Tags
1800s, 732, art, dedication, Emily Dickinson, inspiring, legacy, marriage, metaphors, poem, poem 732, poet, Poetry, women empowerment, writing
While reviewing for my midterm, I decided to post this poem by Emily Dickinson. It is my favorite out of all the other ones we discussed in class and I personally think that every girl and woman ought to read it. I’m also adding my notes so that you’ll get an idea why I believe so.
-732-
She rose to His Requirement–dropt
The Playthings of Her Life
To take the honorable Work
Of Woman, and of Wife–
If ought She missed in Her new Day,
Of Amplitude, or Awe–
Of first Prospective–Or the Gold
In using, wear away,
It lay unmentioned–as the Sea
Develop Pearl, and Weed,
But only to Himself–be known
The Fathoms they abide
(c. 1863)
My notesÂ
(capitalize words for emphasis)
“His Requirement” >> divine, God
writing poetry was her calling; it was her everything
PLAYTHINGS = her writing was considerable “playing” at the time, low value of a woman’s work — threat >> give up her passion
* can also mean that she stopped being a girl and stopped “playing with toys” (became an adult)
Honorable? give up her hopes and dreams; give up her name (her rights)
>> “She missed in Her new Day” (destroyed expectations)
>> “it lay unmentioned” (she never talked about her writing)
>> [last three lines indicate] only the husband knew what she sacrificed for him, for his happiness (now her role is wife–mother–hostess)
(“Pearl”–passion, dreams, possibilities?)
“Sea” – the husband (buries her thoughts, ideas and dreams (dreams=fathoms) with water; covers it with pretty things (pearls, weed)
fathoms – eternal suffering due to lost hope; dreams bow down to husband (male dominant)
[the religious heritage Dickinson learned during her childhood; in the poem she enforces faith in herself]
Conclusion
Dickinson never got married due to the fear expressed in this poem. I am not telling anyone to do the same since today’s circumstances obviously are different. All I’m saying is that I find Dickinson inspiring for standing her ground throughout her life, dedicating her time to art for the sake of independence and love for writing.
Author on Adventure 
Pingback: Why do I blog? (+News on the Writer’s Corner) | The Writer's Corner
Anna, this is the poem by Dickinson that influenced me to interpret your selected poem as ” was Emily disappointed in not finding a man that would love her like she wanted to be loved? ( your comment) It is poem # 751:
My Worthiness is all my Doubt–
His Merit– all my fear–
Contrasting which, my quality
Do lowlier appear–
Lest I should insufficient prove
For His Beloved Need–
The Chiefest Apprehension
Upon my thronging Mind–
‘Tis true– that Diety to stoop
Inherently incline–
For nothing higher than itself
Itself can rest upon–
So I — the undivine abode
Of His Elect Content
Conform my Soul– as ’twere a Church,
Unto Her Sacrament–
Here Emily says her lover is content to elect her although she is undivine where he is like a Diety that one worships as ” ’twere a Church”. It doesn’t sound like he worships her in the same manner like she does him. Anyhow, after more careful reading I have come to believe your interpretation is the correct one. Thanks for your sharing. Hope I wasn’t too meddling….
Kevin
LikeLike
Quite surprised you went through all that trouble for just a poem. Thank you for your input, and your passion.
With that type of determination and good academic attitude, you should look into teaching (if you aren’t already) or something related to the field.
LikeLike
Thank you, Anna, for responding to my post. I also appreciated the fact that you complimented me on the apparent ” time and thought” that I put in my response, which shows considerateness, and that you tactfully disagreed with my interpretation of the poem’s meaning while allowing me to view it another light albeit an incorrect one. You were not defensive in your response but gave me very valid reasons to uphold yours. Also please excuse my inappropriate addresses to you and ‘ women’ in general.
I will write in this post a view which gives substantial credence to yours and perhaps in another reply more information that might help support my original viewpoint.
In the book ” Their Other Side: Six American Women and the Lure of Italy” by Helen Barolini, the author writes: ” In Aurora Leigh ( by Elizabeth Barrett Browning), Aurora, a poet, is caught between her love for her cousin, Romney Leigh, and her willingness to risk all to realize her gift. It became the classic text of a woman at war with two sides of her nature. That book, beloved of Emily Dickinson, was so influential in her own work that it is said that her encounter with it was the Lightening Flash and the “waylaying Light” that consecrated her thereafter to a life of poetry much as St. Paul, felled by light, had his conversion on the Road To Damascus. Or the image could be from Canto 33 of the Paradiso, where Dante, on entering the Empyrean, speaks on being overcome with sudden lightening ( subito lampo) and dazzling light ( viva luce). Lines from her poem make her vocation clear: ” And I would not exchange the Flash/ For all the rest of Life.” Though some critics, unable perhaps to conceive of a woman following so strong a call to Art, have taken that Flash of ” waylaying Light” for religious dedication, the evidence of Dickinson’s own words and actions belie it being anything else less than intuition into her poetic gift and the courage to follow it when Lightening struck.” ( end quote)
My own personal thought is perhaps Emily was influenced by this stanza in ” Aurora Leigh” when she composed her poem of which we have been discussing. Perhaps she drew inspiration for her symbol of the ” pearl” in her poem as she read these lines:
“The man’s need of the woman, here,
Is greater than the woman’s of the man,
And easier served; for where the man discerns
A sex ( ah, oh, the man can generalize,
Said he ) we see but one, ideally
And really: where we yearn to lose ourselves
And melt like white pearls in another’s wine,
He seeks to double himself by what he loves,
And make his drink more costly by our pearls,
At board, at bed, at work and holiday.
It is not good for man to be alone.”
The phrase” melt like white pearls in another’s wine” refers to a tale that Cleopatra made a wage with her lover Marc Anthony that she could eat a million dollar meal or some such tale.
Sorry for the length of this reply……
LikeLike
Interesting that my interpretation of this poem is altogether almost completely opposite of how this blogger interprets it ( and I know that many other females also interpret it in much the same light as this blogger does- that Emily is being asked to give her her dreams to marry this man who would bury her aspirations and dreams in the depths(“fathoms”) of obscurity and subconscious memory).
By being familiar with the phrases of passion( “Eros”) and the extreme heights of ecstacy that the lover feels toward his beloved, my interpretation is that the male suitor doesn’t ‘ require’ that Emily fill him wih the sensation of ” awe” that engulfs the lover as described by Socrates in the Phaedrus Dialogue as well as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s description of love in his essays, nor that there is an ” amplitude” of intensity of passion’s overwhelming feeling that fills the breast of the lover, nor is Emily his “first prospective” ( his first choice-he has sought other females-perhaps more desirable-but was unsuccessful in gaining their love), nor that he expects Emily to keep her beauty ( “the gold in using wear away”– gold as a symbol of beauty in Sappho’s poetry), but that her future husband never mentions these things to Emily.
Instead he anticipates that through the sorrows, tragedies, and daily joys of affectionate love, the ups and downs of married life, the husband is recompensed with the “DEEP regular affections ” in American homesteads that the French aristocrat Alex De Tocqueville remarked and contrasted with the turbulent passionate love found in Europe and which the French writer described in his ‘Democracy in America’ book. This is what Emily is alluding to when she says that like a pearl that becomes polished thru irritation in a clam deep in the ocean, deep affectionate love( as contrasted with passionate ” falling-in-love), takes time and comes from the daily frictions of life and its depth of feeling is unobserved by the outside world but known to her future husband-” only to himself be known”
Sorry, I am probably all alone in this interpretation— is it because deep down I am a chauvinistic male blinded to the realities of what Emily is clearly trying to reveal to her audience in posterity…..
LikeLike