Chamber of Secrets

Dickinson’s poems about May led me to “One Sister have I in our house,” and then the word “house” brought me to “Doom is the house with the door.”  I wrote about that poem yesterday, HERE. 

So then what about doors?  In how many different poems did Dickinson write about doors?
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The online Dickinson Archive includes 195 entries for “door,” and that represents 76 different poems.  One of them is “One need not be a chamber – to be haunted,” which – like “Doom is the house with the door” – includes both a “house” and “door” within the poem.

Of course, psychologically, the opening stanza could not be more chilling – nor could the final lines where the careful soul who carries a gun and bolts the door fails to acknowledge the more sinister being in close proximity, one’s self.

The images of the third stanza, with the galloping steed in the moonless night with “The Stone’s a’chase,” call to mind the midnight ride of the headless horseman in Sleepy Hollow.  Similarly, the opening lines make me wonder if this poem was, in some way, a response to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.”  Poe’s tour de force was published in 1845, and Dickinson wrote this poem in 1862, so it is possible. 

Finally, I LOVE that opening line in the penultimate stanza, “Ourself—behind Ourself – Concealed,” and the way that image develops –  the fact that one’s true identity “should startle” more than an assassin unseen in one’s apartment.

Two more things:

First, this poem and the word/poem association that brought me to it (May → House → Door) called to mind that May is Mental Health Awareness month, and that made me wonder when the month actually received that designation.  I found this: 

“May was designated as Mental Health Awareness Month in 1949 by the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, which later became Mental Health America.” 

LOL – with poems like this one, “I felt a funeral in my brain” and “My life had stood a loaded gun,” it’s too bad Emily Dickinson one May was not able to access resources and information to support her overall health and well-being.  (I jest…somewhat.)

Second, while exploring a possible Poe-Dickinson connection (i.e., did Dickinson read any of Poe’s works), I found this: 

“While there's no definitive proof Emily Dickinson owned Poe's works, there's some evidence suggesting she may have read one of Poe's volumes in the 1850s. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore notes that Jack Capps suggests this possibility, but lacks concrete evidence."

Hmm…who was Jack Capps? Turns out that Capps was a 1963 PhD graduate of the University of Pennsylvania who wrote Emily Dickinson's Reading 1836-1886: A study of the Sources of Her Poetry.

I found his book on the Internet Archive, HERE.

Alas, it was listed as “Borrow Unavailable” so I was not able to check it over for any information related to Poe.
STOP THE PRESSES:  In exploring all of this, my mind was just blown.  I’ll explain tomorrow. LOL. 

"The rest of the story" is HERE.