing that to catch up to Emily Dickinson one has to know how to get there, which few people
do; but the irony of her poetry is that
the secret way cannot be seen by those that do not live it. And that’s the
mystique of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.
───
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