Love in the Time of Corona: Part V
Good news! We are on the way to recovery. We have a road-map. We have dates. We have clear directions on what can and can’t be done: exercising in groups greater than two; having five people over at once; even going to the pub with nine of your closest friends (or strangers). O, for these simple pleasures that are soon to return and hopefully stay. I never thought the day would come that I’d be glad to hear such news.
But, of course, would it even be coronavirus if this good news didn’t also come with a fresh sense of anxiety? Whereas at the beginning of lockdown, the 60% extrovert of my Myer’s & Briggs’ personality was terrified at the thought of isolation. Now, with some sort of an end in sight, the 40% introvert within me, nurtured by all this time at home, is rapidly shrinking. Soon we will be entering the outside world again. Who would have thought that it would come to seem so… nerve-wracking?
And while I am aware that this is very much a ‘First World Problem,’ one that many developed nations still don’t even have the luxury to consider, it is a feeling and personal crisis that I am sure we will all — hopefully — experience sooner or later. Many of us are now accustomed to a new way of life. We have shown that we can work, learn, and play remotely and flexibly from home. There is a new normal so to speak. So the question arises: Do we have to return to the old norms? Should we? Or, from another perspective, what from this time in isolation should we keep and what should we take with us into the future?
Having fallen into the habit of consulting novels over the past few weeks for the answers to questions like these, I thought it might be fitting if this week we read a little poetry. Specifically, why don’t we consider the heiress of isolation writing herself, Emily Dickinson.
The Poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
Over the years, Emily Dickinson has garnered a reputation for being a recluse and hermit. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1830, until her death in 1886 Dickinson rarely lived away from her childhood family home. Unusual by the social expectations of her time, she never married. Nor did she, as of the years soon after she returned from her education at female seminary in 1848, maintain the burdensome domestic duties expected of an unmarried woman living in her father’s house. Her father being Edward Dickinson, an ambitious and prominent lawyer and political figure in Amherst, such duties would not only have entailed regular household upkeep but also included regular and time-consuming playing host to and socialising with her father’s visitors.
Dickinson’s decision to secret herself away from these expectations and the world have long been the subject of critical speculation. Was it due to a nervous, easily overwhelmed disposition? A fear of the outside world matched only by a resolve to self-imprison and avoid others? Or was it, as more recent criticism has emphasised, a conscious and pragmatic choice to avoid the time-consuming social expectations placed upon women, expectations that would have not only detracted from but made almost impossible her pursuit of writing?
In either case, Dickinson’s poetry now resonates with our own COVID-19 moment because, like us, still confined to our homes, she saw and wrote about the world from the unique vantage point of her house-bound isolation. The poetic speaker she creates is at home in lockdown-like isolation and introspection. In many of her poems, the house and home even appear as the fundamental place from which this poetic voice speaks. So often does it appear that in many instances the space of the self and the space of the home seem almost indistinguishable. To this central image of the poet locked away and looking out, the house and home is always a space of safety and security from the outside world. A place where one can know oneself against that world. As Dickinson describes:
Sweet — safe — Houses —
Glad — gay — Houses —
Sealed so stately tight –
Lids of Steel — on Lids of Marble —
Locking Bare feet out –
Could there be a stanza that more adequately describes our similar states of domestic isolation? When fear of COVID-19’s potential to overrun national health care systems spread as fast as the virus itself, governments worldwide appealed to their citizens to #stayathome and stop the spread. And in the rhetoric that followed, the home (sealed away from outsiders and the rest of the world) became a Dickinsonesque haven for us and our most vulnerable peers. In a later stanza of the poem quoted above, Dickinson goes on to say: “No Bald Death — affront their Parlors — No Bold Sickness come/ To deface their Stately Treasures –”. The home is a fortress of biblical proportions, able to turn back pestilence and even death itself. It is the new norm to which Dickinson and now many of us have become accustomed.
Yet, perhaps as important a dimension to Dickinson’s poetry is the attitude that this protection from the outside world does not equate to being disconnected from it. This is the element to her poems that reminds me of my own desires to be free from coronavirus restrictions and out in the world. Dickinson’s speakers are never disinterested in the world or unaffected by it. Rather they are constantly swooning through their lyrics to celebrate what another poet, Ted Hughes, describes as “the crowded, beloved Creation around [Dickinson].” Dickinson’s speakers long to share in the remarkable world outside of the home with their listeners:
I’ll tell you how the Sun rose –
A Ribbon at a time –
The Steeples swam in Amethyst –
The news, like Squirrels, ran –
The Hills untied their Bonnets –
The Bobolinks — begun –
Then I said softly to myself –
“That must have been the Sun!”
Moreover, these passionate verses not only convey a profound love for the world beyond the home’s safety and isolation, but, if anything, they possess a heightened sense of these things. Indeed, as Dickinson describes it in yet another poem, it is not the poet’s role to shy away from life and experience. When it arrives, the poet is bound instead to venture out into the far reaches of experience and record their findings: “I touched the Universe/ And back it slid — and I alone — / A speck upon a Ball — Went out upon Circumference –”.
With this in mind, it’s hard to imagine that Dickinson isn’t the poet to be reading at a time like this. She too is caught between the impulse to stay safe at home and the contrasting urge to be out there in the world. How did she reconcile these two impulses?
I believe, that at the least, an attempt to unite these contradictory desires is what sits at the heart of one of my favourite Dickinson poems, “I dreaded that first Robin, so”. I’ve included it in full below and I am sure that as you go through it you will recognise the two turns to Dickinson’s poetry already described above. One, the desire to stand firm in the locus of certainty whether that be a home or a sense of the self. Two, the call and promise of new knowledge and beauty made by the outside, and in this case natural, world.
I dreaded that first Robin, so,
But He is mastered , now,
I’m so accustomed to Him grown,
He hurts a little, though –I thought if I could only live
Till that first Shout got by —
Not all the Pianos in the Woods
Had power to mangle me –I dared not meet the Daffodils —
For fear their Yellow Gown
Would pierce me with a fashion
So foreign to my own –I wished the Grass would hurry —
So — when t’was time to see —
He’d be too tall, the tallest one
Could stretch — to look at me –I could not bear the Bees should come,
I wished they’d stay away
In gentle deference to me —
The Queen of Calvary –Each one salutes me, as he goes,
And I, my childish Plumes,
Lift, in bereaved acknowledgement
Of their unthinking Drums –
More so than any of the other poems discussed above, this poem combines a tumultuous dread of and attraction to the exterior world. The world beyond the home and speaker is represented by robins, the woods, daffodils, the grass, and bees. This natural world is equated to beauty and also given status as an example and part of divine creation. Therefore it holds not only the promise of new and beautiful experience beyond the speakers domestic abode, but also the promise and glimpsed knowledge of a heavenly world beyond the human.
From both a secular and religious reading then, this promise is the same kind of double-edged sword that we have been grappling with. The beautiful birdsong of a robin or the warm yellow glow of daffodils promises to take us beyond ourselves and provide a sense of escape, wonder, and solace. But the speaker also dreads the cost that such an experience might demand. The Robin’s birdsong, first described as “Pianos in the Woods,” also has the ominous “power to mangle me”. Likewise, the speaker fears that the sight of daffodils with “their Yellow Gown /Would pierce me with a fashion /so foreign to my own –“.
Like us who have become accustomed to our new routines and even a new sense of self over this time in quarantine, what Dickinson’s speaker fears most is what she will have to give up in order to meet the future world that arrives with the approaching seasons. As she frames it here, the stakes are short of nothing less than losing her asserted sense of self.
Does the poem resolve this tension? Despite it’s dread and fear I believe the poem is hopeful, although I would not go so far as to say optimistic. After all, delivered in the past tense (“dreaded,” “thought,” “dared,” “wished,”), the poem is spoken in the reflective voice of someone who has lived through the described experiences and found themselves on the other side. The Robin, “is mastered, now, /I’m so accustomed to Him grown”. But how?
In the poem’s penultimate stanza the speaker describes herself as “The Queen of Calvary”. This title suggests that we should be seeking a resolution and reading in parity, union, and balance. As Christ upon Calvary might be thought of as it’s King, the son of God the King of Kings, the speaker’s framing of herself as Queen to the divine suggests that resolution can be found in a pairing of the two. In other words, we should read for and seek out resolution in the balanced opposition of the exterior and the interior, the settled and the new.
That same stanza divides its lines between two subject matters that might be seen to follow the same pattern. First, the bees of the exterior world and creation; then second, the speaker and Queen of Calvary herself. Each is offset against the other, but also held together by the form of the poem so that it forms a whole.
This reading holds true for Dickinson’s concluding stanza too. In it she describes an exchange of mutual gestures between herself and the exterior symbols of creation. “Each one salutes me, as he goes, /And I, my childish Plumes, /Lift, in bereaved acknowledgement /Of their unthinking Drums –”. The gestures of salutation and acknowledgement between the two opposing subjects here suggest that resolution can only be found in a mutual deference and admiration between the two. The poem itself is only complete if each aspect is contrasted against its opposing element.
So, Dickinson offers us the hope that the future might be appreciated if it is approached with a measured and balanced embrace that keeps one foot firmly in the past, the mundane, the homely and everyday. Likewise, the true greatness of what we have recently found in the security and safety of such places will perhaps be lost on us unless we use it as a means through which we can engage with the more uncertain but potentially brilliant futures ahead of us.
As I mentioned, Dickinson perhaps can’t quite be considered optimistic in this poetic forecast. Despite the hope she garners, her tone still suggests that such an enterprise is never easy. Her first stanza on the Robin suggests that despite the speaker being “so accustomed to Him grown, He hurts a little, though — ”. The future ahead is exciting, but reengaging with the world and finding a new balance between the things we used to do and now do will not be easy. It will take time and work. It may well hurt a little. Somethings may well remain changed. But, let’s hope it has been worth the wait.
