How did Emily Dickinson's unusual poem about death become standard high school curriculum?
Emily Dickinson is one of those writers whose life is as famous as her writing: after she died, having spent much of her life writing at home, her sister found nearly two thousand poems in her bureau, all ready for publication. In a surprising number of those poems, Emily Dickinson was already dead.
"Because I Could Not Stop for Death," Dickinson’s fantasy of getting picked up by the grim reaper, has become standard reading curriculum in English classes across America, but it’s a very strange work of art. For our series on American Icons, Sean Cole, a poet himself, took a closer look at Dickinson's legendary work. And he puts to the test an old rumor that you can sing any of Dickinson’s poems to the tune of “Gilligan’s Island.” (Hint: Yes.)
(Originally aired: July 23, 2010)
Kurt Andersen: Emily Dickinson, she's one of those writers who's as famous for her life as for her work, the whole unpublished spinster living in seclusion thing. For our series on American Icons, we asked Studio 360, Sean Cole, who's a poet himself, to take a closer look at one of her most famous poems Because I Could Not Stop for Death. For a high school English standby, it's a pretty strange work of art.
Sean Cole: I started off by looking at The Original, it's at the Houghton Library at Harvard University. One of the curators Leslie Morris had it waiting for me in the Dickinson room. It's under lock and key. The room is filled with stuff that actually belonged to Dickinson, stuff that was important to her. She wrote at that table?
Leslie: She wrote at that table and in that chair.
Sean: Oh my God. Emily Dickinson is a poetry prophet. You hear all the time that she was a modernist before modernism and a surrealist before surrealism, and yet, I never thought Because I Could Not Stop for Death was that great an example of what she could do. It seemed too high schooly, too obvious, and archetypal, but seeing the thing she wrote with her hand, it was like looking at some sacred lost scroll. Could you possibly read the poem?
Sean: Would you mind reading it?
Leslie: Sure. I mean, no. All right, ready? Because I Could not Stop for Death.
Billy Collins: He kindly stopped for me.
Leslie: The Carriage held but just ourselves.
Sean: And Immortality.
Unnamed Speaker: We slowly drove, he knew no haste.
Unnamed Speaker: And I had put away my labor and my leisure too.
Unnamed Speaker: For his civility.
Unnamed Speaker: We passed the school where children strove.
Unnamed Speaker: At recess in the ring.
Unnamed Speaker: We passed the fields of gazing grain.
Unnamed Speaker: We passed the setting sun.
Unnamed Speaker: Or rather, he passed us.
Unnamed Speaker: The dews drew quivering and chill.
Unnamed Speaker: For only gossamer my gown.
Unnamed Speaker: My tippet only tulle.
Unnamed Speaker: We paused before a house that seemed a swelling of the ground.
Unnamed Speaker: The roof was scarcely visible.
Unnamed Speaker: The cornice in the ground.
Unnamed Speaker: Since then, it is centuries.
Unnamed Speaker: And yet feels shorter than the day.
Unnamed Speaker: I first surmised the horses' heads.
Unnamed Speaker: Were toward eternity. It's a wonderful poem, isn't it? [music]
Sean: It's perfect really that Dickinson should write from the perspective of someone who's already died. No one heard Dickinson's true voice until after her death, and she weirdly seems to have planned for posthumous fame. For example, when the poems were discovered in the bureau about 900 of them, including Because I Could Not Stop for Death, were neatly copied out into 40 hand-bound booklets. Leslie Morris let me hold the piece of string Dickinson used to bind one of them.
Unnamed Speaker: Oh my God, wow.
Sean: I've never been so enthralled by holding a piece of string before.
[laughter]
Sean: I was so thrilled I told my friend Joseph about it. I'm like practically crying over a piece of dirty string that I'm holding in my hand.
Joseph Lease: It wasn't just any piece of dirty string.
Sean: It wasn't just any piece of string. Joseph Lease is chair of the MFA Program in Writing at California College of the Arts and a celebrated poet himself. He's the one who first turned me on to how radical Dickinson was for her time, which is why she's so much more popular now than a lot of other 19th century American poets, he says.
Joseph: If you ask Americans, "You've read some poetry in school, who do you love?" Americans don't say, "Oh, I love Longfellow." Some of them do, Longfellow has his fans.
Unnamed Speaker: Come hither, come hither, my little daughter, and do not tremble so for I can weather the roughest gale That ever wind did blow.
Sean: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was part of a whole windy gang known as the Fireside Poets. They wrote long Midnight Ride of Paul Revere-type macho verse, poetry with a capital P. It was Dickinson's little p, her plain spokenness, and economy that helped usher American poetry into its next era. She could worm through to the same huge issues, death, beauty, love, using a fraction of the words, and a meter so common.
Billy Collins: It's called common meter usually. Yes, it's da, da, da, da.
Sean: This is Billy Collins, former US Poet laureate.
Billy: Da, da, da, da. That four, three-meter, it's the meter of the hymn as everyone knows. It's also the meter of nursery rhymes. Old King Cole is a merry old soul and a merry old soul was he, the same exact rhythm.
Sean: A rhythm that can sound repetitive to younger readers of Dickinson these days.
Jenny Proctor: I'm in this writing class right now and one of the first days we got there, there was a group of people sitting in the corner just bashing her.
Sean: Jenny Proctor is a senior at the University of Wisconsin Madison. When she was in high school, she started an Emily Dickinson fan club that no one joined. Now that she's in college, things haven't gotten much better.
Jenny: They're like you can sing her songs to the tune of, I don't know.
Sean: Gilligan's Island.
Jenny: Yes, Gilligan's Island, thank you. They were singing along and laughing and I didn't join in.
[Gilligan's Island theme song]
Jenny: I tried to stand out from them just like, "Hey, she did it beautifully. I'd like to see you try that."
Billy: To achieve such linguistic originality within that little dance, the very conservative structure of that meter is part of her wonderment.
Robert Howard: There's a kind of, and this is a big theme in the Dickinson literature, the lack of reference in her language.
Sean: This is Robert Howard. He's studied the Dickinson literature at length and written articles on her work.
Robert: Take the example of gazing grain, what is gazing grain? You might think grazing grain, but it sounds absolutely right, but there's no way really to know what it means.
Jenny: We pass the fields of gazing grain. We passed the setting sun. [music]
Sean: The thing is, you don't have to know what it means. Dickinson understood innately that something could feel true without having to make literal sense. No one else was playing with words like that at the time, Walt Whitman was just as radical but in a totally opposite declarative celebratory way. In any case, Dickinson never read him, she said she heard he was scandalous.
Cindy Dickinson: This is Emily Dickinson's bedroom.
Sean: Dickinson's house is about three blocks from the center of Amherst, Mass. It's a museum now. Cindy Dickinson showed me around. She's the director of programming and interpretation.
Cindy: I am not related to Emily Dickinson.
Sean: That's so funny.
Cindy: It is.
Sean: A lot of people think of Dickinson as having been holed up in this house her whole life, but for about 15 years of it, she lived down the street.
Cindy: The other house looked out over the town cemetery. Many scholars speculate that one reason she wrote using funerals, cemeteries as imagery is that that was her experience, it's right next door, so they were her neighbors in essence.
Sean: The dead were her neighbors.
Cindy: The dead, yes.
Sean: Now she's buried in that cemetery. Born December 10th, 1830, called back May 15th, 1886. Dickinson used that little phrase 'called back' in the last letter she ever wrote, a letter to her cousins to tell them she was dying. It read in its entirety, "Little cousins, called back, Emily." Again, she was concise, but if you're called back, there must be a caller, which might be why death seems so comforting in a lot of her poems. Joseph Lease.
Joseph: I think one of the ways that Because I Could Not Stop for Death really speaks to contemporary readers, I think when the dead speak in a poem when a posthumous voice speaks, it answers one of our deepest needs. We hope that there's a heaven and not just a heaven but a heaven where you're still yourself, where there's still a sense of personal agency.
Belinda West: Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.
Sean: About 14 years ago, Emily Dickinson came back to life on Late Night radio in Boston. A woman named Belinda West portrayed her a few times on WGBH's Night Air and she's still playing Dickinson at schools and various events. I thought talking to her might be the closest I could get to talking to the poet herself, except, what do you ask Emily Dickinson. Were you lonely?
Belinda: Sir, we've hardly met. Are you lonely?
Sean: You never feel quite so small as when Emily Dickinson gives you a hard time. Why don't use seek to publish more?
Belinda: Oh, Fame is a bee, it has a song, it has a sting, and, ah, too, it has a wing.
Sean: That's a whole Dickinson poem actually, just those four lines.
Belinda: This business of submitting material to those who only change its form entirely and it's meaning as well. Why seek that? It's the auction of the mind.
Sean: Belinda citing another poem there, the full quote is, "Publication is the auction of the mind of man." Dickinson published 11 poems while she was alive, all of them anonymously. No one saw Because I Could Not Stop for Death until it was put out in a volume of her work four years after her actual death, and even then, no one saw the whole poem. The editors on that first posthumous collection cut out the fourth stanza.
Belinda: He passed the setting sun, or rather, he passed us. The dews drew quivering and chill for only gossamer my gown, my tippet only tulle.
Sean: This is a total mystery. My best guess is that they thought Dickinson was too scantily clad in her gown of gossamer. Anyway, it wasn't until 1955 that the full version of the poem was published. Over the years, certain poets have gotten pretty excited about that gown of gossamer part, if you know what I mean.
Billy: I was taking my clue from that stanza.
Sean: This is Billy Collins again, he's talking about the title poem of one of his books. It's called Taking off Emily Dickinson's Clothes.
Billy: I've removed her tippet, of course, and then the gown of gossamer, that's got to go.
Sean: Is she naked at the end of this poem?
Billy: She's naked in the second stanza, yeah.
Sean: Collins wrote the poem, he says, because he was tired of this one particular thread in Dickinsonian scholarship, the question of her sexuality, whether she was gay or not. He calls it unprofitable gossip.
Billy: That was the frustration I experienced when I decided to write Taking off Emily Dickinson's Clothes and have sex with her.
Sean: So you have sex with her in the poem.
Billy: Yes.
Sean: You dog, you.
Billy: Well, grr, ruff.
Sean: [laughs] Collins' poem is one of about 80 collected in a whole anthology of tributes to Dickinson. Her influence is renewed with every generation of writers. Again, Joseph Lease.
Joseph: The gorgeous music and amazing rhythmical control in her work are there in a number of contemporary poets and that's something that inspires me deeply. [music] I feel like I tune my ear by reading her poetry aloud and along with other poets as well, of course, but always her, always returning to her.
[music]
Sean: Musicians keep returning to her too. This poem has been scored at least five times, including this version by Aaron Copland and three folk versions.
[music]
In fact, the poem is so iconic it's been spoofed in newspaper columns. the one in the Denver Rocky Mountain News turned it into a story about a skiing accident.
Unnamed Speaker: Because I could not stop for breath, it kindly stopped for me. We both been going awfully fast until I hit a tree.
Sean: Maybe this is why Dickinson rejected the very idea of fame, at least while she was around to experience it. One time in a letter to a friend who was critical of her work, Dickinson wrote, "I smile when you suggest that I delay to publish. That being foreign to my thought as firmament to thin. If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her." For Studio 360, I'm Sean Cole.
[music]
Kurt Andersen: You can find out more about Emily Dickinson and Because I Could Not Stop for Death, and about all the dozens of American icons that we've dissected and celebrated so far at studio360.org.
[music]
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