AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 32 (2007) Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Emily Dickinson’s Journeys Beyond Time Claudia Schwarz Emily Dickinson proved to the literary world how she went “out of time” (J 336) as a poet by bridging the gap between her days and ours by means of her timeless poetry. It is hardly surprising that the very idea of transgressing time has always been inherent to her writings. This article outlines how Emily Dickinson uses imagination and creativity as her poetic tools to take on a position “Exterior - to Time” (J 448). From the perspective of a ‘timeless sphere beyond’, she manages to juxtapose two basic understandings of time: time as the irrevocable and steady flow towards death and time as the composition of appreciated, special moments. The signposts on this journey through Emily Dickinson’s poetic approaches and transgressions of time are her poems “Down Time’s quaint stream” (J 1656), “We do not know the time we lose -” (J 1106), “As Summer into Autumn slips” (J 1346), “Forever - is composed of Nows -” (J 624), “A Clock stopped -” (J 287), “Behind Me - dips Eternity -” (J 721), and finally “There is a Zone whose even Years” (J 1056). Lines from a number of other poems and letters are used to accompany both paragraphs and arguments. Time and Literary Timelessness Good friends with time (J 1345) One of the problems in the definition of time is that there is no place ‘outside’ of time; or so it seems. Time appears to have existed before we became part of the world, and we have the notion that it will still be there even when we are gone. Along this line of reasoning, the philosopher Kant treats time as the formal condition a priori of all physical appearance, similar to Heidegger, for whom time is prior to all subjectivity and objectivity because it enables the very idea of something ‘prior’ (Schmidt 1978: 768). It is a paradox how we are part of time while it is part of ourselves, how we live in time while it lives in us. Referring to time we often make use of a subtle but essential distinc- Claudia Schwarz 84 1 This dilemma or “mystery” is depicted by St. Augustine in his famous quote: “What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I want to explain it to someone who does ask me, I do not know” (St. Augustine 1960: 287). In his considerations he concludes that “time is a ‘protraction’ of the mind, and when we measure time we really measure a certain expanse in our conscious memory. Time is essentially subjective or psychological” (Gale 1968: 5). tion between ‘objective time’ measured in seconds, hours, and years and ‘subjective time’ grasped in moments, ‘nows,’ and stages of life. Time is internal and external; it is ever-present and ever-gone. In every respect, time is untouchable. St. Augustine remarks in his Confessions that as long as one does not attempt to find an answer to the question about what time really is, there appears to be no difficulty in using and understanding the term. 1 Trying to depict the very quality of time, one is confronted with the complexity of a concept that seems impossible to grasp, understand, or define. It is a challenge to turn the perpetual fight against time into a friendship; and it seems to be a good starting point in the attempt to come to terms with its forms, functions, limits, and possibilities. For Period exhaled. (J 1159) Great art transcends time. For that reason, encounters with great pieces of literature often seem like time-traveling, or, to be more precise, like traveling beyond time. Ralph Waldo Emerson commented on this phenomenon as follows: We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dryden, with the most modern joy - with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had well-nigh thought and said. But for the evidence thence afforded to the philosophical doctrine of the identity of all minds, we should suppose some preëstablished harmony, some foresight of souls that were to be, and some preparation of stores for their future wants, like the fact observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the young grub they shall never see. (Emerson 1940: 50f) 19 th -century poet Emily Dickinson laid up her “food before death for the young grub”: generations of literary scholars and students she “shall never see”. Her poetic imagination is key to Emily Dickinson’s artistic step outside of time and, thus, her view from ‘beyond’ time. By transgressing the limitations of time, Emily Dickinson radically reframes the conventional understandings of life, death, and nature - as imposed on the Puritan mind by religion - and challenges the reader to measure them against the background of infinity. Emily Dickinson’s Journeys Beyond Time 85 On the familiar Road (J 1291) The journey through time follows the lines of Emily Dickinson in order to meet the poet in the timeless sphere beyond. The approach is not historical but metaphysical and based on concepts rather than dates. After a remark on the poet’s position “Exterior - to Time” (J 448), the journey will start with her seemingly dreadful notion of our limited lifetime we are forced to sail “Down Time’s quaint stream” (J 1656), continue with the poetic expansion of the ‘now’ in order to underline “How much the present moment means” (J 1380), call upon the particularity of the moment of death when “A Clock stopped -” (J 287), and will finally end in the “Zone whose even Years” are outside of earthly time “And Consciousness - is Noon” (J 1056). A Private Poet Exterior - to Time (J 448) Charles Anderson describes Emily Dickinson “by temperament” as a “private person”, who was “aware of the revolutionary nature of her poems” (Anderson 1960: 292). The gap between her as a “private poet” (Anderson 1960: ix) and her posthumous audience can only be bridged by taking a position exterior to time. Born to a wealthy family in Amherst in 1830, Emily Dickinson grew up in a socially protected environment. As a visionary mind among a rather conservative community, Dickinson gradually withdrew from society, changed her image from the teenage “Belle of Amherst” to a mythical figure and took the step out of (her) time through her poetic voice. Only with few members of her “select society” (Salska 1999: 163ff) - the people she had an active, intimate, even passionate letter-correspondence with - did she share some of her poems. During her lifetime, just a handful of verses found their way into publication; and even those were considerably changed by the editors. For Dickinson, this was a further reason to distance herself and her work from the society and conventions of her days: “This was a Poet / […] Exterior - to Time” (J 448). I never heard the word “escape” Without a quicker blood, (J 77) Dickinson might have realized that her position as a woman poet and especially her unconventional poetic style were somewhat problematic in her days, the mid-nineteenth century, an era which was still very much marked by New England’s Puritan heritage. Her withdrawal from society is also a retreat from the rules and restrictions of her time. The fact that Emily Dickinson dressed in white exclusively in the latter part of her life, for example, can be seen as the visible manifestation of this life beyond the ‘colorful’ Claudia Schwarz 86 2 Derrick explains this notion with Heidegger’s remark on the paradoxical aspect of language “that it brings permanence out of the process of change - which allows us to experience time, which lets time ‘open out’ for man” (Derrick 1986: 32). 3 Dickinson wrote this letter in September 1846, during the time she spent in Boston with her aunt in order to recover from a permanent melancholy after the death of her friend Sophia Holland. social customs that threatened to silence her poetic voice. It is almost ironic (as she was) that this withdrawal offered her the means to transcend not only timely restrictions, but time itself and, hence, also death. Dickinson’s carrier between the limited human time and perpetual divine (creative) timelessness became her poetry: “With her poet’s sensibility, she deeply felt the transforming power of words. She, alone, realized that language, properly created, was a certain transcendence of life, a kind of immortality, the permanence beyond the flux, and that, in exercising this transcendence, she became her words” (Derrick 1986: 38). 2 Inder Kher similarly points out that “[t]he poet also lives in the now and here of time and space, but, paradoxically, she is beyond spatio-temporal reality. At will, she can go from now and here to nowhere and vice versa. The poet’s freedom lies in the captivity of her own commitment, in the captivity of womb-tomb, the source of love, creativity, life, and death” (Kher 1974: 177). As the creator of a world, she achieves immortality through the ability to create. In her poetry she reflects the “struggle with the uncertainty of death and her belief that art is her only sure means of transcending it” (Hockersmith 1989: 290). The biographer Cynthia Wolff calls Emily Dickinson’s achievement “a fusion of infinity and nothingness” (Wolff 1988: 192). Therefore, between infinity and nothingness is where our journey is set. Caught in the River of Time? That we are permanent temporarily, it is warm to know, though, we know no more (L 962) Dickinson expresses in her writings that she was well aware of the limited human time on earth and its unstoppable and inevitable suction towards death. Wolff states that “[t]he notion of time seems always to have haunted Dickinson, and she almost never remarked time’s passage without a tremor of fear” (Wolff 1988: 83); Roland Hagenbüchle even calls the knowledge about the flow of time a leitmotif in Dickinson’s work (Hagenbüchle 1988: 10). Already at the age of 15, Dickinson quoted from Young’s Night Thoughts in a letter to her friend Abiah Root: “We take no note of Time, but from its loss. T’were wise in man to give it then a tongue. Pay no moment but in just purchase of its worth & what it’s worth ask death beds. They can tell. Part with it as with life reluctantly” (L 13). 3 Dickinson herself gave this loss of time Emily Dickinson’s Journeys Beyond Time 87 4 Heidegger described this being in the world (“Dasein”) as being held into nothingness; in every moment. Death, according to Heidegger, is not the end of a certain period of life, the end of a term, which every human has to face at one point, but death informs every moment of human existence. By anticipating death (“Vorlaufen zum Tode”), man is capable of combining life in an entity. By including death into the being in the world, life is graspable as a whole and man liberates himself from the nihilism of everyday life (cf. Röd 2000: II, 456). a tongue in the form of several poems whose shared idea is that “time moves in only one direction and leads always to but one destination. Death” (Wolff 1988: 83). As I will try to argue, Dickinson finds the poetic means to challenge the certainty of time’s steady flow. Time is a Test of Trouble (J 861) The following poem reminds us of Heraclitus’ idea that one cannot enter the same river twice. It also conjures up the physical explanation - as brought forward by Newton - that time is ‘absolute’ in the sense that its flow, quite similar to a “river of time”, cannot be influenced by anything (Novikov 1998: 2, 30): Down Time’s quaint stream Without an oar We are enforced to sail Our Port a secret Our Perchance a Gale What Skipper would Incur the Risk What Buccaneer would ride Without a surety from the wind Or schedule of the Tide - (J 1656) Especially with the Puritan background in mind, this poem appears to be foremost a gruesome description of life’s risky journey down the river of time. We set out on this trip without knowing where or when, “Our Port a secret”, unequipped, “Without an oar”, and therefore also unable to influence where we are going. “Without a surety from the wind / Or schedule of the Tide”, we are caught in the stream of time and have to face unforeseeable risks on our way. Whereas the first part of the poem merely describes this situation as a given fact, Dickinson poses the question “What Skipper would / Incur the Risk / What Buccaneer would ride” in the middle of the poem and forces the reader to reflect upon the circumstances of our being thrown into the world. 4 To answer the question, one has to state that we, humankind, find ourselves on this dangerous journey; but the important underlying question is: Do we have a choice? By the implication of this essential and also existential idea of choice, Dickinson provokes a change in perspectives and escapes “Time’s quaint stream”, if only for the brief moment of the dash at the very end of the poem. Claudia Schwarz 88 The Glory of Decay (J 1280) “We do not know the time we lose -” Dickinson warns in another poem, which equally describes the loss of time in every instant: We do not know the time we lose - The awful moment is And takes its fundamental place Among the certainties - A firm appearance still inflates The card - the chance - the friends - The spectre of solidities Whose substances are sand - (J 1106) The passing, “awful moment” takes its “fundamental place / Among the certainties”. It is irrevocably heading towards death. The second stanza describes how everything that seems steady to us is really built on sand, evoking the image of an hourglass in which the sand runs down steadily. The “certainties” of the first stanza are juxtaposed with the “spectre of solidities” in the second one, the loss of time belonging to the first and “the card - the chance - the friends” to the latter. Almost like Plato, separating the world of ideas from earthly appearances, Dickinson wants us to distinguish between what is certain and what is built on sand. We pass, and she abides (J 811) The change of the seasons is probably Dickinson’s most frequent image for time passing, which she also uses to imply timelessness because of their steady renewal. Anderson wrote that “[t]he seasonal process of nature fascinated Dickinson even more than its daily motions, being a subtler demonstration of time running down - either to death or to immortality” (Anderson 1960: 143). In the description of seasonal changes Dickinson tries to grasp the “paradox that nature is a process of dying out of time as well as living in it” (Anderson 1960: 143), and she aims at encompassing it “by making its ambiguity concrete and hence acceptable as part of man’s inescapable ‘reality’” (Anderson 1959: 412). This dualism is contained in the following poem: As Summer into Autumn slips And yet we sooner say “The Summer” than “the Autumn,” lest We turn the sun away, And almost count it an Affront The presence to concede Of one however lovely, not The one that we have loved - Emily Dickinson’s Journeys Beyond Time 89 So we evade the charge of Years On one attempting shy The Circumvention of the Shaft Of Life’s Declivity. (J 1346) Even though this poem is dated around 1875, shortly after Emily Dickinson’s father had died, Dickinson’s letter from 1846 (already mentioned above) reads like an introduction to it: “Does it seem as though September had come? How swiftly summer has fled & what report has it borne to heaven of misspent time & wasted nows? Eternity only will answer. The ceaseless flight of the seasons is to me a very solemn thought, & yet why do we not strive to make a better improvement of them? ” (L 13). It is interesting to note that Dickinson comes back to the image of the seasonal flight on the occasion of the death of a person so close to her. Love - is that later Thing than Death - (J 924) There are two levels on which time is transgressed in this poem: seasonal renewal and (poetic) love. Even though the first one is more obvious, it is yet misleading. The seemingly ever-returning cycle of the seasons, their neverending renewal evokes what Dickinson termed “nature’s ‘changeless change’” (Anderson 1959: 412). In terms of hope for our own eternal life, this is misleading because we deceive ourselves; as reads the poem: “So we evade the charge of Years”. In other words, nature’s constant renewal is also “beyond the mortal poet’s grasp”, as Anderson put it (Anderson 1959: 412). Even though this might seem somehow far-fetched, I would like to offer a second approach to the poem, which emphasizes Dickinson’s transcendence of time. In the second stanza, as in the letter, the author claims what a shame it is not to make a better use of time in general and the “nows” in particular. She even says that it is counted an affront to live the present, “one however lovely”; instead we linger over “The one that we have loved -”. To live and to love the present as we lived and loved past moments seems to be the key to escaping the dilemma of nature’s “changeless change”. So the very love of the present moment bridges the gap between here and there, life and eternity. Again, it is the only dash in the poem, in line 8, that directs the word “loved” right in front of it away from the threat of “Life’s Declivity”. How love is a means of transcending time in Dickinson’s poems has also been described by Kher: Commenting on J 147 and J 403, he speaks of the transcendence of the seasonal (earthly) time for two lovers: “The point involved is that when time shows compassion for the silent lovers, the lovers perceive the mystery of creation and the nature of the endless process, and by apprehending these they earn respite: they are no longer baffled by the phantasm of reality, they perceive reality itself and their love becomes timeless” (Kher 1974: 152). The poet’s love of words remains silent and thus transcends human time by the introduction of the idea of a valuable, long, loved ‘now’. Claudia Schwarz 90 The Moment: Forever Now To wait an Hour - is long - If Love be just beyond - To wait Eternity - is short - If Love reward the end - (J 781) In 1996, the “Long Now Foundation” was established, whose aim is to construct and build a very slow clock that would run for the next 10,000 years. The philosopher Stewart Brand believes that, as an icon, such a clock reframes the way people think because it extends the perception of the ‘now’. The project works towards the establishment of a long-time responsibility in civilization as a complete juxtaposition to the short-lived and short-sighted present state of being. After all, “[c]ivilizations with long nows look after things better”, Brand states (Brand 1999: 29). But what is a “long now” in comparison to a short one, or is the now only “a knife edge without thickness which serves merely to connect the past with the future”, as Aristotle has it? (Gale 1968: 4). J.N. Findlay points out that “[h]ow narrow or wide the present will be depends on the context in which the question is asked” (qtd. in Gale 1968: 7). It lies within the capability of the poet to set up this context. Forever - is composed of Nows - ‘Tis not a different time - Except for Infiniteness - And Latitude of Home - From this - experienced Here - Remove the Dates - to These - Let Months dissolve in further Months - And Years - exhale in Years - Without Debate - or Pause - Or Celebrated Days - No different Our Years would be From Anno Domini’s - (J 624) The meaningful combination of the two furthest distanced expressions referring to time, the lasting “forever” and the ever-fleeing “now”, shows Dickinson’s ingenious poetic treatment of time. In this single line, “Forever - is composed of Nows -”, she bridges the gap between the immediate here and now and the remote forever, transcends the boundaries of the restricted human lifetime to see what lies beyond, and promotes the meaning of the moment by setting it on one level with eternity. The now is contained in eternity and vice versa. As a value of the living - and foremost of those who create - rather than the price they have to pay for life, time can be shaped by the poet and loses its supremacy over life and death. The word “composed” implies that time is created: each “now” is composed like a piece of music (or poetry) and becomes part of the universal harmony. Emily Dickinson’s Journeys Beyond Time 91 How much the present moment means To those who’ve nothing more - (J 1380) Wolff argues that “Forever - is composed of Nows -” explains how the poet repairs God’s deficient creation of isotropic time that has no focus, no goal, and no implicit point of view. As opposed to anisotropic time, isotropic time is time which does not contain an intrinsic shape or structure and every moment is equally important insofar as it impels us towards death: “No different Our Years would be / From Anno Domini’s -”. The poet provides this endless flow of time with a focus by imparting privileged moments, “Celebrated Days”, to the passage of time, which even enrich the message: “The poet can be guide, and the poet’s willingness to confront even death can qualify her to understand both life and eternity, and to explicate the very process of annihilation” (Wolff 1988: 237). By the creative and structure-forming act of the poet, the past and the future are subsumed. “Forever might be short” (J 434), Dickinson writes in another poem and shows how, “[i]n the ontological sense, past, present, and future are irrelevant categories of time” (Kher 1974: 82). Dickinson “transcends all time by experiencing it in the dynamism of the present moment” (Kher 1974: 148). Thus, the celebration of the moment enables the poet to step outside timely restrictions by means of the imagination: “The imaginative experience of ‘nows’ constitutes experience of the eternal time, the mythic moment, the dateless realm of consciousness in which linear months and years evaporate like fumes in the atmosphere of perpetual sunshine” (Kher 1974: 24). Time feels so vast (J 802) If imagination holds the power to transgress time, it inevitably also disputes the notion of space: “To escape from time is to escape utterly from the cosmic order, to enter another order and another universe. Time is indissolubly linked to space” (Chevalier and Gheerbrandt 1994: 1009). The poet, who is timeless, is therefore also spaceless and, from this ‘sphere beyond’ time and space, she has the chance to perceive the universe as a whole. “When the mind removes itself theoretically from the surface of the rotating earth, the sun ceases to measure years and hours and one’s speculation is quite simply out-of-time” (Anderson 1959: 420). Anderson quotes from an astronomical book Emily Dickinson might have been familiar with because it was part of the Dickinson library. A passage in The Stars and the Earth by Felix Eberty (Boston, 1854) discusses the physical possibility to perceive every single ‘now’ of world history simultaneously: The sequence of events that have happened in time continues to exist extended consecutively through space by reason of the time it takes for the ‘picture’ of them to travel, even at the speed of light. This spatial extension of time makes the two terms parts of a single concept. Hence if God exists at all points in space simultaneously, then the whole of history is spread out before Claudia Schwarz 92 his vision as one picture - that is, omnipresence is one and the same thing with omniscience. It is quite possible for man to achieve this god-like view through his imaginative grasp of astronomical truth. It is ‘possible’ because it does not contradict the laws of thought, though the chances of his achieving it literally may be remote, even beyond reach, because of the mechanical imperfection of man’s powers. (Eberty, cited in Anderson 1959: 424, n.6) In his comments on this text, Anderson says that “[t]he poet can escape from this limitation through his imagination, as Emily Dickinson proved” (Anderson 1959: 424, n.6). Indeed, imagination frees the mind from the restrictions of rational clock-time and earthly settings. As Kher remarks, “[i]n this transformation or distillation of our experiential reality, the poet achieves the ontological status of being exterior to time” (Kher 1974: 118). It is within the power of the creative mind to create long and short moments, to keep them or to let them pass, and to value or to disdain them. Creative imagination is also the key to the next part, which challenges death and what lies beyond. Death and Beyond Dying is a wild Night and a new Road (L 332) Dickinson was very eager to find out more about the moment of death. She takes this as a motif in a poem about a clock that stops ticking, which brings the reader closer to grasping what happens when time moves out and death moves in. A Clock stopped - Not the Mantel’s - Geneva’s farthest skill Can’t put the puppet bowing - That just now dangled still - An awe came on the Trinket! The Figures hunched, with pain - Then quivered out of Decimals - Into Degreeless Noon - It will not stir for Doctors - This Pendulum of snow - This Shopman importunes it - While cool - concernless No - Nods from the Gilded pointers - Nods from the Second slim - Decades of Arrogance between The Dial life - And Him - (J 287) Emily Dickinson’s Journeys Beyond Time 93 5 The parallel between the clock that stops and a person who dies can also be drawn on a less metaphysical level: it is sometimes reported that all clocks in a house stop when a person who lived there dies. 6 For the following remarks on the clock poem and in particular the central meaning of the world “noon”, cf. Wolff 1988: 192ff. In a letter, Dickinson describes the actual occurrence when a clock stopped after a thunderstorm and the feeling of uneasiness it evoked: “and the clock stopped - which made it like Judgment day” (L 471). In another poem she makes use of the “audible ticking of a clock to reassure those keeping the deathwatch that time is real and life is still there: ‘T’was comfort in her Dying Room / To hear the living Clock’” (J 1703; Anderson 1960: 235). The image of a clock that has stopped is the perfect conceit for the moment of death. The figurative language applied to clocks in everyday speech can be counted on to personify the object. Clocks have hands and a face and even the heartbeat is imitated by their ticking sounds. The parallels to human life are also contained in the movements of the clock and the figures, respectively. The Infinite a sudden Guest (J 1309) The present poem works with this metaphor on several levels. The acoustic imitation of the last tick in the first line through the hard consonants in the successive words “clock” and “stopped” rhythmically imitate the dying of a clock, hence, evoking the image of the last heartbeat (or breath) of a dying person. 5 The stillness of dying and death is supported visually by Dickinson’s use of dashes at the end of almost every line. “[Death …] is the ‘Hyphen’ between the mortal life and man’s dream of immortality”, Anderson explains (Anderson 1960: 238). How all the Clocks stopped in the World (J 577) The first stanza of the poem basically depicts the moment of death: “That just now dangled still -” [emphasis added]. The dying of the clock is irrevocable, since not even the most crafted clockmaker (“Geneva’s farthest skill”) can “put the puppet bowing”. The “awe” on the Trinket’s face is reminiscent of the face of the dead and calls on the belief that they get a glimpse of heaven at the moment of passing. As the clock stopped, it “quivered out of Decimals - / Into degreeless Noon” 6 . The quivering out of decimals refers to the superimposed fingers with zero degrees between them pointing towards noon. The decimals that usually tell the time now tell the hour of death and eternity, because noon, so carefully positioned in the center of the poem with 37 words before and afterwards, is frequently used as a synonym for eternity by Dickinson. Noon is a palindrome with no beginning and no end, that reads the same way forward and backwards implying circularity and infinity. Moreover, it contains two “oo”s in the center, twice zero, which, combined, looks Claudia Schwarz 94 like the sign for eternity: . As Wolff remarks, “thus are boundlessness and nothingness fused in this single syllable” (Wolff 1988: 192). However, in regard to the dying of the clock, noon also mirrors the word ‘no’, which means that there is no way back to life. How deeply noon is associated with death and eternity becomes obvious in the lines from another poem: “And the Everlasting Clocks - / Chime-Noon! ” (J 297). The privilege of few - Eternity - obtained - in Time -” (J 800) The next surprising image in the poem is “This Pendulum of snow - / […] / While cool - concernless No -”. The pendulum of snow recalls the former beating of the heart which has become cool. Its only message is “concernless No”, which, read in one breath, again conjures up the word “snow” from two lines above. “Concernless” is one of Dickinson’s fairly frequent word-creations which highlight her creative power. For its whiteness and coldness, snow is an image of eternity and hence of death; it evokes the picture of blood that drains away from the body and turns the skin white, but also the freezing of lively motion into the stillness of death. However, white was also Dickinson’s “favorite color, one she associated intimately with her identity” (Vanderslice 2000: 197). Therefore, Dickinson once more positions herself as a poet outside of earthly clock-time since her “pendulum of snow” chimes “concernless No”. The poem ends with “Decades of Arrogance between / The Dial life - / And Him -”. Anderson explains that “‘Arrogance’ was her inspired word for defining the hostile encounter between life and death, the absoluteness of the distance between them both in time and space” (Anderson 1960: 238). If “Him” refers to God, the poem also mirrors the struggle between the poetic power of timeless creation and God’s power over a life that is caught in time. Whereas God has the power to give and to take away, the poet’s imagination transcends the boundaries he has set up and even turns his concepts upside down, because “‘dying to the world’ gives ‘birth’ to the Voice of the poet” (Wolff 1988: 190). And Time went out to tell the News And met Eternity (J 1039) Without going into detail here, I would like to mention the poem “Because I could not stop for Death -” (J 712), in which Dickinson equally makes use of rhythmical patterns already briefly described above. At first, the poem sets up the motion of life, where the galloping of the horses is convincingly made audible in the iambic meter. However, right in the middle of the poem the motion is interrupted by the line “Or rather - He passed - Us”, where this verbal flow from the two stanzas beforehand is unexpectedly stopped through the inverted syntactical arrangement of the line. The rhythmical pattern of motion versus motionlessness is also reflected on a semantic Emily Dickinson’s Journeys Beyond Time 95 level. The poem moves from the active ‘passing’ of the carriage to the passive ‘being passed’ by its surroundings. As the poem is composed from a point so obviously outside the conventional understanding of time, Dickinson also plays with the idea of external and internal perception of time when she writes, “Since then - ‘tis Centuries - and yet / Feels shorter than a Day”. Beyond that all is silence … (L 785) In a letter to Perez Cowan dated 1869, Dickinson writes: “I suppose we are all thinking of Immortality, at times so stimulatedly that we cannot sleep” (L 332). The poet’s uncertainty about where we come from and where we are going is reflected in a poem that moves between eternity and the Christian promise of immortality. Behind Me - dips Eternity - Before Me - Immortality - Myself - the Term between - Death but the Drift of Eastern Gray, Dissolving into Dawn away, Before the West begin - ‘Tis Kingdoms - afterward - they say - In perfect - pauseless Monarchy - Whose Prince - is Son of None - Himself - His Dateless Dynasty - Himself - Himself diversify - In Duplicate divine - ‘Tis Miracle before Me - then - ‘Tis Miracle behind - between - A Crescent in the Sea - With Midnight to the North of Her - And Midnight to the South of Her - And Maelstrom - in the Sky - (J 721) John Vanderslice summarizes that this poem “asserts the complexities and turbulence of her own individual life” and that the poet “is recast into the darkness of doubt” (Vanderslice 2000: 197). Dickinson starts out with the “timelessness before her consciousness existed” and “future timelessness into which her consciousness will survive” (Anderson 1960: 281). Looking back she sees the light in the East from which all life emerges; in the West she makes out the soul’s ultimate destination and concentrates on the human lifespan, “- the Term between -”. Against the background of eternity or immortality this “term between” is almost too small to receive a proper name. As both noun and unspecified period of time, the word “term” stands in between two ungraspable giants. Claudia Schwarz 96 Hope is a strange invention - (J 1392) The second stanza deals with the Christian promise of life after death. The poet distances herself from this heavenly vision by including the anonymous “they say”. The “perfect - pauseless Monarchy -” relates to the idea of isotropic time explained above, where the immortal consciousness is caught in the ceaseless passage of time. Hockersmith points at Dickinson’s dilemma of immortality: if immortality means the continuation of individual consciousness it must also mean a continuing awareness of time, whereas if one escapes the awareness of time in immortality, then immortality must mean “the end of all consciousness in oblivion” (Hockersmith 1989: 278). This might be cause for the lyrical persona’s hopeless confusion that is marked by “Midnight” all around her, the inversion of the moon in the sea, and the “Maelstrom - in the Sky”. Dickinson described the feeling that comes across on the bottom line of this poem in a letter: “I cannot tell how Eternity seems. It sweeps around me like a sea” (L 785). Emerging from an Abyss, and reentering it - that is Life (L 1024) Even though Dickinson conveys the image of confusion and unanswered questions when it comes to the edges of human lifetime, the poet once more shows how - led by the power of her imagination - she moves beyond time. Kher called “Behind Me” the “culmination of her aesthetics of continuity” (Kher 1974: 228). Dickinson shows how immortality and eternity absorb time; they do not annihilate it. Therefore she assures that “Time does go on -”: Time does go on - I tell it gay to those who suffer now - They shall survive - There is a sun - They don’t believe it now - (J 1121) Did Our Best Moment last - (J 393) Dickinson’s path to immortality lies within her art. Her creativity frees her from the sense of temporality and makes her recognize “life as a continuous process in which death ceases to be absolute and final” (Kher 1974: 179). She continues her journey through time in the “Zone whose even Years” are no longer interrupted and her consciousness is forever pointing towards eternity: There is a Zone whose even Years No Solstice interrupt - Whose Sun constructs perpetual Noon Whose perfect Seasons wait - Emily Dickinson’s Journeys Beyond Time 97 Whose Summer set in Summer, till The Centuries of June And Centuries of August cease And Consciousness - is Noon (J 1056) Conclusion When I go out of Time - (J 336) The ancient Greeks distinguished between two kinds of time, kairos and chronos. Whereas the first stands for opportunity or the propitious moments, the second refers to eternal ongoing time: “Kairos is the time of cleverness, chronos the time of wisdom” (Brand 1999: 9). Dickinson strives for a combination of those two concepts by artistically moving from one to the other. Realizing how she is bound to natural cycles, Emily Dickinson recognizes the power of creative work. The poetry she lay out for the generations to come “Will entertain the Centuries / When I, am long ago” (J 290). Cynthia Wolff remarks that “[t]he voice of Dickinson’s verse could confound death and transcend time by springing to life anew for every reader. Her poetry, then, stands as rival creation to God’s” (Wolff 1988: 185). Dickinson’s poems do not deny the unstoppable passage of time. They confront the reader with the reality of the ultimate end of individual time through death. But this is not the end in Emily Dickinson’s understanding: Aesthetically, by being eternally present in the temporal moment, we reverse temporality into eternity. It is only through time that the artist transcends its finiteness. The creative imagination plunges into the reality of the lived moment and transforms it into its eternal significance by perceiving the temporal and the eternal at once. (Kher 1974: 82) As a poet, Emily Dickinson takes a step beyond time and encourages us to follow her either by appreciating the present moment, or by engaging in a creative process. I will end this journey through Emily Dickinson’s notions of time with a quote by Northrop Frye, who speaks of the power of poetry, time, and imagination: If even time, the enemy of all living things, and to poets, at least, the most hated and feared of all tyrants, can be broken down by the imagination, anything can be. We come to the limit of the imagination […], a universe entirely possessed and occupied by human life, a city of which the stars are suburbs. Nobody can believe in any such universe: literature is not religion, and it doesn’t address itself to belief. But if we shut the vision of it completely out of our minds, or insist on its being limited in various ways, something goes dead inside us, perhaps the one thing that it is really important to keep alive. (Frye 1997: 33) Claudia Schwarz 98 7 Adapted from J 721, with commenting lines from J 448, J 67, J 929, J 501, J 802, L 843, and J 174. I would like to thank Gudrun M. Grabher for most valuable comments and ideas that shaped and enhanced this article. P.S. 7 Eternity only will answer (L 13) Behind me - dips Your Poetry - Exterior - to Time Before me - critics’ Commentary - Myself - the Term between - I am Nobody Death but the Drift from common Roads, Dissolving into puzzling Thoughts, Before the Test begin - How far is it to Heaven? […] This World is not Conclusion ‘Tis timeless wor(l)ds before me - then Time feels so vast ‘Tis timeless wor(l)ds behind - between A Curser on the Screen - With Midnight to the North of Her - Night is my favorite Day - And Midnight to the South of Her - And letters - Beyond Time - Past Midnight! Past the Morning Star! References J The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955). Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. (Citation by poem number.) L The Letters of Emily Dickinson. (1958). Ed. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward: 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. (Citation by poem number.) Anderson, Charles R. (1959) “The Trap of Time in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry.” The Journal of English Literary History 22. 402-424. - (1960). Emily Dickinson’s Poetry. Stairway of Surprise. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Brand, Stewart (1999). The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility: The Ideas Behind the World’s Slowest Computer. New York: Basic Books. Chevalier, Jean, and Alain Gheerbrant (1994). “Time.” A Dictionary of Symbols. Trans. John Buchanan-Brown. London et al.: Penguin. 1008-1009. Derrick, Paul Scott (1986). “Emily Dickinson, Martin Heidegger, and the Poetry of Dread.” Western Humanities Review 40: 1. 27-38. Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1940). “The American Scholar.” 1837. The Complete Essays and other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Brooks Atkinson. New York: Modern Library. 43-63. Frye, Northrop (1997). 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Schmidt, Heinrich (1978). Philosophisches Wörterbuch. 21 st rev. ed. Georgi Schischkoff. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner. St. Augustine (1960). The Confessions of St. Augustine. Trans. John K. Ryan. New York: Image Books. Vanderslice, John (2000). “Dickinson’s BEHIND ME - DIPS ETERNITY.” Explicator 58: 4. 195-198. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin (1988). Emily Dickinson. Reading et al.: Addison-Wesley. Claudia Schwarz Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck