Emily Dickinson a Mystic Poet

[Guest guest]

— by Graham Brown

 

You'll know it as you know `tis Noon–

By Glory–

As you do the sun–

By Glory

 

It was with these words that the 19th century New England poet Emily

Dickinson (1830 – 1886) described a transformative experience of

Self

Realisation. Her change of consciousness could be likened to a

conversion, but not the kind of conversion her Calvinist community

were hoping for. Despite relentless pressure from her family and

fellow townspeople, she stubbornly resisted organised Christianity

while having a continuous mystical communion with what she liked to

call `Eternity', a concept beyond the associations of the word

`God'.

Hers was a conversion to the world of the spirit by Nature Herself,

action through the faculty of intuition. This is a notion she held

in

common with the Transcendentalists, in these of her poems:

 

By intuition, Mighty Things

Assert themselves – and not by terms –

"I"m Midnight" – need the Midnight say –

"I"m Sunrise" – Need the Majesty?

Omnipotence – had not a Tongue –

His lisp – is lightning – and the sun –

His Conversation– with Sea –

"How shall you know"?

Consult your eye!

 

"Transcendentalism was a philosophic and literary movement that

flourished in New England as a reaction against 18th century

rationalism, the sceptical philosophy of Locke, and the confining

religious orthodoxy of New England Calvinism. Its beliefs were

idealistic, mystical, eclectic and individualistic, shaped by the

ideas of Plato, Plotinus, as well as the teaching of Confucious, the

Sufis, the writers of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, the

Buddhists and Swedenburg. Transcendentalism had at its fundamental

base a monism holding to the unity of the world and God and the

immanence of God in the world. Because of this indwelling of

divinity, everything in the world is a microcosm containing within

itself all the laws and the meaning of existence. Likewise the soul

of each individual is identical with the soul of the world, and

latently contains all that the world contains. Man may fulfil his

divine potentialities either through rapt mystical state, in which

the divine is infused into the human, or through coming into contact

with the truth, beauty, and goodness embodied in nature and

originating in the Over-Soul. Thus occurs the correspondence between

the tangible world and the human mind, and the identity of moral and

physical laws. Through belief in the divine authority of the soul's

intuitions and impulses, based on the identification of the

individual soul with God, there developed the doctrine of self

reliance and individualism, the disregard of external authority,

tradition, and logical demonstration, and the absolute optimism of

the movement". The most important literary expression of

transcendentalism is considered to lie in Thoreau,s "Walden" and in

the works of Emerson. Others in the movement were A.M. Alcott,

father

of Louisa May Alcott.German transcendentalism (Goethe, Richter,

Novalis) influenced Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth. The

greatness

of these figures and the universal respect for their ideas has led

to

the use of the word `transcendental' by business organisations

masquerading as spiritual paths.

 

Much present in the poetry of Dickinson is the idea of the proximity

of the Eternal in the here and now. Like other visionaries she was

not content to await Judgement Day for a glimpse of Paradise but,

like William Blake, knew that it was visible if the doors of

perception could be cleansed.

 

Not "Revelation"– `tis– that waits, But our unfurnished eyes–

 

`Eternity' recalls Blake's "eternity" glimpsed `in a grain of sand'

and has the oceanic quality described by mystics of all ages.

 

Exultation is the going

of an inland soul to the sea

Past houses – past headlands–

Into deep Eternity.

 

The `lover' in many of her poems is Eternity itself. There is even a

sense of the individual `I' consciousness dissolving into Divinity,

the oceanic consciousness:

 

`Tis little I – could care for pearls

Who own the ample sea –

Of Periods of seas –

Unvisited of Shores Themselves the Verge of Seas to be

Eternity – is Those–

 

In keeping with the tradition of the mystics is the idea of

transcending mental processes:

 

Let not Revelation

By theses be detained

 

 

Akin to the writings of the mystics and great religious teachers is

the call to self knowledge:

 

Explore thyself

Therein thyself

shall find

The "Undiscovered Continent" No Settler had the Mind

 

 

Once realised this Self is known to be limitless:

 

The Brain – is wider than the sky–

For put them side by side –

The once the other will contain With ease –

and You – beside –

 

Compare this to Muso Soseki's Zen Buddhist perspective:

 

For a person of Zen

No limits

The blue sky must

feel ashamed to be so small.

 

 

The sense of paradox so fundamental to Zen is also ever present in

Dickinson. The similarities to Dickinson's insights despite the fact

that she had direct access to Eastern wisdom is testimony to the

universality of the experience of self realisation. To the Indian

Yogi self realisation is the gift of an inner energy known as

Kundalini which manifests itself as a cool wind. During yogic states

the heat of sympathetic nervous activity subsides and the

parasympathetic nervous system comes into play relaxing and

refreshing the body, with a breeze or fountain like energy, so that

the attention can transcend physical needs and merge with the Atman

or Self. According to Dickinson the moments of At–One–ment with

Nature/Self happen "when the wind is within" (Thoreau wrote of "

ecstasies begotten of the breezes") For the yogi or realised soul

the

sensation of this cool energy becomes his means of being sensitive

to

manifestations of Truth–Beauty–Love (Keats' tripartite Unity).

Dickinson stated that she had no other means to discriminate these

qualities in art.

 

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever

can

warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of

my head were taken off I know that is poetry. These are the only

ways

I know of."

 

and in one of her poems:

 

"Your breath has time to straighten,

Your brain to bubble cool

Deals one

imperial thunder bolt

that scalps your

naked soul"

 

Interestingly the yogi also experiences concentration of the

Kundalini, or cool breeze at the top of the head, during union with

the Self (the unity behind Truth–Beauty–Love). The yogic experience

of self realisation is a simultaneous reception of grace, poured

down

from celestial realms, and an upsurging, or erupting, of energy from

the unconscious depths within. Dickinson referred to herself as

a "volcano at home". "On my volcano grows the grass"; there is a

sense of a vast underlying power of unconscious creativity waiting

to

be brought forth.

A final point of comparison with the yogis of the East is

Dickinson's

spiritual detachment from a world that was unready to share her

vision. She spent the second half of her life as a virtual hermit,

just as Indian yogis and the Desert Fathers of early Christianity

(some of whom went to the extreme of meditating for years on the

tops

of columns) isolated themselves from the materialism they saw in

human society, in order to achieve yoga.

"I dwell in possibility", she wrote. She had little time for the

gossips and church people of 19th century Amherst with its

restrictive Calvinist beliefs. "The soul selects her own society and

then shuts the door", perhaps things would have been different if

she

had been born 100 years later. Not everyone was turned away,

however,

the local children were especially welcome since they were

relatively

uncalcified by dogma and selfishness. She wrote of her "Columnar

Self", referring to her strength in standing alone, connected

perhaps

to other columns by celestial vaults in the great palace of the Self.

 

Technique

 

Her genius lay in expressing the Infinite in terms of close–by

things, "her basket", she said, "held firmaments". "Extreme

psychological states could be expressed if the right words were

hunted down, yet a poem is not method. For those on friendly terms

with cherubim, riffling through dictionaries is not always

necessary." Unusual word pairings which jolt the mind, are her trade

mark "confiscated gods". She made use of legal terms (she was born

into a legal family) and scientific or theological

vocabulary, "Enchantment's Perihelion".

 

Legacy

 

To the self addressed question: Wherefore sing...since nobody

hears?", Dickinson affirms; "My business is to sing".

 

After her death Dickinson's sister Lavinia discovered hundreds of

poems in a single locked box. In all she left us over 1, 700 poems.

In them she envisaged worlds far beyond the apparent simplicity of

her daily life. Virtually unknown in her lifetime(only ten of her

poems were published) Dickinson now ranks with Walt Whiteman as one

of the two great visionary names in 19th century American poetry,

and

has had an enormous impact on modern poetry generally. She was ahead

of her time both in terms of form and idea Jane Langdon Writes in

her

selection of Dickinson's poems:"In the end it is perhaps the sense

of

vastness that carries her poems so powerfully forward into this or

any other century, the immensities that spread outward from her

short

quatrains, the flrmaments that fill her basket, her acquaintance

with

eternity."