"If I can save one heart the aching" Emily Dickinson If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin Unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain. | On December 10, in the year 1830, In Amherst, Massachusetts one of America’s most well recognized and revered authors was born and her parents called her Emily Dickinson. Now throughout her own lifetime Dickinson was never known for her poetry and even when it was published it was heavily edited to meet the conventions and standards of the period, The ingenious innovations that made Dickinson’s work incredible were cast aside. While she was alive Dickinson spent much of her life as a recluse only attending the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, then for a short while the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to the home of her socially active and communally public family where she hid herself away in her bedroom writing poetry the world could not yet fathom, full of unusually poignant emotion and realism. She was the image of the solitary and misunderstood writer, prolific though seldom published. She embraced new styles and was boundlessly experimental and creative, with the use of slant rhyme allowing her an escape from cliche and repetition, as well as a more potent sound and adaptation of past organizations to create quick and clever free verse. She facilitated her own structure with meticulous if aberrant punctuation and capitalization. Regarded by those who lived around her as an oddity, she become a most unusual sight, never leaving home, reluctant to greet house guests and always dressed in ghostly white, which looked stark against her pale complexion contrasted with dark eyes and hair. Eventually, she refused to leave her bedroom, she was obviously never married and her only ties to the outside world were through letters, when she died on May 15, 1886, she left behind a treasure trove of undiscovered and unpublished work which was discovered by her sister, yet friends of the family Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd could not help but heavily edit her pieces and they were highly adultureated when they finally published. It was not until 1955 that a selection of almost unedited versions of her poems were published by Thomas H. Johnson in his anthology "The Poems of Emily Dickinson". During her life and for rather long after, her poems were not widely acknowledged or esteemed as any standards of literary prowess, it toke the better part of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for her to become respected as a poet of any worth or original intellect. Despite this, Emily Dickinson if now one of most prolific American poets to ever put a pen to paper. |
Emily Dickinson uses her imagination and daring to experiment with and explore new methods of personalized expression, she has moved on from the intimacy of the Romantic period and embraced the universality of the Modernist movement, in which the public had become both audience and subject. Dickinson addresses a theme which can be applied to anyone and everyone: heroism through becoming a savior, which is the most common plot element of all time through all cultures and stories from Jesus to Frodo, every hero only needs save a single life to become recognized for their accomplishment and fulfil their role. The statement that a single action can validate the virtue of a life is only justified by the fact that this action is the purest of them all: the greatest altruism is required “If [you] can stop one heart from breaking,” as Dickinson states if she can prevent a single heartbreak, her life would suddenly be worthwhile and “[she] shall not live in vain;”. Now, heartbreak can come in many forms and from many sources, whether it be the loss of a loved one to death, disease or another person, or the rejection of an opportunity, maybe even a failure to seize the day, and though many critics have translated Dickinson’s words as a cliche tribute to a sour romance, Dickinson has given no solid evidence in support of this theory. She goes on to ostentatiously branch out from simple heartache into “If I can ease one life the aching,” which could be either a wholly new grim emotion such as depression or humiliation or simply failure, but it could also be another reference to the lasting pains of heartache. Dickinson continues into her second stanza: the tercet with “Or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin unto his nest again.” following the same theme as her first stanza. For the value of morality can be as simple as saving one person a single moment of pain or restoring beauty to it’s rightful place so that moments are filled with joy and not sorrow. Dickinson’s robin may be a metaphor for a child or simply any person who retains the innocence and naivety of childhood, as this tiny bird is often a symbol of birth , new beginnings, youth, energy, fragility, excitement, spring and even life itself, recovering this vitality is most surely a way to ensure a life filled with the valuable nuances and spirit. Dickinson brings her poem full circle with a repeat of her second verse, “I shall not live in vain,” her final statement makes her voice and opinion clear and emphatic. Emily Dickinson is the embodiment of all the values of a modernist poet with experimental free verse combining traditional and raw poetic structures, her poem is seven lines in total, first a quatrain, then a tercet. Dickinson’s quatrain is classic with standard ABAB rhyme scheme and trochaic meter(every second syllable is unstressed) it’s fluency is rapid and pleasantly punctual with adequate pause between thoughts and audible closes and openings for her verses; the rhyme scheme is simple and engaging and the language basic yet not juvenile. Her tercet is a little more audacious, it’s rhyme scheme more liberated and ringing with distinct rhythmic notes. Arranged in CDD rhythmic format, only her last two verses rhyme here, with an additional repetition of syllables to emphasize the closing lines significance; quite unlike the use of an alternating number of syllables in the first stanza for fluency and pattern. “If I can save one heart from breaking” maintains its poetic structure and balance while remaining original and exciting. With one eloquent and archaic stanza, followed by an inventive, expeditious one Dickinson’s “If I can save one heart from breaking” is both classic and unconventional.
Emily Dickinson is one of the most popular American poets of all time, she was blatant, expressive and delightfully sharp-minded. Whether she she dealt with love, philosophy, psychology, nature or politics; she was always intelligent and individual in generous measure, she always expressed her unique and untainted views with a stoic verisimilitude and refreshing boldness, straightforward and in a fluid manner. She has an extraordinary grasp of both the fantastical and realistic, making her writing a symbol of the Transcendentalist movement in literature. It boogles the mind how a young women from born to a prominent family with strong social connections, in the year 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts would be an eccentric introvert who shunned society before they even had the chance to critique her. There came a time when she refused to leave her bedroom altogether and yet she has one of finest grasps of human nature in the literary world. In her lifetime Dickinson was not the picture of respected and beloved American poetry she is today, she lived in seclusion writing poetry the world was not yet ready for, many of her poems, strange as they may have seemed in that period with condensed verses, an absence of titles, slant rhyme(also called half rhyme, is the repetition of similar as opposed to identical sounds at the end of lines), and unique capitalization and punctuation. Even her themes raised many an eyebrow, as she wrote light-hearted compositions about potent topics such as mortality and immortality. During her lifetime, the few poems she did send to publishers were heavily edited before they were released to the public. This is a real shame as Dickinson’s quirks were what made her writing so brilliant. A poet who became most acclaimed for her poems published posthumously, Emily Dickinson was neither fully nor widely appreciated till nearly two centuries after her death. And yet today she is considered one of America’s greatest and most distinguished poets.