Emily Dickinson's Pivot of the Dao*

Tom Patterson Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas, U.S.A.

Abstract: More and more articles have been published encouraging the use of a Chinese lens on Dickinson's poetry (e.g.Kang, Uno, Chen and Patterson).This paper will use a Daoist lens to show how her writing captures a multitude of often contradictory perspectives in a number of conceptual areas.Her embracing this wide range of perspectives, as viewed in the classic Daoist text, the Zhuangzi, reflects a search for greater knowledge.Dickinson graphically refers to this broad business of hers as “circumference.” While Emily Dickinson has been criticized by some for her “homelessness,” for her poems having no center, no whole, yet from a Daoist viewpoint this criticism can be recalibrated into words of praise.When viewed through a Daoist lens her perspectivism reveals her skepticism, and her ability to hold more than one perspective in mind at the same time, both ways of looking at the world that Daoists, as expressed in the Zhuangzi, view as characteristic of higher wisdom.From a Daoist point of view each perspective, rather than compounding contradictions, is more accurately viewed as additional spokes added to the wheel of perspectives, the circumference that she so often mentions.

Key words: Emily Dickinson； perspectivism； circumference； Daoism； Zhuangzi

Though there is no direct or very clear evidence that Emily Dickinson was familiar with or had read Chinese Daoist or Buddhist literature, a number of parallels exist between her writings and Chinese Daoist works.Yanbin Kang has written a number of articles examining Emily Dickinson's poetry from a Chinese perspective.Uno writes on Dickinson's visit to the Chinese Museum in Boston and the possible impact of that on her interest in such concepts as “Nirvana,” and “nothing.”Patterson draws connections between Dickinson's creative development and the Daoist concept of wu-wei 无为 (nonaction).Chen focuses on Emily Dickinson's use of function words as a way of philosophically crossing cultures between China and the U.S..

This article will examine Emily Dickinson's poetry with reference to the concept of perspectivism as put forth in the Daoist text, Zhuangzi《庄子》(a.k.a.Chuang Tzu).Dickinson's poetry reflects the perspectivist attitude so prominent in Zhuangzi.This classic Daoist text from around the 5th century BCE advances the position that greater knowledge is preferable to lesser knowledge because greater knowledge encompasses a broader range of perspectives.These different perspectives can be gathered by focusing on alternative aspects or dimensions of something, or by placing yourself in someone else's shoes.

A perspectivist view of Emily Dickinson's poetry will show how her imaginative ability to inhabit different perspectives allows her to step into others' shoes and to view the world from a variety of perspectives.This article will show how her poetry captures a multitude of perspectives in a few representatively conceptual areas: God, flowers, animals and insects, other people, and home.Her seeking out of a variety of perspectives by expanding her viewpoints can be explained as a search for greater knowledge, and this search is captured graphically by Emily Dickinson in her repeated notion of her “business” being “circumference” which in many ways is quite similar to the Daoist notion of the pivot of the Dao.This in turn addresses the oft made criticism of Emily Dickinson's poetry, that it has no center, no unity to it.In fact, the “circumference” that she pursues has an open perspective that includes everything and doesn't privilege any particular one.

The opening of Zhuangzi contrasts the flight of the giant Peng bird that can fly 90,000 li in the air to obtain the bird's eye view of vast distance with the much smaller cicada and dove and their tiny views in comparison:

What do these two little creatures know? A small consciousness cannot keep up with a vast consciousness； short duration cannot keep up with long duration.How do we know? The morning mushroom knows nothing of the noontide； the winter cicada knows nothing of the spring and autumn.This is what is meant by short duration.In southern Chu there is a tree called Mingling, for which five hundred years is a single spring, and another five hundred years is as a single autumn.In ancient times, there was even one massive tree whose spring and autumn were each eight thousand years long.And yet nowadays, Pengzu alone has a special reputation for longevity, and everyone tries to match him.Pathetic, isn't it?

This passage shows the difference between lesser and greater knowledge—the giant soaring Peng bird's wide perspective is analogous with greater knowledge while its diminutive relative the dove or even smaller cicada have lesser knowledge.Here the scope of the perspective is the difference.Greater knowledge can also be obtained through a long life with its accompanying accumulation of perspectives over time as with the long-lived Pengzu.

In Chapter 17 of Zhuangzi the concept of expanding perspectives to gain greater knowledge is characterized as including a variety of contrasts: ancient and modern, full and empty, joy and sorrow, life and death, and beginnings and endings.Being contained to a limited perspective is compared to the perspective of a frog in a well.Attempting to obtain greater knowledge from such a restricted perspective is “like trying to survey heaven through a tube, or to measure the depth of the earth with an awl.Isn't it just too small? You'd best simply forget about it and go your way.”In this attempt at gathering different perspectives the Zhuangzi does not privilege one perspective over another: “From the point of view of the Course, no one thing is more valuable than any other.But from the point of view of itself, each thing is itself worth more and all the others are worth less.”The Course, the Dao, has an open perspective that includes everything, and doesn't privilege any over another, emphasizing that even opposites support each other: “When you understand the sense in which east and west are opposed to each other and yet indispensable to each other, you have clarified the allotments of their positive effects.”

Another way of increasing perspectives can include finding alternative ways of looking at something.For example, in the Zhuangzi story of Huizi and the giant gourd, Huizi sees this oversized gourd as useless because it cannot be used as a container.However, from another perspective, that of utility, the giant gourd could be used to make a raft.Similarly, in the story of the tree with knotted branches, Huizi views it as being without utility because its wood cannot be used for making furniture.He ignores the perspective of the tree's usefulness as a source of shade, because its wood is knotted and thus unattractive lumber for furniture.

Expanding perspectives to gain greater knowledge entails having different perspectives from one's own.Stepping into another's shoes is stepping into another perspective for as Chong Kimchong puts it: “the person constitutes or is a particular perspective.”This seeing of the world as someone else does involves “the pivot of the Dao,” which comes from Chapter 2 of the Zhuangzi in which opposite positions or perspectives are revealed to be complementarily included in their opposite：

“This” is also a “that.” “That” is also a “this.” “THAT” posits a “this” and a “That” - a right and a wrong - of its own.But “THIS” also posits a “this” and a “that” - a right and a wrong - of its own.So is there really any “that” versus “this,” any right versus wrong? Or is there really no “that” versus “this”? When “this” and “that” - right and wrong - are no longer coupled as opposites - that is called the Course as Axis,the axis of all course.When this axis find its place in the center, it responds to all the endless things it confronts, thwarted by none.

Being in this center position is an empty position, a place apart from any particular perspective, one that allows an appreciation of “all different perspectives from a neutral standpoint.”Only when one has become aware of the other perspectives through the pivot of the Dao can one see how both “this” and “that” are present in the “this.” Being in this position using the pivot of the Dao leads to a particular kind of understanding that is indicative of greater knowledge.This clarity comes through “our ordinary access to the world through individual perspectives ［...］ of the many differing perspectives that are available and of their limitations.”This is one of the central themes of the Zhuangzi, the unlimited perspective of the human imagination:

Through all the parables and anecdotes in the Zhuangzi, we are meant to consider what it would be like to be liberated from our confining, singular human perspective.On a metaphorical level, this means seeing the world as a butterfly, a bird, a tiger.On a more immediate level, this means understanding the world from another person's point of view.

So to briefly summarize, according to the Zhuangzi there is a greater and a lesser knowledge.The difference between the two is in the scope of perspectives that characterize each.Greater knowledge accepts or inhabits more perspectives than lesser knowledge.This knowledge is gained through a mechanism that the Zhuangzi characterizes as “the pivot of the Dao,” whereby one stands, as it were, at the neutral center of a circle of all possible perspectives and pivots through the radii of that circle.As one does so the radius that is characteristic of one's self, one's usual perspective, is, depending on one's viewpoint, abandoned or expanded into other radii that are characteristic of different perspectives.These include the perspectives of others, of opposing views, of different ways of looking.

It is revealing to compare the center that pivots with what is often said about Dickinson's poetry lacking a center.David Porter in his book on Emily Dickinson's early poetry covers a number of writers' comments on Dickinson's lack of a central theme.He cites many who have come to the conclusion that “the cohering principle is judged to be simply the fact that no principle inheres, that the character of the body of poetry is best described as chaotic.”Among those cited are Louis Untermeyer, who concludes that the only coherence lies within the tormented mind of Emily Dickinson； R.P.Blackmur, who suggests that her poetry can best be characterized as fragmented； and Porter quotes Jay Leda as writing of Dickinson's poetry being “omitted center:”

Porter writes that the poems “have no inherent order of priorities or perception.”Reading Dickinson in this regard provides a “special experience” that Porter describes as a series of lacks with no center to the experience.

She made no pact with her readers, gave them no plan of the whole.Her work lacks architectural dimension to direct the reader's activity within its space.In short, a reader emerges from the most empathetic and pleasurable immersion in the body of poetry quite unable to report its order of knowledge or perception.

However, this pivoting center is in keeping with Daoism, where such a static center would invalidate the pivot of the Dao, for no center can encompass the circumference of a circle.One of the common problems voiced by readers of the Zhuangzi is that it has no discernable theme, no single message that one can use as a guide to follow through the book.The Zhuangzi addresses the concept of monism demonstrating how from the pivot of the Dao, taking the rightness of whatever is before us as the present “this,” also entails the taking in of the opposite positions, messages, and themes:

But if we are all one, can there be any words? But since I have already declared that we are “one,” can there be no words? The one and the word are already two, the two and the original unnamed one are three.Going on like this, even a skilled chronicler could not keep up with it, not to mention a lesser man.So even moving from nonexistence to existence we already arrive at three—how much more when we move from existence to existence? Rather than moving from anywhere to anywhere, then, let us just go by the rightness of whatever is before us as the present “this.”

David Loy writes characteristically that the Zhuangzi ［...］ “offers a bewildering succession of anecdotes and arguments whose shifting tone is difficult and sometimes impossible to determine which voice represents the author.”It is generally acknowledged that this multiplicity of concepts, variety of viewpoints, and miscellaneous stories that the reader encounters is perhaps the central concept of the book.These unsolved difficulties that one encounters in the Zhuangzi mirror the difficulties one encounters in life as one wanders through it.In this light, the lack of a single viewpoint in Dickinson's poetry or its failure to adhere to a single path allows her to take the reader through the tangle of life with its multiplicity of unsolved issues and puzzling characteristics, becoming in its variety of perspectives an example of greater knowledge.Like in the Zhuangzi, Emily Dickinson takes up a position in a poem for consideration, then in a separate poem takes up the opposite viewpoint.Perhaps she is challenging us to decide which position is really hers, and then like the Zhuangzi, leading us to examine and answer which position is ours.Or perhaps these seeming paradoxes reveal a deeper reconciliation of poles.Both the Zhuangzi and Emily Dickinson share the eschewing of a unified theme or message other than the miscellaneous unsolved difficulties and considerations one encounters in wandering through the world.

This plurality of perspectives is characteristic of Emily Dickinson's writings on the key concepts that she returns to again and again in her poetry: God, death, immortality, heaven, nature and home.These various concepts pivot through a variety of perspectives, some at times contradicting others.Even though Dickinson never read Walt Whitman they both shared this characteristic—as he wrote: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Ostriker writes that this plurality of perspectives is characteristic of Dickinson:

［...］ when we read Dickinson's poetry at large, we see something larger: that she never worries about contradicting herself, that terms such as “God,” “Jesus,” “heaven,” and so forth, have an abundant variety of meanings, some of them highly ambiguous, many of them mutually incompatible, yet all of them convincing within the local perimeters of the poem.To read Dickinson on God (etcetera), then, is to divest oneself of the desire for a fixed and unitary eternal truth and to accept a plurality of contingent truths.

“God” appears in Emily Dickinson's poetry quite often—140 specific references by name in her poetry.The range of attributes that she ascribes to God is wide and varies greatly.This variety is characterized by many as a struggle, and commentators have speculated about the causes of this “struggle” with God.Keane gives a good summary of a variety of commentaries—some citing her Calvinist background, the Romantic tradition, Transcendentalism, others arguing that she is at heart a traditional believer, still others that she is a rebel.McIntosh,whose Nimble Believing is praised by Harold Bloom as having the “most subtly intelligent discussion of Dickinson's spirituality,” seems to come closest to a Daoist position in saying that the expressions of her spiritual longings are “central to her achievement as a poet.”Yet by maintaining nimble beliefs Dickinson does not allow herself to be assigned summarily to any “ideological camp.”McIntosh goes on to say that a strategy is needed “that allows for her variety in order to present her range as a speculative artist and a thinker.”One such possible strategy would be to embrace a variety of perspectives in her search for greater knowledge.

Dickinson's range of perspectives on God is indeed wide.In “Victory comes late - ,”she characterizes God as stingy: “Was God so economical? / His Table's spread too high for Us -.” In “I never lost as much but twice,”he is a “burglar” or “banker” depending on whether he is robbing or reimbursing.He is an adversary in “I had some things that I called mine - ”against whom Dickinson is prepared to retain counsel.Looking on his all-knowing capacity to spy makes her quite uncomfortable: “Take care - for God is near”or “The deepest hid is sighted first.”The thought of His all-seeing, never-sleeping eye ruins the very concept of heaven for her:

If God could make a visit -

Or ever took a Nap -

So not to see us -

but they say

Himself - a Telescope

Perennial beholds us -

Myself would run away

From Him - and Holy Ghost - and All -

But there's the “Judgment Day”!

Even when thoughts are not acted on - God is watching those as well: “Knows all - even thoughts not acted on.”Nonetheless, He can, when He remembers, guard and protect as a father should: “When God - remembered - and the Friend / Let go, then, Overcome - .”In one poem God is unquestioningly all-powerful: “It's easy to invent a Life - / God does it - every Day - .”Then from a different perspective she writes of his desired power as something to be wished for that she used to pray in hopes of receiving the benefit of, but no longer believes in:

If I believed God looked around,

Each time my Childish eye

Fixed full, and steady, on his own

In Childish honest -

And told him what I'd like, today,

And parts of his far plan

That baffled me -

The mingled side

Of his Divinity -

And often since, in Danger,

I count the force 'twould be

To have a God so strong as that

To hold my life for me

Dickinson feels that God has abandoned her, resulting in her then becoming as inconsequential as a bird stamping its foot with demands: “Of Course - I prayed - / And did God Care?”She characterizes him as a “disappointing God,”who even in her time of need could casually tell her: “Disciple, call again.”She writes that this stifles her begging: “There comes an hour when begging stops, / When the long interceding lips / Perceive their prayer is vain.”And yet she equates God with truth: “Truth - is as old as God - / His Twin identity,”and she admires his selfsufficiency, a God who needs nothing.God becomes the embodiment of her desire to be able to live without desire:

I tell thee while I waited -

The mystery of Food

Increased till I abjured it

Subsisting now like God -

She writes, at times of her absolute conviction of his existence, despite the inability to see him:

My soul - to find them - come -

They cannot call - they're dumb -

Nor prove - nor Woo -

But that they have Abode -

Is absolute as God -

And instant - too -

Then in the poem below, God is the hospitable neighbor that greets “man” when it is too late for him, and this “old neighbor” is amenable to prayer when life is not:

It was too late for man -

But early, yet, for God -

Creation - impotent to help -

But prayer - remained - Our side -

How excellent the Heaven -

When earth - cannot be had -

How hospitable - then - the face

Of Our Old Neighbor - God -

In other poems, she concludes despite her prayers and searching:

His House was not - no sign had He -

By chimney - nor by Door -

Could I infer his Residence -

Vast Prairies of Air

In one stanza Dickinson states, “I know that he exists,”later in that same poem she leaves the impression that “he” is cruel or even evil.This is the perspective that matches her view of an “approving God” not only indifferent to the pain and suffering on earth, but actually approving of it:

Apparently with no surprise

To any happy Flower

The Frost beheads it at its play -

In accidental power -

The blonde Assassin passes on -

The Sun proceeds unmoved

To measure off another Day

For an Approving God -

This poem gives the flower's perspective as one of happy acceptance of the decapitation that comes its way—a beheading that God approves of.Dickinson in a letter to Louise and Frances Norcross writes: “The career of flowers differs from ours only in inaudibleness.”She tried to give it voice in her poetry by entering into a flower's perspective and thus learning something of the challenge the flower faced “in the Bright Affair”：

To pack the Bud - oppose the Worm -

Obtain its right of Dew -

Adjust the Heat - elude the Wind -

Escape the prowling Bee -

Great Nature not to disappoint

Awaiting Her that Day -

To be a Flower, is profound

Responsibility -

She portrayed the flower's attitude as one of courage in “There is a flower that Bees prefer - ”:

The Bravest - of the Host -

Surrendering - the last -

Nor even of Defeat - aware -

Emily Dickinson, as in the previous example, often anthropomorphizes plants, animals, and nature in general.Some may claim that anthropomorphizing is wrong in that it extrapolates notions taken from our human experiences and applies them to the non-human.However, one could argue as Midgley does that the “degree of mutual understanding which we have, both with our own species and with others, is only made possible by attributing moods, motives and so forth to them on the rough model of our own and constantly correcting the resulting misunderstandings.”Another benefit is one of expanding perspectives through what is called “effectance.”Eplely, Waytz, and Cacioppo state that “Attributing human characteristics and motivations to nonhuman agents increases the ability to make sense of an agent's actions, reduces the uncertainty associated with an agent, and increases confidence in predictions of this agent in the future.”These are all gains in perspectives.Perhaps the attempt itself gives an insight into the ascriber's desire to stretch the flexible boundaries of social cognition, straining at the added perspective that Gould writes of:

Give me one minute—just one minute—inside the skin of this creature.Hook me up for just sixty seconds to the perceptual and conceptual apparatus of this other being—and I will know what natural historians have sought through the ages ...［But］ I am stuck with a panoply of ineluctably indirect methods.

This method of expanding perspectives is, as we have seen, widely used in Zhuangzi where anthropomorphized animals are used to expand one's social cognition regarding the narrowminded (the dove, the cicada, and the frog) as well as the enlightened, as in the stories of the Peng bird and the frog.Dickinson uses animal analogies often.For example, her poetry on robins is ripe with examples：

The Robin is the One

That speechless from her Nest

Submit that Home - and Certainty

And Sanctity, are best

Here the robin is seen as a thoroughly domesticated parent, comfortably at home, no longer flitting about as it did in its youth.Shackelford gives a long list of such poems: “Within my Garden, rides a Bird,”“The Rat is the concisest Tenant,”“A Rat surrendered here,”“The Judge is like the Owl - .”He goes on to explain that “these poems unsettle the reliability of the very human perceptions we cannot escape.This dual uncertainty is common in many of Dickinson's anthropomorphized descriptions, and it makes her animal poems a revelatory if often overlooked scene of her contemplations on “human knowledge and consciousness itself.”

At other times, her poetry on nature reveals a blank perspective, completely at a loss for how to depict it.In “Four Trees - upon a solitary Acre,”Dickinson takes the position that nature's role or purpose is unknown beyond its existence, its ability to maintain, its being.Here is one more perspective beyond her anthropomorphism or imaginative attempts to enter into the perspective of the world outside herself—rocks, plants, animals, other people, and God himself.All ultimately are unknown outside of imaginative leaps made by her:

What Deed is Their's unto the General Nature -

What Plan

They severally - retard - or further -

Unknown -

In other poems Dickinson challenges the perspective of looking down on smaller creatures.In “Our little Kinsman - after Rain,”Dickinson compares the vast difference between her and the worm with the vast difference between her and God.In this way the worm's perspective becomes, in a sense, mirrored in hers:

As I of He, so God of Me

I pondered, may have judged,

And left the little Angle Worm

With Modesties enlarged.

In other poems she shows insects as exemplars of how to live with effortless purpose.She gives us a glimpse of this with her perspective on the spider in a couple of poems.In “The Spider holds a Silver Ball” the weaving of the spider is shown to be at work “in unperceived Hands” from “Nought to Nought,” showing that despite the likely end of its work the spider enjoys itself, “dancing softly” as it is engaged in its creativity:

The Spider holds a Silver Ball

In unperceived Hands -

And dancing softly to Himself

His Yarn of Pearl - unwinds -

He plies from Nought to Nought -

In unsubstantial Trade -

Supplants our Tapestries with His - -

In half the period -

An Hour to rear supreme

His Continents of Light -

Then dangle from the Housewife's Broom - -

His Boundaries - forgot -

The spider, which practices its craft with single-mindedness, exemplifies in Daoist eyes a well spent life:

A Spider sewed at Night

Without a Light

Upon an Arc of White -

If Ruff it was of Dame

Or Shroud of Gnome

Himself himself inform -

Of Immortality

His Strategy

Was Physiognomy -

In these spider poems Dickinson is giving voice to the spider's perspective of effortless action, what the Daoists call wu-wei.Among Daoists, and Chinese thinkers in general, the focus was not so much upon questions of what is the good life, but rather on how to become good.As Edward Slingerland puts it:

The sort of knowledge that was therefore valued was not abstract knowledge that the good was to be defined in a certain way but concrete knowledge concerning how to act in a way that was good ［...］ The religious exemplars that we find in early Chinese texts are thus admired more for the sort of practical skill knowledge they display in their actions than the sort of arguments that they could marshal in defense of their particular way of life.

The Chinese emphasize a kind of knowledge they called wu-wei that was emphasized in an act.As Hall and Ames note, this knowledge is “not to be understood as a process of abstract reasoning, but is fundamentally performative in that it is an activity whose immediate consequence is the achievement of a practical result.”This kind of knowledge, or way of being is represented by “an ability to move through the world and human society in a manner that is completely spontaneous and yet still fully in harmony with the normative order of the natural and human worlds—the Dao or “‘Way'.”

This perspective that animals that have no “understanding consciousness, beholden to its specific purposes,” but rather an unconscious free flow with the act—pure performance is captured by Emily Dickinson again in “How soft a Caterpillar steps - ,” where the accent is put on its separateness from human's ability to understand：

Intent upon its own career -

What use has it for me -

In “How soft a Caterpillar steps -，” Dickinson acknowledges that in the animal world, the caterpillar has a life apart and independent of Dickinson's view of it.She recognizes her perspective may not be able to include the caterpillar, just as the caterpillar has no use for her.In fact, she finds, in some of her poems, that insects have it better off than she does:

Nor like the Gnat - had I -

The privilege to fly

And seek a Dinner for myself -

How mightier He - than I -

Similarly in “From Cocoon forth a Butterfly,” Dickinson notes how the flight of a butterfly is “without Design - that I could grace,” admitting again that she is not privy to the purpose of this butterfly, a purpose that nature knows, but is seemingly without purpose: “in purposeless Circumference - .”Here again she gives voice to a perspective that glimpses the far-reaching designs of nature, one not readily apparent to humans.In “My Cocoon tighten - Colors tease - ,” Dickinson strains to find her purpose, blundering along her way, in glaring comparison with the Butterfly who has instinctively “The Aptitude to fly ［...］ And easy Sweeps of Sky - .” Her perspective of the butterfly's free-flowing act haunts her attempt to fly:

My Cocoon tightens - Colors teaze -

I'm feeling for the Air -

A dim capacity for Wings

Demeans the Dress I wear -

A power of Butterfly must be -

The Aptitude to fly

Meadows of Majesty implies

And easy Sweeps of Sky -

So I must baffle at the Hint

And cipher at the Sign

And make much blunder, if at last

I take the clue divine -

While Dickinson is not known for her dramatic monologues, she did write some poems on the direct perspectives of others.For example in “He scanned it - Staggered - ,” she captures a suicide's perspective as he approaches the act of suicide, yet still “Groped up, to see if God was there - ,” and then “Groped backward at Himself” before he “wandered out of life - .”In “The Ditch is dear to the Drunken man,” she writes of the perspective of the drunkard in the ditch with “Honor leagues away.”Then in “She rose to His Requirement - dropt,”she lets us into the housewife's view of her position rising to “His Requirement,” and how whatever it is that she “missed in Her new Day” was buried deep and lay “unmentioned.” In “The Hollows round His eager Eyes,”she captures a sufferer who has not complained and thinks his biography is unknown, not aware of how his very face reveals the pain “Endured, unhelped - unknown.”

If we take Dickinson at her word, as she asked to be taken in her letter to Higginson in which she wrote that her use of “I” “Does not mean—me—but a supposed person” (L 268), then perspectives are greatly expanded.So, if read, as Dickinson encouraged readers to read her poems, not taking the “I” as necessarily referring to Dickinson, then we find her sweep of perspectives gathering in a much more varied picture of human thought and behavior.As Weisbuch notes, Dickinson had a wide range of personae that were “constantly contradicting one another in tone as well as opinion.”This allowed her to write a number of poems that showed her ability to capture emotional perspectives of others both through the use of “I” and in referencing others more directly.For example, the following poem on grief:

I measure every Grief I meet

With narrow, probing, eyes -

I wonder if It weighs like Mine -

Or has an Easier size -

She often takes this view of the imaginative perspectives of others to extremes, at times beyond the death, as in a dead person going to the grave:

'Twas just this time, last year, I died.

I know I heard the Corn,

When I was carried by the Farms -

It had the Tassels on -

Throughout the poem Dickinson gives this dead person's account of the beauty of the earth that they are missing along with speculation on how the still living will remember them, finally being consoled by the thoughts that the living will soon die and come to join the deceased:

But this sort, grieved myself,

And so, I thought the other way,

How just this time, some perfect year -

Themself, should come to me - These imaginative leaps into the perspective of one who has died are called “Hamlet poems” by Robert Weisbuch: “That is, the mourner, by a psychological metaphor, imitates the death of the loved one； and, like him, the mourner achieves a completed understanding through an intensity of pain.We die only once, but before that we project ourselves into death many times, whenever another ‘leaves' or dies.”This is Dickinson experiencing extreme empathy - the perspective of the dead.“I had no cause to be awake.”She writes in “There is a finished feeling”of death's perspective being a “finished feeling” that is “A Wilderness of Size.” Then again in “A Coffin - is a small Domain”she lays out the paradoxical perspectives of death's “restrictive Breadth” combined with its “circumference without Relief—/ Or Estimate - or End - .”

“Home” is another multi-perspectivist topic that Dickinson often writes about—specific mentions in her poetry.Mudge writes that “Emily Dickinson's image of house or home, touching the poet's tangible and imaginative worlds at once, is perhaps the most penetrating and comprehensive figure she employs.”Emily Dickinson spent much of her life at home, missed it when away, derived much security from being there, and yet used it often in reference to a space elsewhere.As with her references to God, insects, and animals, she presents “home” from a number of perspectives, some contradicting others.The home itself touches according to Bachelard's “the ultimate poetic depth of the space of the house.”Home is an extremely rich image and thus it is not surprising that with Emily Dickinson's powerful imagination “home” would be portrayed from a full array of perspectives as she tries to “make others feel all the psychological elasticity of an image that moves us at an unimaginable depth.”

“Home” in “The feet of people walking home - ”and “He found my Being - set it up - ”is a happy destination towards which people walk with “gayer sandals.” In the same vein “home” in “Through lane it lay - thro' bramble - ”is a place that offers security and certainty: “Submit that Home - and Certainty / And Sanctity, are best.”Not surprisingly, “home” in her poetry often refers to heaven “Going to Heaven!”； “Where I have lost, I softer tread - ”； “Tho' I get home how late - how late - ,”； “Good Morning - Midnight - ,”and many others.While her notion of heaven includes notions of security and certainty, it also includes more than a little anxiety—both at the thought of constantly being under the eternally watchful eye of the divine telescope and at heaven's removal from “now” and the comforts that she knows.

Dickinson's notion of home is more happily located within nature in “Except to Heaven, she is nought,”where she writes of a flower's home in nature, and then again in “The fairest Home I ever knew” where she writes:

The fairest Home I ever knew

Was founded in an Hour

By Parties also that I knew

A spider and a Flower -

A manse of mechlin and of Floss -

Being with her lover “Where Thou art - that - is Home - ”or making love “He was weak, and I was strong - then - ”are both positive perspectives of home, as is her notion of the body when contrasted with the wanderings of her mind (“If ever the lid gets off my head”).However, she could see “home” from many other points of view that are in often stark contrast from the above views.She writes elsewhere on how the comforts and softness of home provided by the “King of Down” is “Incarceration - Home.”Home is here viewed as her prison and thus it is contrary to what the concept of home typically is.In “I learned - at least - what Home could be - ”she makes this explicit: “This seems a Home - / And Home is not - / but what that Place could be - .” If then, paradoxically enough, home is not home, then it must be elsewhere, a perspective that Dickinson takes in many of her poems:

Up Life's Hill with my little Bundle

If I prove it steep -

If a Discouragement withhold me -

If my newest step

Older feel than the Hope that prompted -

Spotless be from blame

Heart that proposed as Heart that accepted

Homelessness, for Home -

The perspective is expressed as “Homeless at home,” where she writes that

We deem we dream -

And that dissolves the days

Through which existence strays

Homeless at home.

This perspective is matched in “If ever the lid gets off my head” where she writes that

If ever the lid gets off my head

And lets the brain away

The fellow will go where he belonged -

Presumably, this is somewhere other than the home where it currently resides.Dickinson seems haunted by what it is “that Place could be - ” as she laments

This seems a Home - And Home is not -

But what that Place could be -

Afflicts me - as a Setting Sun -

Where Dawn - knows how to be -

In “She staked Her Feathers - Gained an Arc - ” home becomes something on the wing, in movement, constantly elsewhere, and “beyond the estimate / Of Envy, or of Men - ”:

She staked her Feathers - Gained an Arc -

Debated - Rose again -

This time - beyond the estimate

Of Envy, or of Men -

And now, among Circumference -

Her steady Boat be seen -

At home - among the Billows - As

The Bough where she was born -

This perspective of home as being elsewhere may seem paradoxical or self-contradictory； however, it is deeply human, as the human geographer Yi-Fu Tuan asks, “How do we know that even the most sedentary people don't dream of elsewhere?”

This idea of home as an ever changing location coincides with Dickinson's notion of circumference as it mimics the pivot of the Dao.She writes of this as:

Forever - is composed of Nows -

'Tis not a different time -

Except for Infiniteness –

And Latitude of Home –

The phrase “Latitude of Home” is an old navigational term dating back to the late eighteenth century, before longitude could accurately be reckoned. At that time a navigator who was planning to sail out of the sight of land would measure the latitude of the home port. Then when it was time to return the navigator would sail north or south to reach the pre-established latitude (latitude of home) and then, as they said, “sail down the latitude” to home port. From this perspective “home” is both a point of origin and a point to which one returns, as T. S. Eliot writes: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”In a sense “home” is both the center and the circumference of experience.

“My business is circumference,” is how Emily Dickinson puts it in her letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. This quotation has been much referenced, but the fullness of it often has not. Dickinson makes reference to her business being “circumference” after writing that perhaps her manner of writing might bring a smile to Higginson. Here is the full quotation:

Will you tell me my fault, frankly, as to yourself, for I had rather wince, than die. Men do not call the surgeon, to commend—the Bone, but to set it, Sir, and fracture within, is more critical. And for this, Preceptor, I shall bring you—Obedience—the Blossom from my Garden, and every gratitude I know. Perhaps you smile at me. I could not stop for that—My Business is Circumference—An ignorance, not of Customs, but if caught with the Dawn—or the Sunset see me—Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty, Sir, if you please, it afflicts me, and I thought that instruction would take it away.

She cannot stop for his smile. That limited perspective is not a concern to her because her “business” includes a much wider circle of concerns—it is wide far beyond how Higginson views her. That reference alludes to her pursuit of greater knowledge, her incorporating within her consciousness as full a circle of perspectives as possible.

This full circle of perspectives is the best way of approaching truth, or as the Zhuangzi puts it, seeking greater knowledge. The pivot of the Dao and Dickinson’s circumference both acknowledge as Raab notes:

This nicely captures the scope of the “pivot of the Dao.” The meaning of circumference can be found in Noah Webster's 1844 Dictionary that Dickinson used.It is defined there as “the space included in a circle.”What space is it that she includes within and what is the diameter of this circle? Raab sees the center as referring to “truth or essences beyond human understanding.” Sherwood sees the word similarly referring to “an area of comprehension.” He goes on to write that:

the figure of the circle with the mortal consciousness as the center, the extent of perception as the radius, and the area of comprehension the circumference was one so felicitous for illustrating and organizing some of the themes her poetry was concerned with from the beginning that its discovery could as easily and logically be attributed to the poetic imagination, whose business and gift it is to make precisely such discoveries.And her extension of the figure from mortal consciousness into the immortal sphere is merely the graphic equivalent of those transitions from the mortal to the immortal estate that comprise so much of work.

Eberwein includes a number of notes laying out how different critics have viewed Dickinson's use of the term “circumference” with some like Frye, Sherwood, and Griffith viewing circumference as the circle surrounding her consciousness, thus stressing the inwardness of her within the circle.Others (Gelpi, Diehl, and Wilbur) view it the opposite way—her looking outward sweepingly trying to gather as much in as she can.

Both of these concepts of “circumference” could be in harmony with each other； Dickinson's consciousness could be at the center looking out and pivoting in a circle to gather all the perspectives that she can.The result on her consciousness takes place at the center of the circle, but the circumference maps the reach sought by Dickinson.As her perspective pivots around the circumference her consciousness gains in greater knowledge.Gillespie in his article “A Circumference of Emily Dickinson” writes on how the term “circumference” as used by Dickinson is both inward and outward in reference: “Circumference in this case means the process of absorption, the personality reflecting an object or incident back onto itself, bending around and returning, surrounding it by the self.Circumference, in other words, demands expansion: consciousness, absorbing the event, swells out to encompass time and space.”

Emily Dickinson sees how the “Outer - from the Inner / Derives its Magnitude” as in the poem below, but she is not a solipsist.Despite the multiplicity of perspectives that the viewer takes, she knows that the “Central Mood - / The fine - unvarying Axis” (the pivot of the Dao) “regulates the Wheel - .” That “The Inner - paints the Outer”:

The Outer - from the Inner

Derives its Magnitude -

'Tis Duke, or Dwarf, according

As is the Central Mood -

The fine - unvarying Axis

That regulates the Wheel -

Though Spokes - spin - more conspicuous

And fling a dust - the while.

The Inner - paints the Outer -

The Brush without the Hand -

Its Picture publishes - precise -

As is the inner Brand -

On fine - Arterial Canvas -

A Cheek - perchance a Brow -

The Star's whole Secret - in the Lake -

Eyes were not meant to know.

Nonetheless, she is pivoting with regard to an outer—a mystery, that she knows she could never completely penetrate.However by circling it, and looking at it from different angles over time, looking at it from a variety of perspectives she is able to gain the awe that accompanies greater knowledge, which leads to the poetic expression of her sense of awe: her poetry.

Circumference thou Bride of Awe

Possessing thou shalt be

Possessed by every hallowed Knight

That dares to - Covet thee.

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