Endless suffering: Emily Dickinson about pain

A poem about Pain and Blank by Emily Dickinson

Pain – has an Element of Blank –

It cannot recollect

When it begun – or if there were

A time when it was not –

It has no Future – but itself –

Its Infinite contain

Its Past – enlightened to perceive

New Periods – of Pain. (1)

The poem above, “Pain – has an Element of Blank (...)”, by American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), has been numbered as 650 and was written circa 1862, according to the collection of Dickinson’s work edited by Thomas H. Johnson in 1955, originally. A first selection of 155 poems was published four years after Dickinson’s death, from the discovery of around 900 poems, “sixty little ‘volumes’, as Lavinia [Emily’s sister] called them, ‘tied together with twine’” (DICKINSON, JOHNSON, 1997, p. ix). But the poems from that first selection, and others, were severely edited and altered concerning rhymes, ponctuation, and other aspects. The 1955 collection by Johnson was the first to rigorously preserve the integrity of Dickinson’s writing as a whole.

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, and grew up in a Puritan family of traditional roots in the town. In fact, “the Puritans founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. Nathaniel Dickinson, an ancestor of Emily Dickinson, was one of the first Puritans to settle in Amherst” (MARTIN, 2007, p. 25). The poet, who had to write in a context – social, religious and domestic – where society demanded of women a full dedication to household chores and a tame personality toward male figures, witnessed a boiling period in American history, such as “the Mexican-American War, the California Gold Rush, the first women’s rights convention, Harriet Tubman’s escape on the Underground Railroad, the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Civil War, and the shootings of two Presidents” (MARTIN, 2007, p. 24).

The most famous aspect of her biography, vastly analyzed by literary historians and critics, was her decision to remove herself from society: “Dickinson became more and more removed from the social norms of her community. From the 1860s onward, she began to dress all in white, especially after Edward Dickinson’s death in 1874” (MARTIN, 2007, p. 18). That was a period of intense writing. Around 1869, she chose “to remain permanently on the grounds of The Homestead and The Evergreens, never leaving the property and receding from public life completely (...). Despite her physical reclusiveness, she was still very much emotionally and intellectually invested in her family, her correspondence, and news of the world” (MARTIN, 2007, p. 19).

Posthumously analyzed in the 20th century, her poetry was considered visionary, ahead of her time. As writes Otto Maria Carpeaux, the poetry of Emily Dickinson “está cheia de elipses violentas, como de uma visionária que tem que contar coisas inefáveis e só o pode fazer balbuciando; as fraquezas mesquinhas da língua humana não importam” (2012, p. 141). Today, she is praised by “a absoluta liberdade da poeta no manejo do idioma, o amplo leque temático de que lançou mão, o solene desrespeito ao rigor das rimas e das formas, o constante ir e vir por temas como o amor e a morte, o êxtase e o desespero” (BENDER, 206, pp. 10-11). But that was not the perception of some critics in the end of the 19th century, a group of intellectuals unable to perceive the modernity of her art: “Some reviewers found the poetry ‘balderdash’ suffering from lack of rhyme, faulty grammar, and incomprehensible metaphors, a ‘farrago of illiterate and uneducated sentiment’” (MC MICHAEL [ed.], 1974, p. 171).

In the poem 650, Dickinson works with a sharp and concise idea, defining in only eight verses divided in two stanzas of four verses what would be the feeling of pain. There is no “narrative” in the poem, only an objective explanation of how the poet understands pain. Also, there are no explicitly “characters” in the poem other than the pain itself – although we can perceive that, if the lyrical voice is defining pain with such urgence and knowledge, maybe she herself felt it. As such, the short poem works as the traditional form of an epigram.

According to Edward Hirsch, epigram comes from the Greek word epigramma, “to write upon”, “a short, witty poem or pointed saying” (HIRSH, 2017, p. 100). Hirsch explains: “The pithiness, wit, irony, and sometimes harsh tone of the English epigram derive from the Roman poets (...). The epigram has no particular form, though it often employs a rhymed couplet or quatrain, which can stand alone or serve as part of a longer work” (2017, p. 100). Dickinson, here, writes an epigram with two quatrain. To present the concise idea that pain has two elements, its timelessness dominance and its irresistible force, the poet makes two complementary affirmations. In the first stanza, she states that the pain is so omnipresent and recursive within itself that “It cannot recollect / When it begun – or if there were / A time when it was not”. There is no before or after pain, there is nothing outside itself and nothing but itself. For that mystery, that impossibility of creating a point of view “from outside” in order to see that pain, that it “has an Element of Blank” – its genesis, its forms, sides or edges cannot be perceived, leaving a space of vacuum. In the second stanza, Dickinson complement the original idea, reaffirming the recursiveness aspect of “Pain”, how it folds in itself as an infinite form like a mathematical impossibility: the only possibility for the future is itself (“It has no Future – but itself –”) and its Infinite aspect contain only “Its Past” (therefore, also pain) and the possibility of experience more pain, “New Periods – of Pain”.

That brief and concise epigram form reveals one of the central characteristics of Dickinson poetry, the reduction of the poem to its essential elements, creating a decisive intensity. As analyzes Otto Maria Carpeaux (2012, p. 141):

A inteligência poética, agudíssima, de Emily Dickinson não deixou passar nenhuma palavra sem sentido exato; doutro lado, excluiu as afirmações de natureza lógica, próprias da “poesia filosófica”, didática, chegando assim ao laconismo de oráculos poéticos que nem sempre é possível decifrar. No afã de dar só poesia essencial, escolheu as formas mais elementares, quadras à maneira dos provérbios rimados do povo, mas de uma intensidade extraordinária, densas como condensações de poesias mais longas, como estenogramas. A vítima dessa técnica poética é a gramática.

Since the traditional epigram can contain rhymes in order to create sonority, Dickinson employs two rhymes. In both stanzas, she rhymes the second and fourth verses: “recollect” and “not”, and “contain” and “Pain”. There are, too, parallel sonorities in verses one and three of both stanzas, although there is no rhyme. In the first stanza, she ends the first and third verses with a monosyllabic word: “Blank” in the first verse and “were” in the third verse. In the second stanza, she ends the first and third verses with two-syllable words: “itself” and “perceive”. The repetition of some consonants in both stanzas also contributes to the sonority of the poem. In the first stanza, the letter N dominantes the verses: pain, an, element, blank, cannot, when, begun, when, not. The nasal sound creates a disturbance, as the lyrical voice is nauseated, dizzy, tormented by the spiral movement of the Pain, the vortex it creates that sucks everything, leaving a void of Blank. The second stanza is partially dominated by the letter F: future, itself, infinite; the letter T: it, future, but, itself, its, infinite, contain, its, past, to; and the letter, P: past, perceive, periods, pain. Those consonants are much more harsh and strong than the N of the first stanza. P and T are plosive sounds, while F is a fricative sound. They put the lyrical voice in a strong place, of small movement and no escapatory, revealing the absolute presence of the pain and its strong blows – each word with those sounds has an explosive characteristic, a decisiveness.

The rhythm of the poem appears in the regularity of the metric: both stanzas are written in the pattern 8-6-8-6. There is, too, a rhythm from the way Dickinson builds her argument. Both stanzas begin with a verse that serves as a summary, the most important statement of the stanza, a unique phrase contained in a single verse. Then, from it, she develops the idea, dividing the idea of that new phrase in three verses. The single-verse first statement of the first stanza is “Pain – has an Element of Blank –”, then it is developed with the three-verse statement “It cannot recollect / When it begun – or if there were / A time when it was not”. The single-verse first statement of the second stanza is “It has no future – but itself –”, then it is developed with the three-verse statement “Its infinite contain / Its Past – enlightened to perceive / New Periods – of Pain”. Moreover, the rhythm of the poem also comes from the use of the dashes, a Dickinson trademark:

The Dickinson trademark – the dash – breaks lines apart, forcing the reader to pause and reconsider and providing a visible, physical space for thought. The dashes often invite the reader to fill in the blanks. Dickinson’s unconventional use of punctuation, especially the dash, serves almost as a kind of musical notation that guides the rhythm of the lines (WENDY, 2007, p. 41).

When the poet writes “Pain”, and then stops her thought with a dash, completing right after: “– has an Element of Blank –”, she almost tries to draw that blank, to evoke that space of emptiness. Each dash provides a stop of contemplation where the lyrical voice appears to downs farther in the sensation of pain. As she understands that the pain “cannot recollect / When it begun”, she observes more gravely that there is more: it is even impossible to recollect “if there were / A time when it was not [pain]”. The same process happens in the second stanza. As she states that pain “has no Future”, such realization must emphasizes that the future is nothing “but itself”. The last verse puts “Pain” separated from the rest, a last pause where pain, once again, concludes everything and reaffirms itself, concluding with a resonant echo.

Likewise, it is important to pay attention to the capital letters Dickinson applies in the poem, defining the content of the poem and its intentions, reaffirming the dominance of the pain. In writing “Pain”, the feeling of pain, more abstract, becomes an entity, a whole figure that stands on its own, as a person, a concrete element that can be felt, perceived, seen and can act by itself, dominating one with force and intention. Pain is, now, an “Element”, a grandiose creature, not just “an element”. Also, its main feature is “Blank”, a quality of such emptiness and vacuity that dominates everything else. The same process happens with “Infinite”, as it is possible that the aspect of “infinite” is even more endless. The elements of time, “Past” and “Present”, are also marked with capital letters, emphasizing the wholeness of their existence. In that way, those points in time are “New Periods”.

In that poem, we cannot see an explicit lyrical voice where Emily Dickinson is being “confessional” , or simply pouring her sentiments about the experience of pain. Instead, we can observe a very “modern” attempt – a successful one – of using language to evoke an experience of the mind, to use words to describe such an invisible and dominant entity: Pain. As says Wendy Martin (2002, p. 91):

It is always tempting to regard Dickinson as a confessional poet – one whose poems, for all their innovative brilliance, are nonetheless outpourings of her own private feelings toward love, death, nature, and immortality. A closer look at her vast poetic project, however, reveals a far more complex artistic purpose, one that revels in both the possibilities and the impossibilities of language to evoke the experiences of life and mind.

Emily Dickinson achieves the goal of create a definition of pain in that epigrammatic poem, almost as a pictorial form that explains itself, by “(...) leaving a trail of editors, readers, and scholars perplexed by her idiosyncratic use of meter, rhyme, capitalization and punctuation” (MARTIN, 2007, p. vii). The poem conveys an extreme sentiment of isolation, despair, and loneliness. Pain is so strong that the subject senses every other experience, from the past and from the future, has vanished, leaving an absence of hope. The one identity erases as only Pain remains to define life and spirit. In her poetry, Emily could embody different individuals and express different moods, although in poem 650 the expression is the mood itself, and the reader can feel anything but despair:

Her lines were gnomic and her images kinesthetic, highly concentrated, and intensely charged with feeling. Her greatest lyrics were on the theme of death, which she typically personified as a monarch, a lord, or a kindly but irresistible lover, yet her moods varied widely, from melancholy to exuberance, grief to joy, leaden despair to spiritual intoxication (MC MICHAEL, 1974, p. 172).

The Pain described by Dickinson in that poem, a pain that never ends, may reflect the pain that came from multiple blows during her life and from some debilitating episodes of depression, influenced by the death of her relatives and friends and the departure of loved ones. Before 1862, she lost her friend Ben Newton in 1853, when she had her first depressive episode. And, in 1862, when the pastor Charles Wadsworth – a man whom she loved in secret, unsuccessfully – moved from Philadelphia to California, she entered in a new depressed period (DICKINSON, 2016, pp. 113-115). As states Wendy Martin, “The stress of the family conflict, the deaths of her parents and many of her friends (thirty-one had died of tuberculosis alone), and failing health took their toll on Dickinson” (MARTIN, 2007, p. 22).

To express such enduring pain, that in real life required from her a melancholic resistance, Dickinson wrote out of the conventional boundaries of her contemporary literature, finding her unique space for expression, and hope:

As revolutionary as her contemporary Walt Whitman, Dickinson broke the bounds of nineteenth-century verse form, refusing the confines of convenional poetics (MARTIN, 2002, p. 87).

NOTES

1. Poem by Emily Dickinson, written c.1862, numbered 650, as in: DICKINSON, E., JOHNSON, T. H. (ed.). The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Back Bay Books, Little, Brown & Co., 1997, pp. 323-324

REFERENCES

BENDER, I. “Introdução”. In: DICKINSON, E. Poemas Escolhidos. Porto Alegre: L&PM, 2016, pp. 9-13.

CARPEAUX, O. M. O Realismo, o Naturalismo e o Parnasianismo por Carpeaux / História da Literatura Ocidental; v. 7. Rio de Janeiro: Leya, 2012.

DICKINSON, E., JOHNSON, T. H. (ed.). The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Back Bay Books, Little, Brown & Co., 1997.

HIRSCH, E. The Essential Poet’s Glossary. Boston/New York: Mariner Books, 2017.

MARTIN, W (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

MARTIN, W. The Cambridge Introduction to Emily Dickinson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

MC MICHAEL, G. L. (ed.). Anthology of American Literature - II. Realism to the Present. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1974.

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Citation: DEARO, Guilherme. "Endless suffering: Emily Dickinson about pain". São Paulo: FFLCH/USP, October 2021.