These issues of irony, sincerity, and rhetorical intention strike me as more vexatious than I have so far made out. In the exemplary “I’m going to kill you,” (conveying surprised pleasure, modesty overwhelmed, not a homicidal threat, a distinction permitted by nothing semantic, hence the abundance of dead formalists), the irony is so limp it does not dilute the simple-minded expression of gratitude. Yesterday, I was attempting to counsel a friend in Turkey regarding her translation of Emily Dickinson into the manly language of a people equally comfortable on galloping horses, sofas and ottomans. Ayse Kirtunc, head of American Studies at Ege University in Izmir, was concerned with the opaque, verbally resonant resolution of #1138, but I found myself compelled to raise other issues, or to raise the element from which issues arise:

A Spider sewed at Night
Without a Light
Upon an Arc of White.
If Ruff it was of Dame
Or Shroud of Gnome
Himself himself inform.
Of Immortality
His Strategy
Was Physiognomy.

I suggested that the key word was “gnome” in the second stanza, dwarf-like, aphoristic, and pithy on the one hand, or secret and encoding knowledge of the inner arcanum other. Gnome is cognate with the Greek “know,” and ED invariably spins loose on a semantically explosive, literally semiotic pun, obliging us to take second and third looks at the initial “Arc of White,” alternatively the “Ruff” of a “Dame” or the “Shroud” of a “Gnome.” It is a spider's web, an icky trap woven at night, artfully combining contraries of direction into what is invisible or iridescent, transcendent and suggestive: an “Arc of White” which resolves all shimmering stickiness into a demure opaque purity, yet remains at its dispersive core a mortal threshold, whether as damsel’s ruff or secretive little person’s death-dealing gossamer shroud, enveloping and concealing semantically equated in deadly instability. We would say woven, but Emily said “sewed,” the exultant, corroborating accent on the iamb expunging from the tables of memory and consideration anything so trochaic and mundane. To sew is to skillfully and insistently penetrate a cloth with an adroit silver needle firmly attached to a thread. Suddenly “Ruff” looms as a startling pun, elegant neck decoration as token of that civilly clothed efflorescence of the hirsute upon the convex, volcanic, feminine mount of privilege, source of life and death and so forth (cf., Artchive.com, L’Origine du monde, Gustave Courbet).

This throws the triumphant and defiant assertions of the last stanza, evermore insistently gnomic, swift and pithy in achieving its climax, rendered nonetheless obliquely–this is a spider’s strategy, freighted with ED’s ecstatic affirmation–into a new darkness of light: Dickinson’s celebration of the superficial and two-dimensional, rather than the spiritual or merely judicious, accelerated by the Sapphic foot combination’s (anapest and trochee, fused), grave giggle-thrill embedded in ED’s conclusive (and concussive) “Physiognomy,” all mortal, planetary investment into the secret powers of love’s sovereign signature, the beloved’s face–not to mention heedless and remorseless abandonment of moral obedience as path to heavenly reward immortality. And besides affirming the mysterious power of cosmetic, superficial, facial identity in erotic delirium (one name for a five-syllable poetic foot, technically a cola or tail, is adonic–a fanciful coincidence, since the name Izmir, Turkish for Smyrna derives from the wife of Cinyras, King of Cyprus, foolishly claiming that her daughter, Smyrna, was more beautiful than Aphrodite, who made Smyrna become smitten with her own father, inducing her nurse to make the king drunk, the climbed into bed with him. When Cinyras awoke from the night’s drunken and encylopedic orgy, he drove his daughter from the palace by sword, and just as he was about to overtake and kill her, Aphrodite took pity and turned Smyrna into a myrrh tree, but as the king’s sword descended, it split the tree and Adonis tumbled out), or besides the beloved’s physiognomy as two-dimensional spider’s web, ED was undoubtedly enchanted, impishly, with that very sexy, sapphic, five-syllable poetic cola, with its unaccented prelude, a climactic accent on "og!" and gratifying anti-climactic decline in "gnomy." (Know me.)

Does this reading depend on Dickinson’s deliberate deployment of “Ruff” to invoke the pubic bush? Yes and no. The lifetime so many women spend in exercising their instinct for sexual loveliness, attraction and interpersonal daring makes them artists in a Never-Never Land of blurred intention, and Wallace Stevens, as often as not the Fatty Arbuckle of American modernism and referenced uncritically by Frank Ham, is the epitome of male impatience and rude unloveliness when he commands the amorata poetica, obscure object of all desire and the “Supreme Fiction,” to hold still:

Civil, madam, I am, but underneath a tree,
This unprovoked sensation requires
That I should name you flatly, waste no words,
Check your evasions, hold you to yourself.

Dickinson, needless to say, refuses to hold still. #613 operates similarly to #1138, insofar as it pirouettes and opens its wings on a pun, though a less lewd one than “Ruff:”

They shut me up in Prose–
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet

Because they liked me “still”–
Still! Could themself have peeped–
And seen my Brain–go round–
They might as well have lodged a Bird
For Treason–in the Pound–
Himself has but to will
And easy as a Star
Abolish his Captivity
And laugh–No more have I–

Here ED’s punctuation, quotation marks, signal a initially less discomforting explosive pun, on “still”–parental love is enduring, yet prefers a silent and less distracting Emily: ED’s father had lots to worry about, two unwed daughters, the red-headed one wall-eyed and exhibiting the deranged infatuations and sexual recklessness of someone prematurely and improperly introduced to its thrills and powers, himself married to a gorgeous woman with the coal-black hair and cheekbones of a Turk, founding Amherst College, the town’s volunteer fire department, taking teen-age Emily (his adored, rebellious carrot-top already expelled from Mount Holyoke) off to Springfield with him as secretary and housekeeper to when elected to serve in the Massachusetts state legislature. Her mind, even confined in a disciplinary closet, literal or figurative, is loose as a bird locked in a pound, those large, roofless stone enclosures for strayed animals, no place to cage a bird, nor her treasonous impulses, presumably unsanctioned love. Suggestively and no doubt intuitively, Dickinson sets off and underscores her description of her willful freedom, having the token of her being go round and thereby escape decent managment. More portentously tragic anxieties are invoked when unstillness, love, being and and the captive bird are represented as a star, free in the sky, figure of female genitalia, but whose escape from the visible heaven into an invisible cosmic stratum, is matter for rueful laughter. In love one is terribly free and tragically unfree. The eternal diminuendo into stillness of this ambiguous state is expressed like a shooting star in the last line’s metrical fall into sorrowful knowledge.

But in the midst of these readings, I stumbled on #566, which I suspect is notorious:

A Dying Tiger–moaned for Drink–
I hunted all the Sand–
I caught the Dripping of a Rock
And bore it in my Hand–

His Mighty Balls–in death were thick–
But searching–I could see
A Vison on the Retina
Of Water–and of me–
’Twas not my blame–who sped too slow–
’Twas not his blame–who died
While I was watching him–
But ’twas–the fact that He was dead–

O what fun, but what to do about those balls? Probably nothing, or at most, delicately repress our salacious imaginings in order to locate Emily. Because she’s not to be disconnected and dispossessed of the fun. This fable is certainly satirizing the premature bankruptcy of a Tiger’s desire–he’s just dying for it–the slaking of his thirst for water and for her, as indicated by what she reports discerning in the mirror of his retina, and she brings him what he craves, caught from the dripping of a rock. But it’s not her fault, she who sped so slowly, nor his, who died while her eyes were still open, yet the fact remains, “He was dead.”

In Turkey this is the sort of joke that belongs in a women’s hamam, or Turkish Bath (Cf. Adnan Adam Onart’s recently published, TURKISH: A Dictionary of Delights, distributed in this country by the MIT University Press, ISBN 3-928201-33-6), where women celebrate irreverent boldness by referring explicitly to a lover’s “Mighty Balls,” especially if he’s to be belittled as a “dead tiger.” And though its likely that ED’s mocking intuitions, right after she “caught the Dripping of a Rock / And bore it in my hand,” led her to “His Mighty Balls,” it is inconceivable that she consciously intended those balls to be testicles, or even noticed, consciously, where her intuitions had led her. The chief function of poetry is to strengthen our tolerance for reality, whose essence is uncertainty, and needs to be patiently wooed, gently coaxed, interminably courted and pursued into the Never-Never Land of permission. Sexual intentions are by definition slippery, though no one but our present Republican administration would wish to deliberately deprive the world, including the poetic world, of life and its furtive, complex, indeed nuanced designs.

Kenneth Rosen is the author of seven collections of poems, beginning with Whole Horse (Braziller Poetry Series, 1970), and most recently The Origins of Tragedy, CavanKerry, 2002. Rosen hiked the length of the Presidential Range of the White Mountains over thirty years ago, and was particularly charmed to discover Crag Camp at timberline on the edge of King Ravine, after hiking in a dark hallucinatory rain over black rocks intermittently marked with yellow blazes from Monroe Hut past Thunderhole Junction and down Mt. Adams to Crag Camp's lone gaslight twinkling ambiguously from beyond the gathering shoulder-high pines. Rosen and his wife returned to Randolph, NH on July 31st, 2004, night of the blue moon and a downpour extrordinaire — the northern summits rip the stomachs from slow-moving, low-lying clouds — so that he could review the logbooks maintained at Crag Camp, now in the custody of the Randolph Mountain Club archivist, particularly the entrees made in behalf of G.A.S. (Goddard Alpine Society), by the pseudonymous Grey Dellwood and friends, gnomic meditations on the cultural alternatives represented by military service in Viet Nam and psychedelic self-indulgence in the mountains. This was the era when a song such as "Coming Down Again" (from GOATS HEAD SOUP) magically refracted one's most private erotic, psychic, and geo-physical exigencies, the communion of chaos and ataraxia made popular, in an old-fashioned sense, by substances known variously as Orange Sunshine, Purple Windowpane, ad infinitum. Rosen and his wife endeavored to sojourn at the cabin described in the poem — checking it twice, to see if there'd been some mistake — but eventually Rosen's wife seized the bull, as it were, by the horns, and explained to its sturdy country proprietors, how the cabin would not be meeting their needs—Rosen, at that point, in the passenger seat, judiciously slouched below windshield level, his wife, of course, returning to their car to do the driving.