Emily Dickinson was sensitive to both the medium of sight and sound; she wrote for both the eye and the ear. Dickinson recognized that we depend predominantly on our sense of sight, thus, she incorporated visual features into her poetry. But she simultaneously stressed the importance of sound and listening. To Dickinson, sound succeeds where sight fails, passing through windows and doors, penetrating walls and floors, infiltrating corners and crannies (Fuss). Yet the contest between sight and sound presents a problem for the poet whose work requires both bodily senses fully and precisely to perceive her poems. Unfortunately, as a result of the printing, the vocal effects of Dickinson’s poetry are rarely perceived, becoming muted by the medium. This is exceedingly problematic; by neglecting the musical quality of her poetry, the entire essence of Dickinson is halved. It is with poem 733: “The Spirit is the Conscious Ear” that Dickinson deliberately draws our attention to the purposeful/powerful presence of sound in her poetry. This small but significant poem embodies sound in both its structure and content. Dickinson’s poetry is essentially vocal, thus, it is critical that we, as readers, become attuned to her radical rhythms and lyrical lines.
All of Dickinson’s poems speak to the reader with their own distinct voice, a lyrical voice characterized by a familiar hymn metric pattern. Alternating between four and three-beat lines, her poems follow the rhythm of the adopted hymn. She effectively uses the predictability of the meter as a contrasting backdrop to her content. As Stevie Smith explains in the Poetry Foundation’s “Biography of Emily Dickinson”,
“while certain lines accord with their place in the hymn — either leading the reader to the next line or drawing a thought to its conclusion – the poems are as likely to upend the structure so that the expected moment of cadence included the words the speak the greatest ambiguity”(Smith).
This is evident in the third line of her second stanza, “Outside the Castle — that Contain –”. Dickinson does not distinguish what is outside or inside the Castle; however, the line melds with the meter of the hymn. In this sense, Dickinson plays with deceptive cadence in her text, leading the reader towards resolution but failing/refusing to finalize her thought.
Sound is also signified by the way in which Dickinson punctuates her poems. Punctuation guides both the readers’ eyes and voice as she moves through Dickinson’s poetry, making it possible for the original orality of her poetry has been translated to print. Most notable is Dickinson’s dash, which is musically significant in multiple ways. To begin, she invokes the dash as a way to reach out to the reader, as an invitation to join her; similar to way a ligature connects notes to be sung. In “The Spirit is the Conscious Ear”, Dickinson ends the last two lines of the first stanza with dashes as well as the first, third and fourth lines of the second. In a sense, it is as though Dickinson is calling out, purposefully leaving words unspoken, craving connection, awaiting the voice that “when we hesitate and are silent is moving to meet us,” (Howe 22). Susan Howe, one of the pioneers in revealing and responding to the interpretive possibilities in Dickinson’s manuscripts, elaborates on Dickinson’s creation of hesitation in her text:
“…she built a new poetic form from her fractured sense of being eternally on the intellectual borders, where confident masculine voices buzzed an alluring and inaccessible discourse…a ‘sheltered’ woman audaciously invented a new grammar grounded in humility and hesitation. HESITATE from the Latin, meaning to stick. Stammer. To hold back in doubt, have difficulty speaking” (21).
By invoking human/vocal hesitation, Dickinson’s dashes also represent her deviation from the convention of masculine discourse; by creating hesitation, her poems seem more accessible to people. Dickinson did not write poems that provide answers but rather provoke the process of discovery. Her pregnable poetry crafts a particular kind of connection with her reader. According to Smith, “she asks the reader to complete the connection that her words merely imply – to round off the context from which the allusion is taken, to take part and imagine the whole”. In her poetry, Dickinson structurally binds seemingly ill-fitted fragments in a harmonic hymn, using sound to symbolically show that connections are essentially everywhere.
In addition to the incorporation of dashes in its composition, “The Spirit is the Conscious Ear” also has variants that highlight the vocal significance of Dickinson’s poetry. The most essential being in line 6, “There hangs a smaller Ear”; “smaller” can become “minor”. This is particularly interesting because minor, musically speaking, refers to one of the two modes of the tonal system; identifiable by the dark, melancholic mood of the melody. By incorporating this variant as a music metaphor, Dickinson not only tints the poem with her characteristic tragic tone; she also uses it to highlight the “Ear” described in the first line, “The Spirit is the Conscious Ear.“. This “Ear” represents the opposite of its reciprocal mate, the minor “Ear” described later; thus, the “Ear” in the opening line can be considered major. Musically speaking, as complementary mode of the tonal system, music written in major keys has a positive affirming character. Also significant is the period that punctuates this opening line. Periods are a rare mark in Dickinson’s poetry and with close observation, we discover Dickinson’s pun: by coupling/concluding the phrase “the Conscious Ear” with a punctuation mark indicating a pause, placed at the end of spoken sentences and other affirmative statements, Dickinson reasserts the Conscious Ear as the Major Ear.
Finally, “The Spirit is the Conscious Ear” opens with a definition through which Dickinson privileges the sensation of sound over sight, ear over eye. The Spirit to which Dickinson alludes to is elusive, but based on its capitalization, we can assume its importance; given Dickinson’s interest in theology, it is more than likely that “The Spirit” refers to the Holy Spirit. By using “is”, the first line invariably becomes a statement of comparison between “The Spirit” and the “Conscious Ear”. In the world of Dickinson’s poetry, “definition proceeds via comparison,”(Smith). In her effort to understand “The Spirit”, Dickinson recognizes that she cannot say directly what it is; its essence is unnamable. Instead, Dickinson articulates connection created from correspondence. By connecting “The Spirit” with the vertebrate organ of hearing, responsible for sensing sound, elevates the audible essence of her poetry.
Overall, “The Spirit is the Conscious Ear” is a poem about her poetry. It is most representative of importance sound plays in Dickinson’s poetry. Both in the structure and content of this poem, Dickinson dwells on the Ear and the sensation of Hearing. Continually playing with the homonym “Hear” and “Here” throughout “The Spirit is the Conscious Ear”, Dickinson further alludes to the significance of sound in her poetry; “Hear” referring to the ability to perceive sound and “Here” referring to the poem itself. Though her poetry is rarely considered a musical innovation, it is Dickinson’s melody that massages the reader, stimulating and soothing him/her with the sensation of sound.
Works Cited:
Dickinson, Emily. “733: The Spirit is the Conscious Ear.” The complete poems of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960. 359. Print.
Fuss, Diana. “Interior Chambers: The Emily Dickinson Homestead.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10.3 (1998): 1-46. Project Muse. Web. 20 Nov. 2011.
Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson. Berkeley, Calif: North Atlantic Books, 1985. Print.
Smith, Stevie. “Emily Dickinson: The Poetry Foundation.” Poetry Foundation. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Nov. 2011. <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/emily-dickinson>.
