Safe in their Alabaster Chambers –
\nUntouched by Morning –
\nand untouched by noon –
\nSleep the meek members of the Resurrection,
\nRafter of Satin and Roof of Stone –<\/p>\n
Grand go the Years,
\nIn the Crescent above them –
\nWorlds scoop their Arcs –
\nand Firmaments – row –
\nDiadems – drop –
\nAnd Doges surrender –
\nSoundless as Dots,
\nOn a Disk of Snow.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This poem gets much of its power from simple phrasing and a clear overall arc, contrasting meek stillness and suppression with the grand cosmic and historical movements that are first presented, as it were, in an objective point of view, then, in a startling twist, from the point of view of the deaf and silent dead. What makes the poem marvellous and hauntingly memorable is its combination of forceful simplicity with ripples of suggestion that tug the mind in many different directions, hinting at complicated, contradictory, fluidly shifting layers of feeling as we read.<\/p>\n
Some ripples flow from the associations of words. Take \u201csafe\u201d for a start. Metre gives this word quiet but thought-provoking emphasis, making us hear it simultaneously in very different ways. We can hear the speaker as contemplating and envying the way the dead are shielded from the shocks of worldly life, like snails in their shells. Or it can suggest that the dead are safely disposed of, tucked away and kept from bothering the living. In this sense, we may think of Hamlet\u2019s words as he hides Polonius\u2019s body \u2013 \u201cSafely stowed!\u201d or Macbeth asking the First Murderer whether Banquo is definitely dead and hearing the reassurance that \u201cSafe in a ditch he bides \/ With twenty trenched gashes in his head, \/ The least a death to nature.\u201d As the stanza develops there\u2019s a constant flickering between thinking of the dead as enviably protected and thinking of them as deprived. If \u201cchambers\u201d and \u201csleep\u201d suggest comfortable security, \u201cUntouched by Morning – \/ and untouched by Noon\u201d suggests deprivation. \u201cMeek\u201d suggests that the submissiveness of the dead is a matter of weak will but it also invokes the blessing of the meek in the Beatitudes. To some the \u201croof of stone\u201d in line five might suggest the strength of protection enjoyed by the dead but the word \u201cStone\u201d seems to me to fall with a chilling weight, and its contrast with \u201cRafter of satin\u201d makes me think of the iron fist in the velvet glove, the implacable force behind the superficial comfort of the padded prison.<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t help relating the poem to ideas about the place of woman in the prosperous American middle classes in the mid 19th<\/sup> century, the extent to which even a highly gifted, educated and intelligent woman was expected to sacrifice her life to husband and family, or in Dickinson\u2019s particular case, to a widowed father, and to what I imagine to be her ambivalent feelings about the reclusiveness of her life. In this context the comparison I find myself thinking of Madeline in Keats\u2019 Eve of St Agnes,<\/em> in bed in her chilly room, warmed only by her own body, \u201cBlissfully havened both from joy and pain, \/ Clasped like a missal where swart paynims pray, \/ Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain, \/ As though a rose could shut and be a bud again.\u201d Her havened state has its own blissfulness but is essentially unripe, and fulfilment will only come with Porphyro\u2019s love, even if that also means facing the dangers of the wider world.<\/p>\n As well as by the resonance of individual words, tone in the poem is expressed by metre. For example, I said that the second stanza presents the large movements of history and the cosmos \u201cas it were in an objective point of view\u201d. This isn\u2019t quite right because it seems to me that the first four lines have a subtle flavour of mockery in silent reading and the potential for downright satire in reading aloud. The brilliant division of what could easily have been four-beat lines into shorter two-beat ones pushes grandeur into grandiosity by intensifying the stresses on \u201cgrand\u201d, \u201cyears\u201d, \u201cCrescent\u201d and \u201cabove\u201d. It\u2019s well nigh impossible to read them with respect for the pauses between them without a suggestion of empty inflatedness, BUT the tone in which one does so can be either satirical (mocking pompous pretension) or wistful, whether out of pity for the vanity of ambition and by extension of all earthly life or in sorrow at the speaker\u2019s exclusion from it.<\/p>\n What I’d like to be able to do at this point is express how beautifully the poem fades into its perfectly cadenced ending, how its rhythmic shape\u00a0 lingers in the imagination like music, but I haven’t the words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Safe in their Alabaster Chambers – Untouched by Morning – and untouched by noon – Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection, Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone – Grand go the Years, In the Crescent above them – Worlds scoop their Arcs – and Firmaments – row – Diadems – drop – And […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[216],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-emily-dickinson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2957"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2957"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2961,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2957\/revisions\/2961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}