But we've already done the heavy lifting
of understanding how her poems work, how they dance,
and how utterly intense they are.
So here I just want to invoke her sense that the infinite is
both blessed, and perhaps, beyond her own possibility.
Dickinson, in part, left Mount Holyoke
because it was a place of intense pressure
to be a Christian, which meant in her terms,
having an ecstatic experience, an experience of being saved,
of being touched by God or Christ.
And while she seems to have been a believer,
she never had that experience, and she resented
being supposed to have one.
In her own family, there was such pressure on her,
and certainly her era witnessed a Christian reinvigoration
that was difficult to resist.
I don't know that I'd say that she entirely resisted,
but she was true to her own feelings, her own experience,
and not the least interested in falsifying them.
While many might declare themselves
to be born again, probably far less
actually had such a touched by God experience,
and many were doing the socially correct thing.
Dickinson was not socially correct, was not
touched by grace, though she was often gracious.
I had thought a little bit after I wrote this that maybe she
was touched by grace so often she just
didn't find it special.
But I have to think about that one a little more.
Mentally, she considered heaven out of experience
because it is so glorious it would
require the dissolution of the mind to sense its wonders.
Heaven is so far--
I'm not going to jump there yet.
"Heaven is so far of the mind," this is poem 370,
"that were the mind dissolved, the site of it by architect
could not again be proved.
Heaven is so far of the mind, that were the mind dissolved,
the site of it by architect could not again be proved."
She appreciates its wonder, its vastness,
but senses a distance from it, though she believes it
should be no further than here.
But where is here?