Emily the Comedian

Who thinks of Emily Dickinson as a humorist, a writer of light verse? I always have. In the summer of 1978 I was hospitalized for several weeks – the result of youthful indiscretion – and I had two books to keep me company – Dickinson and Whitman. I gave away my Leaves of Grass long ago, but I have kept The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Looking up from my desk, I can still see where a nurse scrawled my last name, in what looks like Arabic script, on its spine with an apparently indelible pen. Without their humor, much of Dickinson and Whitman would, like folk art, be insufferable. Piety, even the do-it-yourself, jerry-built piety of 19th-century American Protestantism (a historian of religion once described upstate New York to me as “the California of the 19th century”) is seldom hospitable to humor, whether bawdy or witty.

Here’s one from Dickinson, No. 1755 in Thomas H. Johnson’s edition:

“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, --
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.”

That reminds me of the motto on an old dope poster: “God grows his own.” Human imagination, unassisted, renders a world. It’s not a poem about agronomy or soil ecology after all. Dickinson does it with 17 words, recycling a couple of them, with “bee” doubling for “be.” Like Thoreau (in many ways, her neighbor and poetic cousin) and Marianne Moore, she liked bees – and their rhyming reveries. They densely populate her garden. Here is No. 1628:

“A Drunkard cannot meet a Cork
Without a Revery –
And so encountering a Fly
This January Day
Jamaicas of Remembrance stir
That send me reeling in –
The moderate drinker of Delight
Does not deserve the spring –
Of juleps, part are in the Jug
And more are in the joy –
Your connoisseur in Liquors
Consults the Bumble Bee –"

The first two lines might describe Malcolm Lowry or John Berryman. I love “Jamaicas of Remembrance ” -- a reference to the epicenter of rum production? And try this one, No. 1212 in Johnson’s edition:

“A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.

“I say it just
Begins to live
That day.”

I think there’s the tart taste of Yankee humor in “Some say” on the heels of those nursery-rhyme iambs, followed in turn by another “say,” then “day.” Dickinson is mocking the mockers. Not only Dickinson and Whitman but other great American writers from their century have been misread. Everyone knows Twain is often laugh-out-loud funny, but earnest, humorless readers (and their natural allies, teachers) have likewise misunderstood Emerson, Melville and Thoreau. As Constance Rourke say in her indispensable American Humor:

“Emily Dickinson was not only a lyric poet; she was in a profound sense a comic poet in the American tradition…Her poetry is also comic in the Yankee strain, with its resilience and sudden unprepared ironical lines.”