The Bible,” wrote American poet Emily Dickinson, “is an antique Volume…/ Written by faded Men / At the suggestion of Holy Spectres.”
Condemning contemporary pastors for rendering the sacred texts lifeless, the poet urged that Scripture be sung in a manner relevant to everyday life: “Had but the Tale a warbling Teller…/ All the boys would come…/ Orpheus’ Sermon captivated…/ It did not condemn…” (Poem 1545).1
As a young girl growing up in western Massachusetts, where she was born in 1830, Dickinson alone among her family refused to join the prestigious Amherst Congregational Church and eventually stopped attending services altogether. When she briefly attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in neighboring South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1847, the institute’s founder, Mary Lyon, classified Emily among the school’s “No-Hopers,” that is, among those spiritually lost students who refused to embrace Christian doctrine.
But despite Lyon’s assessment, Dickinson was deeply spiritual, holding a strong belief in the divine presence in nature and in the everyday.2 Though she refused to attend traditional church services, she had a sort of church of her own, as she relates in one of her more famous poems: “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…” (Poem 324).
Dickinson also maintained a deep fascination for the biblical text, which served as her chief inspiration and literary model. Among the 19 Bibles in the family home was a copy of the 1843 edition of the King James Version inscribed with Emily’s name, perhaps given as a birthday gift (see photo of Emily’s Bible). The well-worn pages conjure up an image of the slender young poet in white, spending long hours thumbing through the book searching for inspiration—and for the biblical 039quotations that are sprinkled throughout her writings.
Dickinson’s poems and letters quote from or allude to almost every book of the Bible. Her vocabulary, style and imagery depend upon the poetry of Prophets and Psalms, the Book of Proverbs, the Gospels, Paul’s letters and, a favorite of hers, the Book of Revelation.
The poet’s keen knowledge of the biblical text (as well as her quick wit) is revealed in the easy way she sprinkles biblical words and phrases throughout her letters and poems. When a burglar broke into her brother Austin’s home, she wrote, “Burglaries have become so frequent, is it quite safe to leave the Golden Rule out overnight?” (Letter 1023).3 Explaining why she had secluded herself when guests visited, she borrowed Adam’s words to God in Genesis 3:10: “I was afraid and hid myself” (Letter 946).
Her allusions are often so clever and subtle that they test the biblical literacy of modern readers: Grieving the death of a favorite nephew, she wrote of the solace of “Corinthian’s Bugle”—a reference to 1 Corinthians 15:52, which describes the trumpet that will sound at the resurrection of the dead (Letter 1020). Sometimes a single word from the King James Version suggests an entire summary of a New Testament message. She wrote to someone who had served a needy neighbor: “Inasmuch…” (Letter 729). Dickinson apparently felt her correspondent would fill in the rest of Matthew 25:40, as translated in the King James Version: “Inasmuch as ye have done unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done unto me.”
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And when Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a prominent Massachusetts literary figure, asked Dickinson to include a photograph of herself along with some poems he was to review, Dickinson answered: “Could you believe me…without?” (Letter 268). Higginson’s response gives no indication that he understood her clever reference to Scripture, but you likely will when you recall that Higginson shared the first name of the doubting apostle, Thomas, who would not accept the resurrection without first touching the wounds of Jesus (John 20:24–29).
Several Dickinson poems focus on specific Bible stories and characters. Poem 59 tells of “A Gymnast and an Angel” who “wrestle long and hard…,” a clear retelling of the story of Jacob’s struggle in Genesis 32. In Poem 540, which relates the story of David and Goliath (1 Samuel 17), Dickinson demonstrates that she had no simplistic view of the Bible and often applied its stories in surprising ways to her own life. Her poem reads:
I took my Power in my Hand…
And went against the World…
’Twas not so much what David…had…
But I…was twice as bold…
I aimed my Pebble…but Myself
Was all the one that fell…
Was it Goliath…was too large…
Or was myself…too small?
A reading of Dickinson’s poems on the testing of Abraham and the exclusion of Moses from the promised land reveals the poet’s critique of certain descriptions of God in the Torah.
Poem 597 questions God’s refusal to allow “Grand Old Moses in Pentateuchal Robes” to enter the promised land at the end of the Exodus (Deuteronomy 34:1–5). Of this episode, Dickinson writes:
It always felt to me…a wrong
To that Old Moses…done…
To let him see…the Canaan…
Without the entering…
God, in this poem, is compared to a cruel boy testing his strength against a weaker child:
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…God’s adroiter will
On Moses…seemed to fasten
With tantalizing Play
As Boy…should deal with lesser Boy…
To prove ability.
Here Dickinson seems to suggest that either biblical writers or interpreters have erred in depicting God as lacking in justice and compassion or that God is at fault God for bullying Moses.
The biblical text most often quoted in her poems and letters is the Book of Revelation; its atmosphere of visions, angels and thrones permeates many of her works and may well explain her own sense of an ecstatic and visionary poetic mission whose words are to be sealed up until their proper time. So perhaps it is the “little scroll” the angel of the Book of Revelation was told to keep secret for a time (Revelation 10) that led the poet to stitch up her pages of handwritten poems in little books, which she hid in a bedroom drawer. The scene in chapter 10 of the Revelation to John, where the seer is told to “seal up” what has been spoken, and is given a scroll to eat, is the basis for Poem 1587, which begins:
He ate and drank the precious Words…
His Spirit grew robust…
He knew no more that he was Poor,
Nor that his frame was Dust…
But it is Jesus himself who most attracted Dickinson and shaped her faith. Jesus’ experience of suffering particularly drew her: “When he confides to us that he is ‘acquainted with grief,’ we listen” (Letter 932). A passage from Matthew (25:35) remained at the very heart of her understanding of Jesus’ message. She wrote: “The Savior’s only signature to the Letter he wrote to all mankind, was, A Stranger and ye took me in” (Letter 1004).
Her sense of Jesus’ love of nature perhaps moved Dickinson most deeply. In 1884, two years before her death, she sent a lily to a friend who had just had a child, along with the message: “Let me commend to Baby’s attention the only Commandment I ever obeyed…‘Consider the Lilies’” (Letter 904). The full passage in Matthew reads:
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And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?
Matthew 6:28–30
Today Dickinson is renowned as one of America’s greatest poets. Among her 1,800 poems are those that delighted us as children—“I’m nobody! Who are you,” “How happy is the little stone”—and countless poems on flowers, spiders, birds and flies. We meet other cherished lines in anthologies of America’s favorite poetry. “If I can stop one Heart from breaking…I shall not live in Vain” has been framed and hung in parlors across the nation. The majority of her poems, however, have met with less popular acclaim; their idiosyncratic symbolism and enigmatic allusions amaze and mystify Dickinson experts to this day. What could have inspired such a diverse body of poetry from this woman who seldom left her birthplace in Amherst, avoided publication of her work and, in the decades before her death in 1886, seldom ventured outside her father’s house and her beloved garden?
Dickinson’s contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that poets were responsible for the continued revelation of Hebrew and Christian Scripture. Dickinson appears to have sought to demonstrate that view in her own work. Emily Dickinson’s sense of her own poetic mission seems to have been nourished by her belief in divine presence in everyday experience as revealed through the liberating poetry of the Bible.
In 1885, the year before her death, Emily Dickinson wrote a letter to an unnamed friend in which she joined references to both her beloved nature and her beloved Bible:
I thank you with wonder…Should you ask me my comprehension of a starlight Night, Awe were my only reply, and so of the mighty Book…It stills, Incites, infatuates…blesses and blames in one. Like Human Affection, we dare not touch it, yet flee, what else remains?” (Letter 965)
Infatuated and incited, Dickinson repeatedly returned to the Bible, offering herself as the “warbling Teller” who might reinvigorate the biblical texthrough her own unique poetic vision.
The Bible,” wrote American poet Emily Dickinson, “is an antique Volume…/ Written by faded Men / At the suggestion of Holy Spectres.” Condemning contemporary pastors for rendering the sacred texts lifeless, the poet urged that Scripture be sung in a manner relevant to everyday life: “Had but the Tale a warbling Teller…/ All the boys would come…/ Orpheus’ Sermon captivated…/ It did not condemn…” (Poem 1545).1 As a young girl growing up in western Massachusetts, where she was born in 1830, Dickinson alone among her family refused to join the prestigious Amherst Congregational Church and eventually stopped attending […]
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Emily Dickinson provided titles for very few of her poems. For the sake of convenience, later editors have assigned them numbers. Today her poems (1,775 of them) are most accessible in a paperback volume edited by Thomas Johnson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little Brown, 1958), so I have followed the numbering system used in that volume. More recently, R.W. Franklin has edited a more complete collection (1,789 poems) with another numbering system, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1999).
2.
For more on the poet’s religious perspective, see Roger Lundin, Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), and Beth Maclay Doriani, Emily Dickinson: Daughter of Prophecy (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1996).
3.
The poet’s letters may be found in The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Johnson and Theodora Ward, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1958); the letter numbers cited in this article refer to that edition.
