BEFORE I GOT MY EYE PUT OUT by Emily Dickinson

Updated: Jan 11

Emily Dickinson posing for a photo — Photo credit: Amherst College Library

Before I got my eye put out –

I liked as well to see

As other creatures, that have eyes –

And know no other way –

But were it told to me, Today,

That I might have the Sky

For mine, I tell you that my Heart

Would split, for size of me –

The Meadows – mine –

The Mountains – mine –

All Forests – Stintless stars –

As much of noon, as I could take –

Between my finite eyes –

The Motions of the Dipping Birds –

The Morning’s Amber Road –

For mine – to look at when I liked,

The news would strike me dead –

So safer – guess – with just my soul

Opon the window pane

Where other creatures put their eyes –

Incautious – of the Sun –

Emily Dickinson, "Before I got my eye put out" from (02138: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, )

Source: The Poems of Emily Dickinson Edited by R. W. Franklin(Harvard University Press, 1999)

The poems of Emily Dickinson paperback cover with ink pen — The Poems of Emily Dickinson | Reading Edition | Emily Dickinson | Edited by R. W. Franklin | Paperback |

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About Emily Dickinson

Born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson is one of America's greatest and most authentic poets of all time. Dickinson, like Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman, experimented with expression, so as to free it from its conventional restraints. Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Charlotte Brontë, she created a completely new type of persona for the first person. She crafted her speakers, like Browning and Bronte did, as sharp, hawk-eyed observers, who both saw the inescapable restrictions of their societies, as they did their imagined escapes. Dickinson's writing uses an elliptical language for expressing the possible, yet not realized. She defined meaning without imprisoning it, and gave the abstract its tangible. For Dickinson, poetry was the individual's liberation, as much as it was the thing that left him ungrounded.

Dickinson's Early Life

Dickinson's father, Edward Dickinson, was an ambitious lawyer educated at Amherst and Yale. Active in the Whig Party, he was elected to the Massachusetts State Legislature (1837-1839) and the Massachusetts State Senate (1842-1843). Edward Dickinson presented himself as a model citizen and took great pride in his civic work - treasurer of Amherst College, chairman of the annual Cattle Show, supporter of Amherst Academy, and secretary to the Fire Society. Little is known about his wife, Emily's mother. While often represented as a passive wife to a domineering husband, her few surviving letters, Monson Academy's papers and records, reveal a young woman very much dedicated to her studies. Dickinson's brother, Austin, attended law school and became a lawyer, and both him and her younger sister, Lavinia, were Emily's intellectual companions during her lifetime.

Education and Amherst Academy

Dickinson and Lavinia attended Amherst Academy, and, by Emily's account, she loved every aspect of it - the school, the teachers, the curriculum. The school offered its students regular attendance in all principal subjects - natural philosophy, astronomy, zoology, mathematics, chemistry, botany, and geology. As suggested by the list, the school's curriculum reflected the 19th-century emphasis on science - the same emphasis present in Dickinson's poems and letters through her masterful observation and cultivation of flowers, her interest in "chemic force", and her carefully crafted description of plants.

Dickinson's years at the Academy, though with great emphasis on science, contributed greatly to her development as a poet. It was there where she met her first "Master", Leonard Humphrey, who served as the Academy's principal from 1846 to 1848. His death in 1850, unexpected and undoubtedly painful for Dickinson, readily shows her growing poetic interest - she wrote to her friend Abiah Root that her only tribute were her tears, which she will not brush away, she says, for their presence is her expression. Dickinson left the Academy at age 15 and continued her education at Mount Holyoke. She only stayed there for a single year, leaving many to argue the real reason for her departure was the beginning of her so-called reclusiveness, seen in her frequent mention of homesickness expressed in her letters. Biographer Richard Seawall, however, explains that, going over the school's curriculum and seeing how many of the texts were mere duplicates of those Dickinson had already studied, Mount Holyoke had little new to offer her. Her departure from Holyoke marked the end of Dickinson's formal schooling and it prompted the dissatisfaction common among young women in the 19th century. Unmarried daughters, upon their return home, were expected to set their own interests aside, and fulfill their dutiful nature in meeting the needs of the home. In her letters from the early 1850s, Dickinson expresses her frustration with the time-consuming domestic work, writing "God keep me from what they call households".

Dickinson's Rebellious Soul

Dickinson, like the soul she describes when she writes “The soul has moments of escape - / When bursting all the doors - / She dances like a Bomb, abroad, / And swings opon the Hours,” refused to be imprisoned by social norms and outside expectations.

Amherst's Religious Revival and Choosing Poetry

In the 1850s, in the midst of a religious revival during which all her family joined the church and devoted their lives to religion, Dickinson refused to do the same. The loneliness in her rebellion is, perhaps, best felt in a few sharp-crafted, strikingly self-aware sentences from a letter she sent Humphrey, saying,

“How lonely this world is growing, something so desolate creeps over the spirit and we don’t know its name, and it won’t go away, either Heaven is seeming greater, or Earth a great deal more small, or God is more ‘Our Father,’ and we feel our need increased. Christ is calling everyone here, all my companions have answered, even my darling Vinnie believes she loves, and trusts him, and I am standing alone in rebellion, and growing very careless. Abby, Mary, Jane, and farthest of all my Vinnie have been seeking, and they all believe they have found; I can’t tell you what they have found, but they think it is something precious. I wonder if it is?”

This question marked Dickinson's next decade - the one where she incontrovertibly defined poetry, not religion, as the thing most precious to her. Her friends, though the world lacks their letters, and thus, the particularity of their feeling, seemed to encourage her. If not the most important of those friendships was the one with Gilbert, who also thought of herself as a poet. Crafted as letters, Dickinson sent more than 270 poems to Gilbert - in most cases poems written precisely for her. However, the letters suggest that there were some arguments between them - whether about poetry, religion, Austin Dickinson, or their own love for each other, it is not known.

Dickinson's relationship with Gilbert, though their paths diverged as Gilbert married her brother and took on the role of a wife, continued through letters and poems.

Influences and The Art of Writing

As her friends married and devoted themselves to family matters distinctive of the 19th century, Dickinson's primary companions became her books. She read extensively - both the British Romantic poets, Browning, the Brontë sisters and George Eliot, and the American, Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Thoreau. During this time, the number of her actual correspondents grew, as well. Among those correspondents were Samuel Bowles and Josiah Holland - editors in Springfield Republican, who, as is speculated, Dickinson might have seen as men who could help her poetry into print. She sent both of them a number of her poems, and seven of them were published in the paper: “I Taste a liquor never brewed,” “Flowers – Well – if anybody,” “Sic transit gloria mundi,” “Blazing in gold and quenching in purple,” “Nobody knows this little rose,” “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers,” and “A narrow fellow in the grass.”

In the following years, Dickinson's letters became more cryptic - filled with aphorism and heavy with allusion, asking the reader to take her words as small parts, and make a whole. She saw her friendships as central to her life, yet, limited the time spent with other people. In a letter to her cousin Louise Norcross, dating somewhere in 1858, she tells her that she is

“one of the ones from whom I do not run away.”

Dickinson's decision to restrict her visits with other people labeled her a "hermit" and a "recluse". It is not strange, though. Becoming aware of the prohibitions and time-consumption of social visits, she devoted herself to her writing, and, thus, quietly eased out of countless social calls.

By 1860, Dickinson had written more than 150 poems, and continued to correspond with many individuals. Letter writing was, after all, an active engagement in the art of writing and the honing of her expression.

Dickinson's poems from the late 1850s are marked with the familiar metric pattern of the hymn - alternating four-beat/three-beat lines noted by a brevity in turn heightened by her syntax.

Letter to Higginson and Attempting to Publish

By 1865, Emily Dickinson had written nearly 1,100 poems. In contrast to joining the church, she joined the ranks of the writers, a fairly suspect group. The place she envisioned for her writing, however, is unclear. In a letter from 1862 to literary figure Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dickinson sends four of her poems, asking for his opinion, while hoping for publication:

Mr. Higginson,

Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?

The Mind is so near itself—it cannot see, distinctly—and I have none to ask

—

Should you think it breathed—and had you the leisure to tell me, I should

feel quick gratitude—

If I make the mistake—that you dared to tell me—would give me sincerer

honor—toward you—

I enclose my name—asking you, if you please—Sir—to tell me what is true?

That you will not betray me—it is needless to ask—since Honor is it’s own

pawn—

Higginson did not publish her poems, and advised her to work long and hard on her poetry before attempting for its publication.

Dickinson continued to write and collected her poems in distinct packets. She sewed the pages she had written together - her own trope of domestic work - as did the preachers, who stitched together the pages of their sermons.

Dickinson's Death and Legacy

An immensely prolific poet, Emily Dickinson died on May 15, 1886, in Amherst. Her family found her hand-sewn books, or "fascicles" with nearly 1,800 poems after her death.

The first publication of her poetry was by Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd in 1890.

Yet, it was not until R.W. Franklin's version of Dickinson's poems was published that her own spelling choices, unusual punctuation and order were completely restored.