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Johanna Winant on Emily Dickinson ("My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun —")
3.1k Plays1 year ago
I've been waiting for a chance to talk about an Emily Dickinson poem on the podcast, and no one better to do it with than my friend Johanna Winant. She chose "My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun —" for our conversation. (If you're curious, you can find an image of Dickinson's manuscript here.)
Johanna is an assistant professor in the Department of English at West Virginia University, where she works on transatlantic modernism, twentieth-century American literature, philosophy and literature, and transhistorical poetry and poetics. She is completing a book manuscript with the working title "Lyric Logic: American Modernism and the Problem of Induction," and her articles and reviews have appeared in James Joyce Quarterly, Paideuma, Journal of Modern LIterature, Modernism/modernity, and elsewhere. You can follow Johanna on Twitter.
As ever, please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear, and share an episode with a friend. Subscribe to my Substack, and you'll get (eventually!) a newsletter to go with each episode.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello,
Introduction and Origin Story
00:00:01
Speaker
everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and it is a total pleasure for me to have an old friend of mine on the podcast. And somebody who, we were just talking about this, was sort of there at the inception of the, you know, when the podcast was but a glint, a glimmer in my eye,
00:00:21
Speaker
I think a Twitter, I mean, there in quotation marks, a Twitter conversation led me to say, I think publicly, you know, I've been toying around with this idea. And our guest today, Johanna Winant, was one of the people, one of the few people who said, oh, Cameron, you must do this.
00:00:41
Speaker
And I don't think I did it immediately, but I took that as strong encouragement. I filed it away. And once I launched the podcast, I knew that I had Johanna partly to thank for that and that she would surely have to be a guest on the podcast. So it's a real thrill to have her here finally.
Emily Dickinson's 'My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun'
00:01:03
Speaker
Johanna Winant,
00:01:06
Speaker
has chosen a poem by Emily Dickinson for us to read. And it's the poem that is either called, it's as most Dickinson, almost all Dickinson poems are, sort of referred to by its first line. So its title is, My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun. And as ever, you'll be able to find that poem, a link to the text of that poem in the episode notes.
00:01:31
Speaker
Oh, it is also, I have realized I think recently that depending on which podcast service you use, sometimes those links don't work as links in the episode notes. So anyway, apologies. Maybe try a podcast service where you can get it, but also know that you can just Google the poem and you'll find it there. You may have heard my dog barking in the background.
00:02:00
Speaker
So let me tell you more about, and apologies for that, let me tell you more about Johanna. Let me tell you about our guest.
Meet Johanna Winant - Academic Background
00:02:05
Speaker
She's an assistant professor in the Department of English at West Virginia University, where she writes about and teaches on the topics of transatlantic modernism, 20th century American literature, philosophy, and its intersection with literature, and perhaps most pertinently for our purposes today, trans historical poetry and poetics.
00:02:31
Speaker
Johanna earned her PhD from the University of Chicago, where among many other interesting things that happened to her during those years, and maybe she'll tell us about some of them. She worked with a previous guest on the podcast, so she was a student of Orin Eisenberg's, and maybe you'll hear some of that intellectual lineage sort of shine through during our conversation today.
00:02:58
Speaker
Johanna has written a book, or has just nearly is right about to finish writing a book, which will be in our hands soon, I hope. The book's title is Lyric Logic, and I was all ready to read you the subtitle of the book, but Johanna tells me that the subtitle is maybe in process. So
00:03:21
Speaker
Sorry, that's not the subtitle. Maybe it should be. But she'll tell us more maybe about the subtitle of that book. But what the book is about is about modern American poetry and the way that it has transformed what she refers to as the epistemological problem of induction and what that means for people who aren't familiar with some of those words.
00:03:43
Speaker
is the difficulty of predicting future experiences based on past ones. So like in the classic example, how do you know the sun's going to come up tomorrow? Well, it has come up every other morning of your life. And so that question, the problem of induction,
00:04:03
Speaker
Her book is about how poetry transforms that problem into a poetic strategy. And that strategy challenges philosophy's account of how to make sense of the world.
00:04:16
Speaker
And she, the book features readings of, you know, a list of wonderful poets, including the poet that we're talking about today, Emily Dickinson. Johanna's articles and reviews have appeared in places like the James Joyce Quarterly, Paduma, I never know how to say the name of that journal. And I feel like embarrassed about that given, sorry, that's a Poundian term. And I, and as a,
00:04:42
Speaker
someone who cut my teeth in modernist poetry, I should be more confident. But anyway, Paduma, Paduma, the Journal of Modern Literature, Modernism, Modernity, and elsewhere, including in public fora, and I will provide links to Johanna's publications so that you can go look them up. One thing you'll discover, if you do, is that Johanna Winant has, I think, a kind of unique talent.
00:05:10
Speaker
as a writer, she takes on vexing and complex, difficult philosophical and poetic problems, and she sits patiently with them. And she reformulates their constitutive parts in such a way as to make them clear without diminishing either their complexity or their beauty.
00:05:39
Speaker
She's an expert teacher, in other words, and I mean that both in the classroom, though that's where perhaps I have the least authority to make that claim having never been in her classroom. I've been in places with Johanna that are like classrooms, you know.
00:05:55
Speaker
I have been on panels with her at conferences. I have seen how she handles Q&A sessions in those settings. Johanna and I have been part of reading groups and working groups together, and I've seen her think in those spaces. So I have a sense of what it's like. Oh, and actually, I have visited one of Johanna's classes as a guest, so I have seen it.
00:06:19
Speaker
But I mean that she's an expert teacher both in that traditional sense in the classroom, but she's also a teacher on the page. She asks the kinds of questions that I'm always encouraging my students to form, questions that are, when put the right way, easy to understand and hard to answer.
00:06:41
Speaker
It's a great talent to have as a writer. And I think you'll see it on display in our conversation today.
00:06:53
Speaker
And I think that Johanna's chosen a poem that will elucidate some of those kinds of questions that I've just been describing for everyone. So with
Why This Poem? Johanna's Perspective
00:07:06
Speaker
that, I wanna say, Johanna, welcome to Close Readings and tell me how you're doing today.
00:07:12
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for that lovely and generous introduction. It's a total delight to be here today. I'll just mention, as I already told Carmen, that I have a cold, so I'm a little sniffly, but I am not weeping over Dickinson at this moment. Well, not yet.
00:07:29
Speaker
Yeah, there may be sniffles of all kinds before we're done. Thanks for braving the cold to be with us. It is a real pleasure for me. So far in the run of this podcast, I have
00:07:46
Speaker
I guess for obvious reasons, I thought, well, let's not double up on a poet. There's so much poetry to go around. Let's have some coverage. You and I took a little bit of finagling to get our schedules to align to do this.
00:08:07
Speaker
And it seemed funny to me that nobody kept picking Dickinson, which is like a Dickinsonian way to put it, maybe. Johanna, when you started thinking about coming on, how sure were you that Dickinson was the poet that you wanted to do?
Dickinson's Context and Johanna's Journey
00:08:23
Speaker
And to the extent that you decided to do her in the end, why for this setting?
00:08:32
Speaker
There are a lot of poems that I love in a pure way and some poems that bother me so much that it feels something like love.
00:08:45
Speaker
but is not necessarily unmixed. And this poem is sort of the epitome of the latter category. That's right, because even having chosen Dickinson, I was surprised by the, I wasn't surprised by your choosing Dickinson, but I was surprised by your choice of this poem. Yeah, there are Dickinson poems that I feel like I hold closer to my heart.
00:09:11
Speaker
But this one has always been an aggravating splinter. And I say that with like, with real awe and gratitude. But it, so I think I could have talked about
00:09:39
Speaker
the brain is wider than the sky, or until all the two of the tell it slant, very happily. In some ways, probably more happily. What I am restraining myself from saying is that you just laid out, well, there are poems I love unreservedly, uncomplicatedly, maybe. I mean, these are my words, not yours. And then there are poems that irritate me and that generate a different kind of love.
00:10:05
Speaker
Yeah. And what's funny, Johanna, is that there are people who would say, and that's why I chose something from the former category. So in a way, you're sort of dividing things into two categories that I think are recognizable for many of us, whether we feel that way about poems or people or whatever, you know, other things. And it tells us something I think about you that you would want
00:10:31
Speaker
to like lean into that irritation a little bit. Yes, I feel like the irritation tells me a lot, both about myself actually and about the things that irritate me. And again, I feel like it sounds like I'm putting down this poem and I really don't mean to be. I find it like vertiginously powerful.
00:11:00
Speaker
I'm not someone who goes skydiving, but this poem feels kind of like that to me in that you feel such enormous forces acting upon you as a reader.
00:11:22
Speaker
I think it responds really well to close reading. I think we can talk about that more too. But as I was thinking about, why did I choose this poem? And I can also talk about my history reading Dickinson. But a lot of it, I think, had to do with feeling
00:11:47
Speaker
that someone had to do it so that I could be at peace. So we'll see if I'm at peace after this podcast or not. We'll see. Remind me to ask you about that if I forget. Well, since you, I think something you just mentioned in passing might lead to a nice segue here.
00:12:08
Speaker
You said we could talk about how you came to become a reader of Dickinson. And on the podcast, Johanna, we sometimes have poets that seem a bit more obscure or poets that poetry people know, but maybe the wider public doesn't know.
00:12:29
Speaker
I'll bet that most of our listeners, and no shame if I'm not describing you now, but most of our listeners have heard of Emily Dickinson. Even if they don't know it, it could be reminded of a Dickinson poem that they've read in grade school or something like that.
00:12:47
Speaker
So given that, and given that listeners may have not only some kind of sense of Dickinson as a poet, but some sort of image of who she as a person was in their minds,
00:13:04
Speaker
I'm asking you two things now. Tell us about how you came to become a reader of Dickinson and tell us also about what, if anything, by way of context you think you would want our listeners to know about the poet that you're gonna be talking about today. Yeah, I'll do those in the opposite order if that's okay. It's totally okay.
00:13:29
Speaker
Dickinson lived from 1830 to 1886, although she published 10 poems during her lifetime. And after her death, although people close to her knew that she was writing poetry, nearly 1,800 poems were discovered. And about 800 of those were bound in 40 little books that scholars call fascicles.
00:13:58
Speaker
And the poem I'm talking about today is the ninth poem from classical number 34.
00:14:05
Speaker
which had 18 poems, so it was- You looked that up, right? I did. Oh, I had to look this up. I knew it was in one of the fascicles. I knew it wasn't one of the loose ones or one of the ones with the letters, but I couldn't remember there was a fascicle 34. And actually, I'm just going to interrupt you very briefly. I don't want you to lose your train of thought, but to say that her Dickinson's archives have been digitized, and so it will be very easy for me to provide you with a link so that you can see not only a nice clean text of the poem, which I'll also give you,
00:14:34
Speaker
But you can see the poem in Dickinson's handwriting and you can see the piece of paper that was sewn into one of these fascicles with this poem on it. Yes. And so like, even now, like we encounter this poem in quatrains, which we can talk about, but
00:14:47
Speaker
It's not so plain that that's delineation in the manuscript. Dickinson's poetry, because it was published posthumously, has a complicated publication history involving different errors and editors and collections of manuscripts.
00:15:07
Speaker
So this poem is numbered number 754 by Johnson, one of the editors, and numbered 764 by Franklin, which is why we often just refer to her poems by their first lines. So that's just like a little bit about the poem. It was probably written in 1863, which was 1862 and 1863 are where
00:15:37
Speaker
Dickinson just hit this incredibly prolific time. It's crazy. Yeah, like, I mean, either both of those years are sometimes described as an Anna's Mirabilis, which is a miracle year, where she was writing about a poem a day.
00:15:53
Speaker
So, like truly extraordinary. This is really at the peak of her powers. Including many of the poems for which she's most well known. Yes. Like she didn't, I mean, it's not that she didn't miss because I think there's some unevenness and we know more poems for some good reasons better than others, but... Right.
00:16:12
Speaker
like truly an extraordinary stretch. And maybe it's just worth pointing out too, though this may not be your, I suspect it's not your interest here, Johanna, that 1863 for people who are unfamiliar with American history maybe puts us right in the middle of the Civil War.
00:16:31
Speaker
Yes. Right. So Dickinson's writing from Massachusetts. Say more. Yeah. Yes. Dickinson lived in Amherst, Massachusetts. She spent some time in the Boston area too, but mostly was in Amherst, Massachusetts. Never married.
00:16:47
Speaker
wrote her poetry on a tiny desk in this very beautiful, sunny, south-facing bedroom of what had been her father's house on Main Street in Amherst. Her family was prominent Amherst citizens, involved in the founding of Amherst College, for example. And
00:17:12
Speaker
I mean, there's stuff to say about her biography. I don't really feel like we need to go too deep into it, but it was obviously like a really complicated moment in American history. The Second Great Awakening was going on, the Civil War, obviously, and the ways in which those events touch or do not touch her poetry is actually not clear.
00:17:37
Speaker
Right. Yeah, I mean, I raise it in this case. I mean, one could raise it about any poem written in 1863 by someone living in the United States. But, you know, it's a poem about a gun or seems to be anyway. So that makes the question feel a bit more salient. You were going to tell us more about how you came to Dickinson. So I was an undergrad English major and I took a course called Whitman and Dickinson, which is a course actually the title that I teach now that I just taught this semester.
00:18:05
Speaker
Funny that. It's funny how that happens. So it was probably about 19. And I remember feeling like she would swallow me, feeling like her poems would eat me up, which is how she describes the ocean. And I started early, took my dog. Like I remember liking Whitman more.
00:18:34
Speaker
at the time and feeling kind of freaked out by Dickinson. And that was actually like really interesting for me because I was not like some of your guests on this podcast have been really a poetry person in high school. I read enormous amounts of literature, but almost entirely novels.
00:19:01
Speaker
So I'm still very good on the Victorian novel and stuff, because I just read a lot of that. And then when I got to college, I remember feeling a few things, including that I was scared of destroying the novels that I loved by analyzing them. No such fear with the poems? No, actually, no.
00:19:30
Speaker
but that the poems seemed both richer and like more resistant to me in ways that I liked. And Dickinson was sort of really one of the first cases of a poet where I felt very clearly that I was never going to master this and I was into that. Like I was into the fact that like this was so much greater than I was, but I also found it terrifying.
00:20:00
Speaker
And then in graduate school at Chicago, I had a few sort of powerful encounters with Dickinson. One was in my very first quarter there, I was taking a class with Lauren Berlant.
00:20:17
Speaker
who, and I was like very overwhelmed and I didn't know what I was doing. And she pulled me aside at one point and suggested that we have coffee and we did. And I remember sort of being like, why did she want to have coffee with me? Is she gonna tell me that I'm like not cut out for this? Like what's going on? And she's not someone I ever got to know well. That was the only class I ever took with her or with, I should say with them. And I apologize for that. When I knew Lauren,
00:20:46
Speaker
Lauren went by she her and Lauren asked me to have coffee and I remember just sort of chit-chatting with with Lauren in this sort of like kind of Slightly bewildered way and at one point Lauren looked at me and said I think you'd like this book called lyric time by Sharon Cameron and I have no idea I have no idea what
00:21:14
Speaker
prompted that suggestion. They saw something about you that was there. I guess, but we weren't talking about Dickinson. But I read Lyric Time and it bowled me over. You've called it your origin story to me. I did call it my origin story. Sorry, I don't know if that was for public consumption. No, that's fine. I like the idea of academics having superhero origin stories.
00:21:45
Speaker
That was the radioactive spider that bit you was lyric time. Right. That's actually extremely accurate, I think. And then I decided to write a dissertation chapter on Dickinson. And my dissertation was fairly different than my book. But it just chewed me up. It was the first chapter I tried to write. I would write like 80 pages and throw them out and start again. And I think I did that like four times. And I do not recommend this.
00:22:14
Speaker
But it was clear to me that if I could manage to write this chapter, then I could write the dissertation. And if I could not write this chapter, I could not write this dissertation. And it took me a long time to figure out how to write that chapter. And then I never looked at that again. And I wrote a book chapter on Dickinson without even opening that file. But I did write a book chapter on Dickinson with a lot less
00:22:43
Speaker
drama internally, at least, I think. But I still, like I said, I mean, I guess I feel happy with it, but don't feel like I have like conquered Dickinson in any meaning. Well, thank God for that.
00:23:03
Speaker
As I told you, I'm just going to say, I don't know a lot in this podcast. Who wants to feel like they've conquered the literature? I don't know. Probably people do. I don't think I want to feel that way. Well, maybe also in the course of our conversation, there's part of me that wants to ask you more about why lyric time and so on, but actually, I think maybe the wiser bet is to defer that.
00:23:30
Speaker
and hope that some version of your accounting of why that book, that book by Sharon Cameron so moved you, will sort of bubble up in the conversation we have about this poem.
00:23:45
Speaker
And I think I think it's probably high time that we we hear the poem read aloud. So would that we had a recording of Emily reading this, reading this for us. But but we're going to we're going to have to content ourselves with Johanna Winett reading the poem. Johanna, will you read it for us? Yes. My life had stood a loaded gun.
00:24:12
Speaker
in corners till a day the owner passed, identified, and carried me away. And now we roam in sovereign woods, and now we hunt the doe. And every time I speak for him, the mountains straight reply. And do I smile such cordial light upon the valley glow? It is as a Vesuvian face had let its pleasure through.
Understanding the Poem's Structure
00:24:40
Speaker
And when at night, our good day done, I guard my master's head, tis better than the eider duck's deep pillow to have shared. To foe of his, I'm deadly foe, none stir the second time, on whom I lay a yellow eye or an emphatic thumb. Though I, then he, may longer live, he longer must than I. For I have but the power to kill,
00:25:09
Speaker
without the power to die. That's wonderful. Thanks, Johanna. So one thing I like to do, and I would do it even if we were in a seminar room and we were all looking at the poem, but I think it's especially helpful maybe given that this is a podcast and some people may be driving or whatever and aren't able to look at the text.
00:25:37
Speaker
is just to do a bit of describing of what the poem on the page suggests to you sort of as a whole before we back up and start at the beginning as it were. So as so many of Dickinson's poems are, it's in quatrains of four-line stances. You
00:25:58
Speaker
alluded earlier on, Johanna, to some of what might be a slightly more complicated story than that, given what the poem looks like in manuscript. But tell us, what do you notice about it as you look at it? Yeah, so it's six quatrains. Dickinson commonly wrote in quatrains, or at least that's how we've lineated the poems now. And they're in what's called common measure,
00:26:28
Speaker
or hymn measure sometimes, that's what it's called too, which is where the first and the third line are iambic tetrameter and the second and the fourth line are iambic trimeter and the second and the fourth line rhyme with each other. This is a really well-known stanzaic form. It's really similar to like what ballads are written in as well as hymns. It means that you can sing Dickinson's
00:26:56
Speaker
poetry to various tunes, including Amazing Grace and the theme song from Gilligan's Island. I think you were going to say that later. Which I will not do on the podcast. Right. So there's that. So you said tetrameter and trimeter.
00:27:18
Speaker
Tetrameter, for people who don't know, is a line with four metrical feet in it. So four accented syllables. Trimeter with three. So in terms of the length of the lines, four, three, four, three, not a syllable counts, but as a number of feet in the lines with the number of stresses in the lines. And she's not like
00:27:45
Speaker
super regular about even that scheme that you've described, right? Right. In this poem, it's fairly regular for a Dickinson poem, although there are lots of other poems that she's not writing in quadrains at all. But this is sort of one of her most commonly used poetic forms. Right. And and she takes a form that would have been
00:28:11
Speaker
very well known as a hymn form and so it makes it something sung collectively and makes it sort of this lyric we could say for or it's understood to be that with a single speaker. So it's pretty interesting I think. It's so interesting. It's almost like you know the sense I've had is like she's got this tune running in her head and it's just always going there and you know like you get the poem and see what words come down to the tune that's already going
00:28:40
Speaker
with all kinds of interesting variations that then happen once the words start to materialize. Yeah, and the other thing I'll say about this poem on the page too is there are variant words in this poem. Yeah.
00:28:57
Speaker
There's one that I'm really curious about near the end, I bet you can guess. Art? Yeah. So Dickinson, in the fascicles, these are what are called fair copies. They're not drafts. They're final. There's not cross outs or mistakes.
00:29:17
Speaker
but there are also in a number of the poems what are called like variant words or variant lines or sometimes even variant stanzas where there's a little option to like choose your own adventure where there's an asterisk and then at the bottom of the page you can sort of sub in another word for that one. So in this poem for example it could be instead of we roam in sovereign woods it could be we roam the sovereign woods instead of
00:29:46
Speaker
the deep pillow to have shared, it could be the low pillow to have shared. Instead of none stir the second time, it could be none harm the second time. Or the last one is for I have but the power to kill and it could be for I have but the art to kill without the power to die.
00:30:08
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So it's funny because if you look at what scholars will call a variorum edition, and one such edition exists, I have it open in front of me right now, you'll see at the end of the poem that the editor has given you the possible textual variations on different lines and so on.
00:30:31
Speaker
And with some poets what that signals is like, well, they published it two different ways, or we have drafts and it's not clear which is the final draft. But here it's more like the editor is simply recording the variation that was built into what we would want to otherwise take as the final version.
00:30:48
Speaker
Right. So it's not, and Sharon Cameron has another book called Choosing Not Choosing. I was going to say. Yeah. Is this an example of choosing not choosing? Yes. But it's not that this is unfinished. And that in its finished form, it has other possibilities. And I guess it raises questions about what we mean by finished to begin with. Definitely.
00:31:17
Speaker
Ordinarily, we might think, well, the published version. Now, sometimes there's a question, I mean, in contemporary poetry, there can be the question about like, well, do we mean the, you know, if there is a change made between a magazine version and a book version, that can raise sort of interesting textual questions. But for Dickinson, of course, who didn't publish really, except, I mean, unless we consider the fascicles to be a kind of publication,
00:31:47
Speaker
And do we know much about like, did the fascicles like, what were they for? Did they, were they meant to circuit? Was she? It doesn't seem to be that they were circulated. They were bound. She sewed them together with little holes on the side and tied them together. But yeah, her poems circulated in letters. Right.
00:32:12
Speaker
Um, but this one, at least if this one circle, yeah, this one circulated in letters, the letter didn't survive. Right. But so that's the careful way to phrase it. Yeah, that's right. So, um, so yeah. Okay. Um, so that's right. For people who don't know, like many of the poems we have by Dickinson will have
00:32:29
Speaker
There's a version she put in a letter and another version in a fascicle. Sometimes it's just in the letter and not in the fascicle. And then sometimes it's on like a loose scrap of paper. Back of an envelope. Yes, right. And there are volumes you can get that have been recently published that give you a kind of tactile impression of that sort of thing. OK, so let's back up now, Johanna. My life.
00:32:55
Speaker
The first stanza in the first two words of the poem are my life, and in the final line of that stanza there's a me.
Interpreting 'My Life' and Its Ownership
00:33:04
Speaker
So just to remind listeners of that stanza, my life had stood a loaded gun in corners till a day the owner passed identified and carried me away.
00:33:19
Speaker
What do you understand my life? What do you understand my life to refer to? Is it different from me? And if so, how? There's a lot of things in this poem that are not quite synonyms with each other, like my life and me and master and owner, for example, or even like Rome and Hunt, right? So there's like a lot of things that seem very similar but are not quite the same. And
00:33:49
Speaker
I think that what Vex is, I mean, this poem has been written about by like everyone. Everyone important who has written on Dickinson has written about this poem. There's no consensus. There is something like 55 articles, I think I saw Susan Stewart say in her article about this poem.
00:34:15
Speaker
Susan Howe lists nine or ten readings of what my life could mean here, the first two lines of the poem. Do you want to talk to us about some of, as you think about it, what seem like the most, I don't know, likely possibilities?
00:34:40
Speaker
One of the things that's interesting for me is how vivid this is and how immediately like even undergraduates are like hooked in to this poem. What gives it that quality in your view? I mean, you said vividness, but say more about that. Yeah, well that there's, it is immediately available to like various kinds of allegory. Right. So like, I think,
00:35:07
Speaker
the sense of potential energy that has been unrecognized. Right, so we can understand what it might mean in the ordinary course of a human life to refer to it as a loaded gun. Yeah, or to be in corners, although there's readings of even that phrase in the 19th century usage.
00:35:34
Speaker
But what is it to be unused or unuseful or not recognized as powerful? And I think it's immediately apparent why this poem has been so important to feminist scholars of Dickinson to have the potential energy to be a loaded gun, but not have any kind of application for that energy.
00:36:04
Speaker
And that it's both immediately apparent what that's like and also profoundly strange to say my life had stood a loaded gun in corners because there's a literalness too of a gun in a corner.
00:36:23
Speaker
standing there. So, like, is the standing there figurative or literal? It's not clear immediately here. Like, are we talking about a person or are we talking about a thing? And that kind of uncanny valley between people and things, which is, again, like, so important to feminist reconceptualizations of Dickinson, like, runs throughout her work and is always a little bit, I think,
00:36:53
Speaker
charged and unsettling. Yeah, I mean, there's something that's really nicely said. I think there's something, right, that is so, and perhaps this is misleadingly so, but so kind of easily graspable in a kind of allegorical way about what it might mean to say that my life had stood a loaded gun. So in all of the ways you've just described and others besides, we can imagine lives that are like this.
00:37:23
Speaker
we might sometimes feel that our own life is like this if we feel as though we have some kind of power that's not being recognized or deployed in the world. And so it encourages us in a way, at least encourages me, also say me, it encourages me to start to read it allegorically. Okay, so the loaded gun is sort of allegory, my life is like that sort of untapped potential,
00:37:53
Speaker
And then we get another character, the owner. And for me, it's suddenly impossible to identify who that owner might be.
00:38:11
Speaker
Yes. The allegory, you're invited in and then the car breaks down. Well, I think you're invited in and then the car breaks down and then you're presented with various wrenches or jump-starter-y kits. I don't know how to repair cars. We're allegorizing allegory now. Go on. You can get it going again.
00:38:36
Speaker
Yeah. So what are some of those kits? You can say, oh, the owner is a lover. The owner is her muse. The owner is God. These are all pretty established readings of this poem. Or as Susan Stewart's reading, it's a dog talking and the owner is the owner. It's a brilliant reading. It's also deflating in some ways.
00:39:03
Speaker
And so you can sort of jumpstart it again. You're like, oh yeah, okay, okay, I get it. Like this is, and this is like, you know, Helen Venler's sort of take on it. Like this is a story about inspiration, that like poetic inspiration, that the speaker had this kind of potential energy like stuck inside of her. And then the owner passed
00:39:33
Speaker
and identified her, which again, you're like wrenching around the poem a little bit here. You're like monkeying with some of the bolts and carried me away into being a poet. Identify the subject and the object of that verb could go either way though. Sorry, explain what you mean by that. The owner passed, identified.
00:40:01
Speaker
Who is identifying whom? The owner could be identifying the gun and saying, oh, I am the owner of this gun slash person. Or my life as the gun or whatever. So the owner could be identifying the gun. Or it could be that the gun slash person, my life, is identifying the owner. The owner passed, identified.
00:40:29
Speaker
And if that were the case, would that... I mean, the subject of the fourth line of the carried must be the owner, right? Yes, I think so. Because it's in carried. But the confession, and then I guess we should have said this earlier when I was talking about the poem on the page. There's lots of dashes. Oh, yeah, right. Dickinson's famous dashes. So say something about how... How do you talk to students about those, Johanna?
00:40:56
Speaker
How do you think about them yourself? Do they mean something special here, or do they always sort of do the same kind of thing? Well, let's say that Dickinson tends to put dashes where other people would put periods, commas, colons, and semicolons. And sometimes she puts them where people would not put anything, right?
Dashes, Indeterminacy, and Reader Engagement
00:41:14
Speaker
Or breaths, maybe.
00:41:19
Speaker
I mean, some people get into the various lengths of the dashes in the manuscripts. I don't really get into that, although cool. I think I would like to learn more about that. As with many things Dickinson or maybe poetry in general, with students, I tend to be like, what do you think?
00:41:44
Speaker
I mean, I guess one thing to say is like sort of related to the variant question and the choosing not choosing kind of idea is that, I mean, just in your brief gloss now, and I say something similar, like, you know, one thing you could do to students is to say like substitute, you know, and editors did this to Dickinson, of course.
00:42:05
Speaker
is take the dashes out, put other punctuation in, and you have to make choices suddenly. And maybe what the dashes are doing is preserving the possibility of not making the choice. Yes. And I think it's really interesting to ask students, well, what changes if we put a period there instead of a dash? But the reason I'm able to read identified both ways is that it's surrounded by dashes. The owner passed dash, identified dash, and carried me away.
00:42:35
Speaker
So it could either be sort of like a positive to the owner, like the owner who was identified, right? By me, presumably. Or it could be the owner passed as one verb, comma, here's another verb, identified. Yes. And here's the third verb, carried me away. Right. And the line break comes after identified. So that also gives a little bit more flexibility in that it separates it from carried.
00:43:03
Speaker
Yeah, I wanted to ask you something about carried me away. Yeah. Sorry, I don't know if you were if you were gonna say something else to say that. Okay, what I was gonna say is that all of this is only interesting in terms of like what the stakes of it are.
00:43:21
Speaker
Yeah. What do you mean by that? So like, um, like what does it matter that identified could be read in either way? Right. What does it matter even that there are dashes? Yeah. So like it's cool because like no one else is doing this quite the way that Dickinson is doing it. But, um, the ambiguity or even I think could be called like indeterminacy of a lot of Dickinson.
00:43:47
Speaker
is only interesting to me in terms of what it tells us about what's going on in the poem. So with identified, I say it's not clear who's the subject and who's the object there. But that's also because it's not clear throughout this poem who is the subject and who's the object. What subjecthood is in this poem, what objecthood is in this poem is up for grabs.
00:44:16
Speaker
Right. And so I identified like the fact that it can sort of swing either way is like, cool, but only sort of cashes out interpretively, because it sort of is a window into sort of seeing what else is going on in this poem. And that like, we're not sure if the gun is powerful as a subject or only as an object.
00:44:45
Speaker
Is it choosing things or not choosing things? And so Cameron's book, Choosing Not Choosing, he's about making a choice to sort of let indeterminacy stand. Which I think is like- Which might look to the world like not making a choice. Right. And I think that's really interesting, but also for me at least,
00:45:11
Speaker
want to sort of think about like, well, what matters about the indeterminacy here, even down to the level of the dashes? And so like, what's lost if we were to lose them is actually an important question as opposed to a classroom exercise to kill time or something like that, because it's about like, well, what's the point of the indeterminacy?
00:45:37
Speaker
That was what I was going to say. What were you going to say? I think I was going to ask you about a phrase whose reading might be an instance of the thing you were just describing, which is carried me away.
00:45:53
Speaker
I don't know whether the kind of idiomatic use of like, oh, I got carried away as we might use it to signal what a kind of emotional overwhelm of our reason or something would have been as available to Dickinson. So we could look into that and try to figure that out. But even if it's not of
00:46:23
Speaker
I guess, so here's my question to sort of use some of the terms that you've just given us, Johanna, but it's now a question for you. Because you've got to do all the heavy lifting here. I'm noticing that carried me away might mean something literally that you do to an object that you pick up and take somewhere.
00:46:49
Speaker
But it also is a way of describing a kind of emotional state or psychological state. And so what I want to know using your terms here is like, what are the stakes of that ambiguity? Does that matter? I think it does matter. I think it ties back into whether we're talking about an object or a person.
00:47:09
Speaker
that only a person with like subjectivity can talk about being carried away intellectually or emotionally. Whereas an object is just sort of like picked up. So it's another moment where it really tempts allegorical reading, but makes it clear that you can't actually just disregard the concern that maybe we're still in the literal.
00:47:43
Speaker
I'll also note here that there's a perfect line between day and away, the second line and the fourth line.
00:47:52
Speaker
And a lot of times, that's what's supposed to happen in common measure, but a lot of times it doesn't in Dickinson's poems. Even in the second stanza of this poem. Yes. And so in this poem, the first and the last stanza have perfect rhymes. And so the others have slant rhymes or not really rhymes at all where you would expect.
00:48:15
Speaker
And then the other thing I think that's, one thing I like to ask students periodically is like, what kind of words are in this poem? Like what kind of words are in this first stanza? And identify. What kind of words are in this poem, Johanna? What kind of words are in this first stanza? Well, sometimes I say, if you had to say one of these words is not like the other, identified is not like the other words in the first stanza.
00:48:44
Speaker
identified as the only word that a kindergartner might not know, I think here. It's also not coincidentally Latinet compared to all the other words in this stanza. And I think that's pretty interesting too. Polysyllabic, right? Polysyllabic Latin root as opposed to Germanic Anglo-Saxon root.
00:49:14
Speaker
And I think that's pretty interesting. Oh, I guess it passed also, but even so like that's basically part of the same moment in the poem that the beginning of this poem says like this is how things were and then things changed. Yeah. And that's there in the kinds of words that are being used. But then the rhyme makes it so
00:49:41
Speaker
neat and calls back to that second line. But it doesn't actually feel as much like a departure as I think it might initially promise to be. And what the rhyme is on is it's on the day when everything changed. Right. And the away. And the away. Right. Yeah. And really, if the poem is kind of
00:50:07
Speaker
If the poem is telling a kind of before and after story, the before gets one line or one and a half lines if we're being generous, and everything else is after, right? Right, but then we have the repetition of, and now, and now, and now we're gnome in sovereign woods, and now we hunt the doe.
00:50:25
Speaker
Yes, and we get this first person plural introduced in the second stanza of the poem. And I think I'm remembering the way you read the poem to begin with, and I think I heard it again just now in the way that you read it, where the meter, the iambic
00:50:45
Speaker
kind of rhythm gets pretty regular and now we roam in sovereign, I mean, let me accentuate it, right? And now we roam in sovereign woods and now we hunt the dough. So we get the we and we get that kind of regularity of rhythm.
00:51:05
Speaker
If I was asking you, I mean, tell me what you think of this. If I was asking you earlier about like, well, who is my life in distinction to the me and who is the owner in relation to either of those things, at least grammatically, it seems, by the second stanza, those distinctions don't matter.
00:51:27
Speaker
Yeah, they seem like you've jump started the car by the second stanza. Like the things that seem like initially, like maybe these are problems, it's like, well, we are just continuing. And what do you make of what the we who are just continuing are actually doing? Can you extend the allegory into that? Yeah, there's some kind of owner figure and
00:51:59
Speaker
who is allowing the speaker to become powerful through violence. Every time I speak for him. Yeah. That speech is the gun going off.
00:52:19
Speaker
It seems like the speech is the gun going off. Right now we roam in sovereign woods. I actually think the sovereign thing is really interesting. I went on a long tangent at one point in class about like, I don't think this is the comments.
00:52:30
Speaker
I think this is like enclosed, like enclosure woods, you know, these are, which is only interesting, I guess, because like, I think Amherst actually has the commons, you know, so like, because Massachusetts towns have town commons as opposed to like, the woods being sovereign. So like, is this in the new world or is this in some kind of old world fantasy is not clear.
00:52:58
Speaker
We know it's after the invention of guns and down pillows, but that's basically it. And now we hunt the doe. Yeah.
00:53:10
Speaker
If this is a muse, poems are being written here is I think the allegorical reading. If this is a lover, like fun times are being had. The gun is going off. As it were. Yes, as it were. If this is a hunting dog, they are hunting.
00:53:37
Speaker
If there's untapped potential, it's now being actualized. It's being actualized, but it's being actualized through violence, right?
Violence, Allegory, and Power in the Poem
00:53:47
Speaker
And sometimes it's even read as gendered violence, hunting the doe. Yes, not hunt the deer, which it might have been. Right. Which would have been gender neutral, sorry. Right, but there's so many rabbit holes to go down here. I've read about
00:54:01
Speaker
that does were actually commonly hunted for venison in the 19th century, whatever. And also it's being described not just as violence, but as sort of speech every time I speak for him, the mountains straight reply. So like that's the gun firing. And the echo ringing out. And the echo ringing in the mountains. It's so interesting that the description of echo happens in a place that doesn't rhyme.
00:54:31
Speaker
That should. Right, it should rhyme. And you know, we have the we, we, and then the I, and then the him. So they're not totally the same thing. They're not, you know, the life and the owner have not been like fully combined here. Yeah, that's right. But there's a kind of, but the speaker is able to speak for the owner.
00:55:00
Speaker
The speaking—I mean, I can't think of any other—I mean, at least sort of within the metaphor or within the allegory or whatever, it seems clear that the speaking for him, the owner, if you're the loaded gun, that that must be the gun firing.
00:55:19
Speaker
What's less clear to me is what smiling would be in the third stanza. Ugh, I know. I feel like I keep picking on you. Explain this hard bit to me.
00:55:31
Speaker
I mean so like sometimes that's read as firing again but what it's really about is like it seems to be about like pleasure and do I smile like first of all the smile is not automatic it's like if if I smile right so one way to read and do I smile might be like right if I were to smile or and when I smile right yeah right such cordial light upon the valley glow
00:55:59
Speaker
So again, it seems to be like you could read it as like the flash from the gun. But again, the wheels are coming off. The wheels keep coming off this poem's allegories. It's like it's forgetting that it's a gun or something. Or it actually is a gun that thinks that, yeah, that's being sort of personified or it's a person that's being objectified.
00:56:27
Speaker
Which is, of course, like the state of women at this time. It's the state of enslaved people. You know, like this home has been read like that. It is the way that people talk about, for a long time, that people have talked about the muse and the poet, that you speak for the muse, that that's the poet's job. It's the way that people talk about, like,
00:56:54
Speaker
prophecy or prayer, religious experience too. So I don't know, this poem in some ways like reminds me a little bit of, there's a moment in James Joyce's Ulysses where it's like Hamlet and the Bible and the Odyssey, like they're all the same story about the lost son looking for the father and the father looking for the son. And
00:57:20
Speaker
And it sort of feels like I'm like, this is like so many things that could be the same story, but it can't quite maintain them all. It can't quite keep them all in the air at the same time. So
Embracing Diverse Interpretations
00:57:36
Speaker
then they're all just sort of there in different lines, one after the other. And any reading of this poem that tries to sort of be like, here is a unified reading of this poem, can't take in all of it.
00:57:52
Speaker
Fair enough. And maybe that's part of what's irritating. Yeah, and also what I liked. Yeah, yeah, right. So can we talk about the Vesuvian face? Because that seems like another kind of violence that is maybe. Yeah. So to remind people who don't know what Vesuvius even is. Yeah, so Vesuvius is a volcano near Naples that exploded and buried Pompeii. So I think Pompeii is the reference point in
00:58:21
Speaker
the Roman world. But it was also constantly erupting and was erupting during Dickinson's writing of this poem. Somewhere I wrote down the years it was erupting, but it was erupting through the 1850s into the 1860s. So it would have presumably been in the news. And throughout her poetry, she writes about Vesuvius as an image of destruction and also pleasure and release.
00:58:48
Speaker
Yeah. So and in fact, Audrey and Rich is like very celebrated. Oh, I think 1976 essay about Dickinson that reframed Dickinson for second wave feminists is called Vesuvius at home, which is one of the lines of Dickens from a Dickinson poem. So like a Vesuvian face is like a volcano felt
00:59:12
Speaker
Like if a volcano had a face, then when it erupts, that face would feel, would relate its pleasure. Yeah, so it's so interesting. Yeah, gone. But like a gun, I mean, this image makes sense to us as being like a loaded gun. Right. A volcano. Something that contains this potential energy. Yeah, that's sort of blocked up. Right. And then is released and is destructive.
00:59:42
Speaker
And of course what we want to do as like people writing in the wake of like Freud and so on is to think of, you know, repression and then a kind of breakthrough moment or, you know, anyway, a kind of an eruption of the unconscious. Sorry, one thing that just occurred to me too was, you know, there's that famous Dickinson line in the letter about like how she knows if it's poetry. If I feel as though the top of my head were taken off,
01:00:11
Speaker
Yes. It just struck me that that's an image of a volcano too. Yes. Right. Yes. Like a mountain with its head taken off. Right. That there's an image of sort of explosion upwards or outwards or something like that. And it's pleasurable. And that's pleasurable, which is I think part of why I'm like, it's okay that like, I don't love this poem the way that I love other poems, because I don't actually think this poem is interested in that.
01:00:41
Speaker
kind of love. I think this poem is sort of interested in pleasure and fear, which is what I feel relative to it.
01:00:48
Speaker
Oh, what's the kind of love you, like, just distinguish that from the kind of love you have elsewhere for like, I don't know, what were the other poems? Tell all the truth, tell it slant, or that's how they really took my dog. Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. I mean, not that, I just, I just mean in general, like you say, yeah, it's not interested in that kind of love. I want you to say more about that. Okay, tell all the truth and tell it slant. The second stanza of tell all the truth is, but tell it slant is
01:01:16
Speaker
as lightning to the children used with explanation kind, the truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind." And I remember being a graduate student, actually, I don't know if Orin remembers this, I remember having an argument with Orin about that stanza, and he was totally right in retrospect. But I thought explanation kind
01:01:36
Speaker
was an explanation of lightning that explained to children not to be afraid of lightning, because here's the scientific process behind it, it's static electricity, whatever. And Oren was like, no, when you have children, you don't tell them the truth about everything. You tell them the thing that makes them feel comfortable in the world.
01:01:59
Speaker
Like the explanation kind there is about the kindness of an explanation that lets you feel safe in the world, not like the science. I didn't have children yet then. But I think that's a poem that's interested in a kind of kindness. Like what is it that you need in order to feel at home in the world?
01:02:24
Speaker
And this poem has kindness or what might seem internally like kindness represented within it.
01:02:33
Speaker
but it's not relating kindly to you. I mean, I'm thinking about the fourth stanza, for instance, right? And when at night, our good day done, I guard my master's head, it is better than the eider duck's deep pillow to have shared. I mean, that's, if you,
01:02:55
Speaker
I don't know. That seems like care or something. I don't know. Well, it's care, but it's not intimacy. I see. For one. I mean, the gun is not sharing the gun, quote unquote, is not sharing the pillow with the master. And again, the master and owner, we think those are the same. What makes a good day is protecting. What ends the good day is the protection.
01:03:22
Speaker
presumably against us, for example, coming into this scene. There's a sort of guarding against of external forces, guarding my master's head. And then also there's not this trust, I think, but not
01:03:45
Speaker
but not intimacy. There's a sort of like, yeah. There's not like mutuality. No. There's also, I think I can mention here that Dickinson wrote three letters that we don't know if she ever sent to someone she addresses as master. Right. The master letters. The master letters.
01:04:04
Speaker
before probably before this poem um there's a lot of speculation about these uh there's some shared language with this poem very vaguely uh it's not exactly that they're kinky but it's not that they're not but it's not that they're not um so you know listeners could go look those up um but um right you know here too
01:04:34
Speaker
there is a sense of like a near miss with the erotic or something on the edge of the erotic. It also strikes me that the eider duck's deep pillow, I mean that's a fine way to describe a nice soft
01:04:50
Speaker
pillow that a person could lay their head on. But it also lays bare the violence that produced that soft pillow, right? Like some gun shot that duck. They shot a duck at least. I don't know how many ducks you need for a pillow. I don't either. It's a deep pillow. Yeah, more than one, I'm guessing.
01:05:13
Speaker
Although once it was a low pillow in a variant reading, the other reading is a low pillow as opposed to a deep pillow. So maybe the number of ducks depends on that.
01:05:23
Speaker
But yes, it's better. So one of the things I think is interesting in this stanza is that we have evaluation, like we have good, our good day done. I guard my master's head. Tis better than the eider ducks deep pillow to have shared. Like there are things that are less good and things that are better. Right.
01:05:47
Speaker
Um, here. And so there's a lot of, there's comparisons being made. Um, but we don't know. We don't know what the ruler is by which, by which these comparisons are being made. Well, I think in the, in the last case, isn't that the claim is that like the relationship wherein the gun guards, the master's head is a better kind of.
01:06:16
Speaker
a relation or is a better kind of relation to have than to share a pillow with a lover or something like that. Yes. Right. Okay. Or even the master's pillow.
01:06:29
Speaker
that guarding the master is better than sharing the pillow with the master. Right. OK. That does sound like I hear the dog now. That's right. Yeah. To foe of his, I'm deadly foe, none stir the second time, on whom I lay a yellow eye or an emphatic thumb. There's a slant rhyme for us, time of thumb. Say something about that stanza, Johanna.
01:06:58
Speaker
Now I'm just pointing at stances and saying, tell us something. It's, I don't know what to say about it in a way because it's like, again, as with so many things at home, it's on one hand, extremely straightforward. Like the gun is going to.
01:07:18
Speaker
protect the master with deadly violence. The gun has this kind of like absolute loyalty to the master, to foe of his, I'm deadly foe. None stir the second time, like the gun does not miss. On whom I lay a yellow eye or an emphatic thumb. And so then we're like back in the realm with a human here. And this is like,
01:07:48
Speaker
Right. It's like- Only humans, I think, have thumbs. Yeah, there might be some other primates that do. But humans don't have yellow eyes. Unless they're Frankenstein's monster or something. Right, or the very bad case of jaundice. Yeah, but sorry. In a way, it's funny because the allegorical reading we were offering at the beginning was, okay, so let's take the feminist one, right? There's
01:08:12
Speaker
my life refers to a particular woman's life, which is like a loaded gun in the sense that all of the ways that we've described it has this kind of unrealized potentiality in it. And then it gets to fire, because maybe this woman gets to write her poems or what have you.
01:08:35
Speaker
But then it's like within the allegory, the gun suddenly starts to become human, right? It sort of flips back again, right? It's like the gun which had objectified the human is now being personified. One of the things that's so interesting to me is not just that we've had so many interpretations of this poem, but we don't agree. I mean, I think that's interesting.
01:08:58
Speaker
but that also interpreting this poem is simultaneously so easy and so hard. Like it just really invites a kind of solving of it. Like it really invites people to be like, oh, like,
01:09:17
Speaker
if I put this piece in, if I say it's the muse or it's God or it's sex or something, then
01:09:30
Speaker
I can make sense of it as if it's like a crossword, but it won't let you do that, actually. It keeps turning again. So it's easy because it invites that, but hard because it then resists it. Yeah, I think so. A poem that was easy easy would invite it and reward it. It would be a riddle or something. Yeah. And a poem that was hard hard wouldn't invite it to begin with.
01:09:51
Speaker
Yeah, so I think like, and I don't want to attach too much value to poems that are easier in this way. I don't think it's better to be one way or the other. So like even I think, like a poem like The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams is not like easy to interpret. You can take, you know, an hour and a half with a class and
01:10:19
Speaker
get pretty far but not feel like you're done and it's so short. But it rewards interpretation. And this poem I think is incredibly coy with interpretation. I see. In that it invites it and then doesn't reward it. It's not easy to understand this poem but it's really easy to make arguments about it.
01:10:48
Speaker
which I think is really interesting. Maybe nowhere more than in its final stanza. Yeah. So I'm like, this is part of, I think my hesitancy in terms of offering like a reading of this poem is because I'm really interested in the fact that it has had so many readings and there is not one reading to rule them all.
01:11:17
Speaker
that the best Dickinson scholars read this poem and read it really differently, which is super cool. But I don't feel like I have a key for it either. I sort of... Is there something you can say about how that situation that you've just described and have just described is so exciting to you?
01:11:47
Speaker
I'm
Poetry, Mastery, and Interpretation Challenges
01:11:48
Speaker
paraphrasing now, the best Dickinson scholars read this poem and they don't agree about it. I mean, how is that like and unlike what the best fill in the blank scholars would say about some other poem? I mean, I feel as, because I think you're getting at something that's different from simply saying, oh, a poem is kind of,
01:12:14
Speaker
inexhaustible or there isn't a reading that once and for all settles a poem. I'm not even sure I'm asking the question clearly right now, but maybe I'm giving you something that you can work with. Yeah. I do think that sometimes
01:12:43
Speaker
There are just readings of poems that are so good that no one else tries. Or if they try, they build on a reading. And maybe there's some... So they might accept the reading, but then say, and here's what we can do beyond that, in the way that...
01:13:06
Speaker
Galileo's theories build on Newton's but don't dispense with them, right? And that can still be a counter argument. Like, yes, and can still be like a response to a counter argument, you know, so it's not that everyone is like always in harmony. But people feel really strongly about this poem. And
01:13:27
Speaker
have very different accounts of it. Like Sharon Cameron's account of this poem as like about how identity means death is really different than Virginia Jackson's and is really different than Susan Howe's who like reads this poem relative to child Roland and like is really different you know than Susan Stewart's and
01:13:58
Speaker
And that's, I think, really, it tells us something both about the kind of thing we're doing when we read poems. Yeah. It also tells us about this poem in particular as clarifying that activity for us. I guess what I'm wanting to ask you is how much in your view of what we do when we read poems is like mastery or
01:14:25
Speaker
Yeah, well, this poem is all about mastery. That's why I ask. The master, the past identified and carried me away. Like, is that what I'm doing when I read a poem? Do I identify something and then carry it away with me and make it speak for me? Right. And the mountains will answer to the thing you've made it do. And the mountains will answer because it's the only voice around, actually.
01:14:49
Speaker
In my chapter on Dickinson in my book, I write about her analogies, her use of analogies as a form of logical reasoning, and that this poem is an incomplete analogy. And so it has like this missing term, like a mad lib, and people can plug in all kinds of different things there, and it works. Which is to say, what I say there is like this poem is a loaded gun.
01:15:14
Speaker
Like this poem comes, like you come to this poem and it goes off. You plug in what you're interested in and what you're thinking about and what you see and it roars to life, like it goes.
01:15:30
Speaker
The loaded gun analogy would suggest that you don't quite, maybe that you don't quite plug in what you want to plug in because it's already got the, it's bullets, but you pointed at what you pointed at, you know, or something. Yeah. Right. We've got to talk about the final stanza. Yes. Though I then he may longer live. So this one is framed like a riddle and Dickinson's poems are sometimes compared to Riddle's. Right.
01:15:59
Speaker
But they're also sometimes compared to dictionary entries, which is interesting because that's actually the inverse. A riddle describes something and says, what am I? That's how the Exeter book of riddles works. And a dictionary entry
01:16:16
Speaker
starts, here's the thing, here's what it is. And the only rules really are like the words can include the word. Yeah, and people have written about how like Noah Webster, Webster's dictionary was also an Amherst, Massachusetts guy. So here it's, how can I make sense of this, what seems like a paradox? Yeah, read the stanza.
01:16:46
Speaker
Though I than he may longer live, he longer must than I. For I have but the power to kill without the power to die.
01:17:00
Speaker
I mean, Carmen, I don't have answers for you. It's in a very deep sense of the word. It's got wit, right? It's clever. Yeah. And I think it's a poem that actually does keep outwitting its readers, which is, I think, part of its difficulty is that it sort of
01:17:22
Speaker
beckons you along and then turns. But if we just tried, I'm going to try and you interrupt me, that though Ivan he may longer live, OK, if we're in the allegory and the eye designates a gun and the he designates a human who's carried that gun away, who is the owner of the gun, then it makes perfect sense in a way to say,
01:17:49
Speaker
I will I may live longer than he does because he's mortal and and I am metal and whatever and and so I mean the the thing that doesn't make sense about it is to say that that I is living in the first place but set that aside sure he longer must than I so that doesn't quite make sense but then it seems as though the third and fourth lines are going to explain why that
01:18:19
Speaker
conclusion has been reached. But may and must are, again, not the same thing. So I may longer live. Right. Yeah. And may can mean more than one thing. May can mean more than one thing too. But must could be just the force of feeling. He must, he must outlive me because I could not bear it if he were to not. Right. Or it could be... It's like a wish. Right. Yeah.
01:18:45
Speaker
Or it could be that that's a determined fact or some kind of necessary condition or something like that. So it's not clear what that is there. He longer must than I. But the reasoning is, for I have but the power to kill.
01:19:09
Speaker
without the power to die. So as I try to retrofit that explanation into the thing that it must be explaining, as it were, and I realize I'm on your turf here talking about explanation, it seems as though it's because the gun can't die, it sounds paradoxical that he must outlive me.
01:19:36
Speaker
Yes, because I won't. Is it because is it something? Could it be something like because I, the gun, won't die a natural death? If I'm all alone, I won't die. But maybe he can end my life first and then he gets to die. Right. But is it like, are we talking about like a John Dunn poem here, you know, with like people buried together? You're like, what are we talking about? So it's even. I think there's a way that you could read it as like a gun.
01:20:07
Speaker
I think there's a way that, you know, and this is a season, so you're reading, you could read as a hunting dog or something. And I've been like, now I'm thinking of, sorry. I think you can, um, read it as like a sort of like account of like what life really is. Like, are you really alive? If,
01:20:32
Speaker
the enabling force of your life is not there anymore. You can sort of go to the abstractions so quickly in this poem. It's just like an elevator to abstraction, like you're just there. But I also don't really know. I mean, I think you end up sort of being like, well, what does it really mean to have the power to die?
01:20:54
Speaker
And there's a kind of reading of that that's like, well, okay, like a gun doesn't have the power to die because it's like metal and wood or something. So it's not alive in the first place, but if it's not alive in the first place, can it die even? Or like, do we only talk about things dying that in fact have lived? Okay, so then like, what does it mean to really live? Like if you're, we talk about that sort of in a,
01:21:24
Speaker
maybe literal way of drawing breath and being an organism and so on. But like we also talk about, well, like really living is different. Yeah. I'm kind of toying with the distinction here now to go all the way back to the first two words of the poem, my life.
01:21:51
Speaker
and maybe if we could, sorry, so the distinction would be, let's be careful about it. My life isn't exactly the same as I. My life is, you know, I, whatever I am, I exist, but my life is like, is the shape of that existence over time is the, it's full duration.
01:22:16
Speaker
And would it make a kind of sense, or could it maybe, I think maybe it could, this is what I say I'm toying with, that like, I can die, in fact, I will, but my life can't die. Like, insofar as my life is a thing, it doesn't have the power to die. Like, if it does, because if it does, I don't know, like, definitionally, to go back to what you were saying, what it is is like a living thing. Yeah.
01:22:45
Speaker
Whereas I'm a thing that's alive, which might become a thing that's dead, will become a thing that's dead. I think you're making the mountain straight reply. How so? I mean, I think you're sort of doing this thing that the poem asks you to do, which is to solve its problems. And then it'll be really loud when it does, because that's a very powerful account of how we should understand a life.
01:23:15
Speaker
And it's not one that I would have come up with, which is like cool. And like why I like teaching in general and talking to people and like why this is so fun. But yeah, I mean, I do think this poem is like asks you to do that kind of work. And then it's really, you know, Vesuvian. It's fun. And it's also lists the top of your head off. Yeah. And lets its pleasure through.
01:23:44
Speaker
Unless it's pleasure crew. But it also feels potentially destructive or like harm is one of the variant words. Yeah.
01:23:55
Speaker
Oh yeah, that was the variant word that I said I'd want to talk about, but that we didn't. Harm and art. Yeah, it might be, for I have but the power to kill without the power to die, or it might be, for I have but the art to kill without the power to die. I mean, art and power seem synonymous enough. Maybe they're like those near synonyms that you were describing earlier. But if it were art and not power, then it would seem to be pointing at whatever distinguishes the one from the other. Yeah.
01:24:26
Speaker
The art to kill. You see Sylvia Plath here, too. I've been thinking of her throughout this conversation, actually. This reads like a Plath poem. It reads like a Plath poem. You see what you learned from Dickinson here. Johanna, obviously, this is one of those cases, I think every one of these conversations I have is where we could just keep on going.
01:24:54
Speaker
We were going to try to stick to an hour. Yeah, we were going to try to stick to an hour. We didn't. And I think we both have our children to get from school or whatever. So we're going to have to cut it short. But maybe before we go, I can ask you to read the poem for us one more time. Yeah.
01:25:13
Speaker
My life had stood a loaded gun, in corners, till a day the owner passed, identified, and carried me away. And now we roam in sovereign woods, and now we hug the doe. And every time I speak for him, the mountains straight reply. And do I smile such cordial light upon the valley glow? It is as a Vesuvian face hath let its pleasure through.
01:25:42
Speaker
And when at night, our good day done, I guard my master's head. Tis better than the eider duck's deep pillow to have shared. To foe of his, I'm deadly foe, none stir the second time, on whom I lay a yellow eye or an emphatic thumb. Though I that he may longer live, he longer must than I, for I have but the power to kill without the power to die.
01:26:11
Speaker
Johanna Winant, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. It was a real pleasure to talk with you and to talk about this poem.
01:26:21
Speaker
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