The Grammar of the Self: ‘This loved Philology’

Abstract

For Emily Dickinson, poetry was the dwelling place of thought. Inevitably the themes of the poetry are as protean as the mind itself. The first editors divided them into Life, Love, Nature, Time, Eternity, but any grouping would do. Everything she thought or felt, everything she saw or heard, any object, large or small, became an occasion for reflection and meditation. Poetry, like the mind, was a place of extraordinary possibility:

I dwell in Possibility —

A fairer House than Prose —

More numerous of Windows —

Superior — for Doors —

Of Chambers as the Cedars —

Impregnable of Eye —

And for an Everlasting Roof

The Gambrels of the Sky —

Of Visitors — the fairest —

For Occupation — This —

The spreading wide my narrow Hands

To gather Paradise — (657)

’Tis a dangerous moment for any one when the meaning goes out of things and Life stands straight — and punctual — and yet no content(s) (signal) come(s). Yet such moments are. If we survive them they expand us, if we do not, but that is Death, whose if is everlasting. (PF — Prose Fragment 49)