A Circumference of Emily Dickinson

EMILY DICKINSON'S best poems come from an awe of change, and her feeling about change makes the characteristic movement of many poems a terrible passage or journey from one state to another. Her special vocabulary of awe, particularly the word circumference, has been examined in several studies since Charles Anderson's Emily Dickinson's Poetry: Stairway of Surprise,' but circumference and other distinctive words and images with symbolic meaning for her ought to be understood in their connection with the journey. Because I could not stop for Death, for instance, or Our journey had advanced, indicate in their opening lines that the experience of each poem is a journey through time, and the journey is her image of change. It is also an image of a separation between the self and what the self desires-a separation that causes fear. To get across this gap is to go through terror, but it is a passage that must be made before the desire can be realized. An ambiguous cluster of desire, separation, terror, and transition, the journey in Dickinson's poetry is where the meanings are. Her poems often begin with a tiny object like a bee or child in a familiar scene, and progress outward, upward, away, into the large and vast, eternity and immortality. We-Bee and I -live by the quaffing2 climaxes in her special term noonNoon-our last Cup-just before death occurs. The bee in flight, quaffing or imbibing, is an image of absorption of air, oxygen, power, joy, and time. Intoxication produces images of swelling and puffing out, expanding away, growth, and finally

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