Metaphor Making Meaning: Dickinson’s Conceptual Universe

Margaret H. FreemanDepartment of EnglishLos Angeles Valley College5800 Fulton AvenueVan Nuys, CA 91401-4096USA

in: Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995) 643-666

Abstract: If meaning, understanding, and reasoning in human language are achieved

through bodily experience and figurative processes, as recent work in cognitive

linguistics has argued, then the traditional notion of a separation in kind between

ordinary discourse and poetic language no longer holds. Metaphor making, under this

view, is not peripheral but central to our reasoning processes, not unique to poetical

thinking but that which is shared by both ordinary discourse and the language of

poetry. Poets, then, in their metaphor making, serve as arbiters of and commentators

on the way humans understand and interpret their world. Much of Dickinson’s poetry

is structured by the extent to which she rejected the dominant metaphor of her

religious environment, that of LIFE IS A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME, and replaced it

with a metaphor more in accordance with the latest scientific discoveries of her day,

that of LIFE IS A VOYAGE IN SPACE. Examples from her poems show how the

schemas of PATH and CYCLE and the AIR IS SEA image metaphor contribute to a

coherent and consistent patterning that at the same time reflects a physically embodied

world and creates Dickinson’s conceptual universe.

Biography: Margaret H. Freeman holds a B.A. Honours degree (1962) in Philosophy and

English from the University of Manchester and a Ph.D. in English (1972) from the

University of Massachusetts in Amherst. She has done postgraduate work in linguistics,

published work on Dickinson and language, and is currently working on a book-length

manuscript on Reading Emily Dickinson in the age of cognitive science. She has been

Professor of English at Los Angeles Valley College since 1989.

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Does meaning make metaphor? Or does metaphor make meaning? The orthodox

view, dominant in the tradition that comes down to us from Plato and Aristotle, sees

metaphor as merely imitative of an objective reality, a reality that can be known

independently of human participation. With the rise of modern science, however, and

particularly in the philosophy of Kant, such presuppositions about the relation of

human cognition to our understanding of physical reality and the “truths” of this

world, have been called into question. Kant advanced the debate between the empirical

and rational approaches to these questions by acknowledging that human perception of

physical reality was structured by a pre-existing cognitive “framework”; Einstein

furthered the debate in the twentieth century by showing that reality is partially

constituted by human participation in the physical world.1.Recent work in cognitive

science, especially in the area of metaphor, has developed a much more sophisticated

view of the relations between human thought and perception. Researchers like George

Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Mark Turner have shown how the metaphorical structures

of our everyday language are embodied in our physical experience of the world and

have enabled us to identify and recognize the idealized cognitive models that underlie

our common everyday understanding of the world in which we live.

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When we turn to literary criticism, recognition of those cognitive models is particularly

important, both those that critics hold and those held by writers. In discussing the

stages of translating a poem into another language, for example, Robert Bly (18-19)

warns us of the dangers of not recognizing the existence of such culturally embedded

presuppositions: “When a poet from another culture contradicts our assumptions, we

tend to fudge his point; therefore to struggle with each eccentricity we see is extremely

important....If we don’t, we should let the poem alone and not translate it; we’ll only

ruin it if we go ahead.” What Bly says about translating poetry is just as true when we

are reading poems in our own language, especially when the poet comes from a

different milieu or century.2 If we are to understand how a poet like Emily Dickinson

structures her experience of the world, we need to look at the way she structures her

metaphors of that world.

Although recent critical work on Dickinson takes some account of cultural models (this

is especially true of feminist studies), all the critics I have read presuppose a taken-for-

granted world of objective reality, onto which Dickinson's images are mapped. Such

readings assume that the goal of criticism is to discover the nature of that mapping and

how it fits with the truth conditions imposed by that reality. It is from this perspective

that a major work on Dickinson's poetry has found much of it without direction,

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coherency, or meaning, and has concluded as a result that Dickinson had a “finless

mind” (Porter, passim).

What I should like to argue is that it is the philosophical assumptions underlying such

readings that cause these difficulties. An Objectivist view of reality sees metaphor as

incidental to the propositional basis of truth. Recent work in cognitive science, however,

has shown, to the contrary, that we organize our knowledge according to prototypes,

and that we assign membership to categories, not on the basis of inherent similarity in

concepts or objects, but according to how tightly or loosely they conform to the

prototypes. Metaphorical thinking, according to this view, is an imaginative mechanism

that, together with bodily experience, is “central to how we construct categories to

make sense of experience” (Lakoff xii). In this paper I present a reading of Dickinson’s

poetry that shows how such metaphorical structure creates what I call “Dickinson's

conceptual universe.”

Emily Dickinson lived during a time and in a place which both experienced radical

upheavals in beliefs. Puritan New England, as both Allen Tate and R. P. Blackmur have

noted in making this point, was breaking up around her, despite the final dying gasp of

one more Calvinist revival. The times were changing: the early part of the century saw

the rise of what T. H. Huxley was to call “Victorian Agnosticism” (Lightman), and the

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rise of evolutionary theories during the same period culminated in the publication of

Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, when Dickinson was 29 years old. The challenges

presented to traditional, orthodox belief were enormous. And it is in these contexts—of

time and place—that, in Blackmur’s terminology, the “poetic relations” of Dickinson’s

words exist. How she creates her conceptual universe and what its nature is can only be

found in examining “what is said in the saying,” to quote Heidegger.

The PATH Schema and the Language of Time

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have shown convincingly that we structure much of our

experience of the world through the metaphor of LIFE IS A JOURNEY, where life is the

target and journey the source domain of the metaphorical construct. Johnson (1987: 113)

has further elaborated on this metaphor by showing how PATHS, which schematically

underlie the source domain, journey, have “always the same parts: (l) a source or

starting point; (2) a goal, or end-point; and (3) a sequence of contiguous locations

connecting the source with the goal.” What, then, for this metaphor, is the goal of life's

journey? For Calvinist religion, the answer is simple: heaven. And man's purpose in life

is therefore just as simple: to get there. The Calvinist view necessarily devalues life and

the things of this world in favor of an afterlife (the desired goal and purpose of life's

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journey), as any cursory reading of Calvinist writings will show. And death, the

physical termination of life's journey, is seen merely as a gate to the afterlife (figure 1).3

But this is exactly where Dickinson balks. As one who once wrote, “I find ecstasy in

living—the mere sense of living is joy enough” (L342a),4 she could not accept the way

the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor was defined by the religious outlook of her day. She

knew it all right, pervasive as it was in her readings and her culture. But it is the way she

deals with that metaphor as it is embodied in the cultural model of Calvinist theology

that shows her rejection of it. Note, for instance, how, in the following poem, the

speaker subverts the journey by first making it incomplete, with the phrase “almost

come,” then slowing it down because of death's barrier, “the Forest of the Dead,”

finally to stop altogether with a symbol of surrender in “the white flag” between

retreat and God's gates (P615):

Our journey had advanced—

Our feet were almost come

To that odd Fork in Being's Road—

Eternity—by Term—

Our pace took sudden awe—

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Our feet—reluctant—led

Before—were Cities—but Between—

The Forest of the Dead—

Retreat—was out of Hope—

Behind—a Sealed Route—

Eternity's White Flag—Before—

And God—at every Gate—

The speaker’s discomfort with continuing the journey in this poem is a consistent motif

in Dickinson's poems and letters. Her roads are “funereal” (P735); “a scarlet way”

associated with pain, renunciation, and crucifixion (P527); the speaker on such a road

“felt ill—and odd—” (P579); the paths don’t so much achieve, or lead to, or even end at,

so much as come to a “stop” at their destination (P344):

'Twas the old—road—through pain—

That unfrequented—one—

With many a turn—and thorn—

That stops—at Heaven—

In an early poem, she mocks the biblical metaphor (P234):

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You’re right—”the way is narrow”—

And “difficult the Gate”—

And “few there be”—Correct again—

That “enter in—thereat”—

'Tis Costly—So are purples!

‘Tis just the price of Breath—

With but the “Discount” of the Grave—

Termed by the Brokers—”Death”!

And after that—there's Heaven—

The Good Man's — “Dividend” —

And Bad Men—”go to Jail”—

I guess—

Dickinson explicitly rejects the idea that life is a path that has a specific, predetermined

destination. In contemplating the importance of “experience” in our understanding of

the world in the following poem, rather than docilely accepting the convention that

experience can “lead” us to our destination, she turns it inward into the operations of

the mind (P910):

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Experience is the Angled Road

Preferred against the Mind

By—Paradox—the Mind itself—

In a late poem, the perennial question of where we “go” after death is subtly subverted

by the underlying negative connotation of its rephrasing (P1417):

Of subjects that resist

Redoubtablest is this

Where go we—

Go we anywhere

Creation after this?

One significant aspect of the PATH schema is its linear characteristic. The metaphor

LIFE IS A JOURNEY is ostensibly grounded in notions of space and spatial orientation,

embedded in the notion of “passage.” However, since “passage” reflects in the aging

processes of life the notion of time, the metaphor is actually temporally determined by

the target domain, life. The word journey itself, in its original meaning, meant the

distance one could travel in a day (from the French jour). More accurately, then, the full

metaphoric construct is that of LIFE IS A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME. This point is

crucial in understanding Dickinson’s rejection of the metaphor, because it was not

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simply the Calvinist view of life’s journey toward heaven that she could not accept; she

could not accept traditional notions of time, either.5 Sometimes she denies clichéd

attitudes, as in “They say that time assuages/Time never did assuage” (P686), or

“Death’s waylaying’s not the sharpest/Of the thefts of Time—” (P1296); sometimes she

condescends to time: “He doubtless did his best—” (P1478); but it is in her treatment of

time in its relation to eternity on the one hand and the world on the other that we see

the complexity of her attitudes toward it.

Although this is not the place to explore the whole question of time in Dickinson’s

poetry, one poem in particular characterizes the way Dickinson uses time in the context

of the metaphor I am discussing here. Dickinson found it difficult, if not impossible, to

accept the notion that “death” was at the “end” of a linear progression of a “lifetime”

and that “eternity” somehow came after. For Dickinson, eternity was “in time” (P800).

In “Forever—is composed of Nows—” (P624), time and eternity seem to collapse into

one: “‘Tis not a different time—,” and the markers of time “dissolve” and “exhale” to

obscure the elements of “Infiniteness—/And Latitude of Home—” that distinguish

“Forever” from “now”:

Forever—is composed of Nows—

‘Tis not a different time—

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Except for Infiniteness—

And Latitude of Home—

From this—experienced Here—

Remove the Dates—to These—

Let Months dissolve in further Months—

And Years—exhale in Years—

Without Debate—or Pause—

Or Celebrated Days—

No different Our Years would be

From Anno Dominies—

If Dickinson rejected the metaphor of LIFE IS A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME in its

Calvinist interpretation, what did she replace it with? The answer, perhaps, was literally

all around her. From the details of nature in its annual cycles, the circumference of hills

that surround the valley in which the town of Amherst lies, and, ultimately, from the

discoveries of the new science, Dickinson transformed the metaphor of LIFE IS A

JOURNEY THROUGH TIME into that of LIFE IS A VOYAGE IN SPACE.

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It is perhaps difficult for us, with space ship Ulysses on its four-year voyage to the sun,

to imagine the concept of previous centuries that the solar system, though large, was

not very distant, that earth was judged to be some 4.8 million miles from the nearest

star. Not until Bressel succeeded in the first precise measurement, by means of parallax,

of the distance from earth to a star in 1838, only eight years after Dickinson's birth, did

scientists establish just how vast the universe is. New discoveries were happening all

the time: through the work of Thomas Wright, Kant, and Lambert, disk-shaped

galaxies were discovered, with the sun no longer centered but at the edge of the disk

that formed the Milky Way.6 The stars and planets were seen to be afloat in a great

expanse, and scientific metaphors developed which saw space as a vast sea, with the

planets as boats, circling in sweeps around the sun (Ferris, passim).7

Such heady stuff provided Dickinson with the imagery she needed. From her early

childhood days at Amherst Academy, Dickinson took a keen interest in developments

in all the physical sciences, from botany to astronomy. In his biography of Dickinson,

Richard Sewall (1974: 343) describes how Edward Hitchcock, President of Amherst

College from 1845-1854, was known for his meticulous scientific observations and made

Amherst a leading center for scientific study. In his writings Hitchcock developed a

Natural Theology in which he attempted to reconcile a devout belief in revealed

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religion with the new scientific discoveries of his day. Dickinson’s language is full of

terminology related to the astronomical achievements of the previous century and to

the contemporary events and discoveries happening in her lifetime.8 This language is

not incidental. Dickinson links it imaginatively into a coherent conceptualization that is

realized by the metaphor LIFE IS A VOYAGE IN SPACE.

The AIR IS SEA Image Metaphor

The metaphor of the JOURNEY, as we have seen, was problematic because, unlike the

VOYAGE metaphor, it presumed a specific destination.9 And “the voyage of life” was a

commonplace conception in her culture. Dickinson, however, transformed it into a

metaphor that created a coherent model for her conceptual universe, that is, LIFE IS A

VOYAGE IN SPACE. This she achieved through the creation of the image metaphor

AIR IS SEA.10 I call this an image metaphor after Mark Turner’s usage in Reading Minds

(1991: 171), since the source image, sea, is mapped onto the target image, air. Each of

these images contain image-schemata in themselves and therefore, following Turner’s

(173) account of the invariance hypothesis, when we map the image schema contained

in the source image sea onto the target image air, the target image acquires only that

part of the image-schematic structure of the source that is not inconsistent with its own

image-schema. For example, the sea is salty, and “salty” therefore is part of the image-

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schematic structure of sea; “salty,” however, is not part of the image-schema of air, and

therefore that part of the sea’s image-schematic structure is not mapped onto the target

domain of air. As we shall see, Dickinson does not violate this constraint in her

metaphorical mapping of the sea/air image-schemata.

Throughout the poetry, sea substitutes for air (P1198):

A soft Sea washed around the House

A Sea of Summer Air

In one poem, the comparison is made clear (P484):

My Garden—like the Beach—

Denotes there be—a Sea—

That’s Summer—

The meaning of the first two lines of what has been considered a puzzling little poem is

made clear by recognizing the AIR IS SEA image metaphor (P1337):

Upon a Lilac Sea

To toss incessantly

Given the AIR IS SEA image metaphor, other components of the source domain sea are

mapped onto the target domain air. Thus EVERYTHING THAT FLIES IS A SAILOR:

Straits of Blue/Navies of Butterflies—sailed thro’—(P247)

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Bags of Doubloons—adventurous Bees/Brought me—from firmamental

seas—(P247)

For Captain was the Butterfly/For Helmsman was the Bee (P1198)

As Bird’s far Navigation/.../A plash of Oars, a Gaiety— (P243)

The most triumphant Bird I ever knew or met/Embarked upon a twig today

(P1265)

And he unrolled his feathers/And rowed him softer home—(P328)

Even an insect like the “Summer Gnat” is “Unconscious that his single Fleet/Do not

comprise the skies—”(P796).

In like manner, action verbs associated with EVERYTHING THAT FLIES are also

associated with the sea:

A Sparrow.../Invigorated, waded/In all the deepest Sky (P1211)

Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon/Leap, plashless as they swim. (P328)

Sometimes, EVERYTHING THAT FLIES IS A BOAT, as in the poem in which a bird

leaves its nest for the first time (P798):

And now, among Circumference—

Her steady Boat be seen—

At home—among the Billows—As

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The Bough where she was born—

Sunsets, too, are drawn into the metaphor, as air, now understood as sea, is projected

onto the sky and ultimately onto space. Thus SUN IS A BOAT:

A Sloop of Amber slips away/Upon an Ether Sea, (P1622)

I have a Navy in the West (P1642)

Where Ships of Purple—gently toss—

On Seas of Daffodil—

Fantastic Sailors—mingle—

And then—the Wharf is still! (P265)

In one poem, the sunset becomes the sea itself, and the images associated with the

sea—traffic, landing, bales, merchantmen—the traces left in the sky by the sun in its

setting (P266):

This—is the land—the Sunset washes—

These—are the Banks of the Yellow Sea—

Where it rose—or whither it rushes—

These—are the Western Mystery!

Night after Night

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Her purple traffic

Strews the landing with Opal Bales—

Merchantmen—poise upon Horizons—

Dip—and vanish like Orioles!

The SEA IS AIR image metaphor also encompasses the human being to give the

metaphor THE HUMAN BEING IS A SAILOR (P1656):

Down Time’s quaint stream

Without an oar

We are enforced to sail

Our Port a Secret

Our Perchance a Gale

What Skipper would

Incur the Risk

What Buccaneer would ride

Without a surety from the Wind

Or schedule of the Tide—

Like EVERYTHING THAT FLIES, THE HUMAN BEING IS A BOAT:11

One port—suffices—for a Brig—like mine— (P368)

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If my Bark sink/’Tis to another sea— (1234)

Myself endued Balloon/By but a lip of Metal—/The pier to my Pontoon— (P505)

One little boat gave up it’s strife/And gurgled down and down. (P30)

My little craft was lost! (P107)

As with EVERYTHING THAT FLIES, THE HUMAN BEING is also associated with sea-

related action verbs:

I can wade Grief— (P252)

Sweet Pirate of the heart,/Not Pirate of the Sea,/What wrecketh thee? (P1546)

A hint of piracy (from childhood scenes of “walking the plank”) hovers around the

following poem that describes the voyage of life (P875):

I stepped from Plank to Plank

A slow and cautious way

The Stars about my Head I felt

About my Feet the Sea.

I knew not but the next

Would be my final inch—

This gave me the precarious Gait

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Some call Experience.

As this poem suggests, the AIR IS SEA image metaphor transforms the “voyage” of

life, common to conventional views, from one that is earth-bound to one that takes

place within the context of outer space, as the speaker is poised between star and sea.

Dickinson completes this transformation by the additional schema of the CYCLE.

The CYCLE Schema and the Language of SPACE

As Mark Johnson (1987: 119) describes this schema, the cycle is part of our physiological

make-up: “We experience our world and everything in it as embedded within cyclic

processes: day and night, the seasons, the course of life (birth through death), the stages

of developments in plants and animals, the revolutions of the heavenly bodies.” The

schema is also something imposed by conventional cycles, such as the time constructs

we have created in Western tradition: the hour, the week, the year. Based on earlier

studies Johnson (120-121) cites, he comes up with four features shared by conventional

cycles:

1. Cycles constitute temporal boundaries for our activities.

2. Cycles are multiple, overlapping, and sequential.

3. Cycles can be quantitatively measured according to mathematics of time,

but they will also have qualitative differentiation.

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4. There is a difference between “natural” and “conventional” cycles.

As Johnson (1987: 119) says: “Most fundamentally, a cycle is a temporal circle” in which

“backtracking is not permitted.”

Dickinson was enormously sensitive to the natural cycles of the seasons, the recurrent

change from day to night, the daily routines of the household. However, one way in

which her imagination reached beyond the boundaries of the cultural model of “cycle”

she inherited was to spatialize the temporal construct of the cycle. Thus she often

changes the linear trajectory of things that move, EVERYTHING THAT FLIES; SUN,

STARS, AND PLANETS; and HUMAN BEINGS, into a circular one:

Butterflies from St Domingo/Cruising round the purple line— (P137)

Some little Wren goes seeking round— (P143)

Within my Garden, rides a Bird/Upon a single Wheel— (P500)

See the Bird.../Curve by Curve—Sweep by Sweep—/Round the Steep Air— (P703)

And all the Earth strove common round— (P965)

Meanwhile—Her wheeling King— [referring to the sun] (P232)

Convulsion—playing round—/Harmless—as streaks of Meteor— (P792)

Swifter than the hoofs of Horsemen/Round a Ledge of dream! (P65)

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The Feet, mechanical, go round—/Of Ground, or Air, or Ought— (P341)

I worried Nature with my Wheels/When Her’s had ceased to run— (P786)

My wheel is in the dark!/.../Yet know it’s dripping feet/Go round and round. (P10)

To these components we can add the SEASONS, the WEATHER, LIFE itself:

[Autumn] eddies like a Rose—away—/Upon Vermillion Wheels— (P656)

The Seasons played around his knees (P975)

As Floods—on Whites of Wheels— (P788)

Of Life’s penurious Round— (P313)

To take just one of the many metaphors in the poetry that deal with space and that are

generated from the CYCLE schema, I choose the obvious one of the cycle itself, which

Dickinson invariably associates with the word wheel. (Lest readers presume this is no

metaphor, remember that bicycles were not invented until later in the century;12 the

word cycle comes from the Greek kuklos, which also means wheel, a point Dickinson

would have recognized and appreciated from her beloved lexicon.) The word cycle in

Dickinson’s poems refers to the cyclical movement of the planets and is, as expected,

associated with time. But the addition of wheel creates the metaphorical extension of

movement through space. In an early poem in which Dickinson asks God to find a place

for the mouse that has been killed by a cat, she imagines it “Snug in seraphic

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Cupboards” while “unsuspecting Cycles/Wheel solemnly away!” (P61). In a somewhat

more serious poem, again on the subject of death, in which eternity is associated with

sea imagery, the speaker imagines time as a movement through space (P160):

Next time, to tarry,

While the Ages steal—

Slow tramp the Centuries,

And the Cycles wheel!

Dickinson found the schema of CYCLE more productive than the schema of PATH

because it accorded more closely with her conception of the physical world. Although

Johnson identifies the CYCLE schema with time, it is also closely associated, as

Dickinson saw, with the movement of the earth in space.

The notion of an infinite universe, encouraged by the discoveries of the new science,

enabled Dickinson to relate both the temporal and spatial elements of her geography

and the AIR IS SEA metaphor in a mapping of the details of the particular world around

her into the vaster world of space. Thus the particulars of a flower are projected onto a

sunset in a poem whose final lines show Dickinson’s awareness of and wry reaction to

the scientist who paradoxically must have faith in order to explore faith (P1241):

The Lilac is an ancient shrub

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But ancienter than that

The Firmamental Lilac

Upon the Hill tonight—

The Sun subsiding on his Course

Bequeathes this final Plant

To Contemplation—not to Touch—

The Flower of Occident.

Of one Corolla is the West—

The Calyx is the Earth—

The Capsules burnished Seeds the Stars—

The Scientist of Faith

His research has but just begun—

Above his synthesis

The Flora unimpeachable

To Time’s Analysis—

“Eye hath not seen” may possibly

Be current with the Blind

But let not Revelation

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By theses be detained—

It is interesting, and perhaps significant, that just as the etymology of the word journey

includes the element of time, as we have seen, so the etymology of the word voyage

includes the element of space, since the morpheme [voy] comes from the Latin via,

meaning path or way. By revealing the metaphorical TIME relation to the processes of

life in the SPACE schema that underlies the schema of PATH in the JOURNEY

metaphor and by revealing the metaphorical SPACE relation to the physical universe in

the schema of TIME that underlies the schema of CYCLE in the VOYAGE metaphor,

Dickinson created a world view in which physical location and temporal constructs

come together (figure 2):13

The points on the compass where the lines bisect the circle represent the climaxes of the

CYCLE schema that, as Johnson (1987: 120) observes, we impose, such as the life cycle

we experience “as moving from birth to the fulness of maturation followed by a decline

toward death.” By overlapping the temporal constructs of the daily and annual climaxes

with the geographically determined points of the compass, Dickinson has transformed

them into spatial schemata. Thus, temporal climaxes on the circle are mapped on to the

source domain of space, so that TIME IS LOCATION:

A Music numerous as space—/But neighboring as Noon— (P783)

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Past Midnight! Past the Morning Star!/.../Ah., What leagues there were (P174)

Whose galleries—are Sunrise— (P161)

Though sunset lie between— (P1074)

To continents of summer—/To firmaments of sun— (P180)

Winter under cultivation/Is as arable as Spring (P1707)

Who fleeing from the Spring (P1337)

Besides the Autumn poets sing (P131)

In the following poem, the cyclical components of “circumference” and “diameter”

structure the relationship of time and eternity (P802):

Time feels so vast that were it not

For an Eternity—

I fear me this Circumference

Engross my Finity—

To His exclusion, who prepare

By Processes of Size

For the Stupendous Vision

Of His Diameters—

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Here, the spatial concept of size marked by Dickinson’s version of the CYCLE schema,

rather than temporal linearity marked by her PATH schema, describes the notion of

time.

It could, perhaps, be argued that Dickinson was simply using the image schemata of

both PATH and CYCLE, which Lakoff and Johnson have shown are basic to

conventional interpretations of experience. With respect to her understanding of life,

death, and immortality, however, one can see from her very earliest poems that this is

not the case: that what she did, in fact, was to replace the PATH schema of conventional

attitudes toward immortality (her “Flood subject”) with the CYCLE schema projected

onto her understanding of space, time, and the universe. The tensions between the two

schemata can be seen to be developing, for example, in the following poem in which

the “strait pass” is placed, right at the center of the poem, within a planetary scene, as

“Convulsion” (itself a turning, a convolution) plays “round” the straight path, and the

martyrs' “Expectation” is turned into an image of a compass needle wading through

“polar air” (P792):

Through the strait pass of suffering—

The Martyrs—even—trod.

Their feet—upon Temptation—

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Their faces—upon God—

A stately—shriven—Company—

Convulsion—playing round—

Harmless—as streaks of Meteor—

Upon a Planet's Bond—

Their faith—the everlasting troth—

Their Expectation—fair—

The Needle—to the North Degree

Wades—so—thro' polar Air!

Even though the martyrs believe they are proceeding on a linear path that will lead

them to their final destination, in the planetary scene of Dickinson’s world, paths are in

fact orbits, with the result that what seems straight to the martyrs is in fact circular and

cyclical. Their faith and their expectation, the “everlasting” covenant they have made

with God, is ironically compared with the needle of the compass pointing to magnetic

north, just as the poles, which mark the diameter of the earth’s sphere, appear fixed but

are actually moving in space, kept in their orbit by the sun’s “Bond.”

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In what is perhaps her most famous “journey” poem, “Because I could not stop for

Death—” (P712), the same pattern of change at the very center of the poem occurs as

the journey is abruptly terminated with a cyclical image of movement in space: “We

passed the Setting Sun—/Or rather—He passed Us—,” and the tone changes from a

pleasant afternoon's ride to the “quivering and chill” of the grave. This stanza

(interestingly omitted from the poem on its first publication) transforms the poem from

an otherwise fairly orthodox account of life’s journey to one that is more problematic

and foreshadows the incompletion at the end, as time and the journey stand still:

Since then—‘tis Centuries—and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses Heads

Were toward Eternity—

In “No Man can compass a Despair—” (P477), the poet compares the man to a traveler

going round “a Goalless Road” who is “Unconscious of the Width—/Unconscious that

the Sun/Be setting on His progress—.” With such a metaphorical restructuring of the

linear, temporal characteristic of the journey into a circular, spatial orientation,

Dickinson formulated a vision of a world in which the dead have no place. Unlike

religious interpretations of the LIFE IS A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME metaphor, in

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which the afterlife is its destination and death merely a gate on the way (as was shown

in figure 1), Dickinson’s new metaphor had no place for either in her conceptual

universe (figure 3).

In a cyclical universe, the geographical metaphors of goal, location as up or end have no

physical, bodily grounding, with the consequence that it no longer makes sense to

speak of “destination” after death. The problematic “location” of the dead is raised in

the following poem which confronts the conflict between the two metaphors directly as

astronomy replaces revealed religion in establishing God's existence (P1528):

The Moon upon her fluent Route

Defiant of a Road—

The Star’s Etruscan Argument

Substantiate a God—

If Aims impel these Astral Ones

The ones allowed to know

Know that which makes them as forgot

As Dawn forgets them—now—

If there is purpose in the universe, only the dead can know—but they are beyond

memory and time. A variant to the last four lines of this poem makes even clearer the

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loss of Heaven as an anticipated goal at the end of life’s journey with the shift to a

cosmological perspective and the disruption of linear time:

How archly spared the Heaven “to come”—

If such prospective be—

By superseding Destiny

And dwelling there Today—

With the LIFE IS A VOYAGE IN SPACE metaphor, Dickinson conceives a new place for

life on earth. It is almost as though Dickinson has anticipated the concept of modern

physics that not just the world but the universe itself can be finite but unbounded (see

figure 4).

No longer are we travelers on life's road, but we are identified with the earth itself in its

daily rotation, as the first and last stanzas of the following poem show (P721):

Behind Me—dips Eternity—

Before Me— Immortality—

Myself—the Term between—

Death but the Drift of Eastern Gray,

Dissolving into Dawn away,

Before the West begin—

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Tis Miracle before Me—then—

...

''Tis Miracle behind—between—

A Crescent in the Sea—

With Midnight to the North of Her—

And Midnight to the South of Her—

And Maelstrom—in the Sky—

Dickinson contemplates the seemingly infinite reaches beyond the solar system as she

defines eternity in terms of space (P695):

As if the Sea should part

And show a further Sea—

And that—a further—and the Three

But a presumption be—

Of Periods of Seas—

Unvisited of Shores—

Themselves the Verge of Seas to be—

Eternity—is Those—

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Infinity itself is seen as a giant extending across the diameters of the earth, as one poem

begins with infinity and ends with eternity (P350):

They leave us with the Infinite.

But He—is not a man—

His fingers are the size of fists—

His fists, the size of men—

And whom he foundeth, with his Arm

As Himmaleh, shall stand—

Gibraltar’s Everlasting Shoe

Poised lightly on his Hand,

So trust him, Comrade—

You for you, and I, for you and me

Eternity is ample,

And quick enough, if true.

“How infinite—to be/Alive—” Dickinson exclaimed (P470). It might be (P847):

Finite—to fail, but infinite to Venture—

For the one ship that struts the shore

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Many’s the gallant—overwhelmed Creature

Nodding in Navies nevermore—

Perhaps one of the most revealing poems that suggests “The Finite—furnished/With

the Infinite—” (P906) is the following, which unites the metaphors of air/sea with those

of space, ending with an explicit reference to the scientific establishment in the final

stanza (P797):

By my Window have I for Scenery

Just a Sea—with a Stem—

If the Bird and the Farmer—deem it a “Pine”—

The Opinion will do—for them—

It has no Port, nor a “Line”—but the Jays—

That split their route to the Sky—

Or a Squirrel, whose giddy Peninsula

May be easier reached—this way—

For Inlands—the Earth is the under side—

And the upper side—is the Sun—

And it’s Commerce—if Commerce it have—

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Of Spice—I infer from the Odors borne—

Of it’s Voice—to affirm—when the Wind is within—

Can the Dumb define the Divine?

The Definition of Melody—is—

That Definition is none—

It—suggests to our Faith—

They—suggest to our Sight—

When the latter—is put away

I shall meet with Conviction I somewhere met

That Immortality—

Was the Pine at my Window a “Fellow

Of the Royal” Infinity?

Apprehensions—are God’s introductions—

To be hallowed—accordingly—

The voyage of the soul is an embarkation on eternity's sea (P76):

Exultation is the going

Of an inland soul to sea,

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Past the houses—past the headlands—

Into deep Eternity—

That Dickinson personally identified with her metaphor can be seen in her

correspondence. To her presumably ill sister-in-law she wrote: “You must let me go

first, Sue, because I live in the Sea always and know the Road” (L306). Life lived in

Dickinson’s metaphorical sea is graphically portrayed in the following poem (P867):

Escaping backward to perceive

The Sea upon our place—

Escaping forward, to confront

His glittering Embrace—

Retreating up, a Billow’s hight

Retreating blinded down

Our undermining feet to meet

Instructs to the Divine.

The destination of the dead in a cyclical universe is a concept she struggled with all her

life. The surviving worksheet of a poem she tried to reconstruct approximately sixteen

years after she first recorded it reveals the underlying structural metaphor of LIFE IS A

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VOYAGE IN SPACE with its accompanying ambiguity of a location for the dead (P533).

The early version of this poem, written, so far as we can tell, when Dickinson was 32

years old, shows again the consistent use of the AIR IS SEA image metaphor and the

LIFE IS A VOYAGE IN SPACE metaphor, as the butterflies “together bore away/Upon

a shining Sea.” The focus of this 1862 poem is on Dickinson’s identification with and

knowledge of the “Sea” of nature: the butterflies’ disappearance is marked by no

“mention” of their arrival in “any

Port—,” no “notice/Report” made to the speaker either by the speech of the “distant

Bird” or by a “Frigate, or by Merchantman—.” The idea that these butterflies may have

embarked upon the sea of eternity is only suggested, hinted at. When Dickinson

returned to this poem sixteen years later, she made both the sea imagery and the

transition from life to death more explicit, even though the poem remains in a

worksheet draft (see figure 5).

Now the “shining Sea” is replaced with “eddies/fathoms/rapids of the Sun—,”a more

concrete image of the cosmological concept of space as a vast sea; the “Port” has

become a “Peninsula,” reflecting a venturing forth rather than a coming home; the

butterflies are “wrecked/drowned/quenched in Noon—,” a time which marks for

Dickinson a transitional point, as does midnight; and the final stanza makes explicit the

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actual death of the butterflies, shifting the emphasis from what the speaker might have

heard to the more generalized “Example—and monition.” The images of

circumference, sun, and gravitation, of wreckage and being “hurled from noon” are all

consistent within Dickinson's new conceptual universe. Just as the two butterflies

“stepped straight through the Firmament,” the dead no longer “go” to a “place” called

Heaven; they drop out of the cycle of existence (P149):

She dropt as softly as a star

From out my summer's Eve—

In “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” (P280), the speaker “dropped down, and down—/And

hit a World, at every plunge.” The dead, in the depths of the earth, are at the same time

“beyond space,” space in the newly discovered dimensions of discs and galaxies. In the

following poem, the relentless rhythm of the galloping horse that underlies the metrical

structure is disrupted in the second stanza by the double images of space (“Giant long”)

and time (“Year long”) to end with the passionate cry for a “disc” to bridge the distance

between the living and the dead (P949):

Under the Light, yet under,

Under the Grass and the Dirt,

Under the Beetle's Cellar

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Under the Clover's Root,

Further than Arm could stretch

Were it Giant long,

Further than Sunshine could

Were the Day Year long,

Over the Light, yet over,

Over the Arc of the Bird—

Over the Comet's chimney—

Over the Cubit's Head,

Further than Guess can gallop

Further than Riddle ride—

Oh for a Disc to the Distance

Between Ourselves and the Dead!

Dickinson's language of arcs and disks,14 crescents and circumferences, is drawn

directly from the newly acquired knowledge of the universe around her. The discovery

of disk-shaped galaxies not only vastly increased the reaches of space, it placed our own

solar system within such a disk-shaped galaxy (P1550):

39

The pattern of the sun

Can fit but him alone

For sheen must have a Disk

To be a sun—

In her contemplations of immortality, Dickinson found her metaphors for time and

space more fitting than the Calvinists' narrow road (P1454):

Those not live yet

Who doubt to live again—

“Again” is of a twice

But this — is one —

The Ship beneath the Draw

Aground— is he?

Death—so—the Hyphen of the Sea—

Deep is the Schedule

Of the Disk to be—

Costumeless Consciousness—

That is he—

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Dickinson's LIFE IS A VOYAGE IN SPACE metaphor enables us to understand that her

so-called “abstract images” are grounded in her experience of the world and the

universe around her. The problem she faced in accepting the religious import of the

LIFE IS A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME metaphor and the way she replaced it with LIFE

IS A VOYAGE IN SPACE is graphically displayed in the following poem, with its

contrast between the static image of the dead in a location in space “untouched” by

time, in the first stanza, and the movement of time through space, with the associated

images of circle and sea, in the second (P216):

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—

Untouched by Morning—

And untouched by Noon—

Lie the meek members of the Resurrection—

Rafter of Satin—and Roof of Stone!

Grand go the Years—in the Crescent—above them—

Worlds scoop their Arcs—

And Firmaments—row—

Diadems—drop—and Doges—surrender—

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Soundless as dots—on a Disc of Snow—

Infinity in time, eternity in space. Had Dickinson known about black holes, in which

time and space exchange places, she might have found the metaphor she was searching

for that would enable her to unite life and death.15 As it was, she was left suspended at

the point in which the old order had been discredited by the new science, but more

questions had been raised as a result. She would, however, have understood Dyson’s

lectures in Infinite in All Directions (1980: 14), and perhaps seen her own attempt to link

the things of this world to the universe in the images he uses:

Butterflies are at the extreme of concreteness, superstrings at the extreme of

abstraction. They mark the extreme limits of the territory over which science

claims jurisdiction. Both are, in their different ways, beautiful. Both are, from

a scientific point of view, poorly understood. Scientifically speaking, a

butterfly is at least as mysterious as a superstring.

That is a concept Dickinson would have understood. Poets have, through the ages, been

credited with the ability to speak truths, to capture, somehow, the “truths” of the

universe through a different path from the ones scientists take. “Tell all the Truth but

tell it slant—/Success in Circuit lies” (P1129) was Dickinson’s way of putting it. In

attempting to describe what poets do, however, we reach the ‘fudge factor’ when we

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try to explain how poets ‘tell truths,’ how their work somehow illuminates for us the

nature of the world and the nature of human understanding. We fail to do so when we

impose the false theoretical construct of ‘objective reality’ on physical—and

poetic—reality. What I have tried to show in this paper is how the constructive power

of metaphor enables a poet like Dickinson not to describe but to create her own

individual world truth, a truth that is grounded in a physically embodied universe.

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