The gardens of Emily Dickinson
Metadata
- Author: Farr, Judith(Author)
Highlights
Her real garden served as an index to Dickinson’s conception of “that garden unseen”—the inner plot she called the soul, with all its needs of cultivation and improvement, and beyond it, in a continually interrogated, distrusted, but yearned-for distance, the garden of Heaven or “Paradise” to which she frequently alludes — location: 37
The actual garden she gazed at in various seasons helped to inspire the garden of the poems. There, summer and fall, springtime and winter had differing powers that moved her to envision a mythic universe. — location: 53
The garden in the real world mirrors the garden in the soul
The phrase “several gardens” alludes to the actual spaces where Dickinson cultivated her plants and flowers, the imaginative realm of her poems and letters wherein flowers were often emblems of actions and emotions, and the ideal Garden of Paradise, which—in earnest, incandescent language—she sought to envision beyond the limits of her own grounds. — location: 94
Three kinds of gardens:
- gardens in actual spaces
- imaginary gardens in one’s mind
- the ideal garden of eden
Just as her poems were uncommon, some of the flowers she chose to grow are unusual, gorgeous and complex, requiring the grower’s knowledge, prudence, and insight. Others like gentians and anemones were wildflowers, associated for her with simplicity of mind and heart, with youth and humility, fresh imagination, and the possibility of everlasting life. All were indices of her own spiritual and emotional state, while in her letters and poems, she continually associates flowers with herself and making gardens with making poems. — location: 137
There are many houses among all classes into which treasures of fruit and flowers were constantly sent, that will forever miss those evidences of her unselfish consideration. … One can only speak of ‘duties beautifully done’; of her gentle tillage of the rare flowers filling her conservatory, into which, as into the heavenly Paradise, entered nothing that could defile, and which was ever abloom in frost or sunshine, so well she knew her chemistries.6 — location: 160
In “My nosegays are for Captives –,” she is the fastidious gentlewoman who (with apparent sincerity) called “Publication… the Auction/ Of the Mind of Man –” (f 788); she presents her activity as both poet and gardener in the guise of corporeal acts of mercy, good deeds designed to relieve both aesthetic yearning and physical debility. — location: 190
Her poems, like her flower garden, were a means of creating order and beauty. Far more private than the flowers, the poems were gathered in her manuscript books as acts of self-expression related to her symbolic bouquets. Like her flowers, they were also protection against the blightIntroduction — location: 256
whose reputation for leading a life of fastidious withdrawal, limited (as Higginson put it) by her “friends and flowers,”8 was assuming prominence. The Indian pipe, a white woodland flower that grows in hidden places, had been a favorite of Emily Dickinson from childhood. — location: 292
Emily Dickinson had mysteriously worn the white hue of the Indian pipe since her early thirties. — location: 296
It kindled a lively responsiveness to nature, growth, and change that was dramatically thoughtful and sometimes almost comically grave. — location: 364
“very firm, strong little hands” are the hands of a gardener, surely. His confession that, to him, they seemed “emancipated from all claspings of perishable things” is, in retrospect, ironic since she herself made clear that her hands were frequently occupied with helping the servants pick fruit and with planting seeds and tending flowers. Fruits and flowers are eminently perishable; yet by the 1860s, Emily Dickinson, whose chief artistic theme in the poems is “Eternity” and whose quest was always for Immortality, was spending long hours “train[ing]” the ephemeral flowers of her garden, always showing them a more intimate concern than she did her father’s favorites: shrubs and trees, a garden’s more architectural and ideally permanent features (l 102). — location: 411
For Dickinson, to whom a garden was a refuge, a sanctuary, and a studio of sorts in which artistic as well as practical decisions were made, flowers were metaphors, of both her own self and others. Flowers were her children, friends, and counterparts. They had souls and played a role in the Christian mystery of death and resurrection. — location: 422
“Did you ever know that a flower, once withered & freshened again, became an immortal flower,—that is, that it rises again? I think resurrections here [in my garden] are sweeter, it may be, than the longer and lasting one – for you expect the one, & only hope for the other” (l 91). Still, since her tulips and hyacinths “rose” each spring, the Resurrection itself began to appear to the skeptical Dickinson more likely. — location: 448
Dickinson herself called her poems “Blossoms of the Brain” (f 1112). — location: 475
Making poems, like cultivating gardens, required time, skill, industry, love. In her large bedroom facing Main Street, she often wrote before dawn, hearing the birds awake, watching the meadows fill with light. — location: 477
But woodland flowers pleased her preference for the unsung and unexpected, for hidden loveliness that triumphs over mud, rocks, and thorny places. The plucky triumph of these small, seemingly weak posies over the vast and dangerous woods amused her. — location: 549
He had resigned the ways of “Ambush,” of lying in wait for the sublime experience of death. Instead, he took “the way of Dusk”: his illness was long and his energies slowly drained so that, like a precious day, he sank into evening. — location: 778
“How lovely to remember! How tenderly they told of you! Sweet toil for smitten hands to console the smitten!” (l 609). Whether Mary inferred a pun on smitten—to be smited by grief or smited by love—we do not know. — location: 804
“My garden” is the garden of herself: her imagination, her love, each of which, she says, will outlast time. — location: 898
(Any gardener who has tried to detach a dandelion from the earth knows that even knives and poison will frequently fail to do so permanently. — location: 1270
insistent attachment to nature
One of Dickinson’s meditations on the nature of the dandelion, like Hill’s, contemplates its roundness, akin to the sun’s, and she is fascinated by its arrival and appearance in a winter landscape: — location: 1273
Dickinson implicitly argues a point in this playful poem about the superiority of the natural to the artificial, the simple and traditional to the new and complex. What can truly give the heart ease? Not those things of artificial or, as she liked to say, “Cosmopolit[an]” nature (f 1592). — location: 1368
Emily, however, speaks to Austin in biblical cadences about a whole world that is renewing itself because it is May: “This morning is fair and delightful – you will awake in dust, and amidst the ceaseless din of the untiring city, wouldn’t you change your dwelling for my palace in the dew?” (l 89). “You will awake in dust” implies not merely the cinders and dirt of the city but the “dust” that is mankind’s eventual decay and death, from which Christians hope ultimately to be awakened at the General ResurrecThe — location: 1573