Before I got my eye put out--

I think it's only appropriate to start with a response to a poem by my favorite writer, Emily Dickinson.  So here goes.  This is poem number 336 in the Franklin edition.


Before I got my eye put out –

I liked as well to see

As other creatures, that have eyes –

And know no other way –

But were it told to me, Today,

That I might have the Sky

For mine, I tell you that my Heart

Would split, for size of me –

The Meadows – mine –

The Mountains – mine –

All Forests – Stintless stars –

As much of noon, as I could take –

Between my finite eyes –

The Motions of the Dipping Birds –

The Morning’s Amber Road –

For mine – to look at when I liked,

The news would strike me dead –

So safer – guess – with just my soul

Opon the window pane

Where other creatures put their eyes –

Incautious – of the Sun –

Many of Dickinson's considerable strengths are on display in this poem.  Dickinson sets up a binary between the expansive outdoors and the inner life—the domestic life. While we can read this poem literally as being a poem from the point of view of a blind person, we can also read sight as a signifier of some spiritual quality.  There is also a connection between sight and owning—if her sight were returned, she wouldn’t just see the “Meadows” and “Mountains” and “Stars.” She would own them: “That I might have the sky/ For mine.” This possibility is so overwhelming that it might kill her, so “safer—guess—with just my soul/ Upon the windowpane.” Without sight, she sits inside her house and puts her soul in a vantage point that is usually reserved for looking. It seems the soul is replacing the eyes as the vehicle for a kind of sight.  Perhaps. What troubles me about this last stanza is that word “guess” in the first line.  She could be saying, “so safer—I guess” this way, and if so, the lack of the word “I” does two things. For one, it adds a tone of apathy to the speaker’s voice, making her sound exhausted and sad. But it also recalls the speaker’s missing eye: she is missing both an “I” and an “eye.” An interesting pun, but I think it does more than that. It suggests that in losing her sight, she has lost her self.

Dickinson astounds me.