I could have put up with the darkness
If I hadn't seen the sun
However, the sunshine makes me desolate.
Become a new desolation
(Jiang Feng/translated)
I have never seen a wasteland.
I've never seen a swamp,
I have never seen the sea;
But I know what a wilderness is,
Know what the waves look like.
I've never talked to God,
I have never been to heaven;
But I can confirm the location.
I seem to have a map in my hand.
(Ma Yongbo/translation)
No ship can be like a book.
No ship can be like a book.
Send us to a foreign country,
There is no good horse.
Can fly far away like a poem.
Even the poorest people can travel like this,
Do not need to be intimidated by tariffs;
Vehicles carrying human souls
How cheap the charge is!
(Zhang Yun/translation)
Please allow me, this is your summer.
Allow me, this is your summer,
When summer flies!
Your music remains the same, when the nightingale is in the north.
And orioles-have been silent!
I will jump out of the grave and bloom for you,
My flowers will line up around you!
Please pick me up-
Anemone-
Your flowers-forever!
(Zhang Qi/translation)
Emily Dickinson (1830~ 1886) is an American legendary poet. Born into a lawyer's family. Life as a teenager was monotonous and quiet, and he received a formal religious education. From the age of twenty-five, she abandoned social women and stayed at home. She wrote poems in solitude for 30 years, leaving more than 1,700 poems. Only seven songs were published before her death, and the rest were published after her death and are well known to the world.
Although Dickinson's life experience is full of puzzling mysteries because of her unique personal endowment, we can still find some clues to crack her lonely and secluded soul from Dickinson's works by connecting with the times and living environment where the poetess lives and carefully studying her correspondence with relatives and friends.
The mystery of Emily Dickinson
Daisy Wang
Emily Dickinson (1830- 1886), a world-famous American poetess, spent most of her life in amherst, a small town with only four or five hundred families, except for a short trip to Philadelphia and Washington with her family in her early years. In the eyes of the townspeople, this lonely woman likes to wear a long white dress and live indoors all the year round. She doesn't like talking to visitors. In her later years, she even buried herself in her favorite books and didn't even bother to go downstairs.
It is rumored that Emily Dickinson's brother Austin's mistress Mabel loomis Todd has a crush on this talented sister. Austin invited Todd to meet him at home. Emily Dickinson often heard them playing the piano and singing upstairs, but never went downstairs to see Todd. Even Susan, her best friend for life (who later married her brother Austin), often talks in the form of notes, which is really strange.
Although Dickinson's life experience is full of puzzling mysteries because of her unique personal endowment, we can still find some clues to crack her lonely and secluded soul from Dickinson's works by connecting with the times and living environment where the poetess lives and carefully studying her correspondence with relatives and friends.
Don't forget that the Dickinson family lived in New England in the19th century, and they were still very conservative at that time. Her family belongs to Puritans, and their ancestors migrated to the New World from England 200 years ago. Since then, they have been living in a pious and strict Puritan society. Her grandfather Samuel founded Amherst College almost by himself, and her father Edward was also a well-known local lawyer. Therefore, it is not difficult to imagine that Dickinson's daily environment is not far from the Victorian scene in England. Virginia Woolf, a British woman writer, once lamented that it was extremely difficult for a woman from the middle class to become a writer and poet in the traditional western society. At that time, women's primary task was to be fertility tools, so that the blood of the family could continue; Secondly, as a housewife, there are countless housework to do every day, such as sewing, washing clothes and cooking. For them, writing poetry is an unattainable luxury. If this woman's situation is better, she can get rid of the entanglement of daily chores such as kissing the well mortar. It takes considerable courage to mix in the man's world with trousers and a pipe in her mouth like the Frenchman George Thornton. According to Woolf's description of the social environment in which female writers and poets lived in that era, Dickinson, a housewife who spent a lot of time in boring jobs as an adult, failed to really enter the mainstream society, and did not express the major themes of the abolitionist movement and the civil war in her nearly 65,438+0,800 poems. Nowadays, people seem to understand a little more: we don't use the current standards to criticize female poets a century and a half ago.
There is another detail in Dickinson's life that can't be ignored. The poetess felt the threat of death because of the death of her relatives and friends, and her own health was not good, which greatly affected Dickinson's creation. While studying at Amherst College, Dickinson dropped out of school several times because of health problems. According to statistics, from 1845 to 1846, Dickinson attended classes 1 1 week. Her close relative Sophia Holland also died of typhoid fever during this period, which almost made the poetess have a nervous breakdown. She suffers from severe depression, so her parents have to take her home to recuperate. Reminiscent of many unusual strange things in her later life, the death of relatives and friends and depression left a distinct mark on her personality and creation. No wonder death and immortality have become two themes repeatedly sung in Dickinson's poems.
Dickinson had several emotional experiences in her life, but none of them succeeded, although we can really feel the breath of a poetess in her poems.
Persistent pursuit and surging * * *, however, in real life, Dickinson showed too much hesitation and self-confidence, and even died alone. In her last year at Amherst College, Dickinson made friends with Leonard Humphrey, the popular young headmaster. On her trip to Philadelphia with her mother, Charles Wadsworth, a local Presbyterian priest, also attracted Dickinson's attention. However, at this time, Charles was happily married, so the poetess had to bury her deep feelings in her heart and regard the elder as her mentor and spiritual pillar for life. Another serious emotional experience happened in the later period of the poetess's creation. Rod is a good friend of Dickinson's father and a judge. She came into her life in 1772, and the Rod family often went to Dickinson's house. After the death of Mrs. Rhodes, Dickinson and Rhodes once came to the edge of marriage, and their love for Shakespeare made them emotional. However, due to Dickinson's cowardice and indecision, and the fact that the poetess seems to be used to single life at this time, she finally failed to summon up the courage to enter the marriage hall.
Due to all kinds of bizarre coincidence factors, life can give us female poets too little and too boring. Life is as dull as a stagnant pool, and any humble and insignificant soul will undoubtedly suffocate in this dullness. However, the misfortune of personal life is enough to achieve a special and extraordinary personality. The rigid and closed living environment in New England society forces the sensitive and intelligent poetess to gradually drift away from real life, and turn their eyes more to their own hearts and to the eternal world where everything has no beginning and no end.
There is a view that female poets are very skeptical about their religious ideas. One example is Dickinson's aversion to the local cliche of liturgy, and she never goes to church. In fact, this is just one of the many grotesque features of a maverick poetess's life. There are many such excellent poets, writers, philosophers and scientists in modern western society, who refuse to compromise with secular churches. Their understanding and belief in religious concepts are often many times more than those secular people who observe church rituals and often speak biblical quotations.
As we all know, Emerson, the father of American spirit, and the poetess launched a transcendentalist movement called unity at the same time. A group of outstanding writers and thinkers such as Thoreau, Hawthorne and Melville had a profound and extensive influence on all aspects of real life around Emerson's creative activities, which eventually led to the American Renaissance. In fact, after careful consideration of Dickinson's poems about death and immortality, it is not difficult to find that the creative activities of female poets are closely related to this vigorous religious movement. Moreover, the concepts of nature, God and immortality, which are characterized by the pantheism advocated by Spinoza, have even become an inexhaustible source of nourishment and encouragement for Dickinson's poetry creation, making many of her works emit fresh and lasting artistic light. This is one of the reasons why Dickinson's works are full of mystery and still loved by readers.
Of course, we can't exaggerate the position of religion in Dickinson's works and its influence on female poets' creative activities. Dickinson did say things like "I found my savior", "I'm glad to talk to God alone" and "die according to God's will". On this basis, some people classify Dickinson as an evangelical poet and compare her with Hopkins, Eliot and Auden, which is not only unfair, but also greatly devalues the artistic value of Dickinson's poetry creation.