Battle Lines. Eliza Richards
the corpselike description of the elms whose articulated parts, “trunk and limb,” summon the amputation and dismemberment so ubiquitous during the war. The “banner of storm,” stridently patriotic in its unrelenting demands, insists on continuing its siege until the entire “pale city” is buried in a single “winding-sheet” (the Civil War dead, especially regular infantry, were frequently buried in mass graves or left to the elements).24
The speaker can still talk after the whole world has been destroyed, because, like Emerson’s “housemates,” she has sought shelter out of the storm in a room. Instead of Cowper’s comforting fire, Allen’s speaker stares at a picture of Rome and a wreath on her wall. Here the war surfaces fully as the subject of the poem, and the weather metaphor recedes:
Clouds may thicken, and storm-winds breathe:
On my wall is a glimpse of Rome;—
Land of my longing!—and underneath
Swings and trembles my olive-wreath;
Peace and I are at home, at home!
Shut in, a lone survivor, the speaker turns away from the present toward the ancient history of civilization in order to imagine a place “at home, at home” with peace. Even that dislocation from the natural world and the present moment, however, does not keep the threat of destruction at bay, for the very place she looks to reassure herself of the rise of civilization has fallen, as a result of war. The late eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon famously attributed the “decline and fall of the Roman Empire” to barbarian invasions that were possible due to the loss of civic virtue.25 Allen’s snow actively recalls Emerson’s frolic savagery in order to obliterate it, suggesting that poets, or at least her poem, can no longer use the natural world as a playground where the imagination is free to roam. The snow imposes a vision of mass death upon the speaker in spite of herself, one she seeks to escape. Bunkered in her home, she assembles pieces into a collage-like figure of a shrine—a picture of Rome in place of the world outside her window, an olive-wreath beneath—shoring up fragments in a vain attempt to look elsewhere and see differently. The weather brought the news home to the speaker, who invokes peace as a desperate plea in response.
To distill a difference between the antebellum aesthetics of Emerson and the “bellum” aesthetics of Allen, we might say that the work of a creative imagination transforming the world has been replaced by the grimmer task of picking up the pieces and trying to construct something out of what seems like nothing. Emily Dickinson’s Poem #291B both validates and develops this distinction, echoing many of the images discussed thus far.
It sifts from Leaden Sieves –
It powders all the Field –
It fills with Alabaster Wool
The Wrinkles of the Road –
It makes an even face
Of Mountain – and of Plain –
Unbroken Forehead from the East
Unto the East – again –
It reaches to the Fence –
It wraps it, Rail by Rail,
Till it is lost in Fleeces –
It flings a Crystal Vail
On Stump – and Stack – and Stem –
The Summer’s empty Room –
Acres of Joints, where Harvests were –
Recordless – but for them –
It Ruffles Wrists of Posts –
As Ancles of a Queen
Then stills it’s Artisans – like Swans
Denying they have been –26
Rather than remaking the world in a fantastic jumble (Emerson), or burying it in a winding sheet (Allen), Dickinson’s “It”—at first the snow, then something more mysterious—gives the world a sinister facelift, covering up signs of devastation. Like a cosmetician, it “powders all the Wood” and “fills with Alabaster Wool / The Wrinkles of the Road.” Fixing up the landscape might not seem so bad, until we hear that “It makes an Even Face” and an “Unbroken Forehead” of the entire world, “from the East, / Unto the East, again.” That leaves us to wonder, if the globe is a head, where the rest of the body is. It also suggests that a face is made up for posthumous viewing. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust discusses the advances in embalming during the Civil War. Families who could afford it hired embalmers near the front to prepare bodies for shipment home—often a long way by train for Union soldiers—so that loved ones could be seen one last time and given a proper burial.27 Embalmers and other middlemen in this process quickly realized that there was money to be made identifying and preserving the dead for distant burial. Dickinson’s image of filling wrinkles with wool on a bodiless face begins to suggest the detached, clinical gaze that would accompany such engagements with the Civil War dead.
Dickinson’s “even face” updates the “universal face[s]” of both Thomson and Cowper. Thomson’s snowy visage shows nature’s indifference to human suffering:
Earth’s universal face, deep hid, and chill,
Is one wild dazzling waste, that buries wide
The works of man.
In Thomson’s poem, winter is a murderer, but the focus is on individual casualties, like that of the “swain” who “sinks / Beneath the shelter of a shapeless drift” while his family waits for him to come home. Dickinson’s snow buries countless bodies—a world of bodies—beneath a shapeless drift of global proportions. She emphasizes the enormity of the burial by nodding to and magnifying Thomson’s depiction; a snowstorm that can “make [ ] an even face / Of Mountain – and of Plain –” leveling peaks and valleys, would have precipitation levels of hundreds or thousands of feet. Snow would have to be that deep, Dickinson implies, to cover the massive number of casualties. The unimaginable proportions death takes in modern warfare summons a hallucinatory depiction. Dickinson has given up on crafting an appropriate affective response; in the “even face” response has been overwhelmed, the onlooker numbed in a mimic facsimile of the distant masses of dead soldiers she cannot summon to the mind’s eye. Death has become so remote and so vast that registering and absorbing the fact of it is inconceivable; the poem asks us simply to think about the blankness of shock that would accompany such an encounter. Dickinson’s “even face” exaggerates the transformation “by most unfelt” of “the face of universal nature” that in Cowper signified a kind of numbness.28 She elevates that numbness to shock.
The poem foregrounds the fragmentation not only of poetic understanding and worldview, as Allen’s “Snow” does, but also of the human body. “It sifts” through images of body parts, vainly trying to reassemble the human, an aesthetic task, Dickinson indicates, that inevitably accompanies modern warfare. Countless Civil War reports of battlefields (Dickinson replaces the first version’s “Wood” with “Field” in this second version, strengthening the military association) covered with wounded and dead soldiers used metaphors of autumn harvest (discussed in Chapter 2), underscoring the gruesome yield of war. Dickinson also aligns the botanical world with human anatomy; “stump” can refer to both botanical and human portions (the hospital where Silas Weir Mitchell worked was known as the “Stump Hospital”). Once that association is established, we can read “Stem” as shorthand for human decapitation, and “stack” for human corpses piled like so much hay. The next phrase, “Acres of Joints,” fully inverts the metaphoric valence, so that now human dismemberment signifies agricultural harvest; we do not commonly refer to mowed fields as full of “Joints.” If “Acres of Joints” are “where Harvests were,” then we can understand that, rather than metaphoric equivalence, Dickinson has moved to a literal description of substitution: where grain was harvested now lie human bodies and their dismembered parts. Simultaneously closing and opening the distance between Southern