There is a Languor of the Life

I keep coming back to Emily Dickinson.


Adrienne Rich, in 1975, wrote a powerful essay about Emily Dickinson called "Vesuvius at Home:
The Power of Emily Dickinson."   I have been re-reading that this past week. It came to me to re-read it after my Intro to Poetry class had a 75 minute class/casebook study of some of her poems and some of her letters and some letters about her.  She has been on my mind ever since.

Listen to this passage from the Adrienne Rich essay:

“….Dickinson was convinced that a life worth living could be found within the mind and against the grain of external circumstance: “Reverse cannot befall/ That fine prosperity/ Whose Sources are interior—.” (#395). The horror, for her, was that which set “Staples in the Song” —the numbing and freezing of the interior, a state she describes over and over:

There is a Languor of the Life
More imminent than Pain—
’Tis Pain’s Successor—When the Soul
Has suffered all it can—

A Drowsiness—diffuses—
A Dimness like a Fog
Envelops Consciousness—
As Mists—obliterate a Crag.

The Surgeon—does not blanch—at pain
His Habit—is severe—
But tell him that it ceased to feel—
The Creature lying there—

And he will tell you—skill is late—
A Mightier than He—
Has ministered before Him—
There’s no Vitality.

(#396)

 

and

 

For the poet, the terror is precisely in those periods of psychic death, when even the possibility of work is negated; her “occupation’s gone.” Yet she also describes the unavailing effort to numb emotion:

Me from Myself—to banish—
Had I Art—
Impregnable my Fortress
Unto All Heart—

But since Myself—assault Me—
How have I peace
Except by subjugating
Consciousness?

And since We’re mutual Monarch
How this be
Except by Abdication—
Me—of Me?

(#642)

 

This numbness is something that holds me . It's a true comfort zone. But it keeps me from writing poetry with the depth it deserves.   Give me some of your single-minded courage, Emily.