A Consideration of Poetry

The Morning after Woe—
’Tis frequently the Way—
Surpasses all that rose before—
For utter Jubilee—

As Nature did not care—
And piled her Blossoms on—
And further to parade a Joy
Her Victim stared upon—

The Birds declaim their Tunes—
Pronouncing every word
Like Hammers—Did they know they fell
Like Litanies of Lead—

On here and there—a creature—
They’d modify the Glee
To fit some Crucifixal Clef—
Some Key of Calvary—

Dickinson is a natural in thinking about the cool, ungummifying effects of nonsense on poetry and the liberation nonsense introduces to the spirit. “The Morning after Woe” is a grief-giddy poem, dazzled with loss and filled with extreme invention.

The first two stanzas establish one of those big contrasts so characteristic of Dickinson’s way of constructing a poem, how she rubs rough opposites together so that each side aggravates the other. In this poem the contrast is between the night of Woe (probably someone’s death) and the tauntingly joyous morning after.

It’s the last two stanzas I want to get to. Emily Dickinson’s sensitivity this morning (if we agree to think of her as writing this on the morning after a death) is so extreme that the language is exaggerated and speeded up and cartoonlike. The mind is impatient with anything local. It has to find some sort of mover—like the little cast-metal car or boot of the Monopoly board—that can maneuver free of the clingy stuff of the actual unbearable morning. She finds birds. She describes the birds as “Pronouncing every word/Like Hammers.” See how fast she’s moving here from the aural to the physical. She barely slows down as she passes from the sound of birdsong to the still logically related sound of ringing hammers, to the strange shift in logic whereby she keeps the hammer idea, but moves from their sound to their terrible downward weight. The picture is comically impossible; if you think of the birdsong broadcast out (as of a sprinkler, say) it suddenly condenses, going south fast and hard, falling as “Litanies of Lead.” The transmutation from the immaterial sound to the aggressively material hammerheads shifts the poem to a cartoon scene where “here and there—a creature” is getting bonked on the head like Krazy Kat.

Now the game changes again. No more weight; back to abstraction. If the birds knew the painful effect their joyous song was having on the sufferers below, “They’d modify the Glee.” And it’s little wonder the word “glee” should come up here; it’s glee that’s cranking up this poem, delivering it now to another kind of invention dear to nonsense writers, the invented word “Crucifixal” nestling against an actual word: the birds would find some other way of singing, some “Crucifixal Clef.” With that, Emily Dickinson has invented a whole new musical notation—a new pitch of suffering.

Well, no, not suffering. We are far beyond suffering here. We are in the grip of invention so free that invention invents further, so that the first great trope, nudged by the appetites of rhyme (“Glee”) effortlessly discovers its own restatement: “Some Key of Calvary.” This whole new notational Golgotha at which we arrive is a place discoverable only by language operating on language. The direction of this poem is one of increasing exaggeration and extremity, moving out and out—much as Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay”—to a condition of understanding which only the poem sustains. In Frost, we know a shivering gold; in Dickinson, this painless pitch beyond hearing. I have to think they were both having a wonderful time.

Nonsense exists only in relation to sense. It uses the rules of sense but comes to different conclusions. What is it but nonsense that has taken the grave weight of Frost’s and Dickinson’s poems—the sensible, expressible weight of them: all that is new is soon lost; human grief finds no sympathy in nature—and has left them weightless? Because if these poems, or a Shakespeare sonnet or a dark sonnet by Donne, had not had their arguments undone somehow, they would indeed crash upon our heads like hammers.

All feelings must go through the chillifier for us to feel them in that aesthetically thrilling way that we do in poetry. Poetry’s feelings are not human feelings; we know the difference. There is some deep exchange of heat for cool that I’m trying to get at, something that I see operating in nonsense and that I believe gives poetry much of its secret irresistibility and staying-power (we are not exhausted by it and must always revisit it). In fact I am sure this mysterious exchange informs all the arts I’m drawn to. Today, again, I’ve found evidence of it in a New York Times article about a puppet theater version of Anne Frank’s diary. The puppets are Barbie-sized “pose-able mannequins” that two actresses move around in “a giant cutaway dollhouse, an exact replica of the annex rooms where Anne and her family hid.” This unlikely production, “which sounds at first blush like someone’s idea of a bad joke,” succeeds. It is thought to succeed “because puppets, by their very woodenness, force the audience to fill in movements, expressions and interior lives.”

We swarm to a vacuum. We warm a vacuum. That’s nonsense; vacuums can’t conduct heat. That’s funny.