Emily Dickinson’s Civility

Even when occasioned by intensely private, idiosyncratic experiences, Emily Dickinson orients herself by metaphors that invoke the ground of politics: a public life of deliberation and manners and the hard compromise of living alongside strangers. Nor does she invoke this world as a mere foil to her inner life; instead, her poems imply that those values and norms upon which politics depend have purchase beyond mundane existence, and that even if they are of this world, they will only be redeemed beyond it. She does not recoil from social life, but instead she finds in social life a promise that cannot be fulfilled in human society but that nonetheless can be known there. Rather than Augustine’s City of God progressing in history impossibly tangled with the City of Man, hers is a Civility of God impossibly bleared by the Civility of Man.

Because I could not stop for Death—

He kindly stopped for me—

The Carriage held but just Ourselves—

And Immortality.

We slowly drove—He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labor and my leisure too,

For His Civility—

We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess—in the Ring—

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—

We passed the Setting Sun—

Or rather—He passed Us—

The Dews drew quivering and chill—

For only Gossamer, my Gown—

My Tippet—only Tulle—

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground—

The Roof was scarcely visible—

The Cornice—in the Ground—

Since then—‘tis Centuries—and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses Heads

Were towards Eternity—

To offer any account of this poem, we need to begin with some account of the situation: someone dead looks back at the moment when they encountered death, and rode to their final resting place. Or someone alive recalls the instant when they realized that death was inviting them to ride alongside it in life, towards a resting place, and that this happened centuries ago in some metaphysical or metaphorical sense (“Centuries” not factually hundreds of years). Dickinson’s poems are sometimes felt to disappoint in their resolutions, but her greatest works, like this, are sublime in their irresolution. It’s easy to fuss over the dashes, and what they mean; what they do not settle into is more relevant, I think, and the dash after “Eternity” in the last line works because it holds in suspense what more determinate mark of punctuation it might be. It points towards eternity but does not pretend to know if it is already there, if it is the blank of the page beyond, or something else entirely. But the word that truly opens up the ending is the one I’ve already mentioned: “Centuries,” since this word denies the poem a simple contrast of eternity and time, and offers instead three scales of experience, one which extends beyond a single life, or which a single life can encompass only as something not quite humanly alive. Though we might take this to be among the great ghost poems in English, it also could be thought that the experience of time in the company of death is distended. I wrote earlier that the “since then” refers to the time since she first joined Death in the carriage, but it might also be since they "paused,” and the “pause” itself might be the break in the normal experience of time; the contemplation of the cemetery, rather than the literal burial in the ground, opening an expanse of time that nonetheless falls short of eternity, driving home how different the eternal is, how far beyond the poem it lies.

The poem does not take up a political situation; it also does not imagine a political situation where few would otherwise find one. But one of its boldest words cannot be detached from politics: “Civility.” With this word, Dickinson allows the language of politics to poem, and she draws attention to the decorum—the tactful sensitivity for social expectations—that she sustains throughout the poem. Whereas Whitman is inclined to disrupt the standards of decorum in favor of a diction that opens onto a broader democratic commonality, Dickinson more often violates decorum by syntactical inscrutability, metaphors glanced at and not sustained, and a disinclination to engage in standards of discourse that could be susceptible of public exchange. Even here, the shock of “Centuries” suggests that she is inaccessible to earthly interlocutors. But the word “Civility” characterizes the relationship with Death as existing within the constraints and expectations of public decency, and the poem’s syntactical clarity and its openness of address hold themselves to the same. Most obviously, this is itself a profession of independence: Dickinson willing to engage by such rules of the game when she is playing a game accessible to herself alone. The poem is an example of what William Empson calls a double irony, since it cuts two ways: the invocation of civility reinforces the impression, found elsewhere in her poetry, that Dickinson thinks social mores to be frivolous, since we are invited to reflect on the gulf between what they represent and the significance of this encounter with death; at the same time, there is a suggestion that the gulf is not between civility on the one hand and the existential encounter on the other, but between the frivolous civility of human society and the genuine civility of death, which makes a mockery of its earthly shadow, as the cornices of the cemetery make a mockery of domestic architecture. A paraphrase of the implied attitude might run: “I met Death, and he showed me real Civility, the sort that you all believe you know, but which I never cared for because it could not matter like it did in this situation.”

“Civility,” of course, is a word that cannot is part and parcel of a political situation of language: it is a crux where civilization, the city, citizenship, manners, and decorum meet. Dickinson’s double irony suggests that there is a political situation surrounding the existential, even if it is not within the poem; it points towards something like an Augustinian City of God, a second plane of public life where our earthly social codes find their truest fulfillment. This is both a defense of those codes and a rejection of their final importance. After the twentieth century, it is common to speak of an encounter between Self and Divinity, or Self and Other, as one of radical difference which must be negotiated anew for each person. How else, the thought goes, could an encounter with something beyond our experience, be possible? But Dickinson suggests that such an encounter makes sense if we perceive it as realizing the promise implicit in our social codes: manners are what we would expect a stranger to have towards us, and the incomprehensible otherness of death, divinity, and eternity are no less as a consequence.

It is possible to read into this poem something more idiosyncratic still, which jars against what we think to find in Dickinson’s poetry: the Aristotelian thought that humanity is a political animal, dwelling in society, and that this is both inescapable, and intolerable. The only hope therefore is that we can discern within incessant sociability of humankind, a sociability that is always political in nature, the presences and movements of what transcends it, but which—in so far as it reaches humankind at all—reaches us in a guise of civility.

Such a thought—or a thesis, as I’ve unpacked it—does not run through all or most of the poems. One of her greatest poems, “There’s a certain slant of light,” suggests quite the opposite, recollecting an encounter with grace that remains as private as a letter inwardly received:

There's a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons –

That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –

We can find no scar,

But internal difference –

Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –

'Tis the seal Despair –

An imperial affliction

Sent us of the Air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –

Shadows – hold their breath –

When it goes, 'tis like the Distance

On the look of Death –

The metaphor of the private letter is found in the lines “An imperial affliction | Sent us of the air.” But “imperial” and “sent” suggest at least something like civilization; even if the message is entirely personal, it is carried by (“sent us of”) and from an order that is imagined in political terms. It is not a social call, but it is the next best thing: a letter sent and received (a practice that was the lifeblood of Dickinson’s art, with many of her poems written as, or transcribed within, letters). And so the situation, even if not political, is nonetheless possible only in a broader political structure, a public medium permitting private communication. The point is more keenly apparent in another great poem (Yvor Winters thought this, along with “There’s a certain slant of light” and “A Light exists in Spring” to be her three masterpieces):

As imperceptibly as Grief

The Summer lapsed away—

Too imperceptible, at last

To seem like Perfidy—

A Quietness distilled

As Twilight long begun

Or Nature spending with herself

Sequestered Afternoon—

The Disk drew earlier in—

The Morning foreign shone—

A courteous, yet harrowing Grace

As Guest that would be gone—

And thus without a Wing

Or service of a Keel

Our Summer made her light escape

Into the Beautiful.

The structuring metaphor here is of Nature spending the afternoon in her drawing room, receiving the guest that is summer light, which departs suddenly. The poem ends on a deft pun: “made her light escape” both is “escaped lightly” and “made her light escape,” as if it was light that was made to escape, implored by summer. Both carry the social metaphor: the latter a melodramatic rescue, and the former a liberating break from hospitality. And with either of these, something else is broken: the confines of courtesy, with the suggestion that there is something beyond courtesy, something wild and uncivilized, which cannot always be tamed, even if we meet it on the best terms. We can see here Dickinson the reader of the Brontë sisters. Light can live in nature but also escape because the light is both natural and supernatural; it is “a courteous, yet harrowing Grace,” just as Death is a civil but disturbingly sublime presence. The natural, the civilized, and the supernatural all converge and fracture in this poem. But the convergence—which allows for the shock of departure, and the revelation of what the light also (not truly, but also, at least sometimes) is—is only possible in terms of sociability, in the situation of civilization.

It is sometimes said that humans tell stories about themselves, and that narrative is basic to our self-understanding.[i] More capacious, because less bound to a particular set of genres or forms, is the idea that humans incessantly need to orient and place themselves; that they do this by representing situations; and that this is the work of the imagination. The idea of a “situation” is necessarily vague: it suggests a field of action, a unity that persists long enough for something to happen, a limiting and granting of possibilities.  It is imagined—and even if it is later modeled by, say, an economist, something imaginary must precede the modeling. The imagination can of course be contested and corrected; there are others doing the same around us and we might come into conflict, and there are sharp edges we need to recognize as we move through the world.

All people, quite a lot of the time, must represent the situations of their lives and of the lives of others (empathy cannot just be occupying the feelings of another; it needs to conceive of where and when they feel). A strong imagination allows people to do just this, with the word “strength” a term of praise, not quite the innate sensations of a body striving for balance or control but deriving from it in a family resemblance. Now, a work of art does more than this. It realizes the imagination’s promise: in its very shape, design, selection, and arrangement of materials, it brings the imagination into sensuous immediacy, and in so doing it bears the marks of the situation. A work of art inhabits the situation it represents.

There are no absolute criteria for what makes something count as a situation at all. Even in the first moment of representation, the imagination drawing together the elements in a room and finding a pattern and shape, it is making up what belongs as it goes along. It’s a version of Aristotle’s phronesis; it is a demonstration of strength (in all of its dimensions of intelligence, right feeling, and virtue), but there are no external measures for any of these. Whereas most of us don’t know we are up to this most of the time, a work of art does, and it contains within itself a justification for why it constitutes the situation in the way it does, why it sets limits where it does, why it relates the elements there as it does.

Insofar as literature shows and knows strength, this is because it also shows and knows situations, not merely assuming them, but apprehending, registering, and embodying what they impose, how they impinge and constrain, and what actions and thoughts they permit and encourage. Finding strength, neither in reacting against nor seeking to dominate the situation, but within its possibilities, requires making sense of the situation one is in, by an effort of discernment, feeling, and imagination. Literature, like any art, requires a genius for situations, understanding the situations that present themselves, but also understanding how people represent situations to themselves, and how situations can be plausibly and searchingly represented by the techniques of art.

Speaking to modulation, restraint, and sensitivity of perception, the words “tact” and “delicacy” catch some of what this apprehension of situations involves. It is a capacity that recalls T.S. Eliot’s principled insight: “intelligence, an important function of which, is the discernment of just what and how much is felt in any given situation.” A work of literature sets right the feelings by which we know what it might be right to do in any given situation, but also towards the very possibilities for constituting situations out of what life gives. In all of this, recognizing how much pressure can be withstood by phenomena, how determinate or indeterminate the relations between them may be, and how subject they are to change are functions of the intelligence that Eliot describes, one which we encounter most vividly in novels by Henry James or Jane Austen where civility is of the utmost concern and where strength of character undergoes an education in what I’ve called tact (Emma is one perfect example; The Ambassadors is another). However much it is susceptible to degradation into snobbery, malicious judgment, and stigmatization, such an ideal of civility is entirely appropriate to as profoundly felt sense of Death as Dickinson’s. If her Death is proud, it is not the unchecked pride of Donne’s Holy Sonnets but is instead the requisite social pride subject first to critique but ultimately to redemption in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It is the pride that knows itself capable of modulating its strength, and that does so in an understanding of the strength and weakness of others, the eternity of their souls and the intensity of their finite pain. It is not, perhaps Dickinson would feel, too much to ask that such a standard of civility be lived on earth as well as in heaven.

[i] Galen Strawson’s 2004 essay “Against Narrativity” delightfully confronts the truism that narrative is essential to human life by arguing that there are “deeply non-Narrative people and there are good ways to live lives that are non-Narrative.”