NATURE AND THE SELF: DICKINSON, BISHOP,PLATH, AND OLIVER
The importance of the natural world can be traced through time within the context of many disciplines, including science, religion, and literature, to name a few. Not only do humans rely on nature for survival, but many have learned to depend on nature for inspiration. During the early nineteenth century, American literature, under the influence of Romanticism, depicted nature as a source of “knowledge,” “refuge,” and “revelation” (Reuben). Works by male authors of the era—such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman—became instrumental in shaping contemporary and future writers’ ideas about nature. Specifically, American women poets of the nineteenth century and beyond have used nature to orient the poet’s place in the world by seeking the wisdom and escape that the natural world offers. Major female poets—Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Mary Oliver—all use nature as subject matter in a variety of ways, and a common link between these poets is their use of nature as metaphor in relation to the self.
Similarities exist in how each poet develops message and content. For instance, word choice, symbols, and images provide several examples of how a reader can link these authors, with some associations stronger than others. However, a reader can reference each poet’s biographical information in an effort to unravel particular styles and stances. Whether or not the authors intended for their personal lives to line the poems like shelf paper, connections between the personal and poetic undeniably exist. Dickinson, Bishop, Plath, and Oliver share a common treatment of nature as metaphor that parallels biographical details about their lives. In addition, each poet portrays a distinctive desire to merge fully with nature in a way impossible to achieve while physically alive. A close reading of selected poems will result in a progressive portrayal of the American female poetic mind grappling with issues of spirituality, a sense of place, and identity as explored through nature.
Emily Dickinson: 1830-1886
Emily Dickinson led a unique life, held unconventional viewpoints, and spent the bulk of her later years devoted to writing poetry. She received an education from both Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where her ideas about religion and society molded into those much different from the norms of her community. This nineteenth-century poet wrote much of her work under the unusual circumstances of seclusion, and Dickinson did not aspire to publish, even though she wrote over 2,000 poems and communicated with a select few about her work. She wrote in an experimental, original style, and her content complemented the form. Her poetic power lay in her ability to use an everyday backdrop to present complex ideas in sharp-edged, compact stanzas often following a rhyme scheme.
Dickinson continually questioned and searched for meaning, and her poems can leave a reader with many unanswered questions. Throughout her poetry, she isn’t afraid to approach the world with honesty: “Despite Dickinson’s fanciful image and allegories, her poems insist on their own kind of uncompromising realism. They speak of the universal human effort to imagine experience in reassuring terms, but they do not suggest that reality offers much in the way of assurance…” (“Emily” 1042). While the poetic legend didn’t shy away from exposing nature’s unforgiving, unsentimental qualities, she also felt free to approach the subject with perpetual awe, trying to breach the boundary between human life and eternal knowledge. In a number of poems, she uses nature as metaphor for something separate from the self, ultimately exposing an illusive and invisible borderline. The qualities of the natural world she identifies and interprets are represented in varying tones through interesting symbols and word choice. She mirrors the ambiguity of nature in her own writing by leaving much unsaid and unexplained to the reader. She uses the uncertainty to her advantage in her sustained search for nature’s many revelations.
Another poem exploring the mysteries of nature through the limited knowledge of a human lens opens “What mystery pervades a well!” This line describes an interaction between speaker and nature, with an idea of eternal separation concluding the poem. The six four-line stanzas lack significant punctuation and employ an ABCB rhyme scheme of exact, vowel and suspended rhymes; each stanza offers an experiential snapshot of the speaker’s journey. In this poem, Dickinson uses multiple elements of nature in metaphorical ways to describe the positions of humans. Specifically, the poem begins with an idea of wonder and confinement, as presented through a device used by humans:
What mystery pervades a well!
That water lives so far—
A neighbor from another world
Residing in a jar
(1-4)
Based on this stanza, an unseen boundary exists between man and the water encased by the earth. In addition, Dickinson compares humans to vegetation when she personifies “grass.” The speaker states that “The grass does not appear afraid…” and ponders the physical position of the “grass:” “…Can stand so close and look so bold / At what is awe to me” (9, 11-12). These lines reveal a common human fear of the unknown, as well as show the aggressive manner of those who believe they master nature. This leads to a further interpretation that perhaps Dickinson is questioning whether or not the “grass” has the ability to understand. Dickinson also shows the close discernable link between humans and nature by contrasting “grass” with “sedge.” Sedge resembles grass but has solid stems. The “sedge” remains distinct in the poem and is placed specifically by “the sea.” The superficial likeness pointedly relays the interconnected nature of man and earth.
Dickinson switches to a human perspective to further explore the idea of fear. In the penultimate stanza, she relays the haunting and mysterious qualities of nature:
But nature is a stranger yet;
The ones that cite her most
Have never passed her haunted house,
Nor simplified her ghost.
(17-20)
In this excerpt, nature is used to symbolize both a “haunted house,” as well as the “ghost” that inhabits it. While nature might be portrayed as an inspirational harbor, it can also embody alarming qualities. The complexities of this quatrain are explored in Yuto Miyata’s article, “The Rejection of the Traditional Idea of Nature in Emily Dickinson’s Poems”: “The word ‘haunted,’ originally meaning to be visited by a strange form of a spirit, may imply that nature is haunted by an unidentified ghost. Perhaps this unidentified ghost is nature’s inner truth: it can never be revealed to man, though it has many outer aspects to be observed and to make man imagine what they stand for. Nature never permits simplification by Dickinson” (81). In addition, the notion of a home, where one resides, should be comforting. However, the home that nature provides is an unsettling rather than reassuring environment; in fact, this dwelling’s occupants are figures of death. Dickinson concludes the poem with an ironic statement that shows the knowledge of nature is actually lessened as one becomes more aware of its greatness: “That those who know her, know her less / The nearer her they get.” Even though the reader is given a succinct message at the end, it doesn’t dilute the speaker’s quest for understanding already presented. According to this poem, the mystery of nature will continue to evolve and increase as an individual becomes more intent on scrutinizing its mysteries. Consequently, the line the speaker seeks to cross in order to receive wisdom and a retreat seems to shift farther away with each step similar to the movement of a horizon.
Dickinson’s treatment of nature is various and contradicting because it sometimes renders
an incredible beauty, and other times exposes a relentless, unforgiving enigma. The poet once said that “The unknown is the largest need of the intellect,” and nature is clearly an entity she considered a mystery (“14” 83). A reader can conclude that Dickinson perused the pages of nature as she would a text book, as she perhaps did the Bible, in an attempt to assemble the elements into a coherent story. Through her poetry, she captured her quest to understand the illusive natural world by portraying ambiguous journeys. Her unconventional perspective and life parallel her unusual writing style and content; accordingly, her life story is as easily identifiable as her work.
