One of my favorite quips from Emily Dickinson is, “Life is over there.  On a shelf.”  Part of what makes this thought so captivating for me is that I still have buried in my heart a “literal” lew mind/heart which, when reading an observation like that wants to exclaim, “Why hell!  That’s nuts!  Life is not ‘over there’ and certainly not on a damn shelf.”  That reflects the concrete-thinking that I spent the first two or maybe three decades of my life firmly ensconced in.  But now I completely understand what Dickinson was noting and simultaneously revealing about herself.  She was an “observer” of life; she paid attention to a life in which those around her were immersed to the point being oblivious of a “hidden” dimension that she captured with her poetry. Emily was alienated or detached, allowing her to grasp the human soul and put into words its machinations, those delightful as well as beastly.  There is sense in which poets might be described as prophetic, not in the sense of being able to foretell the future but being aware of the implications of the present.  She was aware, acutely aware.  She saw that bookshelf in her room and in her heart conjoined that image with a feeling of separateness and loneliness in life.

This division of the soul is problematic without looking beneath the surface.  Such a “division” makes one think of “schizo” as in schizophrenic.  The difference is that a schizophrenic is definitely “divided” but is lacking that substrate of the soul which provides an underlying unity.  Dickinson certainly felt the anxiety and despair that she conveys in her poetry.  Who would not if they were more or less “cloistered” in their father’s attic for the whole of their life.  But she found beneath the surface that “substrate” which anchored her and allowed her to offer the profound wisdom that blokes like myself can take comfort in.  (Btw, I could easily spell substrate with a capital “S.”)

I close with a relevant bit of poetry from Matthew Arnold:

I’d like to close with a relevant quote from another 19th century, Matthew Arnold:

The poet, to whose mighty heart

Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart

Subdues that energy to scan

Not his own heart, but that of man.