"A Word made Flesh is seldom" by Dr. Kellie Brown
Regarded by some as The Belle of Amherst, the American poet and woman of letters Emily Dickinson can hardly be described by a single moniker. She remains a mystery, not fully knowable, and yet paradoxically revealed in intimate glimpses through her verse. Dickinson held words as sacred and the act of stringing them together as a solemn ritual undertook with great reverence. Spending her entire life in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson fashioned a stoic public persona that over time resembled a narrowing funnel that let in fewer and fewer people. She eventually chose to interact with those outside her family through letters. These epistolary relationships worked well because the reclusive Dickinson proved most expressive when putting ink to paper. But more importantly, she felt so much and so strongly that it was sometimes hard for others to be near her. She found it even difficult to be with herself at times.
The Soul selects her own Society –
Then – shuts the Door –
To her divine Majority –
Present no more –…
But no matter how sparse her outer realm became, her inner life soared. She preferred to compose her poems during the night, but like any dedicated writer, was never without a scrap of paper and pencil throughout the day to record images, words, and phrases that came to her. She found inspiration in the quotidian tasks of the day, “She sweeps with many-colored Brooms –…,”1 and crafted them, sometimes rather cryptically, into metaphors about life, and death, and faith, and the human condition. She grasped the preciousness of the temporal, the ephemeral, commenting on the stem of a dandelion, a gust of wind, a beam of light, the baptism of dew, and the drift of a dust moat. Not even the most seemingly inconsequential of our lives, such as the gnat, escaped her notice and contemplation.
I am not sure when I encountered my first Emily Dickinson poem, but I know that they have been roaming around in my mind for as long as I can remember. When I feel a longing for her words, I usually reach for the old paperback copy I own from 1961. The edges of the pages are soiled and slightly foxed, and the orange cover faded. It fits nicely in my hands, neither too large nor too small, and the pages make a satisfying crackling sound as I turn them. It was not new when I received it during my freshman year of college from a dear friend. Both preachers’ kids, he and I shared an eclectic affinity for the arts that had made us a bit odd among our high school peers. But we were not concerned by this, and instead felt a bit smug as we spent hours together discussing poetry, listening to Mahler symphonies, watching the mesmerizing images of Philip Glass’s Koyaanisqatsi, anticipating Marlon Brando’s “Stella!” scream in A Streetcar Named Desire, and singing along with Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones in Oklahoma!
My friend had found this particular book of poetry in some second-hand shop, and it fit into his budget as an impoverished college student. He proudly presented it to me as a Christmas present in 1989 with a beautiful note about our friendship inscribed on the title page. Priceless to me, this volume will never be placed into the discard pile during a culling of my bookshelves. I have lovingly tucked my favorite photo of us between two pages. It depicts one of our happy adventure days as we stand near the historic Covered Bridge in Elizabethton, Tennessee, built in 1882, four years before Emily Dickinson’s death. We look young and relaxed. He is wearing his standard outfit: a well-washed t-shirt and Birkenstocks; I have on shorts and sunglasses. We are leaning against a white wooden fence at the edge of the water where ducks swim and seek handouts of bread. For the first time recently, I wonder what passerby we asked to take our picture. But that will remain unknowable, almost as elusive as the recapturing of a day of wonders from one still photo, one fixed moment in time.
Emily Dickinson proved exceptionally dexterous at capturing a snapshot of a moment through words. Adjectives and adverbs created a vivid portrait, while her deftly chosen verbs left much open to interpretation. She embraced minimalism way before it evolved into the admired alternate lifestyle championed by some today. She lived a life of minimal possessions and relationships, an ascetic landscape on which to create. She valued an economy of words, a frugality that came not out of scarcity but because she savored the plucking out of that one perfect word that held a world of meaning within its few letters. She mostly preferred to communicate her poetic message in no more than 20 lines and never exceeded 50. Instead of epic narrative poems such as those by Keats or Byron, Dickinson gave her eventual readers truth and imagery in concentrated capsules.
While her poems rested in a confined physical space on the page, Dickinson knew few bounds in her subject matter. She wrote much of nature, and the divine, and the relationship of both to the human condition. Her verse often spoke of hope, and so despite what limitations the world or even she herself imposed, it seemed that the light of hope burned brightly in her spirit.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –…
She did not shy from explorations of the eschatological kind because she felt a restlessness to know what happens at the end, what lives beyond the present life we know.
Before Me – dips Eternity –
Before Me – Immortality –
Myself – the Term between –…
Her religious roots grew from the strict, piety-focused tradition of the Congregationalists. She tried as a young person to feel at home in that world and belief system, but except for her strong alignment with their abolitionist leanings, she felt too much of a pull-push relationship with the divine, a sort of war with God, to find comfort there. Her spiritual beliefs aligned more with the progressive views of the Transcendentalists who blossomed around her New England. As with Whitman and Thoreau, Dickinson encountered the divine in nature, and often proffered more questions than answers.
Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –
I keep it, staying at Home –
With a Bobolink for a Chorister –
And an Orchard, for a Dome –…
God preaches, a noted Clergyman –
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last –
I’m going, all along.
But regardless of any philosophical quarrels she might have had with her church, Emily Dickinson embraced their hymnody, and it contributed significantly to her verse. Dickinson’s writing has much in common with music even beyond the standard considerations of meter and rhyme. Her distinct punctuation, especially the use of the dash, establishes a definitive, yet often unexpected, cadence; and her use of capitalization emphasizes as an agogic accent would a note of importance within a measure. While many of her poems flow in the meter of her favorite hymns, Dickinson was not afraid to present changing meter or even asymmetry, much in the way that 20th century composers would feel liberated from the rhythmic and metric confines of the Common Practice Period.
There seems little doubt that as a writer and thinker, Emily Dickinson functioned more as a harbinger of the future than a recipient of success in her lifetime. Misunderstood and unappreciated, she suffered unveiled dismissal because of her gender and eccentricities. After her death at age 55, almost 1,800 poems were discovered and collected. These works resided in a variety of locations and in numerous formats— within her desk on fine stationary, enclosed in her prolific correspondence, and even through her own attempts at self-publication in small booklets of poetry, fascicles constructed from folded paper and handsewn. Her family also found fragments of verse on scraps of paper, discarded envelopes, and even candy wrappers. Having only received an anonymous publication of 10 or less in her lifetime, Emily Dickinson would finally receive a posthumous publication of a complete volume of her verse in 1955, almost 70 years after her death, by Harvard University Press.
When looking at her entire oeuvre, there seems something especially provocative and captivating about her opening lines, often the only part I can quote accurately from memory. They circle in my head in a repeating cycle like an earworm does with a musical fragment. Perhaps the fact that she did not title her poems, and thus the first lines undertake a dual purpose, strengthens their impact. Who can deny the arresting cadence and imagery of these opening words? No matter how many times I have read or recited them, they still leap off the page with urgency as if being revealed for the first time.
Because I could not stop for Death –/ He kindly stopped for me –…
My life closed twice before its close –…
Success is counted sweetest/ By those who ne’er succeed…
I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –…
If you were coming in the Fall,/ I’d brush the Summer by…
I measure every Grief I meet…
A Word dropped careless on a Page…
She sweeps with many-colored Brooms –…
This is my letter to the World/ That never wrote to Me –…
I am grateful that Emily Dickinson gifted us with such a prolific collection of verse because an “undiscovered” one seems to be waiting for me when I need it. Last year, I encountered “A Word made Flesh is seldom” for the first time. It is one of her poems with an unknown date of creation although some scholars have speculated that it might have been written circa 1862 when many of her poems that celebrate linguistics were conceived. The lines reveal her usual prowess and veiled, multi-layered meanings. Even experts find this one a bit tricky to excavate and suggest a variety of possible interpretations. What appears certain is that Dickinson took the opening line from The Gospel of John, whose first chapter has much to say about Jesus, the Incarnation, as Word. Verse I declares, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Then in verse 14, we read the eponymous phrase, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Additional consensus can be found that this is an example of Dickinson drawing on traditional Christian beliefs, and then reshaping and expanding them to reflect her worldview. She is not irreligious in this poem, quite the opposite.
She has sought common ground between the faith of her childhood and her reverence for the written word. That path feels familiar to me.
That I stumbled upon this powerful poem in the month of December, the season of Advent as I prepared for the Christ child, speaks to one of the most significant aspects of her body of poetry. Whatever time of year or season in life, a reader can discover at least one poem, and probably more, that speaks to the moment and deepens the reflection of the heart and soul. Her relevance remains, and I believe fulfills her sincerest desire to create timeless words that would keep her ever present.
Beauty crowds me till I die
Beauty mercy have on me
But if I expire today
Let it be in sight of thee –
1The Dickinson poetry quotations in this essay all come from Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems. Selected by Thomas H. Johnson. Little, Brown and Company, 1961.
Dr. Kellie Brown serves as Chair of the Music Department and Professor of Music at Milligan University. She is a violinist, conductor, and award-winning writer whose book, The Sound of Hope: Music as Solace, Resistance and Salvation during the Holocaust and World War II (McFarland Publishing, 2020), has received international acclaim. In addition to over 30 years of music ministry, she is a certified lay minister in the United Methodist Church and currently serves at First Broad Street United Methodist Church in Kingsport, TN. More information about her and her writing can be found at kelliedbrown.com.