Ontopoetics: Metaphysical Massacre in Dickinson’s Poetry

       The poetry of Emily Dickinson exhibits a command of mind that represents one of the paradigms of feminist ideology, storytelling as a vehicle for the activation of “the centrality of identity” (York 2). In her radical poem “It was not Death, for I stood up,” Dickinson reveals the pathology of oppression through her probe into the harrowing ontological dimensions of womanhood, thereby spotlighting the scope and intensity of patriarchal violence. 
       The poet’s focus on sensory details and manipulation of syntax produce an impression of investigation. Sensuous diction — such as “crawl” (6), “cool” (8), and “[b]eating” (20) — pervades the work, and, in an almost synesthetic fashion, the speaker moves fluidly among different forms of stimuli (touch, taste, sight) as if signaling an indefatigable desire to grasp, assimilate, reality. Dickinson’s syntactic strategies boast both physical and rhythmic  consequences that reinforce these ideas of inspection. Physically, the presence of punctuation plays an endocytic/vesicular role: harvesting or sealing elaborations to defend against the dissipation of experience. Rhythmically, the commas and dashes indicate pauses that highlight the speaker’s processing of the world; these grammatical stones introduce resistance, which maximizes the sense of prolongation, sustained immersion. 
       This journey of discovery takes on an ontological quality as the speaker grapples with questions of classification, essence, and identity as she endeavors to understand “It” — linguistically foreign, unfamiliar, distant. Because the speaker inserts herself in the inquiry by proclaiming “for I stood up” (1), the question of “It” centers on defining her essence, notably through apophasis. This apophatic technique emphasizes the degree of impenetrability presented by the speaker’s spirit — her personhood, her womanhood; analogously, identification through unequals creates a circumferential depiction of the speaker’s self: silhouette-like and void of substance. William Franke’s “The Missing All’: Emily Dickinson’s Apophatic Poetics,” however, interprets this utilization of apophasis as an echo of mystic traditions: “In such traditions, the encounter, in uncommunicable registers of experience, with the Inexpressible is marked by a backing off from language [. . .] then registered in language, language that in various ways unsays itself” (Franke 2). Nonetheless, Dickinson’s incorporation of extremes  — “Death” (1) and life (non-living and living), “Night” (3) and morning, “Frost” (5) and “Fire” (7) — and their subsequent negation set up repulsive ontological boundaries that furnish the speaker with limbo. Reality leaves the speaker suspended in a medium of ambiguity, in a state of unknowing. “Noon,” as an inflection point, advances the notion of internal meaninglessness as the statically transitional term has no function beyond referring to the dynamics outside of itself, to the two poles, start and end, that reject it (4). Dickinson further illustrates this oblivion through the vanity of sensation, an epistemological cornerstone: “And yet, it tasted, like them all” (9). The superposition of these antithetical conditions convey the disintegration of the speaker’s empirical instruments. Ultimately, the speaker arrives at an inconvenient truth: the undetectability of her identity. 
       Dickinson unveils the etiology of such misfortune by examining the interactions among life, death, and femininity. The speaker encounters an intersection of life and death (being and non-being) within the vacuum of her essence: “The Figures I have seen / Set orderly, for Burial /Reminded me, of mine —” (10-12). Life persists in death; death flows through life. Passivity (passive voice) and impotence envelop the descriptions of the buried, alluding to the distress spawned by patriarchal domination. The oppressive forces that acted on the living continue to bombard their victims by regulating decay — aerobic — by precluding all manifestations of emancipation. Dickinson invigorates this symmetry in death’s more concrete display of living characteristics; she animates the actions of “breath[ing]” (15) and “[b]eating” (20) with syntactic engineering: the anaphoric use of the kinetic “And” and repeated terminal punctuation establish a sense of pulsation that mirrors opening and closing, dilation and constriction, inhalation and exhalation. The fabric of death cannot expunge existence. Dickinson attributes a homeostatic nature to this state as the structure of the poetry itself embeds the interplay between inverses, oscillations redolent of biological feedback loops. Primary dashes herald the appearance of the proceeding clause’s complement (surroundings for system) while the dashes at the other endpoint signal the binding of the two abstractions, which results in cyclical neutralization, or the waxing and waning of a net momentum: 
	     When everything that ticked — has stopped —
	     And space stares — all around —
	     Or Grisly frosts — first Autumn morns, 
	     Repeal the Beating Ground — (16-20)
The persistence of survival, woven into the experience of death, renders any vehement “Repeal” ineffectual (20). The poet capitalizes on thermodynamic phenomena to explore the converse. She portrays two types of death, but these two fates function as mirror images of each other in that they both amount to the perpetuation of uncertainty. Vastness and uniformity connect the astronomical imagery of the inert death and the nautical imagery of the chaotic one; these features of sea and space provoke feelings of disorientation. Moreover, frost obliterates any potential for distinction in the same manner that disorder crushes the possibility of a gradient. These entropic traits reflect the characterization of the speaker’s existence: (macroscopically) stagnant, (topographically) suppressed. In essence, the struggles that accompany spatiality, the hunger for acceleration, fuse life and death. Formidable winds cannot displace the speaker; similarly, inertness — resulting from the paralytic effects of coolness — engulfs the “[c]hancel,” a catalytic surface for metaphysical navigation (8). Energy and matter embalm the speaker. Thus, womanhood entails the total convergence of life and death — two diametrically opposed elements. Across space-time, within the confines of a patriarchal universe, femininity does not exist because, fundamentally, opposition ravishes it. The pursuit of self always greets nothingness, lending credence to the arrival of “Despair” (24). 
       The clash between abiotic and biotic elements elucidates the speaker’s prognosis: her fixed protobiont-like existence reflects how the amber of being and non-being imprison her. Reality reduces her living properties to the  elementary biochemistry of sentience, thereby inflicting a “shaven” status (13). Whereas the speaker’s associations with life remain mechanistic, pale, and loosely organic, as in “marble feet” (7), inanimate/non-human objects like “Siroccos” (6) possess vigorous infantile attributes from unrestrained tongues to “crawl[ing]” (6), mocking the protocell’s inability to exit the transitional phase. Once more, the impossibility of potential (discrete cool and hot spots) evokes thermodynamic principles; the speaker, a lukewarm entity, cannot locate the promise of evolution anywhere because “[t]hermodynamically speaking, discernible difference constitutes order” (Gold 9). This environment disables tropisms, which serve as the impetuses for self-actualization. 
       Ostensibly, Emily Dickinson emits pessimism with her report on the pulverizing immanence of the female psyche and the ontological mutilation from which it stems, but this species of takeaway eclipses the prescriptive significance of her quasi-Platonic oeuvre that “It was not Death, for I stood up,” aims to rationalize, legitimize. The poem’s very pillar, this initial invocation of apophatic or negative theology, unearths a transcendental reality — unintelligible under the grammar of a misogynistic universe — in which women can access and marvel at the divinity of their feminine self, a nirvana that Dickinson visits throughout the body of her work. She ultimately positions literature as a beacon of liberation amid a raging sea of patriarchal brutality and invites the oppressed to rise, to ascend, with her.

                                    Works Cited
Dickinson, Emily. “It was not Death, for I stood up, (355).” Poetry Foundation,
     2020, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44085/it-was-not-death-for-i-stood-up-355.
     Accessed 1 December 2020. 
Frankle, William. “‘The Missing All’: Emily Dickinson’s Apophatic Poetics.” Christianity and 
     Literature, vol. 58, no. 1, 2008, pp. 61-80. 
Gold, Barri. ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science. M.I.T. Press, 2010. 
Hall, Mary Louise. "The Relation of Love and Death in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson." Theses            
     and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons, 1970.
York, Regina. “Feminism, Selfhood & Emily Dickinson.” Western Kentucky University
     TopSCHOLAR, 1991.

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