(no subject)

[proximoception]

I died for Beauty — but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining room —

He questioned softly "Why I failed"?
"For Beauty", I replied —
"And I — for Truth — Themself are One —
We Brethren, are", He said —

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night — We talked between the Rooms —
Until the Moss had reached our lips —
And covered up — our names —

I can't possibly be the first to have noticed that this is clearly a tribute to Keats and Shelley. Keats ("load your rifts with ore") dies for beauty in the sense of dying while still living for it, Shelley likewise truth. Keats is, what, a year in the ground at Rome's Protestant Cemetery when Shelley is buried nearby. They don't recognize each other at first, being dead and in the dark--and personality is somewhat less important there. Shelley politely quotes Keats' own poem to him when he realizes who he's with--Dickinson knows what an influence Hymn to Intellectual Beauty had on Keats' Odes, clearly. They talk till their names are covered up, lips stifled, meaning: their poetry is in dialogue, our memories of them intertwined, until that time when they shall be forgotten. See Westminster Abbey, the plaques joined by a flourish, above Shakespeare's bust. As for the "why they failed," see perhaps Browning's Childe Roland.

Kinsmen met a night.

Dickinson's heart is more with Keats, hence her speaking his part.

Bloom links Strange Meeting to a passage in Revolt of Islam. I can't remember the details, perhaps Dickinson's working off that too.

The teacher had some other explanation. I had to shut my mouth because it's an invasion to go into all that.

(See Mamet's The Edge, last line, for a differently ironic twist on dying "for" something.)

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I always took the poem as E.D. rebuking junkets. He says that truth and beauty are brethren, and she allows him to think so. But she prefers beauty and is subtly contemptuous of his invocation of truth. But i'll have to think about your version, which seems pretty convincing off the bat.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Well,

I can't tell for sure what her take on beauty v. truth is here. Presumably there is one. If she's corpse 1, though, there's no mention of her rebuking the newcomer: 2's delcaration of brethrenhood is echoed in the poet's "kinsmen", and what they then do forever is chat. I suppose if 2 is Keats she may be gently rebuking him by not affirming? After which they get along fine, though.

But 'Much madness is divinest sense' is matched by 'Tell the truth and tell it slant.' In general Dickinson was after the sublime sorts of beauties, the true ones we can't afford to not forget--the seal Despair, untakeable Tint, Death's courtings and all those. So in a sense she's with Keats in combining B&T, with Shelley in finding beauty a matter of discovering something intellectually real but elusive.

I think my teacher's reading involved both words being silly purposes for life, or silly descriptions of life's purposes; the two are one only when you're dead, when everything else is also one, is Emily's irony. Basically an attack on Romanticism and conventionality--the two being one to that teacher.

Their being Shelley and Keats explains the order of death, proximity, agreement/kinship, cessation of talk once the names are gone etc...I think Dickinson would have found the Urn's seeming-say too easy a target, literalized; whereas the ways what Keats wrote might have been true would have fascinated her. But who knows? Perhaps she's undermining both precursors--implying their male overstatements are true only where they now are. But the rest is tribute.

The only half-mystery I see in the S/K reading is why Dickinson's Keats. But he came first on her favorite readings list. Does she call him junkets somewhere or is that you?