From “Like a Very Strange Likeness and Pink”

Poets trade in resemblances—between things in the world, and between themselves and others—whenever they compose a simile. Is the news like squirrels? Am I the only person out there who feels like the news resembles squirrels? Will others see this likeness like me? Emily Dickinson—who once observed how “the news, like Squirrels, ran”—worried herself over these questions like nobody else in modern American poetry. Probably it has something to do with this poet’s sense that she was utterly unlike the people around her. (In a letter to her literary pen pal Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the reclusive Dickinson once described herself as “the only Kangaroo among the Beauty.”) In #723, she makes art of this anxiety:

Have any like Myself
Investigating March,
New Houses on the Hill descried—
And possibly a Church—

That were not, We are sure—
As lately as the Snow—
And are Today—if We exist—
Though how may this be so?

Have any like Myself
Conjectured Who may be
The Occupants of these Abodes—
So easy to the Sky—

’Twould seem that God should be
The nearest Neighbor to—
And Heaven—a convenient Grace
For Show, or Company?

Have any like Myself
Preserved the Charm secure
By shunning carefully the Place
All Seasons of the Year,

Excepting March—’Tis then
My Villages be seen—
And possibly a Steeple—
Not afterward—by Men—

Dickinson’s uncertainty—“Have any like Myself”—lurks under the surface of every original simile. Have any, like myself, thought the news runs like squirrels? Sometimes, alas, the answer is no. I, for one, have no idea what this poet sees on her investigations into March. (Clouds—my best guess—appear “easy to the Sky” all through the year, and not only in spring.) Is that community on the hill real, or a hallucination? What doctrine do they preach in its possible church? Venturing beyond the boundaries of her historical community, Dickinson spies a spectral society that no one else sees—like a solitary anthropologist conducting fieldwork on a vanishing tribe—in the hills of rural New England. It’s a lonely poem, making the question of social likeness—“Have any like Myself”—into an unanswerable refrain. Maybe to see like this poet, you have to resemble a kangaroo.

The hyphenated prosody of #723 allows for the possibility that collective life is but a dream: “If We exist—/Though how may this be so?” Though she’s often read as a metaphorical poet, studying Dickinson’s similes can help us to map our imagined communities of resemblance. One of her most widely anthologized poems, #320, begins with a classic simile of American literature:

There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons—
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes— 

Whenever I teach this poem, all my students agree—there is a particular angle of bleak winter light that weighs on the soul like church music. Rhetorically speaking, Dickinson leaves us little room for dissent. There’s no “I” in this poem, only the unanimous “us” and “we”: “Heavenly Hurt, it gives us—/We can find no scar,/But internal difference—/Where the Meanings, are.” But what if—heaven forbid—you’re one of those benighted souls who happens to like sacred music? People who feel exalted by “Cathedral Tunes” might feel that Dickinson’s first-person plural “oppresses” them. Though it looks universal at first, this simile selectively addresses itself to a secret society of like-minded agnostics who only pretend to sing along during church services in Dickinson’s nineteenth-century Congregationalist community. Fans of sacred music may crash the simile, but they don’t really belong to the poem’s inner circle. Every likeness is a social occasion.

Now might be a good time to review a few basic principles from Simile 101. (Feel free to take notes; there will be a quiz.) Every simile, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics tells us, is composed of a tenor and a vehicle. The tenor is the thing itself: an inkblot, Hermann Rorschach’s hair, a certain slant of light. The vehicle is what you, the poet, bring to the table: dancing imps, an approaching tsunami, the heft of cathedral tunes. Put them together in a wavy equation, and you have a simile:

tenor

 

vehicle

Inkblot

≈

Dancing Imps

Rorschach’s Hair

≈

Tsunami

Slant of Light

≈

Cathedral Tunes

But there’s a paradox hidden inside any literary comparison. To liken one thing to another, your vehicle has to be recognizably different from its tenor. Imagine what would happen if Dickinson’s poem began something like this:

There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons—
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons ...

This vehicle doesn’t travel very far, does it? To get any mileage out of her simile, Dickinson must liken winter’s light to something unlike it. This “internal difference” at the heart of every simile is “Where the Meanings, are.” (We’ll return to the question of difference a little later in this talk.) For now, here’s my unsolicited advice to students in Driver’s Ed and Beginning Poetry Workshops: a good vehicle transports the reader as far as possible from its neighboring tenor. But sometimes a vehicle can spin out of control.

Though she ultimately refused to travel beyond her father’s gate, Dickinson tricks out some of the most outlandish vehicles in the English language. She’s like a gear freak at the auto show of resemblance. Let’s look at a few examples. Take out your pencils, and see if you can supply these Dickinsonian vehicles with suitable tenors of your own. Print clearly. No talking, please. Extra credit for artful prosody:

tenor

 

vehicle

__________

≈

a Panther in the Glove

__________

≈

Let of Snow

__________

≈

intermittent Plush

__________

≈

Chariots—in the Vest

OK, so what’s like a panther in the glove? Any guesses? How about a let of snow? Intermittent plush? No, they aren’t the titles of Steely Dan albums, though they really ought to be. Chariots in the vest, anyone? Sorry, time’s up. Here are Dickinson’s original similes, with the missing tenors supplied:

It is simple, to ache in the Bone, or the Rind—
But Gimblets—among the nerve—
Mangle daintier—terribler—
Like a Panther in the Glove—
—From #242

A Voice that alters—Low
And on the ear can go
Like Let of Snow—
—From #254

A Dog’s belated feet
Like intermittent Plush, be heard
Adown the empty street—
—From #617  

The eager look—on Landscapes—
As if they just repressed
Some secret—that was pushing
Like Chariots—in the Vest—
—From #696  

This is a totally unfair learning assessment, I know. My dictionary tells me “Gimblet” isn’t even a word anymore. (Dickinson’s talking about gimlets, the carpenter’s tool for boring holes in wood, and not the gin cocktail, FYI.) But once you see how nerve pain feels “like” a panther in the glove—or how a low voice sounds “like” a let of snow, or how a dog’s paws pad down the street “like” intermittent plush, or how landscapes seem to hold secrets that surge “like” chariots thundering in your vest—you see things a little differently. Dickinson’s literary comparisons make us perceive likenesses like someone unlike us. For a spell, we behold the world like kangaroos amid the beauty. That’s the unsung work of this venerable trope. Every memorable simile increases the communal fund of likeness available within a society.

Occasionally, a poetic vehicle achieves escape velocity, leaving its tenor behind entirely. “It scatters like the Birds—/Condenses like a Flock—/Like Juggler’s Figures situates/Upon a baseless Arc.” Like the birds, like a flock, like juggler’s figures—we find plenty of vehicles aloft here, but where on earth is the tenor? When Dickinson sent these cryptic verses to an editor at the publishing house Roberts Brothers, she supplied the answer in the poem’s title: “Snow.” A vehicle without a tenor is a kind of riddle. At her most philosophical, Dickinson never reveals the answers to her riddles—“The Riddle we can guess/We speedily despise,” writes this literary sphinx—in order to foreground the mystery of likeness itself. In one of Dickinson’s signature poems, #355, the riddle remains unsolved to the end:

It was not Death, for I stood up,
And all the Dead, lie down—
It was not Night, for all the Bells
Put out their Tongues, for Noon.

It was not Frost, for on my Flesh
I felt Siroccos—crawl—
Nor Fire—for just my marble feet
Could keep a Chancel, cool—

And yet, it tasted, like them all,
The Figures I have seen
Set orderly, for Burial,
Reminded me, of mine—

As if my life were shaven,
And fitted to a frame,
And could not breathe without a key,
And ’twas like Midnight, some—

When everything that ticked—has stopped—
And space stares—all around—
Or Grisly frosts—first Autumn morns,
Repeal the Beating Ground—

But, most, like Chaos—Stopless—cool—
Without a Chance, or spar—
Or even a Report of Land—
To justify—Despair.

This “it” is the ultimate inkblot. Dickinson might be hinting at her theological sense of perdition, or the historical trauma of civil war, or some domestic contretemps with a family member, or internal difference itself. (Maybe it’s all of the above.) Riddled with doubt, the poet won’t say what “it” is, but she can tell us what it isn’t. The parade of negative definitions that opens the poem—it’s not death, not night, not frost, nor fire—dramatizes metaphor’s failure to solve the riddle of human feeling. “And yet,” Dickinson writes, “it tasted, like them all.” Her poem works like a rudimentary algorithm, first trying out various metaphors for “it,” then feeding the recycled vehicles (death, night, frost, fire) into simile’s wavy equation. With each iteration, we come closer to finding an apt likeness for “it”—progressing from “some” like in the fourth stanza to “most” like in the sixth—in this methodical poem of sequential approximations.

Just when we expect to learn what “it” is “most” like, though, Dickinson’s riddle jumps off the tracks. We began with failed metaphors of death, night, frost, and fire. Then three of these metaphors—death, night, and frost—return as similes: “The Figures I have seen/Set orderly, for Burial,/Reminded me, of mine”; “ ’twas like Midnight, some”; “Or Grisly frosts.” But something weird happens just when we expect Dickinson’s fourth metaphor, fire, to come down the poem’s conveyer belt: a new and entirely different vehicle usurps fire’s position in the final stanza. Oddly, we learn that “it” is “most, like Chaos—Stopless—cool.” What happened to fire? Fire isn’t cool, and it isn’t stopless, either. (It’s hot, and it burns out, by its very nature.) Entering a new kind of variable into her lyric algorithm, Dickinson enters a lineage of poets from Hesiod to John Cage who’ve sought literary forms for chaos since time immemorial. Ovid places it at the outset of his epic cosmogony:

Ante mare et terras et quod tegit omnia caelum
unus erat toto naturae vultus in orbe,
quem dixere chaos.

Before the sea and the earth and the all-covering sky
nature appeared the same throughout all the world,
which men called chaos.

Once upon a time, everything was one thing: “unus erat toto naturae vultus in orbe.” Chaos reigns in a world without differences. But we’ve seen how likeness, to exist, depends on some form of “internal difference” between vehicles and their tenors. Dickinson’s “it,” then, is “most like” something—chaos—that’s ontologically beyond compare. Chaos is absolutely self-identical, inherently unlike anything else. To shore up this metaphysical contradiction, Dickinson immediately slips a hidden comparison into her poem’s final lines. At bottom, Dickinson’s version of chaos looks a lot like the sea: “Without a Chance, or spar—/Or even a Report of Land—/To justify—Despair.” Maybe “Despair” is the answer to Dickinson’s riddle. It’s not death, night, frost, or fire. But it tastes like them all.