Freeman m Dickinson's Conceptual Univ

ELSEVIER Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995) 643~566

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Metaphor making meaning: Dickinson's conceptual universe

Marga re t H. F r e e m a n

Department of English, Los Angeles Valley College, 5800 Fulton Avenue, Van Nuys, CA 91401-4096, USA

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 Dickin- son's conceptual universe.

I. Introduction

Does meaning make metaphor? Or does metaphor make meaning? The orthodox view, dominant in the tradition that comes down to us from Plato and Aristo- tle, sees metaphor as merely imitative of an objective reality, a reality that can be known independently of human participation. With the rise of modem 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 ' t ruths ' of this world have been called into question. Kant advanced the debate between the empirical and rational approaches to these questions by acknowledg- ing that human perception of physical reality was structured by a pre-existing cognitive ' f r amework ' ; Einstein furthered the debate in the twentieth century by showing that reality is partially constituted by human participation in the physical

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644 M. Freeman / Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995) 643~66

world . 1 Recent work in cogni t ive sc ience, e spec ia l ly in the area o f metaphor , has deve loped a much more sophis t ica ted v iew of the re la t ions be tween human thought and percept ion. Researchers l ike George Lakoff , Mark Johnson, and Mark Turner have shown how the metaphor ica l s tructures o f our eve ryday language are e m b o d i e d in our phys ica l exper ience o f the wor ld and have enab led us to ident i fy and recognize the idea l ized cogni t ive mode l s that under l ie our c o m m o n e v e r y d a y unders tand ing o f the wor ld in which we live.

When we turn to l i terary cri t icism, recogni t ion of those cogni t ive models is par- t icular ly important , both those that cri t ics hold and those held by writers. In discussing the stages o f t ranslat ing a poem into another language, for example , Robert B ly (1983: 18-19) warns us of the dangers of not recogniz ing the exis tence of such cul tural ly embedded presupposi t ions : " W h e n a poet from another culture contradicts our assumptions , we tend to fudge his point; therefore to s truggle with each eccen- tricity we see is ex t remely important . . . . I f we don ' t , we should let the poem alone and not translate it; we ' l l only ruin it if we go ahead" . What Bly says about trans- lat ing poetry is jus t as true when we are reading poems in our own language, espe- c ia l ly when the poet comes from a different mi l ieu or cen tu ry? I f we are to understand how a poet l ike Emi ly Dickinson structures her exper ience of the world, we need to look at the way she structures her metaphors of that world. Al though recent crit ical work on Dickinson takes some account of cultural models (this is especia l ly true o f feminis t studies), all the crit ics I have read presuppose a taken-for-granted world of object ive reali ty, onto which Dick inson ' s images are mapped. Such readings assume that the goal of cr i t ic ism is to d i scover the nature of that mapping and how it fits with the truth condi t ions imposed by that reali ty. It is f rom this perspec- t ive that a major work on Dick inson ' s poetry has found much of it without direction, coherency, or meaning, and has concluded as a result that Dickinson had a "f in less m i n d " (Porter, 1981 : passim).

What I should like to argue is that it is the phi losophical assumptions under ly ing such readings that cause these difficult ies. An Object iv is t view of real i ty sees metaphor as incidental to the proposi t ional basis of truth. Recent work in cogni t ive science, however , has shown, to the contrary, that we organize our knowledge according to prototypes , and that we assign membersh ip to categories, not on the

It is interesting that although both Kant and Einstein paved the way for a more complex view of the nature of reality as it relates to human cognition, neither gave up the traditional belief in objective reality. As Freeman J. Dyson (1980: 7) has noted, "The old vision which Einstein maintained until the end of his life, of an objective world of space and time and matter independent of human thought and obser- vation, is no longer ours. Einstein hoped to find a universe possessing what he called 'objective reality', a universe of mountaintops, which he could comprehend by means of a finite set of equations. Nature, it turns out, lives not on the mountaintops but in the valleys". 2 R.P. Blackmur (1980: 35) makes this point even more cogently in his discussion of Dickinson. He argues that the greatness of Dickinson (one can infer "any poet") lies not in "anybody's idea of greatness" (or "cultural models" in our terms) but in the "poetic relations of the words - that is to say, by what they make of each other. This rule, or this prejudice applies ... exactly as strongly to our method of determining the influence of a culture or a church or a philosophy, alive, dead, or dying, upon the body of Emily Dickinson's poetry. We will see what the influence did to the words, and more important, what the words did to the influence" [my emphasis].

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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, 1987: 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 radi- cal upheavals in beliefs. Puritan New England, as both Allen Tate and R.P. Black- mur 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" (Lightmann, 1987), and the rise of evolutionary theories during the same period cul- minated 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 enor- mous. 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 (1975: 19).

2. 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: (1) a source or starting point; (2) a goal, or end-point; and (3) a sequence of con- tiguous 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 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 (Fig. 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.

3 I am grateful to Jorge Mata for providing the graphics for this paper. 4 References to Dickinson's works in this paper are drawn from the following sources: T.H. Johnson, ed., 1958. The letters of Emily Dickinson. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard Uni- versity Press; T.H. Johnson, ed., 1955. The poems of Emily Dickinson. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Letter numbers in the text are preceded by the letter L; poem numbers by the letter P.

646 M. Freeman / Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995) 643--666

source gate goal

birth death heaven

Fig. 1.

She knew it all right, pervas ive as it was in her readings and her culture. But it is the way she deals with that metaphor as it is embod ied in the cultural model o f Calvin- ist theology that shows her re ject ion of it. Note, for instance, how, in the fo l lowing poem, the speaker subverts the journey by first making it incomplete , with the phrase "a lmos t c o m e " , then s lowing it down because of dea th ' s barrier, " the Fores t of the Dead" , f inal ly to stop a l together with a symbol of surrender in " the white f lag" be tween retreat and G o d ' s gates (P615):

Our journey had advanced - Our feet were a lmost come To that odd Fork in Be ing ' s Road - Eterni ty - by Term -

Our pace took sudden awe - Our feet - reluctant - led Before - were Cit ies - but Between - The Fores t o f the Dead -

Retreat - was out of Hope - Behind - a Sea led Route - E te rn i ty ' s Whi te F lag - Before - And God - at every Gate -

The speake r ' s d i scomfor t with cont inuing the journey in this poem is a consis tent mot i f in D ick inson ' s poems and letters. Her roads are " fune rea l " (P735); " a scarlet w a y " associa ted with pain, renunciat ion, and crucif ixion (P527); the speaker on such a road "fe l t ill - and odd - " (P579); the paths don ' t so much achieve, or lead to, or even end at, so much as come to a " s t o p " at their des t inat ion (P344):

'Twas the old - road - through pain - That unfrequented - one - Wi th many a turn - and thorn - That stops - at Heaven -

In an ear ly poem, she mocks the bibl ical metaphor (P234):

M. Freeman / Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995) 643-666 647

You're right - "the way is narrow" - And "difficult the Gate" - And "few there be" - Correct again - That "enter in - thereat" -

'T is Costly - So are p u r p l e s !

'Tis just the price of B r e a t h -

With but the "Discount" of the G r a v e -

Termed by the B r o k e r s - " D e a t h " !

And after t ha t - there's Heaven - The G o o d Man's - " D i v i d e n d " -

And B a d Men - "go to Jail" - I guess -

Dickinson explicitly rejects the idea that life is a path that has a specific, predeter- mined destination. In contemplating the importance of "experience" in our understanding of the world in the following poem, rather than docilely accepting the con- vention that experience can " lead" us to our destinations, she turns it inward into the operations of the mind (P910):

Experience is the Angled Road Preferred against the Mind By - Paradox - the Mind i t s e l f -

In a late poem, the perennial question of where we "go" after death is subtly sub- verted 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, l i fe . The word j o u r n e y itself, in its original meaning, meant the distance one could travel in a day (from the French j o u r ) . More accurately, then, the full metaphoric construct is that of LIFE IS A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME. This point is crucial in understanding Dickinson 's rejec- tion of the metaphor, because it was not simply the Calvinist view of l i fe 's journey toward heaven that she could not accept; she could not accept traditional


not ions of t ime, either. 5 Somet imes she denies clich6d attitudes, as in "They say that t ime assuages /Time never did assuage" (P686), or " D e a t h ' s w a y l a y i n g ' s not

the sharpest /Of the thefts of T ime - " (P1296); somet imes she condescends to t ime: "He doubt less did his best - " (P1478); but it is in her t reatment of t ime in its relat ion to eterni ty on the one hand and the world on the other that we see the

complexi ty of her atti tudes toward it. Although this is not the place to explore the whole question of time in Dick inson ' 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 impos- sible, to accept the notion that "death" was at the "end" of a linear progression of a " l i fe t ime" and that "eterni ty" somehow came after. For Dickinson, eternity was " in t ime" (P800). In " F o r e v e r - is composed of Nows - " (P624), time and eternity seem

to collapse into one: " ' T i s not a different time - " , and the markers of time "dissolve" and "exhale" to obscure the elements of "Inf ini teness - / A n d Latitude of Home - " that dist inguish "Forever" from " n o w " :

Forever - is composed of Nows -

'Tis not a different time - 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 lit- erally 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, ulti- mately, 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.

5 What is significant in the following story Dickinson told about herself, as noted by T.W. Higginson after his meeting with her, is perhaps not so much the facts she relates (though it is unusual, it is true, for a bright and intelligent child not to be able to grasp the 'telling' of time before the age of fifteen), but that she thought it noteworthy to tell Higginson about it years later. "I never knew how to tell time by the clock till I was 15. My father thought he had taught me but I did not understand & I was afraid to say I did not & afraid to ask any one else lest he should know". (Quoted by Higginson in a letter to his wife on the 17 August 1870. L342b.)

M. Freeman / Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995) 643-666 649

It is perhaps diff icul t for us, with space ship Ulysses on its four -year voyage to the sun, to imagine the concept of previous centur ies that the solar system, though large, was not very distant, that ear th was j udged to be some 4.8 mi l l ion mi les f rom the nearest star. Not unti l Bressel succeeded in the first precise measurement , by means of paral lax, of the dis tance f rom earth to a star in 1838, only eight years after Dick- inson ' s birth, d id scientists es tabl ish jus t how vast the universe is. New discover ies were happening all the t ime: through the work of Thomas Wright , Kant, and Lam- bert, d i sk -shaped ga laxies were d iscovered, with the sun no longer centered but at the edge o f the disk that fo rmed the Mi lky Way . 6 The stars and planets were seen to be afloat in a great expanse, and scientif ic metaphors deve loped which saw space as a vast sea, with the planets as boats, c i rcl ing in sweeps around the sun (Ferris , 1989: passim). 7

Such heady stuff p rov ided Dickinson with the imagery she needed. F rom her ear ly ch i ldhood days at Amhers t A c a d e m y , Dickinson took a keen interest in developments in all the phys ica l sciences, f rom botany to as t ronomy. In his b iography of Dickinson, Richard Sewal l (1974: 343) descr ibes how Edward Hi tchcock, Pres ident o f Amhers t Col lege f rom 1845-1854, was known for his met iculous scientif ic obser- vat ions and made Amhers t a leading center for scientif ic study. In his wri t ings Hitch- cock deve loped a Natural Theo logy in which he a t tempted to reconci le a devout be l i e f in revea led re l ig ion with the new scientif ic d iscover ies of his day. D ick inson ' s language is full of t e rmino logy related to the as t ronomical achievements of the previous century and to the con tempora ry events and d iscover ies happening in her life- t ime. 8 This language is not incidental . Dickinson l inks it imagina t ive ly into a coherent conceptua l iza t ion that is rea l ized by the metaphor LIFE IS A VOYAGE IN SPACE.

3. The AIR IS SEA image metaphor

The metaphor of the JOURNEY, as we have seen, was problemat ic because, unl ike the VOYAGE metaphor , it p resumed a specif ic dest inat ion. 9 And " the voyage of l i fe" was a c o m m o n p l a c e concept ion in her culture. Dickinson, however , t ransformed it

0 Kant's scientific work was conducted when he was a young man. One wonders whether his explo- rations into the 'new' science provided at least the groundwork for his later philosophy, just as Dickin- son's readings in the 'new science' led to those aspects of her poetry discussed in this paper. 7 Interesting evidence for the theory of cognitive metaphor is provided in the history of science. In 1728, Bradley solved the problem of aberrant starlight when idly contemplating the movement of a wind vane in the shape of a boat. As Ferris (1989: 138) explains, "It occurred to Bradley that the earth is adrift in winds of starlight". Similarly, Herschel's Book of Sweeps was named after the physical move- ments he made with his telescope to 'sweep' the night sky. Just think what would have happened to the history of science if Bradley's wind vane had been a rooster! s See the chapter "Dry Wine", in Emily Dickinson's Imagery (1979), in which Rebecca Patterson dis- cusses some of these terms and their possible associations with contemporary events. 9 One can see the difference I am alluding to here by considering our commonplace assumptions in our use of the two words, journey and voyage. When we say we are 'going' on a journey, it is assumed we have a particular destination in mind; when we 'take' a voyage, however, it is the travelling itself that seems more important than any possible destination we might have in mind.

650 M. Freeman / Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995) 643-666

into a metaphor that created a coherent mode l for her conceptual universe, that is, LIFE IS A VOYAGE IN SPACE. This she achieved through the creat ion o f the image metaphor AIR IS SEA. 1° 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, fo l lowing Turner ' s (1991 : 173) account of the invariance hypothesis , when we map the image schema conta ined in the source image sea onto the target image air,

the target image acquires only that part of the image-schemat ic structure o f the source that is not inconsis tent with its own image-schema. For example , the sea is salty, and " sa l ty" therefore is part o f the image-schemat ic structure of sea; " s a l t y " , however , is not part o f the image - schema o f air, and therefore that part of the sea ' s image-schemat ic structure is not mapped onto the target domain of air. As we shall see, Dickinson does not violate this constraint in her metaphor ica l mapping o f the sea/air image-schemata .

Throughout the poetry, sea substi tutes for air (P 1198):

A soft Sea washed around the House A Sea of Summer Ai r

In one poem, the compar i son is made clear (P484):

M y Garden - l ike the Beach - Denotes there be - a Sea - Tha t ' s S u m m e r -

The meaning of the first two lines of what has been considered a puzzl ing little poem is made clear by recogniz ing the AIR IS SEA image metaphor (P1337):

Upon a Li lac Sea To toss incessant ly

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 Butterf l ies - sai led thro ' - (P247) Bags of Doubloons - adventurous Bees /Brought me - from f i rmamenta l seas - (P247)

~'~ Judith Fan (1992) has also noted the relationship of Dickinson's imagery to the sea. In a rich description, she shows how Dickinson's language may be associated with the landscape painters of her time, specifically Thomas Cole's series of paintings called "the Voyage of Life". Although she com- ments on the soul's journey, she does not connect the metaphor to the whole of nature, nor does she identify the principles underlying such metaphorical structuring. Dickinson's images certainly reflect the Hudson River School of painters to a degree, but 1 would argue that they, like her, are sharing in the common and well established metaphors that were current in the language of the time.

M. Freeman /Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995) 643466 651

For Capta in was the But te r f ly /For H e l m s m a n was the Bee (P1198) As B i rd ' s far N a v i g a t i o n / . . . / A plash o f Oars, a Ga ie ty - (P243) The most t r iumphant Bi rd I ever knew or me t /Embarked upon a (P1265) A n d he unrol led his fea thers /And rowed him softer home - (P328)

twig today

Even an insect l ike the " S u m m e r G n a t " is "Unconsc ious that his single F lee t /Do not compr i se the skies - " (P796).

In l ike manner , act ion verbs associa ted with EVERYTHING THAT FLIES are also asso- c ia ted with the sea:

A Spar row. . . / Inv igora t ed , waded/ In all the deepes t Sky (P1211) Or Butterfl ies, of f Banks of Noon/Leap , p lashless as they swim. (P328)

Somet imes , EVERYTHING THAT FLIES IS A BOAT, as in the poem in which a bird leaves its nest for the first t ime (P798):

A n d now, among Ci rcumference - Her s teady Boat be seen - At home - among the Bi l lows - As The Bough where she was born -

Sunsets, too, are d rawn into the metaphor , as air, now unders tood as sea, is pro jec ted onto the sky and u l t imate ly onto space. Thus SUN IS A BOAT:

A Sloop o f A m b e r sl ips away /Upon an Ether Sea, (P1622) I have a Navy in the Wes t (P1642)

Where Ships o f Purple - gent ly toss - On Seas o f Daffodi l - Fantas t ic Sai lors - mingle - A n d t h e n - the W h a r f is still! (P265)

In one poem, the sunset becomes the sea itself, and the images associa ted with the sea - traffic, landing, bales, merchan tmen - the traces left in the sky by the sun in its

sett ing (P266):

This - is the land - the Sunset washes - These - are the Banks o f the Ye l low Sea - Where it rose - or whi ther it rushes - These - are the Wes te rn Mys te ry !

Night after Night 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 T ime ' 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

O n e p o r t - suffices - for a Brig - like m i n e - (P368) If my Bark s ink/ 'Tis to another sea - (1234)

Myself endued Balloon/By but a lip of Metal - / T h e 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 G r i e f - (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 p lank") 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.

~1 It is possible to claim that the imagery here reflects the body-soul split of Platonic philosophy, and that it is the body, not the soul, that is the boat. However, I think that this is an example and monition of Bly's warning that we not read into a poet's conceptual schema our own preconceptions. The erotic sug- gestion of "Wild Nights - Wild Nights!" (P249) depends on seeing the whole human being as a boat, not just the body. Dickinson's depth of agony in confronting the idea of death also takes its force from this metaphor.

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I knew not but the next Would be my final inch - This gave me the precarious Gait 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.

4. The CYCLE schema and the language of SPACE

As Mark Johnson (1987:119) describes this schema, the cycle is part of our phys- iological 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 heav- enly 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 (1987: 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. (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 - / R o u n d the Steep Air - (P703)

And all the Earth strove common round - (P965) Meanwhile - Her wheeling King - [referring to the sun] (P232)


Convulsion - playing round - / H a r m l e s s - as streaks of Meteor - (P792)

Swifter than the hoofs of Horsemen/Round a Ledge of dream! (P65) The Feet, mechanical, go round - / O f 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. (PIO)

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

[Autumn] eddies like a Rose - away - / U p o n Vermillion Wheels - (P656) The Seasons played around his knees (P975) As Floods - on Whites o f 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 Cupboards" while "unsuspecting Cycles/Wheel solemnly a w a y ! " (P61). In a somewhat more serious poem, again on the subject o f death, in which eternity is associated with sea imagery, the speaker imagines time as a movement through space (P 160):

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 o f an

~2 The first definition for cycle in the OED (Second Edition) is the astronomical: "a circle or orbit in the heavens", and the earliest literary reference for this meaning is cited as 1631. The first reference for the abbreviated version of bicycle or tricycle is 1870. The second definition, "a recurrent period of a def- inite number of years adopted for the purposes of chronology" is closely associated in its earliest cita- tions (the first 1387) with time calculations based on the (spatial) movement of the planets and stars.


infinite universe, encouraged by the discoveries of the new science, enabled Dickin- son 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 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 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 JOUR- NEY 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 (see Fig. 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 fol- lowed by a decline toward death". By overlapping the temporal constructs of the

~3 See the chapters on "Emily Dickinson's Geography" and "The Cardinal Points" in Emily Dickin- son's Imagery (1979) for Rebecca Patterson's more detailed discussions of the terms used in Fig. 2.

656 M. Freeman / Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995) 643--666

North Winter

Mldntght

I1"1

UOON Je~u.Jns

q.Lnos

Fig. 2

daily and annual climaxes with the geographically determined points of the compass, Dickinson has transformed the into spatial schemata. Thus, temporal climaxes on the circle are mapped onto the source domain of space, so that TIME IS LOCATION :

A Music numerous as space - / B u t neighboring as Noon - (P783) Past Midnight! Past the Morning S ta r ! / . . . /Ah , What leagues there w e r e (P174) Whose galleries - are Sunrise - (P161) Though sunset lie between - (P1074)

To continents of summer - / T o 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 -

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, fight 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 - 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" .

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 - / O r 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 which the afterlife is its destination and death merely a gate on the way (as was shown in Fig. 1), Dickinson's new metaphor had no place for either in her conceptual universe (see Fig. 3).

." ,,'

:~'~" . ~ i ~ . •

.... i~::..::::::.:::~.~ I

Death ? Fig. 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):

M. Freeman / Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995) 643466 659

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 loss of Heaven as an anticipated goal at the end of l i fe 's journey with the shift to a cosmological perspective and the disruption of l inear t ime:

How archly spared the Heaven "to come" - If such prospective be - By superseding Destiny And dwell ing 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. 14

No longer are we travelers on l i fe ' s road, but we are identif ied with the earth

itself in its daily rotation, as the first and last stanzas of the fol lowing poem show (P721):

Behind Me - dips Eternity - Before Me - Immortal i ty - M y s e l f - the Term between -

Death but the Drift of Eastern Gray, Dissolving into Dawn away, Before the West begin -

. o .

'Tis Miracle before Me - then - 'Tis Miracle behind - between - A Crescent in the Sea - With Midnight to the North of Her -

14 See graphic in Timothy Fen-is' Coming of Age in the Milky Way (New York: Doubleday, 1988: 202), where he describes the fact that "two-dimensional inhabitants of a finite universe must confront the paradox of an 'edge' to their cosmos. But if we add a dimension, curving the plane on which they live into a sphere, their world, though still finite, becomes unbounded. General relativity reveals a simi- lar prospect for the four-dimensional geometry of the universe we three-dimensional creatures inhabit: hence Einstein's 'closed, unbounded' universe".

660 M. Freeman ! Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995) 643-666

And Midnight to the South of Her - And Maels t rom - in the Sky -

Dickinson contemplates the seemingly infinite reaches beyond the solar sys tem as she defines eterni ty 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 presumpt ion be -

Of Per iods of Seas - Unvis i ted of Shores - Themse lves the Verge of Seas to be - Eterni ty - is Those -

Infini ty i tself is seen as a giant ex tending across the d iameters of the earth, as one poem begins with infini ty and ends with eterni ty (P350):

They leave us with the Infinite. But He - is not a man - His f ingers are the size o f fists - His fists, the size of men -

And whom he foundeth, with his A r m As Himmaleh , shall stand - Gib ra l t a r ' s Ever las t ing Shoe Poised l ight ly on his Hand,

So trust him, Comrade - You for you, and I, for you and me Eterni ty is ample, And quick enough, if true.

" H o w infinite - to be /Al ive - " Dickinson exc la imed (P470). It might be (P847):

Fini te - to fail, but infinite to Venture - For the one ship that struts the shore M a n y ' s the gal lant - ove rwhe lmed Creature Nodding in Navies nevermore -

Perhaps one o f the most reveal ing poems that suggests "The Fini te - fur- n ished/With the Infinite - " (P906) is the fol lowing, which unites the metaphors of air/sea with those of space, ending with an expl ic i t reference to the scientif ic estab- l ishment in the final s tanza (P797):


By my Window have I for Scenery

Just a Sea - with a Stem -

If the Bird and the Farmer - deem it a "P ine" - The Opin ion will do - for them -

It has no Port, nor a "L ine" - 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 i t ' s Commerce - if Commerce it have - Of Spice - I infer from the Odors borne -

Of i t ' s Voice - to affirm - when the Wind is within - Can the D u m b define the Div ine? The Defini t ion of Melody - is -

That Defini t ion is none -

It - suggests to our F a i t h - They - suggest to our Sight - When the latter - is put away I shall meet with Convic t ion I somewhere met

That Immortal i ty -

Was the Pine at my Window a "Fel low

Of the Royal" Inf ini ty? Apprehensions - are God ' s introductions - To be hal lowed - accordingly -

The voyage of the soul is an embarkat ion on e terni ty ' s sea (P76):

Exultat ion is the going Of an inland soul to sea, Past the houses - past the headlands - Into deep Eternity -

That Dickinson personally identified with her metaphor can be seen in her corre- spondence. Shortly after the death of her nephew Gilbert, she wrote to her sister-in- law: "You must let me go first, Sue, because I live in the Sea always and know the Road" (L306). Life lived in Dick inson ' s metaphorical sea is graphically portrayed in

the fol lowing 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 approxi- mately sixteen years after she first recorded it reveals the underlying structural metaphor of LIFE IS A 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 Dick- inson'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 tran- sition from life to death more explicit, even though the poem remains in a worksheet draft (see Fig. 4).

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 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 - / A n d 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

M. Freeman /Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995) 643~66 663

[stanza 1]

Two Butterflies went out at Noon And waltzed upon a Farm And then espied Circumference Then overtook--- And caught a ride with him---

and took a Bout with h im--

[stanza 2]

Then lost themselves and found themselves staked lost chased caught

In eddies of the sun-- Fathoms in Rapids of Gambols with

of For Frenzy zies of

antics in with

Till Rapture missed them missed her footing--

Peninsula Gravitation chased

humbled-- ejected foundered grumbled

Until a Zephyr pushed them chased-- flung-- spumed scourged

And Both were wrecked in Noon-- drowned-- quenched-- whelmed--

And they were hurled from noon--

[stanza 3]

To all surviving Butterflies Be this Fatuity

Biography-- Example and monition To entomology--

The Poems of Emily Dickinson. ed. T. H. Johnson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 1955. II.410-411.

Fig. 4.

664 M. Freeman /Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995) 643~66

images of space ( "Gian t l ong" ) and t ime ( "Yea r long" ) to end with the pass ionate cry for a " d i s c " to br idge the dis tance be tween the l iving and the dead (P949):

Under the Light, yet under, Under the Grass and the Dirt, Under the Bee t l e ' s Cel lar Under the C l o v e r ' s Root,

Fur ther than A r m could stretch Were it Giant long, Fur ther than Sunshine could Were the Day Year long,

Over the Light, yet over, Over the Arc of the Bird - Over the C o m e t ' s ch imney - Over the Cubi t ' s Head,

Further than Guess can ga l lop Further than Riddle r ide - Oh for a Disc to the Dis tance Between Ourse lves and the Dead!

Dick inson ' s language o f arcs and disks, 15 crescents and c i rcumferences , is drawn direct ly f rom the newly acquired knowledge of the universe around her. The discov- ery o f d isk-shaped galaxies not only vast ly increased the reaches of space, it p laced our own solar sys tem within such a d i sk-shaped ga laxy (P1550):

The pattern of the sun Can fit but him alone For sheen must have a Disk To be a sun -

In her contempla t ions o f immorta l i ty , Dickinson found her metaphors for t ime and space more fit t ing than the Calv in is t s ' narrow road (P1454):

Those not l ive yet W h o doubt to l ive again -

~5 The word is spelled disc or disk apparently arbitrarily, though the OED says disk is the preferred spelling in America. Dickinson at first spelled it disc, but then changed to disk, perhaps because of the influence of its usage in scientific terminology. She certainly was using it in its scientific sense, i.e. as "the (apparently fiat) surface or 'face' of the sun, the moon, or a planet, as it appears to the eye" (OED). It was Kant who realized that at a certain angle, the disk-shaped galaxy of the sun appears to be linear (Ferris, 1989: 148).

M. Freeman /Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995) 643~566 665

" A g a i n " is o f 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 - Cos tumeless Consc iousness - That is he -

D ick inson ' s LIFE IS A VOYAGE IN SPACE metaphor enables us to unders tand that her s o - c a l l e d "abs t rac t i m a g e s " are g rounded in her exper ience of the w o d d and the universe around her. The p rob lem she faced in accept ing the re l ig ious impor t of the LIFE IS A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME metaphor and the way she rep laced it with LIFE IS A VOY-

AGE IN SPACE is graphica l ly d i sp layed in the fo l lowing poem, with its contrast be tween the static image o f the dead in a locat ion in space "un touched" by t ime, in the first stanza, and the movemen t of t ime through space, with the associa ted images of circle and sea, in the second (P216):

Safe in their Alabas te r Chambers - Untouched by Morn ing - And untouched by Noon - Lie the meek member s of the Resurrec t ion - Rafter of Satin - and R o o f of Stone!

Grand go the Years - in the Crescent - above them - Wor lds scoop their Arcs - A n d F i rmamen t s - row - Diadems - drop - and Doges - surrender - Soundless as dots - on a Disc of Snow -

Infinity in t ime, eternity in space. Had Dickinson known about b lack holes, in which t ime and space exchange places, she might have found the metaphor she was searching for that would enable her to unite life and death. 16 As it was, she was left suspended at the point in which the old order had been discredi ted by the new science, but more quest ions had been raised as a result. She would, however , have unders tood D y s o n ' s lectures in Infinite in All Directions (1980: 14), and perhaps seen her own at tempt to link the things of this world to the universe in the images he uses:

16 The classical theory of black holes, according to Dyson (1980: 21), says "that black holes are absolutely permanent", a concept that would surely have apealed to Dickinson's desire for confidence in immortality. But, as Dyson continues, Stephen Hawking's work has shown that "a black hole is not just a bottomless pit but a physical object". In Hawking's achievement in bringing "black holes back out of the domain of mathematical abstraction into the domain of things that we can see and measure", we see the same principles of physical embodiment that are applied in the cognitive theory of metaphor.


"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 butter- fly 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. "Tel l all the Truth but tell it slant - / S u c c e s s in Circuit l ies" (P1129) was Dick inson ' s way of putting

it. In attempting to describe what poets do, however, we reach the ' fudge factor ' when we try to explain how poets ' tell truths' , how their work somehow il luminates 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 'object ive reali ty ' on physical - and poetic - reality. What I have tried to show in this paper is how the construc- tive 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.

R e f e r e n c e s

Blackmur, R.P., 1980 [1952]. Language as gesture. New York: Columbia University Press. Bly, Robert, 1983. The eight stages of translation. St. Paul, MN: Ally Press. Dyson, Freeman J., 1980. Infinite in all directions. New York: Harper & Row. Farr, Judith, 1992. The passion of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ferris, Timothy, 1989. Coming of age in the Milky Way. New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday. Heidegger, Martin, 1975. Early Greek thinking: The dawn of Western philosophy. Tr. by David Farrell

Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. Johnson, Mark, 1987. The body in the mind: The bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason.

Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Johnson, T.H., ed., 1958. The letters of Emily Dickinson. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of

Harvard University Press. Johnson, T.H., ed., 1955. The poems of Emily Dickinson. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press

of Harvard University Press. Lakoff, George, 1987. Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind.

Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson, 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago and London: The University

of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George and Mark Turner, 1989. More than cool reason: A field guide to poetic metaphor.

Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Lightman, Bernard, 1987. The origins of agnosticism: Victorian unbelief and the limits of knowledge.

Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press. Patterson, Rebecca, 1979. Emily Dickinson's imagery. Ed. by Margaret H. Freeman. Amherst, MA: The

University of Massachusetts Press. Porter, David, 1981. Dickinson: The modem idiom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Turner, Mark, 1991. Reading minds. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sewall, Richard, 1974. The life of Emily Dickinson. 2 vols. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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