Mohammad Reza Yarahmadi PhD Student of University of Tehran - Kish International Campus 1
EMILY DICKINSON’S ‘I DIED FOR BEAUTY’ AN INTERPRETATION
“I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.
He questioned softly why I failed?
“For beauty,” I replied.
“And I for truth, -the two are one;
We brethren are,” he said.
And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.”
There are lots of interpretations about Emily Dickinson’s poetry, especially the one that is going to be discussed here.
“I Died for Beauty” is a very famous poem among the scholars. This is the story of a timeless speech between truth and beauty. Some critics consider the ending of this poem a sad one, yet others consider a happy ending for it. Some give a female sex to the poetic persona of the poem merely because it has been composed by a female composer. Some consider the word “brethren” in the second stanza as a male religious relation and some are amazed of using this word by a poetess.
To put an end to this useless discussion, which reminds us of the endless discussion of the difference between freewill and determinism, actually we should conclude that in the spiritualistic realm there is no sex-limitation for beings. They are just sexless beauty and sexless truth that’s all. They are brethren, regardless of their sexes and their fleshes. They are beautiful and well-shaped, regardless of their voluptuousness or their ordinariness. They are the real essence of beauty.As Immanuel Kantbelieves, “I have every reason to believe that others, similarly free of their private interests, would arrive at the same judgment of the beautiful.”[1]One cannot measure their beauty and their truth with the earthlyyardsticks. They are far from diabolical realm of materialistic world. They relate to the celestial being, a kind of being even not dependentupon their beings. Since they have reached the spiritual and eternal world, they are like oceans, although they are only little drops.Every little drop in the ocean contains all the characteristics and being of the ocean.
Even their being is different from their earthlybeing, according to John Donnethey “Careless, eyes, lips, and hands to miss,” because they are eternal. In that realm, silence is exactly talking, and talking is exactly silence. Everything is perfect because it is related and connected to eternity. In that land of eternity “affliction is a treasure”. “No man is an island, entire if itself every man is connected and involved in mankind, so he is part of the main. No matter who is talking, and who is listening. In that land nobody needs talking and nobody needs listening.Their lips and ears are not madeof flesh they are heavenly mouths and heavenly ears. They listen without listening and talk without talking. People are not known by their names. Namelessness is not vanishing in the celestial existence. All are going toward namelessness, a land free from the boundaries of name and reputation. Namelessness does not mean annihilation. It is the dominance of eternity; they know each other by their nothingness, by their emptiness. This emptiness is not void. “Being” means to vacate the selffrom selfishness, and to escapematerialistic self.
In the world of eternity sometime a very small being is far bigger than a huge one. In the world of mathematics, the illimitable numbers between ‘zero and one’ is equal to the whole numbers, because we are dealing with infinities. That is why “beauty is truth,truth beauty.”
Some Critical Views
Jennifer A. Bussey
In a critical essay on “I Died for Beauty,” Jennifer A. Bussey discusses the poem. She divides the poem into two parts, beauty and truth then, she discusses the poet’s treatment of the two in the poem in a greater context.
She revised some of the themes as Life, Nature, Love, Time and Eternity in Dikinson’s poems. “Dickinson is known for her preoccupation with death and her tendency at times to slip into the macabre in her treatments of this theme. Dickinson seems to be so comfortable with her own mortality that she thinks about death in unusual ways, and often in great detail. She writes about the moment of death, the presence of death, and tombs.”[2]
Bussey believes that Dickinson creates parallels between beauty and truth. At the beginning the two newly buried corpuses are delighted and happy in the grave. They are talking to each other up to the time they are being kept silent by the moss on their lips. In fact they are no longer talking and no communication is between them. She then interprets the word “for”in the poem as follows: “There are two ways to interpret ‘‘for’’—the speaker may have died in the service of or as a sacrifice for beauty, or she may have died in order to attain beauty.”[3]
Then Busseyrelates another poem of Dickinson to “I died for beauty”, ‘‘To tell the beauty would decrease,/ To state the Spell demean’’ to support her idea and illustrates that explaining the reasons of beauty would be a heresy, because the realm of beauty and literature is an unexplainable domain and when a person wants to illustrate abstract ideas like beauty or truth, he turns a simple mater intoan abstruse problem and opaque argument.
Bussey start another argument concerning the effect or the outcome of beauty in a poem by Dickinson:
In another four-line poem, Dickinson writes: ‘‘So gay a flower bereaved the mind / As if it were a woe, / Is Beauty an affliction, then? / Tradition ought to know.’’ In these short lines, Dickinson tells of a flower so beautiful that it is painful to look at it. Beauty, therefore, can be full of grief ‘‘as if it were a woe.’’ Dickinson juxtaposes the beauty and the onlooker’s reaction, which leads naturally to the question: ‘‘Is Beauty an affliction, then?’’ She wonders if beauty is less the joy people believe it to be, and is instead burdensome. Her answer is inconclusive and likely unsatisfying to many readers: ‘‘Tradition ought to know.’’ In other words, only life experience and the past can answer that question. Perhaps the answer is different for different people.[4]
In her last argument about the poem which is the most relevant to ‘I died for beauty’ in a four-line poem of Dickinson, Bussey indicates that in the lines “Beauty crowds me till I die,/Beauty, mercy have on me!/ But if I expire today,/ Let it be in sight of thee.’’, beauty in the first two lines is pictured as something unkind and invasive.
This image offers a clear answer to the prior poem’s question: ‘‘Is Beauty an affliction, then?’’ For this speaker, the answer is a resounding yes, although the manifestation of beauty is unclear. In the last half of the poem, however, she admits to having a need for beauty. She asks beauty not to leave her if she dies today. The speaker wants to die ‘‘in sight of’’ beauty. The speaker clearly has intense feelings about beauty, and those feelings figure prominently in her anticipation of death.
On the whole these three examples and arguments on them introduce beauty as “simultaneously indefinable, burdensome, intrusive, and comforting”.[5] Then she results that Emily Dickinson has a sophisticated and particular understanding of beauty and its meaning.
Then the critic shifts from beauty to truth in Dickinson’s poem.Bussey says that Dickinson’s truth “transcends manipulation, logic, or understanding.”…. Dickinson personifies truth as a woman to whom the crowds of men are irrelevant because she is with God.… What Dickinson does not make clear is how much she values truth. It seems more like an overarching force than something she connects with on a personal level. While it seems like something that is great and enduring, it is difficult to make an argument that her poetry reflects a belief that it is worthwhile to die for truth.[6]
In this critique Bussey concludes that even for Dickinson it hardly seems worth dying for truth or beauty. “In the end, as Dickinson sees it, people can die under the honorable banners of beauty and truth, but their deaths go the way of all others. Their expressions go mute, their bodies decay, and their names are forgotten.”[7]
Evan Carton
Another critique is by Evan Carton that has said almost nothing about Dickinson’s poem “I died for beauty”, but it contains some hints about the ideas of Dickinson concerning a critical overview of her poetry, focusing on the spiritual and philosophical theme of her work.
Dickinson, in the words of several of her critics, writes ‘‘poems of epistemological quest,’’ poems that enact ‘‘radical inquiry,’’ poems that test ‘‘the strength of the imagination against the stubbornness of life, the repression of an antithetical nature, and that ‘hidden mystery’with a supreme reality which at once pervades her most intimate surroundings and remains beyond her reach; to this end, she effects the odd fusions of homeliness and extravagance which characterize her language and herconceptions.Because the supreme or divine reality that Dickinson pursues is most hidden when it seems immediate and most mysterious when it seems plain, the pursuit must be wage d by means of paradox, renunciation, and surprise.[8]
Evan Carton then quotes a beautiful sentence from Dickinson which is very helping. “Whenever we take up our ideal, Dickinson suggests, whenever we clearly view the object of our quest, we perceive it to be flawed. Its flaw, however, reflects our own limitation or failure.’’
Carton asks a question about Dickinson’s faith, whether Emily Dickinson by nature was a pagan? That is, was she irreligious?” he considers it something strange from the first look. It is a faith of a little child. “She addresses the Almighty as ‘‘Papa above,’’ ‘‘our hospitable old neighbor,’’ ‘‘the Jehovah who never takes a nap.’’At times she was petulant and pouting—in short, childish. She liked to regard herself some-what kittenishly as God’s ‘‘old- fashioned, naughty’’ little girl.Of course she was not always childish. It is undeniable that albeit her faith was simple, at the same time, it was very strong and an unbreakable one. “She was a mystic also in the religious sense of the term—a Christian mystic.’’[9]
“Her own faith was equally confiding; it was a bridge without piers, which bore her bold soul over its‘‘unshakeable span of steel to the mysterious, yet certain Isle s of the Blest.’’ In the midst of sorrow and hardships she could feel the hand of her Heavenly Father.”[10]
Mr. Carton concludes that:
Though she had rebelled against the Calvinistic faith of her parents, Emily Dickinson didnot turn to Unitarianism, as did Oliver WendellHolmes, or to Episcopalianism, as did Harriet Beecher Stowe. Nor did she become an agnostic like Francis Parkman, or an unbeliever like William Dean Howells. She retained her religious faith, mystical and individualistic as it was. She suggests the Transcendentalists, but the parallel must not be pressed. As in other respects, so in her inner life, she was sui generis.[11]
Francis Stoddard
The third critic is Francis Stoddard. He offers a reasonable refutation against an earlier critic review of Dickinson’s poetry. He debates the claim that has considered the poems of Dickinson especially “I died for beauty” something formless, and proves that its form is something new and does not follow the traditional poetic forms.
Francis Stoddard’s sent a letter to the Editors of The Critic. The Editors refer to the first volume of Miss Dickinson as a ‘volume of keenly form-less poems,’ and suggest that the fact of the issuance of several editions proves ‘that a great many persons care little for the form of expression in poetry so long as the thoughts expressed are startling, eccentric and new.’ In the same review the critic says of the two volumes taken together that ‘their absolute formlessness keeps them almost outside the pale of poetry.’[12] In order to make them understand, Stoddard says that good poetry must have perfection, technique, metrical and grammatical finish, and Miss Dickinson’s “I died for beauty’ seems to have not such grammatical finish;
“… the poems of Emily Dickinson do not have such finish; hence these verses are almost out of the pale of poetry. The major premise here set down has not been attacked of late. The minor one is not so easily disposed of. For Miss Dickinson’s poems may be formless, or they may be worded to so fine and subtile a device that they seem formless, just as the spectrum of a far-off star may seem blankness until examined with a lens of especial power. I wish to examine one poem of Miss Dickinson’s, taken almost at random, and search for the fine lines of the spectrum. For such example I take this poem [‘‘I died for beauty, but was scarce’’]
He considers the idea of the poem as the unity of truth and beauty. Because of the harmony he says, we should expect a closely paralleled structure with a figure based on two factors.
In the first stanza there are some matched in pairs words like; ‘adjusted’: ‘joining’, died’: died’, tomb’: room’. But ‘beauty’ and ‘truth’ do not match because theyhave not been proved to have the same nature.
I died’ for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted’ in the tomb’,
When one who died’ for truth’ was lain
In an adjoining room’.
“…in the first line, the slurred words ‘but was scarce’ are at the end, while in the corresponding line the slurred words ‘when one who’ are at the beginning. Similarly, the slurred words in the in the second line are contrasted in position with the slurred words ‘in an’ in the fourth line.”[13]
In the second stanza the harmony between truth and beauty is developed.
He questioned ’, softly’, why’ I failed’?
For beauty’; I replied’.
And I’—for truth’—t he two’ are one’,
We brethren’ are; he said’.
“Almost a formal balancing, but with a suggestion of relief; as, for example, in the harmonic echo of ‘he questioned ’, in the opening line, with ‘We brethren’, in the closing line, suggesting a recurrence of the first verse motive.”[14]
Then Mr. Stoddard suggests that although truth and beauty spiritually are the same, in this physical world they are different.
In the third and last stanza we have a reversion in the form and tone, and the pattern changes.
And so as kinsmen’ met a night,
W e talked’ between the rooms’,
Until the moss’ had reached our lips ’
And covered’ up our names’.
“The rhyme changes to alliteration which is beginning-rhyme instead of end-rhyme— night: names. That is, our earthly names are lost in the endless night of death; ourselves, at one with each other, at one with truth and beauty, entered into the endless day of beauty and of truth.
I submit that such art as this may be subtle and medieval, but it is not formlessness.”[15]
Charlotte Alexander
Charlotte Alexander believes that the poem “I died for Beauty” is a document of her obsession with death, although the subject is beauty and truth. By death she believes Dickinson may mean devoted to the beauty in the realm of humanity or the supernatural. “By truth she may be referring to philosophical or religious truth, or she may just mean, more generally, any abstract ideas.”[16]She claims that for sure the line “the two are one” is nothing but the influence of Keats.
The setting is uncomfortable and grotesque she believes, but at the same time there is an intimacy about it, in the spirit of John Donne’s poems of love and death. The setting seems to be pathetic in Alexander’s opinion. Because Dickinson tries to inject her morbid inclination and it shows her troubled spirit.
Some critics consider Emily Dickinson’s‘I died for beauty’ nothing but an imitation of John Keat’s‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, because of the famous purple patch of the poem, i.e. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,". It may be right, because Dickinson used to love Keat’s poems, but this is not the only poem Dickinson has with this subject matter. She has lots of poems with the theme of death, beauty and honesty as well as the subject related to afterlife. In order to criticize Emily Dickinson’s ‘I died for beauty’, first of all we must be familiar with her personal life specially her philosophy concerning death and afterlife.
There are definite speculation concerning Dickinson’s belief and philosophy. Some say she was pagan, some say she was seriously religious.She had her own territory and divinity concerning faith. In her long life she never claim to infer God fully, but she had a kind of childish faith certainly more robust and strong that the people of her time.
“Emily inherited the Puritan traits of austerity, simplicity, and practicality, as well as an astute observation of the inner self, but her communication with her higher Self was much more informal than her God-fearing forefathers would have dared. The daughter of the ‘Squire’ of Amherst, she came from a line of gritty, stalwart pioneers, carrying what was almost considered the blue blood of America. Her family was far from poor, but she did not lead a lavish life, for the Puritans abhorred luxury and waste.”[17]