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Friday – Halloween
While we are more apt to associate Halloween with Edgar Allan Poe than Emily Dickinson, the “belle from Amherst” has poems that are very Poe-like. I shared one a few Halloweens ago: In “One need to be a chamber to be haunted,” she points out that no haunted house is as frightening as the human mind. “The brain has corridors surpassing/ Material place,” she notes.
We are taken into these corridors in the two poems I have selected for today. In “‘Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch” she talks about what it is like to be on the verge of death. In it she may have in mind Poe’s horrifying “Descent into the Maelstrom,” although the whirlpool is even more malevolent in her case since it seems to be deliberate and calculated. For comparison’s sake, here’s a passage from the Poe story:
The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray ; but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven.
Dickinson’s maelstrom, while terrifying, has a notch, which I interpret as getting tighter with every rotation. If so, it is like the pendulum in that other Poe story, where the blade comes closer to the victim’s chest with each swing. This is what it feels like, the poet indicates, when one is nearing death. It’s as though “a Goblin with a Gauge” is overseeing the entire operation, an executioner measuring out the hours and eventually the seconds.
That’s not the end of the torture, however. Just when the final hour appears to have come, with the speaker leaving the “Dungeon’s luxury of doubt” for the certainty of “the Gibbets, and the dead,” a reprieve is granted. “The Pit and the Pendulum” also features a last-minute rescue, but in Dickinson’s case, it’s unclear whether the reprieve is genuinely freeing or just another stage of the anguish. Here’s the poem:
‘Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch,
That nearer, every Day,
Kept narrowing its boiling Wheel
Until the Agony
Toyed coolly with the final inch
Of your delirious Hem
And you dropt, lost, When something broke
And let you from a Dream
As if a Goblin with a Gauge
Kept measuring the Hours
Until you felt your Second
Weigh, helpless, in his Paws
And not a Sinew stirred could help,
And sense was setting numb
When God remembered and the Fiend
Let go, then, Overcome
As if your Sentence stood pronounced
And you were frozen led
From Dungeon’s luxury of Doubt
To Gibbets, and the Dead
And when the Film had stitched your eyes
A Creature gasped Reprieve!
Which Anguish was the utterest then
To perish, or to live?
Rather than go through all this again, wouldn’t it be easier just to perish?
The narrator’s observations in Poe’s “Pit and the Pendulum” work as a useful gloss on Dickinson’s poem. Of how the Spanish Inquisition is toying with him, the narrator writes,
To the victims of its tyranny, there was the choice of death with its direst physical agonies, or death with its most hideous moral horrors. I had been reserved for the latter. By long suffering my nerves had been unstrung, until I trembled at the sound of my own voice.
In another poem Dickinson provides instruction for defeating the horror of death: just look it full in the face and accept it. The truth of death may be bald and cold but grappling with it “will hold,” allowing us to conquer it. In contrast, “to scan a Ghost” leaves us faint. And in what could be read as a reference to Poe’s pendulum, she notes that it is “Suspense” sawing—and seesawing—away at us that we find tormenting. Here’s Poe:
Down — still unceasingly — still inevitably down! I gasped and struggled at each vibration. I shrunk convulsively at its every sweep. My eyes followed its outward or upward whirls with the eagerness of the most unmeaning despair; they closed themselves spasmodically at the descent, although death would have been a relief, oh! how unspeakable! Still I quivered in every nerve to think how slight a sinking of the machinery would precipitate that keen, glistening axe upon my bosom. It was hope that prompted the nerve to quiver — the frame to shrink. It was hope — the hope that triumphs on the rack — that whispers to the death-condemned even in the dungeons of the Inquisition.
Dickinson’s speaker finds it exhilarating to move beyond hope (“Stop hoping, now”). Suddenly the Soul is secure and she need fear the cold grave no more. “Others, can wrestle–/ Yours, is done,” she asserts. If we cease bleakly dreading Woe and simply open our arms to it, we will set “the Fright at Liberty and free/ And Terror’s free.”
With this approach, it’s as though we have been granted a gay holiday from all of death’s horrors. Although having made her case, the poet must then admit that it’s also a ghastly holiday. That adverb casts doubt on the whole rest of the poem. She can’t altogether dismiss the subject.
‘Tis so appalling—it exhilarates—
So over Horror, it half Captivates—
The Soul stares after it, secure—
A Sepulcher, fears frost, no more—
To scan a Ghost, is faint—
But grappling, conquers it—
How easy, Torment, now—
Suspense kept sawing so—
The Truth, is Bald, and Cold—
But that will hold—
If any are not sure—
We show them—prayer—
But we, who know,
Stop hoping, now—
Looking at Death, is Dying—
Just let go the Breath—
And not the pillow at your Cheek
So Slumbereth—
Others, Can wrestle—
Yours, is done—
And so of Woe, bleak dreaded—come,
It sets the Fright at liberty—
And Terror’s free—
Gay, Ghastly, Holiday!
I wonder if today’s partying, with all its skeletons, corpses, and murderous monsters, is a ritual way of facing up to our fears of death. It is indeed a gay and ghastly holiday. Happy Halloween!
