Books: Impregnable of Eye

“Impregnable of Eye”

FURTHER POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON —Withheld from publication by her sister Lavinia; edited by her niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson—Little Brown ($2.50).

Emily Dickinson, delicate iridescent poet, is the impish New England recluse that hovers within charming mystery. With her father once she journeyed to Philadelphia; went of a Sunday to church, heard a sermon, fell in love with the preacher. The preacher was a married man; Emily Dickinson put him out of her life and then turned poet. Rebel against the Puritanism of her day (1830-86) she could hardly have made the sacrifice from prudishness. But perhaps it was from gentle reluctance to distress the preacher’s wife, and her own family. Or perhaps it was a mystic self-denial that gave her the dream of perfection instead of the disappointing inadequacies of fulfillment. This is the solution implied by many of her poems:

I dwell in Possibility

A fairer house than Prose,

More numerous of windows,

Superior of doors.

Of chambers as the cedars—

Impregnable of eye;

And for an everlasting roof

The gables of the sky.

Of visitors—the fairest—

For occupation—this—

The spreading wide my narrow hands

To gather Paradise.

Her biographer and niece, Martha Bianchi, avoided explicitness, displayed an understandable reticence in throwing too much light on the mystery. Her editor and sister, Lavinia, reluctantly surrendered The Complete Poems, in 1922. But their completeness is gainsaid by the present, “little unexplored package” of 150 poems, some of them pondering the emptiness left by love, more of them blithely magnifying the details that filled her life:

Autumn overlooked my knitting;

“Dyes,” said he, “have I

Could dishonor a flamingo.”

“Give them me,” Said I.

Cochineal I chose for

Deeming

It resemble thee—

And the little border dusker—

That resembles me.

Yet she. recognized the details as insignificant pastime:

At leisure is the soul

That gets a staggering blow;

The width of life

Before it spreads

Without a thing to do.

It begs you give it work,

But just the placing pins—

Or humblest patchwork

Children do—

To help its vacant Hands.

For those who like her—and there are those who rank her with Sappho, Elizabeth Browning, Christina Rossetti—the publication of Further Poems is an event delectable and important.