Emily Dickinson's poems and literary significance

Emily Dickinson and Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound's poem "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter" is inspired by Chinese poetry, and dramatizes the situation of the Chinese wife of a traveling salesman. In its empathetic portrayal of the life of a woman, it resembles poems by Emily Dickinson -- but the difference is, of course, that Pound's form is fundamentally dramatic. Pound announces, in his title, the speaker of the poem. Dickinson's lyric voice, by contrast, announces no dramatized speaker. Nonetheless, we may identify certain aspects of Pound's work by comparing it with three of Dickinson's lyrics: "Tell all the truth but tell it slant," "If you were coming in the fall, and "She rose to his requirement." I will identify the ways in which each of these Dickinson lyrics illuminate Pound's poem, and in conclusion will show that "She rose to his requirement" is the closest in terms of overall poetic effect.

Dickinson's "Tell all the truth but tell it slant" is, in some ways, a manifesto for poetic reticence. This reticence is also the modus operandi of Pound in "The River-Merchant's Wife." Dickinson makes it clear that suggestion works better as an expression of the truth than outright or blatant statement. The final simile compares poetic utterance not to a lightning-bolt, but to the explanation given to children to make the lightning-bolt less frightening: "as lightning to the children eased / with explanation kind / the truth must dazzle gradually / or every man be blind." Similarly, Pound's method of dramatizing the speaker's situation in "The River-Merchant's Wife" is gradual: we learn the progress of the speaker's emotions by yearly description, and rather than stating the outright truth of "I learned to love you," Pound expresses this slantwise. "At fifteen I stopped scowling, ? / I desired my dust to be mingled with yours ? / Forever and forever." The word love is never used here -- instead the idea of a love transcending death is sketched with images of death and eternity, just as the tender emotions are expressed in the litotes. Pound does not write "at fifteen I learned to smile" -- he "tells it slant," in Dickinson's terms, and writes "at fifteen I stopped scowling."

Pound's method of using concrete images to dramatize the situation is reflected in Dickinson's poem "If you were coming in the fall." To some extent, the two poems parallel each other: both are expressions by one lover to the beloved, from whom she is separated. And both use a tentative conditional tense to question whether these lovers will even be reunited: Dickinson's first four stanzas each begin with an "if," while the fifth and final stanza expresses more directly the pain of uncertainty that is located in that "if." Similarly the speaker in Pound's poem concludes with a conditional "if": "If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang, / Please let me know beforehand, ? / And I will come out to meet you / As far as Cho-fu-Sa." We do not know how far Cho-fu-Sa is, but the sense of yearning indicates that it might be as far as humanly possible for a young woman to travel alone, simply to be reunited. But the greater similarity between "If you were coming in the fall" and "The River-Merchant's Wife" lies in the use of concrete images: in particular, the abstraction of time is given poetic form in both poems. For Dickinson, the "months" can be wound "in balls," and a whole season could be brushed aside "as Housewives do, a fly." For Pound's speaker, time is measured in similarly concrete images: "the moss is grown, the different mosses, / Too deep to clear them away!" In both poems, time is measured not in minutes but in images that make the pain of enduring time away from the beloved seem comprehensible.

But the overall effect of Pound's poem is most closely matched by Dickinson's poem "She rose to his requirement." Here, Dickinson is engaged in dramatization: she is telling the story of a marriage, understood from the woman's perspective, but told as a third-person compressed narrative. Marriage is seen as the woman's emergence from childhood -- once married, the woman "dropt / the Playthings of her Life" and began "honorable Work." This is very similar to the situation of the River-Merchant's Wife, who meets her future husband when she is still a child, and whose husband courts her as an adult might play with a child: "I played about the front gate, pulling flowers. / You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse, / You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums." Both poems then proceed to sketch the process of maturation.