BLog 8, Dickinson and Hardy

At first, I found Emily Dickinson's poem “Because I could not stop for Death” to be frustrating. I had to read it several times on several different days, on each of which I had to be running a slightly different mood and level of brain performance. It was for the same issue that I was initially drawn to “The Man He Killed” by Thomas Hardy. To me, his poem was simple, and I understood it easily, and it didn't take this stressful coordination of my thoughts and evisceration of my leisure schedule to understand.

Venting done, moving on.

The speaker's tone was a big point of contention for me. I liked how Hardy accomplished a sort of accent, which I perceived to be Scottish or Irish, as this helps to give the poem somewhat of a whimsical mood. He speculates upon his foe as a man largely just like him, who “thought he'd 'list, perhaps off-hand-like, – just as I – ”(lines 13-14). This, I see, as the speaker's acknowledgment of the value of human life, which my prejudgment led me to doubt in Dickinson's poem. Whereas the speaker in Dickinson's poem seems constantly drawn to Death, Hardy shows his preference by sandwiching his description of what happened between two stanzas that emphasize an obviously preferable alternative to war. His fleetingness, given away by, “Yes; quaint and curious war is!”(line 17), he actively tames, using two examples of how these two men would be at the ready to help each other and be friends, had their countries not been at war.

Both poems had to do with life and/or death, which, for some reason, I liked.

I understand that Dickinson was suicidal, and at first, I judged her concept of human life as undeveloped beyond where her feelings of worthlessness had been keeping her, which there is no real evidence of.  Her romanticized depiction, “The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality”(line 4), made it seem like Death was her ticket to heaven/hell/the afterlife/whatever your preference. Before, this seemed irresponsible to me.

I guess my issue could have been to do with the stereotypical distinctions between men and woman. In the tone and structure of Hardy's poem, he shows great integrity of conscience, a trait I admire. Dickinson shows Death the normally girly trait of wanting to maintain decency in polite company. Initially, this angered me, but only after I mistakenly drew into account an imaginary presence of danger to the people around her, which she made no mention of. I came to that conclusion because of the way she paints Death as a concrete character, even capitalizing his name. I pictured Death as a serial killer, for whom the speaker was consciously allowing herself to be seduced. Upon further contemplation (some of which I have documented) on Dickinson's mental state, and ultimately recognizing her possible friendship with Death as a development I do not totally understand, on top of the fact that there is no evidence to support this in the poem whatsoever, I found the strength to let it go.

Now, for a (hopefully) final observation of my feelings regarding these works. Though I did initially not like Dickinson's poem, it presented a depiction of death that I have never thought about before. The last stanza gives a hint that the preceding girth of the poem was a description of something that happened to the speaker, maybe to her house. A near-death situation. Or this is the event that caused her to think about suicide for the very first time. I realized that over the amount of time, “Centuries”(line 21), probably her friendly depiction of Death became the best option for her, since confrontation is so hard to maintain for many women, and since the time frame is so long, the speaker may just as well be seen as an abstract, perhaps immortal, being. “Stopping for Death” was a phrase that I struggled with for a while, whilst writing this response. Now, I think it may mean that the speaker is telling of a time when she was caught up in living with the same perspective, doing the same things (her “labor and leisure”(lines 6-7)), and maybe the experience with the house being destroyed eventually led her to befriend the idea of dying, since they were so close at one point.