Dickinson's Misery Read Online Free

error that led several later interpreters to treat the poem invented by a modern editor as Dickinson’s own last poem).
    Now, the cricket’s elegy may be or may have been simply the elegy of summer’s passing, and its elevated or outlandish description no more than that. Yet the summer of 1865 was full of elegies for nature that were elegies for the culture lost with Lincoln and the war. Whitman’s great pastoral elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” may now be the best known of such poems, a spring elegy on the occasion of the events of April 1865, and the most beautiful lines ever written on the relation between seasonal redemption, Christian myths of resurrection, and cultural reformation. Yet there were many less distinguished elegies published that summer in the aftermath of the war. In the July 1865 issue of the Atlantic Monthly a sonnet appeared, bearing a somewhat out-of-date title:
    ACCOMPLICES.
    Virginia, 1865.
    The soft new grass is creeping o’er the graves
    By the Potomac: and the crisp ground-flower
    Lifts its blue cup to catch the passing shower;
    The pine-cone ripens, and the long moss waves
    Its tangled gonfalons above our braves.
    Hark, what a burst of music from yon wood!
    The Southern nightingale, above its brood,
    In its melodious summer madness raves.
    Ah, with what delicate touches of her hand.
    With what sweet voices, Nature seeks to screen
    The awful Crime of this distracted Land.—
    Sets her birds singing, while she spreads her green
    Mantle of velvet where the Murdered lie,
    As if to hide the horror from God’s eye! 20
    The war over, “accomplices” seems the wrong word for the signs of natural recovery the sonnet describes. Yet, as becomes (all too) clear in the closing sestet, the grass, flowers, moss, and birds of postwar Virginia are in cohoots with the Union’s former enemies by themselves regenerating a pastoral scene to “screen” the war’s casualties. “The Murdered” appear all the more murdered (as opposed to, say, fallen in battle) in contrast to the apparent peace of the pastoral scene. 21 Not the instruments of divine will (like Howe’s “grapes of wrath”) but attempts “to hide the horror from God’s eye” (still identified with the wounded Union’s perspective), the sonnet mourns the fact that natural expression is not cultural expression—or if it is, it is the expression of the wrong culture, the wrong poetry of the wrong earth. “The Southern nightingale” could not exist in nature in North America, but as romantic poetic figure it becomes the laureate of “this distracted Land,” a rough analogy to the cricket’s function as “Witness for Her / Land” in Dickinson’s lines. Unlike “The Earth” in “Further in Summer than the Birds,” however, Virginia in 1865 was, according to the sonnet, still removed and led astray from the Union, a condition that nature could not repair. The problem in the Atlantic sonnet is that nature is not naturally elegiac; “its melodious summer madness” is the wrong tune for the cultural season, or for what will now, the poem suggests, count as the perspective empowered by the state to decide that the South’s actions were criminal.
    The perspective of the sonnet itself is not hard to locate: as a rather elaborate combination of Italian and Elizabethan forms in Wordsworth’s modern mode (including couplets within as well as at the end of the sonnet), the poem claims the privilege of its high-middlebrow Atlantic publication (a rough equivalent to the contemporary weekly New Yorker poems) to present what later in the century in another genre the same magazine would call “local color.” In contrast, in Dickinson’s 1865 lines to Vanderbilt, “Beauty is Nature’s / Fact” rather than the sign of individual or cultural pathos, though “the