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Emily Dickinson's Books
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Oberhaus, Dorothy Huff |
| Copyright Year | 1993 |
| Abstract | rn a poem dated 1862, Emily Dickinson's "supposed person" refleas, "I measure every Grief I meet / With narrow, probing, Eyes — Il wonder if It weighs like Mine — / Or has an Easier size" (P-561). As she ponders the griefs born by others and wonders how they compare to her own, she does not specify what hers is. But she does present a suggestive list of five possible griefs, which she calls the "fashions — of the Cross." The first grief she names is one's own inevitable "Death"—which she adds, "comes but once — / And only nails the eyes." The second is "Want"; the third, "Cold"; and the fourth, "'Despair.'" The fifth grief is "Banishment from native Eyes — /In sight of Native Air." The first, one's own death, is, of course, common to all humankind. So are some amount of want, cold, and despair, if one thinks figuratively as well as literally. But the fifth — "Banishment from native Eyes — /In sight of Native Air" — is not innately part of the human condition. It therefore seems likely that when she wrote these lines Emily Dickinson may have had in mind her own particular "Cross." Whether or not she did, they describe her position vis-à -vis the nineteenth-century America in which she lived and wrote. By choosing to die to the world — to become "Nobody," as the speaker of an earlier poem declares (P-288) — she did, in effea, banish herself from native eyes, did become in a sense an exile. Yet she was still very much in sight of native air. She was thus part of her culture, but at the same time far more outside her culture than the other major writers of the American literary Renaissance. |
| Starting Page | 58 |
| Ending Page | 65 |
| Page Count | 8 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1353/edj.0.0120 |
| Volume Number | 2 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.gproxx.com/http://blogxd.info/dspace/uk/emily_dickinsons_books.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1353/edj.0.0120 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
