Confiscated Gods
Confiscated Gods
Don Thompson
Everyone has a different Emily Dickinson, often with nothing in common except enigma: the prudish spinster upstairs, a secular nun in white; the broken-hearted girl abandoned by this man or that—or by an equally indeterminate woman; timid recluse or emotional vampire; conflicted Christian or closeted atheist who read her Bible to tatters, especially the Revelation of all things; one of the last Puritans or among the earliest Darwinists; a clinically diagnosable agoraphobic or epileptic or both. In recent years, Dickinson has come out as a Sapphic vixen given to “wild nights”. I doubt it. Not with sister-in-law Susan—arguably her one deep love—or anyone else. No, her passions were on paper, not in the flesh.
All of these Dickinsons seduce critics into painstaking if not convoluted interpretations of her poems that, like those versions of her personality, are both mutually exclusive and perfectly consistent in their own terms.
And what about my Emily? Well, she was my first love—literary love, anyhow, and like so many of those infatuations, I never quite got over her. In 1960, my senior year, I carried around the Laurel Poetry Series put out by Dell, John Malcolm Brinnin’s selection that I still have, old bone yellow, a bit unglued, and pre-priced on the cover at 35¢. And on my nightstand now, thicker than a Gideon Bible, there’s a paperback of the Complete Poems edited by Thomas H. Johnson. The last thing I do every night before lights out and brief prayers is to read a couple of pages of Emily. Tonight I’ll be in the 850s, about halfway through—again—in a copy already swollen by a hundred dog-eared pages.
To be honest, though, I don’t understand most of what I read. But what’s that got to do with love? Emily remains a mystery to me—and more than a little intimidating. That red-headed finch of a woman, Edith Piaf sized (another petite giant), I’d have to characterize—if you will promise not to be offended—as somewhat witchy.
If we can never really pin her down, not quite explicate her intricate simplicity, it might be valuable to recall what John Berryman said of his Dream Songs:
“These songs are not meant to be understood, you understand.
They are meant only to terrify & comfort.”
But few critics will settle for that since their business is to interpret it anyhow—and then argue about who really gets it, who knows the true Emily. My concern here, however, is limited to some guesses about her religion, every bit as contentious and complex as her sex life.
First of all, let’s be sure to keep her in her own time and place—a Victorian in Amherst and not a bohemian in Greenwich Village. Proto-feminist, if you wish, but also a woman of her milieu and a poet capable of both revolutionary imagery that could have been written last night and cloying sentimentality.
Therefore, whatever we surmise about her Christian faith or lack of it must be considered in-house—confined to a Calvinist Amherst just beginning to feel the challenge of Unitarianism and the essays of Emerson. Her close, epistolary friend, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was a Unitarian minister and all-round radical. Emerson himself had been a dinner guest next door at her brother’s home.
Dickinson isn’t a materialist: She lives in a natural world much too resonant with spiritual associations for that. Nor is she an agnostic, let alone an atheist. Perhaps her problem is with the Father. Inevitably in the Judeo-Christian understanding of God as Father (and not, for example “the Force”), our relationship with our own fathers colors our attitudes toward God.
There is no need here, or space, to rehash the poet’s complicated and contradictory feelings about Edward Dickinson—a classic patriarch, but not a stereotype. Concerned about his daughters’ education and their intellect in general, he even provided them with books he disapproved of—baffled by if not hostile to the likes of the Bronte Sisters and Mrs. Browning. For whatever reason, Emily never left his house, and his death hit her hard. She later described him as “a man whose heart was pure and terrible.” The same can be said for her heavenly Father, who so often seems distant, indifferent, domineering, arbitrary, and even cruel.
Like many seekers past, present and still to come (and all believers at times), Dickinson never reconciled the apparent contradiction between Father and Son. Jesus seems meek and mild in this understanding while the Father—well, as William Blake says: “old nobodaddy aloft…likes drawing and quartering every bit as much as war and slaughtering.” How a loving God could create and permit to flourish such a violent and hate-filled world remains a question without glib answers. Not even Jesus tried, simply sweeping the paradox aside with His usual incisive precision: “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father” (John 14:9). The trick is, of course, to see.
So the poet could be characterized as “a rebellious heir of the kingdom” as her niece Martha Bianci puts it, rather than an outsider, who is “ventilating her baffled impatience with the inscrutable”. And sometimes she can be harsh and direct. In one sneering letter, she mentions that her family has gone to church to worship “an Eclipse they call Father”. But it might be helpful to remember that during an eclipse, the sun is merely hidden, that it truly exists although it can’t be seen. Her sarcasm has a subtext. Maybe it’s more ironic than blasphemous after all, a comment on a creator who is there (Jehovah-shammah), but often seems to be the absentee landlord of His creation.
With that in mind, let’s consider an early poem which has been rather gleefully called blasphemous by a prominent critic. “The Gentian weaves her fringes—” (Johnson18) ends with a three line benediction:
In the name of the Bee—
And of the Butterfly—
And of the Breeze—Amen!
I suppose this could be taken as satire on the form, but coming as it does at the conclusion of a longish (for her) poem that conducts a funeral for summer in Dickinson’s familiar, playful but earnest manner of adulation for nature, I detect no mockery here. Rather, the infinite is applied to the ordinary using traditional—not to say hackneyed—Christian analogies, but with a clever twist. We can take the “Bee” as a pun on to be, that is to say, “I AM”, the name God the Father provides when Moses asks. The “Butterfly” has been a symbol of the resurrection of the Son from the earliest times. And the “Breeze” is, of course, the Holy Spirit, the wind that “bloweth where it listeth” (John 3:8 KJV)—softened here so as not to overwhelm the bee and butterfly (and for the neat alliteration). Harmless. In fact, this could make an excellent flannel board lesson for Sunday school.
There are other more mature poems that seem to be the work of a believer. “The Savior must have been” (J1487, c. 1880) is nevertheless rare—a poem in which dealing with God isn’t a struggle:
The Savior must have been
A docile Gentleman—
To come so far so cold a Day
For little Fellowmen—
The Road to Bethlehem
Since He and I were Boys
Was leveled, but for that ‘twould be
A rugged billion Miles—
The speaker strolls toward Bethlehem (Salvation) without arguing or complaining for once, without dragging his (or her) heels. That road is infinitly longer than the one Bunyan’s Pilgrim faced, impossible to travel on her own, and would be unmanageably rugged if not “leveled” by a Savior, who is both God and fellow man and thus able to walk beside the human race and bring it in out of the cold.
You could no doubt find someone who would be offended by calling Jesus a “docile Gentleman”, but there is no blasphemy intended. The appellation of gentleman—gentle man—that might be ironic elsewhere seems to be straightforward here. And the description does fit, although Dickinson would never use it for the Father, for whom she has such conflicted feelings. Jesus is certainly submissive to God’s will, so docile is also apt. Meekness is in the mix. And we might think of a compliant boy who is neither unruly nor rebellious, who is willing—finally?—to sit still and be taught. Perhaps that’s why this is one of her poems in which the “I” is a boy. It’s interesting, though not our business here, that Emily did often refer to herself as a boy as did another red-headed poet, Marianne Moore, who was he to her family all their lives.
I’ve avoided referring to Dickinson’s best known poems for the sake of freshness (they’ve all been analyzed ad infinitum by professionals anyhow) though some of them consider issues of faith. For instance, her great “I heard a fly buzz—when I died—” is hopeless in its approach to death, which is oblivion. It’s bleak and godless for sure, but how exhilarating is that fly’s “Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz”, perhaps the most wonderful description of a sound we’ll ever read.
The religious tension Dickinson lived with is apparent in the final stanza of a less familiar poem, “Going to Heaven”, a pair of conjoined quatrains that balance opposites:
I’m glad I don’t believe it
For it would stop my breath—
And I’d like to look a little more
At such a curious Earth.
I’m glad they did believe it
Whom I have never found
Since the mighty Autumn afternoon
I left them in the ground.
Faith wouldn’t literally kill her, but would stifle her love for this “curious Earth”. The adjective here isn’t used in the sense of “strange” but “intriguing”—something that stimulates curiosity. This brings us close to the heart of the matter.
On one hand she resents the relentless cultural pressure to convert, stubbornly holding out against the revival at Mt. Holyoke school as a teen and during subsequent “awakenings” that stirred Amherst. On the other, her respect for the faith she has been taught, that “friendship with the world is enmity with God” (James 4:4KJV)—probably making the mistake of conflating the creation with worldliness—meant that she would have to give up nature if she accepted Christianity. And that she would never do; for her, this world was enough: “…if God had been here this summer, and seen the things that I have seen,” she writes to her close friend Mrs. J.G. Holland, “I guess that He would think His Paradise superfluous”.
A false dichotomy, but not uncommon, especially in a rigid New England congregation. Dickinson, however, would never compromise anything so serious as religion, which she took seriously, living a hundred years before the flippancy of our time. Nor would she ever follow the path of her brother, Austin, a pillar of the church caught up for years in an affair with Mabel Loomis Todd that seems to have been less like Victorian hanky-panky than contemporary porn.
So if happy enough not to believe, she’s also relieved that those close to her who have died did have faith—just in case. It’s a sort of Pascal’s Wager: nothing to lose if you believe and are wrong; everything to lose if you don’t and it’s true. Either way, death is the spoiler, taking everything—friends and family and her beloved flowers. The last three lines, more than cynical, are nearly a snarl.
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Dickinson isn’t an agnostic because rather than holding neither position, she both believes and doubts with intensity. It’s an existential crisis. I’m reminded of Scott Fitzgerald’s aphorism: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
Indeed, the persona of Dickinson’s poems insists on ambiguity: “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—”. But she’s more explicit about her beliefs in letters. Though she can be coy and riddling, her letters tend to come unfiltered from her love of friends and family—heartfelt. Writing to Judge Lord in 1882, she admits “I both believe and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps Believing nimble”. That’s so Emily.
And to the Norcross cousins: “I believe we shall in some manner be cherished by our Maker—that the One who gave us this remarkable earth has the power still farther to surprise that which He has caused. Beyond that all is silence”. Not exactly a statement of faith, but honest and in no sense faithless. Recalling that her use of the upper case is always significant, we might notice that Maker and One are capitalized while earth and silence are not.
Finally, to Higginson (a famous preacher himself) she gives this advice: “Do not try to be saved, but let redemption find you, as it certainly will. Love is its own rescue, for we, at our supremest, are but its trembling emblems”.
Dickinson resisted surrendering her will, even for the sake of salvation. This world was simply too precious to her, as well as those whom she loved. It was too difficult for her to place above the loved ones she knew a remote and mostly unknowable God. What is truly ironic about Dickinson is that she was among the great lovers. And if her love was platonic, it was all the more passionate for that reason: the very Form of love, its ideal, and so intense that many recipients (targets?) drew back. It was just too much.
The “Life that is to be” to me,
A residence too plain
Unless in my Redeemer’s Face
I recognize your own—
she proclaims in “Because that you are going”. So there it is: love for the natural world so deep that another world beyond, which is speculative, can’t compete with it; love for friends and family deep enough to discount if not devalue love of God. And yet—and yet—this same poem ends with possibility:
If “All is possible with” him
As he besides concedes
He will refund finally
Our confiscated Gods—
Even if Dickinson’s cherished gods were never given up voluntarily, perhaps they had been confiscated, and might in the end be returned in another world because, speaking through gritted teeth, finally, begrudgingly, she had in her own way agreed: Thy will be done.
Don Thompson
Writer & Poet
Don Thompson has been writing about the San Joaquin Valley for over fifty years, including a dozen or so books and chapbooks. A San Joaquin Almanac won the Eric Hoffer Award for 2021 in the chapbook category. For more info and links to publishers, visit his website at www.don-e-thompson.com
Photography by Andreas Dress