I want to move now to "Her Dance with Herself."
"Who am I within and through these words?"
Dickinson asks periodically or in some ways, continuously, who
am I, what am I, where am I, within and through her words
and sometimes, directly.
Sometimes, it seems she is the world itself
or the voice in the poem is.
As in this poem, number 397, "When diamonds
are a legend and diadems--
a tale, I brooch and earrings for myself,
do sow and raise for sale.
And though I'm scarce accounted, my art, a summer day,
had patrons.
Once, it was a queen.
And once, a butterfly."
Dickinson's poems are her jewels--
for herself, sown and grown, risen.
She feels scarce, small, yet her jewels are valuable ones.
And her art calls forth queens and the best nature
has to offer.
So while she posits herself as small,
somewhere in her, she says, along with a massive figure
like Whitman, I am large.
I contain multitudes.
Whitman was somewhat scandalous in the Dickinson household,
as was, in some ways, even Emerson.
Yet Dickinson does not seem to have shared their castigation
with her father and others, and may
have learned from them, as well as from Shakespeare.
She dances with herself from the minute to the grandiose,
tiny to large, spreading through that universe.