Back in August, my wife and I visited a museum of parade floats. The exhibition displayed a host of floats that had been featured in the Rose Bowl Parade, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, various presidential inauguration parades and more. Following that visit, I published a post about the day a circus parade passed by Emily Dickinson’s home (HERE), and my next post (HERE) discussed Dickinson’s use of the word “parade” in a handful of her poems.
On that same day back in August, following our visit to the float museum, we toured a potato chip factory. Talk about an exciting day, huh? We were not allowed to take photographs inside the plant where workers prepared the potatoes and then fried and bagged the chips; however, we could take pics in and around the gift shop/snack bar – see below for a few.
In response to that tour, I searched the online Dickinson archive to see if the poet ever used the word “chip” in any of her poems – and as a matter of fact, she did. She used the word “chips” in “My Portion is Defeat – today,” a poem which uses war as the central metaphor for whatever “defeat” the speaker in the poem had experienced.
 | Is the poem about the Civil War? It was written in 1862 (Johnson) or 1863 (Franklin). Or was something going on in the speaker’s life that resulted in such physical and emotional defeat as to liken it to war? The word “chips” appears in the tenth line, “And Chips of Blank – in Boyish Eyes.” And what, exactly, are “Chips of Blank”? The Dickinson lexicon provides this bloated definition related to Dickinson’s one-time use of the word “chips”: “Fragment; bit; shard; small piece; fragment of a broken-off whole; [phrase “Chips of Blank”] fixed pupils; a frozen stare; an empty gaze.” Obviously, it is the tail-end to that rambling definition that is intended here. Was “Chips of Blank” a common phrase? Not that I can tell. It seems to be a descriptive coinage of Dickinson’s with the dead boys’ eyes portrayed as blank chips. A very thorough analysis of the poem can be found HERE, at The Prowling Bee, where blogger Adam Degraff interpreted the second stanza with this: |
“Defeat is populated with the bones of soldiers and the stain of blood, with dead bodies so stiff they can no longer stoop, with piles of men moaning in pure agony, with dead boys who now have blank chips for eyes. (“chips” -what a word choice.) The dead boys are holding scraps of prayer, perhaps bible pages. (This is as biting a line about faith as Dickinson has yet written.) And then there is that final haunting image; the way the faces of the dead still show the surprise of death, as if the soldiers were statues carved in stone.”
Another analysis, HERE, opens with, “this poem explores the aftermath of defeat, contrasting its somber reality with the fanfare and celebration associated with victory” -- and that certainly calls to mind Dickinson’s earlier poem (from 1859), “Success is counted sweetest.”
 | Both poems focus on the defeated to emphasize the exultation beheld in victory – and I love how Dickinson hit just about every faculty of human perception to express the feeling. She deftly incorporates each of the five senses (except smell?), and in exploring this, I found the ancient Greek word αίσθηση (aesthesee): sensation, sense, perception, feeling, impression, notion. Dickinson certainly hit all of those! Are there any readers old enough to remember ABC’s program “Wide World of Sports”? The show opened with these lines which encapsulate the two poems: “Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports… the thrill of victory… and the agony of defeat… the human drama of athletic competition.” |
Now who’s ready for some potato chips and more Dickinson poetry? I betcha can’t eat – or read – just one!
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