house – The Emily Project

I YEARS had been from home,
And now, before the door,
I dared not open, lest a face
I never saw before

Stare vacant into mine 5
And ask my business there.
My business,—just a life I left,
Was such still dwelling there?

I fumbled at my nerve,
I scanned the windows near; 10
The silence like an ocean rolled,
And broke against my ear.

I laughed a wooden laugh
That I could fear a door,
Who danger and the dead had faced, 15
But never quaked before.

I fitted to the latch
My hand, with trembling care,
Lest back the awful door should spring,
And leave me standing there. 20

I moved my fingers off
As cautiously as glass,
And held my ears, and like a thief
Fled gasping from the house.

~Emily Dickinson

This is a poem about the fear of returning to a familiar place after a long absence, of course, but what my imagination has snagged on is line 15. “Who danger and the dead had faced”?? Who is this speaker? Emily Dickinson, Vampire Hunter?? She most likely means it in a much more prosaic way, but it’s still an intriguing line. There’s a whole mess of stories behind that line. What dangers has the speaker previously faced? What is so terrifying about facing the dead, especially if they’re just ordinary dead people and not zombies?

I have admittedly strayed down a quirky path with this one, but that line feels like such a tease. There is a lifetime of mystery implied by that line. All kinds of things we’re not allowed to know, because they’re not particularly germane to the message of the poem.

But it’s October, and I have spooky stuff on the brain, so I’m going to have fun imagining what the poet has left out.

Remembrance has a rear and front,—
’T is something like a house;
It has a garret also
For refuse and the mouse,

Besides, the deepest cellar
That ever mason hewed;
Look to it, by its fathoms
Ourselves be not pursued.
~Emily Dickinson

I’d never encountered this poem before, and I really like it. I love how Dickinson begins with the mundane–a house, an attic with space for the unwanted and uninvited. In the second stanza, she moves to a grander and more dire tone–“deepest,” “fathoms,” “pursued.”

There’s so much truth in this small poem. It reminds me of Sherlock Holmes’s explanation of memory to Watson:

“I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
~ Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

Both Holmes and the speaker in Dickinson’s poem note the perils of an unselective memory, and both caution against them. Though Holmes’s is clearly an approach driven by professional need, both these descriptions of memory strike me as stemming from similar worldviews. The difference is that if Holmes clutters his brain-attic, he’ll have a hard time doing his work, while if the speaker in Dickinson’s poem allows unwanted memories to clutter hers, she will be forever “pursued.”

Tag: house

The awful door

The fathoms of remembrance