Awareness of Emily Dickinson has grown and deepened over thecourse of the twentieth century such that the "delightful" andplatitude-laden verses, as they were initially viewed, have provento be rich, often ironic, highly complex explorations of one poet'ssubjectivity. Dickinson's poetry today challenges us to confrontaspects of our own inner processes in relation to psychologicalpain, death, the world and possible -- though not undoubted --transcendence of it, and frustrated desire, to name just a few ofthe themes. The emergence of discourse on addictions, both tosubstances and to modes of behavior, gives us a framework in whichwe can newly assess one of Dickinson's poems, and even though thepoet's particular life circumstances -- involving the influence ofPuritanism, which would also affect Dickinson's contemporariesHerman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the limitations placed onwomen in nineteenth-century America in general, and EmilyDickinson's own self-limiting reclusive existence -- differ fromour late-twentieth-century circumstances, nonetheless Dickinson'spoetry presents the overall shape of the subjective processunderlying addiction in such an abstract form, that the work inquestion speaks to us directly over a century later.
The circumstances alluded to above brought the poet into asituation in which she was caught between the desire to communicateher reflections on life -- she sent poems as both letters andaesthetic objects with illustrations of a collage character tofriends -- and the distrust of worldly success and fame proceedingfrom the Puritanical tradition embodied in the writings of theeighteenth-century preacher Jonathan Edwards. Whereas a later --and male -- author, H.G.Wells, would see no need to limit hissexual drives to conform to a monogamous marriage, and would findwilling partners with whom he could express his sexuality, EmilyDickinson would feel desires for worldly pleasures and restrict herexplorations of these desires. Her poetry, in many instances,chronicles the tension between desire and frustration -- bothwilled and externally imposed -- in the context of her cloisteredconsciousness. Again, although Wells's self indulgence has becomeincreasingly normative for our society, Dickinson's fine-tunedawareness of the inevitable frustrations of such a pursuit has muchto say to us in relation to our experience.
Emily Dickinson's two-quatrain poem "The Heart asks Pleasure --first --" from fascicle 25, H 89 in the Houghton Librarynumeration, and 536 in Thomas H. Johnson's edition of theComplete Poems -- presents the reader with a brief yetcomplete outline of a subjective process that has inspired manyinterpretations as to how that process applies to either EmilyDickinson's life experience or the subjective evolution of people'sindividual consciousnesses in general. I would like to add onemore model to this interpretive repertory, suggesting that theconcision and relative abstraction characteristic of the poem makeof it a "deep structure" -- used in a sense other than those ofClaude Lévi-Strauss or Noam Chomsky -- that is multivalent;resisting exclusive, reductionistic interpretation. In addition,following Susan Howe's practice of looking closely into NoahWebster's dictionary, I would like to tie the poem to its probableroots in the language and moral background of Dickinson's time andcultural context, without at the same time robbing the poem (or"deep structure") of its applicability to other temporal andcultural contexts, such as our own.
The poem appears as follows in Johnson's edition:
The Heart asks Pleasure -- first --
And then -- Excuse from Pain --
And then -- those little Anodynes
That deaden suffering --And then -- to go to sleep --
And then -- if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor
The privilege to die --
It should be noted that at the bottom of the page in thefascicle, there are in addition the three words "Blessing,""Liberty," and "Luxury" without any punctuation except for anx or possibly a + before each of the words. Of these marks(which also occur twice in the body of the poem itself -- beforethe words "Pleasure" and "privilege") R.W. Franklin, editor ofThe Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, comments in generalthat they could have been marked in the fascicles by Sue Dickinson(Emily's sister-in-law), Lavinia Dickinson (Emily's sister), or byEmily herself, and that they are "probably a form of ranking orother indication of interest" (xvi). Although these three wordsare not included in any published text of poem 536 that I haveseen, I will comment on them later in relation to the text.
Previous commentaries on the poem have either suggested orasserted that "All of life is compressed herein" (Van Wyck,186-87), that the poem presents "life's tragic defeat" (Whicher,13-14), depicts the "disappointment of the naive dream ofhappiness" (Carpenter, 115), suggests "the inevitability anduniversality of the psychic career" (Brooks, Lewis, and Warren,1244), enumerates "the five ascending degrees of intensityassociated with pain" (Morey, 8-9), and Alexander, in herMonarch Notes commentary, suggests that "the poet at deathexpects to face some sort of inquisition for her personal religiousheresy during life" (59-60). Without denying the applicability ofany of these interpretations, I would like to suggest that themodel of the experience of the addictive process also fits theprogression outlined in the poem.
Psychologist Charlotte Kasl, in characterizing the "addict side"of a personality, echoes Dickinson's poem: "Its goal is to avoidpain, achieve euphoria, and have control" (27). Both "pain" and"euphoria" appear in the poem's text, "pain" appearing directly and"euphoria" appearing as "pleasure." "Control" can be said toinform the poem structurally, in terms of both formal and thematicclosure. Dr. Kasl in effect paraphrases the progression outlinedin "The Heart asks Pleasure" in regard to the heart's sequence ofrequests:
On a continuum, the motivation foracting addictively progresses from pleasure, to relief of pain andtension, to maintenance (just getting through the day), to a desirefor oblivion (21).
Here it is important to recognize that Dr. Kasl is viewingaddiction as a process with recognizable characteristic stages,rather than as a purely biochemical phenomenon involving abuse ofa particular substance. In this regard, she recalls the followingconversation as illustrative of a common misperception:
On one occasion, a chemical dependency counselorbecame quite irritated with me for saying that sex could be anaddiction. After I told him how people's behavior with sex fitsall the criteria of addiction, he said with some hostility, "Well,then anything could become an addiction," to which I replied,"Yes, more or less, that's true" (17).
Although Dickinson's poem mentions "those little Anodynes / Thatdeaden suffering --" and thus includes what we would today callsubstance abuse in the catalogue of the heart's desires, clearlythis is merely one stage in a much more inclusive psychologicalprogression. This, then, is not a "drug poem," but, as with Kasl'sperspective on the addictive process, has a much broader range ofapplicability.
The foregoing range of possible interpretations of this poem --from the heretic's fear of judgment to the outline of the addictiveprocess to a softer yet more relentless version of "Life's a Bitchand then you Die" -- arises from the two qualities that CristanneMiller emphasizes in Dickinson's poetic language in general: "it ishighly compressed and highly disjunctive" (21). The compression ofthe language here takes the form of general terms, such as"Pleasure," "Pain," "suffering" and the like, with noparticularization of them in the form of specific instances ofsuffering, pleasure, etc. The one instance of relatively extensivemodification --"those little Anodynes / That deaden suffering --"is almost coy, as if the poet is referring to something from anexperience familiar to many of her contemporaries. She still shiesaway from specifying which little anodynes (the adjective "little"making the painkillers almost cute, the adjective "those" implyinga shared awareness of a class of painkillers), although Websterlists several specific types in his definition of "anodyne": "Anymedicine which allays pain, or causes sleep, as an opiate,paregoric, narcotic, &c." Were Emily Dickinson closer to WaltWhitman stylistically, she could well have listed a whole catalogueof substances; in one of her letters, she asks "Have you ...'Confessions of an Opium Eater," by DeQuincey?" (Capps, 71),indicating that she had some contact with literature that wouldhave supplied her with details of this nature. (Another possibleliterary source for those little anodynes would have been laudanumin Silas Marner; Susan Howe underscores Dickinson'sadmiration of George Eliot's writing (19).) However, Dickinson'sstyle is one of compression rather than of Whitmaniacal expansion,and this very minimalism makes her expression more universallyapplicable.
Disjunctive devices here include the frequent use of dashes --which interrupt the forward movement of the poem's lineardevelopment eight times in the first six lines -- and parataxis,here reinforced by the dashes after each of the four instances ofthe phrase "And then --". Miller characterizes this paratacticprocedure thus (not in specific relation to this poem): "Dickinsonjuxtaposes the stages of an idea or story rather than explainingtheir progression" (30). That is, the fact of a sequence of stagesin what the heart asks is presented, but why the objects of desirego from pleasure to excuse from pain to painkillers to sleep todeath is completely withheld. The compression and the disjunction,then, both contribute to making the structure outlined here moreuniversally applicable because both the particular form each stagetakes and the reasons motivating the devolution from each stage tothe next can be supplied by the reader according to herunderstanding and experience.
Barbara Herrnstein Smith analyzes poem 536 to reveal itsinterlocking structures of formal and thematic closure:
What results in [this] poem is that the ... gradualdeath of the heart, is given the quality of mathematical precisionand neutrality -- and also of mathematical certainty, which,among other things, strengthens the sense of finality at itsconclusion (112).
Smith's basic principle concerning poetic closure is that itrefers not merely to the effectiveness of the last line of a poem,but that it results from structural principles set up throughoutthe entire poem. The "sense of finality at its conclusion" isearned by the poem; in this case, not only because the lastsyllable of the poem is "die," but also because this has beenprefigured by the presence of "deaden" in the last line of thefirst quatrain, and because the expectation of six-syllable linesset up in the first two lines of each quatrain is frustrated by theeight syllables of each third line, then is triumphantly reassertedin each fourth line.
There is an additional device in closural structure employed byDickinson in this poem, involving syllable count and, I hope todemonstrate, this reinforces the thematic concern. This devicearises from the fact that 74% of the poem's words (rounding down)are monosyllabic -- making polysyllabic words stand out incontrast. There are 31 monosyllabics, 4 bisyllabics, 3trisyllabics, and only one four-syllable word. These polysyllabicwords are so arranged as to make a syllabic "crescendo" in thefirst quatrain, followed by a "rest," climax and dramatic"decrescendo" in the second quatrain. There is one two-syllableword in each of the first two lines ("pleasure" and "excuse"),there is a cluster of a two-syllable word followed by athree-syllable word in each of the following two lines ("littleAnodynes" and "deaden suffering"), there are only monosyllabicwords for the fifth, sixth, and first half of the seventh lines,followed by the poem's only four-syllable word ("Inquisitor"), asif to let out pent breath on the part of poet and reader alike. Finally, the last line "decrescendoes" through a three-syllableword ("privilege") to the final monosyllables. It is as ifmonosyllabic words form the ground of the poem's being -- including"heart," "pain," "sleep," "will" and "die" -- from which theheart aspires to polysyllabic desires, such as "pleasure," "excuse[from pain]," "those little anodynes that deaden suffering," andfinally the "privilege [to die]." This final request/desire isprefigured not only by the verb "deaden," but also by the firstmonosyllabic wish: "to sleep." That sleep is death's second selfDickinson undoubtedly knew from Shakespeare (for Dickinson'sinterest in Shakespeare, see Howe, 29, 91); in this context, thefact that it is monosyllabic reinforces that associationstructurally.
"The Heart asks Pleasure -- first" is an inverted form of the"Tale of the Fisherman's Wife": whereas the character in the fairytale repeatedly asks the fish for greater wealth and status, theheart in Dickinson's poem exhibits an incremental diminution inwhat it allows itself, not to expect, but to hope for. Is theHeart the hero(ine) of the poem's narrative, or is it the villain? It is instructive to examine the definition and examples of usagein Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the EnglishLanguage:
"Heart -- .... 4. The seat of the affections andpassions, as of love, joy, grief, enmity, courage, pleasure,&c.
The heart is deceitful above all things. Everyimagination of the thoughts of the heart is evilcontinually....Scripture.
The second passage cited from "Scripture" above by Webster, fromGenesis 6:5 of the King James Version of the Bible, concernshumanity before the Flood: "And God saw that the wickedness of manwas great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughtsof his heart was only evil continually."
Whereas the Biblical text refers specifically to antediluvianhumanity, Webster, in Kerry Sherrin's apt expression, generalizesthe sentence to include all people, transhistorically. Thealteration of the passage for inclusion in the dictionary isparticularly striking since Noah Webster's own edition of the Bibleretains the specificity of the King James Version in Genesis. Ifindeed Emily Dickinson consulted Webster's Dictionary concerning"heart" and compared it with the biblical text -- and CristanneMiller emphasizes the strong Biblical influences on Dickinson'slanguage and thought as well as her lexicographical interests, andher possession of the 1844 printing of the 1841 edition ofWebster's Dictionary (132-137, 153-154) -- the poet's notion of theimaginations of the heart would have been colored by thisAugustinian bias. Although Emily Dickinson herself had adistanced, idiosyncratic relation to the church of her community,Susan Howe has drawn in some detail her affinity with the work andthe figure of Jonathan Edwards (47-52) and Jane Donahue Eberweinhas in similar detail demonstrated the presence in Dickinson'spoetry of the Calvinist sacramental tradition (89-104). Thus, eventhough her understanding of the Biblical -- and Webster'slexicographical -- depiction of the heart's imagination may haveinvolved more than a simple acceptance of this negative judgment,nonetheless Dickinson's use of the Heart in this poem isundoubtedly inflected by this semantic element. "The Heart," then,might be associated, in part, with Kasl's notion of "the addict"side of the addictive personality, and its desire for pleasure,painkillers, and oblivion could be seen as the evolution ofconcupiscence.
The only two words in what is generally considered "the poemitself" (i.e., excluding the three words "added" at the bottom ofthe fascicle page) that are marked with an x are "Pleasure"in the first line and "privilege" in the last. These are the firstand last things the heart "asks," and are thus set up as a framingdevice for the entire process depicted. Using Rachel BlauDuPlessis' procedure of "sound mapping," it becomes evident that"pleasure" and "privilege" are variations on the same soundstructure: both begin with "p," both have "l" and "r" -- the orderof these is reversed -- and the "s" of "pleasure" hardens into the"g" in "privilege." Is the "privilege [to die]" a variation on, orevolved form of, "pleasure?"
I have not been able to find any connection drawn between EmilyDickinson and Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, but if she had access toa copy of it -- at Amherst Academy or Mary Lyon's Female Seminary,for instance -- she would have found possible layers of meaningnot available in Webster's Dictionary. Webster defines pleasureas:
The gratification of the senses or of themind;...opposed to PAIN...Pleasure, bodily and mental,carnal and spiritual, constitutes the whole of positive happiness,as pain constitutes the whole of misery.
Webster draws a simple binary opposition between pleasure andpain, which Dickinson seems to modify through drawing out thegradations between them over the process of the heart's requests. A possible cause for this progression is suggested when Johnson, inthe 1755 edition of his Dictionary, lists as the second definitionof "pleasure" "Loose gratification," citing Milton as an example ofusage: "Not sunk in carnal pleasure."
"Privilege" is defined similarly in the two dictionaries, butone of Johnson's examples of usage for that word has a strikingresonance in Dickinson's poem under consideration: "A soul that cansecurely death defy, / And counts it nature's privilege todie. Dryden." I have been unable to locate this couplet inDryden, and I have been unable further to locate any indication ofinterest in Dryden's work on the part of Dickinson; his onlyoccurrence in her writing seems to be in a letter she wrote to theRev. J.L. Jenkins, as follows: "...though as Lowell quotes from theStranger, 'Live -- live even to be unkind!'" That is to say, sherefers to Lowell's citing of a line of Dryden, referring to theseventeenth-century Englishman only as "the Stranger" (Leyda, 298and n.). Cynthia Griffin Wolff suggests a possible connection inDickinson's studies:
Students at the Amherst Academy learned to writegracefully by studying the great English stylists of the eighteenthcentury -- Addison and Steele, Dryden [sic] and Pope -- andDickinson continued this study of style at Mount Holyoke (345).
If the Dryden couplet is a source of Dickinson's phrase"privilege to die," she seems to have altered its significance; Dryden seems to imply that a soul secure in its rectitude will finditself translated to heaven upon death, whereas for Dickinson, atleast, in this poem, death is a privilege simply as an escape fromincreasing torment in life. Or, as Alexander suggests, death isindeed feared because of possible divine retribution for the poet's"personal heresy."
The three words at the bottom of the page do not fit into thetight, closural structure analyzed by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, anddo not appear in any printed version of the poem that I have seen. They are in the same hand as the poem, and seem possibly to havebeen written at the same time, since they slant at the same angleas the preceding text -- compare particularly "little" in the thirdline with "liberty" at the bottom. Marta Werner, in a talk at theMLA conference in December, 1996, discussed Dickinson's additionand subtraction of lines and phrases from poems as a possibleexperimentation with different poetic combinations; do these threewords constitute an ongoing process of extending the poem? Or,alternatively, do these three words serve as a sort of schematicoutline of the poem as a whole, or even as a gloss on the poem?
I would suggest that these three words present a sequence,starting with a possibly divine gift, leading through a politicalor temporal good, and resulting in moral corruption. "Blessing" isdefined in Webster's 1855 edition as follows: "3. Any means ofhappiness; a gift, benefit, or advantage; that which promotestemporal prosperity and welfare, or serves immortal felicity."
The sequence of "Blessing...Liberty" recalls the phrase "andsecure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity"from the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, andWebster defines "liberty" as "privilege" at one point (the seventhmeaning in the 1855 edition). "Luxury" cannot help but recall theLatin "luxuria" --"wantonness, riotous living, excess" -- toa student of the classics, and Emily Dickinson studied Latin atboth the Amherst Academy and Mary Lyon's Female Seminary. Websterderives "luxury" from the Latin luxuria and indicates thatthe noun comes from luxo, which he glosses as "to loosen." The first definition Webster gives for "luxury" is:
"a free or extravagant indulgence in the pleasures of the table,as in rich and expensive diet or delicious foods and liquors; voluptuousness in the gratification of appetite... Riches expose aman to pride and luxury."
If the poem as a whole outlines schematically the process of theheart's expectations from life, the three words written beneath thepoem suggest a progression from an unqualified good to the kind offreedom exalted in the Preamble to the Constitution, to thepostlapsarian "wrong choice" within the framework of Free Will. This addendum to the poem, if that is what it is, mirrorsthe degenerative structure of life schematized poetically, perhapsexplaining this inevitable process from a theologicalperspective.
In summary, I would argue that Emily Dickinson's "The Heart asksPleasure -- first --" is a tightly knit poetic construction witha definitive yet inventive closural structure. This structure,through the use of open-ended meanings resulting from adisjunctive, paratactic linear sequence, serves as a multivalentfoundation for many interpretations or applications to particularlife issues, ranging from the sinfulness of postlapsarian humankindto worldly resistance to human desire. The relation of the threewords at the bottom of the fascicle leaf to the "rest of" the poemis ambiguous as a result of a similar disjunction, and theirinterpretation (or, the interpretation of them) is similarlyopen-ended. Thus, the text as a whole presents us with aremarkable fusion of closural and anti-closural elements. Thethematic and affective core of the poem is a sort of closure initself; to borrow and misuse a term from Hans Robert Jauss, poem536 illustrates the progressive narrowing of the Heart's"expectation-horizon" into the monosyllabic point, "die."
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