A glimpse into my mind’s eye

Once again, Shakespeare does not dissappoint. As with all of his tragedies, the characters die. This doesn’t make for a very interesting blog topic in itself, so I have decided to spice it up with questions of my own surrounding the final events of the play, or Hamlet’s state of mind. When Hamlet is talking to the gravediggers at the beginning of Act 5, he asks them about this price of Denmark that has supposedly gone crazy. Hamlet asks the gravediggers why he went mad, how it happened, and where he is now. I want to ask Hamlet why he asks about himself to these people. This is a time I wish I could have seen the movie before I read the play. Is he just being condescending because obviously he knows that he is the one they are talking about? Has he gone so insane that he is just talking to talk? If he is trying to prove that he knows more than the gravediggers, why would he care what they think? He says himself “Has this fellow no feeling of his business? He sings at gravemaking?” I think his condescention of the gravediggers further prove his insecurities and his downward spiral into fullblown insanity. But then again it is Hamlet, this could be part of his plan to go crazy in order to get revenge and prove his superiority over everyone else, because at this point he has no true allies.

Another scene in which I have to call Hamlet into question is after the fencing match near the time of his death.  He makes a plea to Horatio by saying,  

“Oh God, Horatio, what a damaged reputation I’m leaving behind me, as no one knows the truth. If you ever loved me, then please postpone the sweet relief of death awhile, and stay in this harsh world long enough to tell my story.”

At this moment, Hamlet regains some of the human qualities he possessed before the whole revenge idea. In this moment he understands how his reputation as the previously noble prince of Denmark will be replaced by, like the gravedigger alludes to in the beginning, a legacy of insanity. His awarness of the treagic transformation makes me question the realness of his insanity that I was so sure of earlier in the play. He goes even further in his recognition of this downfall that he asks Horatio to make sure his story is told to future generations so that his mistakes can be avoided. I think at this point he realizes the power of revenge to take hold of someone’s sanity and, in his request to Horatio, is trying to regain the power of his own will to make sure that his mistakes don’t ruin someone else’s life as they did his. Although I felt his insanity was validated  throughout the play, his awarness and effort to recognize his mistakes make him seem like a sane person caught up in the insantityof revenge. Then again, the fact that he waited until his death to have such an ephiphany also suggests that he is merely trying to clear his conscience before he can go onto heaven. Still, even now that the play has ended, I am torn. I guess that’s the beauty of Shakespeare.

In Act 4, insanity becomes a disease, a disease which at first only struck Hamlet but now has spread to everyone else. In an effort to help cure him of his insanity, Ophelia and Laertes only become caught up in the same madness.  Claudiu  predicts this spreading of  maddness after he witnesses the  beginning of Ophelia’s insanity over her father’s  death. He says,

“Oh, this is the poison of deep grief. It springs All from her father’s death, and now behold!   O Gertrude, Gertrude,   When sorrows come, they come not single spies   But in battalions.”

In this quote he is saying that the main cause of Ophelia’s insanity is grief over her father’s death. However, he also recognizes that it won’t take to long for her grief to hatstemn others, specifically Laertes, into insanity. This proves to be true later in the act. He knows that when bad things happen, they do not come neatly in single file. Instead they come charging in like an army that becomes almost impossible to contain.

Following Ophelia’s insanity, Laertes begins to “catch the disease” after he learns of Polonius’ death. He says “I dare damnation. To this point I stand That both the worlds I give to negligence. Let come what comes, only I’ll be revenged. Most thoroughly for my father.”  At this point , he begins to take on the traits of Hamlet  in the beginning of the play when he meets the ghost and is  determined to get  revenge for his father’s death, no matter  if the consequence is death.  Both men  take on the attitude that  it does not matter what happens to them in life or death, the only thing that matters  is getting revenge. This attitude is what  ultimately leads both men to insanity.

Going back to Hamlet for a moment, his sililoquy in scene 3 chanels his two be or not to be speech in Act 3. He commets on how in order to fight with honor or be considered great one must fight with reason. Considering this he returns to thinking about his place in this world and specifically in this battle for revenge. He rejects this hypothesis of reason to achieve greatness because he belives that after everything he has been through ( ie his father’s death, Ophelia turning on him, his friends spying on him), he feels entitled to reject having to use reason and concludes, “from this time forth,  My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” His violent attitude is  also recognizable  in Laertes  quest for revenge in his father’s  death, thus proving that Hamlet’s insanity  is ruining  more than just his own  mind. When Laertes discusses his father’s murder with Claudius he is in  no state of mind to sit and listen to Cladius plan  to  clear his own name and honor Polonius instead , he says  to the king, “Ay, my lord—   So you will not o’errule me to a peace” Like Hamlet, he too is only focused on  violent revenge instead of listening to  anything else .

Finally, the most tragic consequence of Hamlet’s insanity is that it eventually leads to Ophelia losing her mind and commiting suicide. Ophelia began, as Laertes says, as the most angelic, good-hearted, genuine person in th play. She is willing to do anything to protect Hamlet from himself and does not resent him when he goes on a tyrade against him. The ability of insanity to ruin a character as homorable as Ophelia proves the power of this disease.

Through the use of literary devices, Shakespeare is able to further develop characters, thicken the plot, and force his audience to think about future events in the play.

While talking to Ophelia about his father, Hamlet makes use of sarcasm which is only apparent to the audience. When Ophelia tells him that his father has been dead for months rather than weeks, he replies.

“Well, in that case these mourning clothes can go to hell. I’ll get myself a fur-trimmed suit. Good heavens, he died two months ago and hasn’t been forgotten yet?”

This reply is important because only the audience can recognize his sarcasm. Ophelia takes his comments as just another example of his denial to cope with the king’s death. However, as the audience, we remember Hamlet’s sililoquy in Act I detailing how upset he was over his mother’s marraige so quick after his father’s death.

The scene then changes to a flashback with the King Hamlet and Queen Gertrude in which she rejects his idea that she will someday remarry again:

“Oh, confound the rest! Such love must needs be treason in my breast. In second husband let me be accursed! None wed the second but who killed the first.”

This statement is ironic because her quick marraige to the King’s brother calls into question whether she was unfaithful while the king was alive. She also helps to strenthen this suspicion because she goes on to proclaim her faithfullness and love to the point where it is overkill caused by guilt for what she may have done. I think that only know that she the king is dying, she feels the need to proffess her love in order to clear her conscience before he dies. If we continue to go on this suspicion that she committed adultery, it also raises the question of whether she herself had a hand in her husband’s death. If that were true, this statement would be even more ironic because she says that marrying another man would be equally as bad as killing him, and she was strangely quick to marry Claudiuis.

Hamlet investigates his suspicions of his father’s murder by Claudius and his mother’s adultery by writing a play based on these suspicions. When he notices that Claudius becomes uncomfortable during the prolouge’s descrition of the play, he says to Claudius,

“Your majesty and we that have free souls, it touches us not. Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung.”

By assuring Claudius that the play is just fiction, he wants to say that Claudius should not be affected by the immoral actions of the characters because he and Hamlet have nothing but clear consciences…right? This helps to thicken the plot because Hamlet knows that Claudius will not come out and say that he killed the king. Instead, Hamlet must continue to pretend that nothing is wrong in hopes that either Claudius will go on unsuspecting of any plans or he will get a hint that Hamlet knows something and that will lead to his downfall. For now, I think that Claudius is unaware of Hamlet’s knowledge, but htat this will change in the future and provide Shakespeare with a more complicated web to untangle throughout the rest of the play.

Hamlet’s mental state becomes more fragile at this point in the play because he confronts his mother about her affair and moves from releasing his anger to threatening her life and wishing her harm. This is important because in an earlier act, the ghost advises Hamlet against confronting his mother about the affair. Likewise, Hamlet is willing to follow any advice that the ghost offers…in the beginning. As he has time to contemplate the situation, he can no longer contain his anger and feels that intimidating his mother is an important step to clearing his father’s name and beginning his revenge. His inablility to control his emotions without resorting to intimidation and threats of violence demonstrates just how fragile his state of mind is at this point:

“Whatever you do, don’t do this: let the fat king…make you admit that my madness is fake, all calculated. What a great idea that would be, because why would a fair, sober, wise queen hide such things from a toad, a pig, a monster like him? Who would do that? No, no, it’s much, much better to spill the beans right away, let the cat out of the bag, and break your neck in the process.”

In Act II Hamlet’s state of mind takes a turn for the worse. In his quest to act crazy as part of his plan for revenge, Hamlet becomes crazy by exhibiting characteristics that psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud would associate with the beginning of a breakdown. When Ophelia comes to Polonius telling him of Hamlet’s actions, she says,

“He raised a sigh so piteous and profound. As it did seem to shatter all his bulk. And end his being. That done, he lets me go, And, with his head over his shoulder turned, He seemed to find his way without his eyes, For out o’ doors he went without their helps, And to the last bended their light on me.”

After his encounter with the ghost, I think Hamlet becomes overwhelmed with what to do with himself next. He knows that he has a huge mission ahead of him that will lead him through obstacles, insecurities, and bouts of insanity. Supposedly, he will experience all of these things in order to bring peace to his father and restore order in Denmark. But it is a tradgedy after all, and we know that nothing good can come from Hamlet’s noble but flawed revenge. Although Hamlet will faithfully carry out this mission, he too, must acknowledge that it will not be smooth sailing. In order to distract himself from his fear, he fixates on his love for Ophelia, which I think is real and true before he meets the ghost, but becomes nothing but an escape mechanism. He is reluctant to take his gaze off of Ophelia after talking to her because he wants to make sure that she will not abandon him and return unexpectedly like the ghost does to him. She is his only chance of stability and he wants to keep it that way.

In is letter to Ophelia, Hamlet “proclaims is love” by saying,

“Doubt though the stars are fire,

Doubt truth to be a liar,

But never doubt that I love.”

In this letter, Hamlet wants to assure Ophelia of his love for her and make sure that she does not doubt his feelings. However, this is only the surface intent of the poem. His emphasis of the word doubt is ot only to reassure Ophelia, but even moreso to reassure Hamlet himself. By proclaiming that his intentions are true, he hopes that she will recipricate those feelings toward him. This way, Hamlet can reassure himself that he will have at least one person that expresses security and consistency during his journey of revenge that will brigng nothing but turmoil and, most of all, doubt.

Hamlet’s fears of detatchment become real after Ophelia follows her father’s advice to stay away from Hamlet and not allow him to visit her. Instead of strengthening Polonius’ assumptions that Hamlet will move on from his daughter, it moves him toward a breaking point because the person that is his is security blanket suddenly avoids him. Polonius says that “this hath made him mad” because he thinks that Hamlet cannot deal with being away from his true love. Instead, it is losing someone that was someone he could count on for affection on security that shakes him up the most.

Polonius contradicts himself a few lines later when he tells Queen Gertrude,

“I will be brief: your noble son is mad. Mad call I it, for, to define true madness, What is ‘t but to be nothing else but mad?”

In this quote Polonius says that insanity cannot be called anything else than insanity because that is what it is. Insanity is not brought on nor catalyzed by love. Thus, he admits that Ophelia is not the reason for Hamlet’s antics because insanity is what it is.

Act I first lends itself to a feminist critique when Claudius looks down upon Hamlet for being too emotional over his father’s death. Such emotion, Claudius says, is

“unmanly grief and shows a heart unfortified, a mind impatient…simple and unschooled.”

Here, Claudius almost scorns Hamlet for showing any emtion and goes so far as to say that this emotion not only makes him weak, but also cowardly and illogical-qualities which in Shakespeare’s time are associated only with women. Claudius says that because death is natural and unavoidable, it is a waste of time for Hamlet to grieve for his father. Hamlet would be better off “taking it like a man” and focusing on the bright future ahead of him and not wasting precious time dwelling on the past.

When Ophelia tells of her feelings for Hamlet to Laertes, Laerates is quick to warn her against acting like the typical, overemotional woman who gets carried away by love. He warns,

“Just keep your love under control, and don’t let yourself become a target of his lust. Baby blooms are most susceptible to disease. So be careful. Fear will keep you safe. Young people often lose their self-control even without any help from others.”

I think Laertes feels the need to tell her this because he assumes that as a young woman, Ophelia will become irrational, lovestruck, and dissillusioned by Hamlet and his supposed tendency to treat her like an object instead of a person. Both Ophelia and Hamlet are victims of gender stereotypes in this conversation. It does not occur to Laertes that Ophelia may be a woman who has a good head on her shoulders but is just letting herself enjoy the feelngs of young love. He treats her in a condescending way while warning her that Hamlet will do the same thing to her if she allows him the opportunity. His remarks demonstrate the hypocriscy that is often associated with gender stereotypes. When Laertes says to Ophelia,

“Baby blooms are the most susceptible to disease…young people often lose their self-control” he is saying that women are the most susceptible to decepion by men because they are often distracted by their emotions to realize men’s lustful intent. He assumes that she needs his words of wisdom in order to stay away from any tricks that he thinks Hamlet has up his sleeve. I also inferred that when he says “young people often lose their control” he is specifically saying that women have a tendency to lose their self control if they are not taught the warning signs of being too emotional. Laeretes does not consider the possibility that Hamlet may have intentions beyon those involving lust, or that he may be the one to become too involved in the relationship while Ophelia is the one who can keep a level head.

The last part of the play which I analyzed through a femenist lens is one in which the tables are turned on Laertes and he is offered advice by Polonius about how to succed while he is in France. Polonius’s pieces of advice are what he calls “a few rules of life.” He tells Laertes,

“Don’t say what you’re thinking, and don’t be too quick to act on what you think. Be friendly to people but don’t overdo it. Don’t be quick to pick a fight, but once you’re in one, hold your own.”

He tells Laertes to be careful not to possess any of these qualities that are characteristic of women-Keep your feelings to yourself and don’t be irrational or impulsive. He tells Laertes to keep people at a distance because emotional attatchment only leads to drama and intense feelings which are only acceptablie to feel if you are a woman. In fact, not only are they acceptable, but overemtional behavior like this is to be expected, and that is why Laertes must be extra careful to avoid it. Finally, Polonius tells Laertes to stand his ground should anyone challenge his dignity or authority. Now, if he was giving advice to Ophelia, he would probably tell her to do the exact opposite-stand by and passively accept whatever criticism you receive, because it is not proper for a woman to voice an opinion.

These three scenes which I viewed through a feminist lens demonstrate the sexism present during Shakespeare’s time. However, I do not think Shakespeare included these scenes and characters in order to take a stance on the sexism of his society. Although he does not protest or discourage his characters from possessing sexist views, his tone does not lend itself to the endoresement of these attitudes either. He does not make Ophelia overly emotional or irrational to the point where it seems that he is saying that this is how all women are, nor does he make Ophelia some sort of feminist hero. By that same token, he does not present Laertes or Polonius with any pompous attitudes that suggest he is endorsing a patriachal society. Instead these characters simply offer the advice which they think is appropriate. I think that he intends to provide the audience with this commentary and leave it up to interpretation how gender roles and attitudes develop in the story.

http://wesleyhill.tumblr.com/post/72841268/jane-kenyon-and-donald-hall

Because there was no place to leave a comment on Wessley’s blog, I put my response to his post on my blog.

When I read the poem by Donald Hall that Wesley posted on his blog, it seemed to me that Hall is  asking Kenyon why she had to leave so soon. I think he felt a strong sense of grief because he battled cancer and survived while she did not. Immediately after I read this poem I thought that if Kenyon could hear Hall asking her this question, she would have responded by reading an excerpt from a poem that she wrote called Here. This is only part of the poem.

You always belonged here.
You were theirs, certain as a rock.
I’m the one who worries
if I fit in with the furniture
and the landscape.

I feel my life start up again,
like a cutting when it grows
the first pale and tentative
root hair in a glass of water.

I think in the first stanza, Kenyon wants to reassure Hall that he shouild not feel guilty about being the one that survived because his survival was for a reason. She always admired his strength in the way that he handled his and her cancer and knows that he will be strong enough to continue on without her. She points out the fact that she was always the one to reassure her in difficult times, and now this is her way of reassuring him after her death.

When she moved out to Eagle Pond with Hall, Kenyon had a spiritual and personal rebirth. In the second stanza she wants to thank Hall for giving her back the zest for life that she couldn’t find growing up with a caring but strict and sometimes overbearing family. Although she has died, she makes clear  that she lived more in her short time with Hall than during any other time in her life, so he should not worry about her resenting him or wishing that things had turned out differently. He brough passion and poetry back into her life by bringig her to Eagle Pond, and that was the greatest time of her life.

Technology has never been my strongpoint, nor am I a natural blogger. I am much stronger at writing papers because it gives me a chance to show my creativity that seems absent in my blog. By that I mean that I am not the type of person that likes to go searching for videos and other media about my poet, but I am creative in my paper with my word choice, ideas, and the way I structure my paper. It was hard for me to show that I had worked hard on this project because when you initially see my blog it does not have a lot of the cool aspects to it that would draw you in. The same goes for writing my posts. I struggled with how I could show that I had researched my poet well while keeping the informal tone of a blog. Because I like the style of writing papers I would suggest having people write their scholarly posts in a sort of “paper style” and then have them write comments and other posts in a more “blogger-friendly way.” That way, you would be able to see the substance that the scholarly research contains while also seeing that people have tried to take on the blogger way of writing.

http://engl125spring2009.blogspot.com/2009/02/jane-kenyon-otherwise-post-by-chris.html

http://amandaegr1.edublogs.org/2009/03/09/the-sara-teasdale-chronicles-episode-one-the-early-years/#comment-13

http://kathleenegr1.edublogs.org/2009/03/11/an-introduction-to-anne-sexton/#comment-5

https://www.blogger.com/comment.do- A comment about Emily Dickinson’s quote “To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.”

http://wesleyhill.tumblr.com/post/72841268/jane-kenyon-and-donald-hall

I have never had to go looking for sadness,

it has always found me. Happiness on the other hand,

has never been too far away.

And I say to myself “Why can’t I just give up?”

The cancer I understand. Its causes are tangible, its effects understandable,

displayed in scientific terms for all to see. But sadness?

Science can never conquer that.

And yet, I find comfort in the fact that sadness is a wave. Yes,

there are days when it destroys all that it touches. But there are days when it is nothing more than a ripple in this sea of life. Yes,

there are days when sadness is a brick wall that blocks your view of happiness, sometimes for so long that you forget it is waiting for

you on the other side.

But there are days when that brick wall turns to glass, almost frightening in how easily it can shatter under the strength of happiness. Sadness, like happiness, has a purpose.

Without it, I would not appreciate the gift of happiness; I would throw it away and naturally expect it to be there the next day.

Without waves of sadness,

this sea of life would appear perfect. And you and I both know

that this world is far from flawless. Without that “brick wall”,

I would never know the power of my happiness to shatter the glass of which it is really made.

My favorite poem of Kenyon’s is Happiness. I admire the way that she discusses her battle with depression so openly in an attempt to help others who are going through the same struggle. She has this incredible talent to be both realistic and optomistic, blunt and flowery. That is what I admire most about her. With poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, they have two very distict syles which are prevalent in their poems, Whitman using long and elaborate language while Dickinson remains short and sweet. While they both master their writing styles, they do not mix syles as freely as Kenyon. The prominent qualities in Happiness are the strong metaphors for her subject and the way she asks questions to herself. I tried to emulate her by explaining the impact of sadness while maintaining an optomistic message about the power of happiness.

In his memoir The Best Day, Donal Hall chronicles his life with Jane Kenyon, going into excruciatingly poignant detail about her last days:

“Leukemia was a dreary continuous landscape of drips, injections, and pills; sleeplessness and long steep nausea…we sat in a small room with big windows, and we became ourselves a small room bounded by a door and windows, obsessed to remain together in life”

When I first read this excerpt from the book, I was reluctant to research more of Donald Hall’s poems because I didn’t want them to be a depressing look at his final days with Jane. Jane’s poetry intertwines tones of optomism and realism that make the reader feel at peace with the fact that she is dying, and part of that comes from the fact that after much worry about the future, she decided to come to peace with death. I admired the way she could mesh feelsing of sadness and optimism that I didn’t want to be dissappointed when it appeared that her husband did not have the same gift. I was proven wrong after reading Affirmation, a poem that is included in one of the last books he wrote during Jane’s life. This is only part of the poem:

If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.

Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

After reading this, I discovered that Hall did not spend all of his time remembering only the sad things about Jane’s last days. In fact, it seemed that he wanted his final words to her to be words of admiration for her courage in such a difficult time. In this poem he speaks honestly about society’s tendency to repel age and all of the wisdom that comes with so much life experience. I think the intent of this poem is to show Jane Kenyon that she does not need to worry about Hall leaving or losing interest just because she does not have the tenacity or vivaciousness she had in her younger days. That is why this poem is called Affirmation. Hall wants to assure Kenyon that he values her more in this fragile state maybe more than he did when she was a budding poet, and that is because it takes strength to show vulnerablility. Those who are younger than her tend to backaway from life when the going gets tough but because Jane has been through so much she has the courage not to back down from anything, even death. And that is what Hall admires most about her. His most powerful lines are at the end of the poem when he tells his audience (and Jane) to affirm that it is “fitting and delicious to lose everything.” In this he means to say that if you are saddened by losing something, that is a beautiful thing because it means that you care about it enough to resist letting go. Nothing is worth having if you do not care about the possibility of losing it, Hall reaffirms Jane that it is okay for her to let go because the life they lived was a happy one, and there is no greater gift to Hall than that.

Just as Jane’s struggle with cancer inspired Hall, Hall’s cancer (although he recovered from it) inspired Kenyon. In her poem Pharaoh, Jane reveals her admiration for Hall’s inner strength despite his outer weakness. This is only part of the poem:

Big hands. Men with big hands
make things happen. The surgeon,
when I asked how big your tumor was,
held forth his substantial fist
with its globed class ring.

I woke in the night to see your
diminished bulk lying beside me –
you on your back, like a sarcophagus
as your feet held up the covers. . . .
The things you might need in the next
life surrounded you — your comb and glasses,
water, a book and a pen.

In the first stanza, Kenyon describes the surgeon’s as Pharaos, capable of greatness and noble in their cause. They have the technology and tools to make miracles happen as pharaoh’s have the power and resources to transform whatever kingdom they control, and the surgeon’s kingdom is the operating room. All they have to do is utilize the resources given and they have the power to transform people lives. They can save her husband’s life, and their is no greater power, or gift, than that.

The scene then switches to Kenyon’s bedroom where she is observing his shrinking body sleep. The cancer has made him weak and tired, but she makes a point to show that she has never considered him to be stronger. In this stanza, he is the pharaoh. He holds the power of will, and no resource or piece of technology can diminish a person’s will. On the other hand, while Hall is still fighting for his life, Kenyon recognizes, still with admiration that he is prepared to face death. He has his most prized possessions surrounding him so that he is prepared to be as successful in the next life as he was in his first. The fact that he is a pharaoh instead of a king or prince is also significant. It is part of Egyptian culture to believe that people will have another life after their death and will need several resources to continue in this life. Even though we may bury things with our loved ones, it is not part of our culture to think that these things will be used in the next life. Anything that we bury with people is more of a sentiment that people like to be surrounded by what they loved to do in life, so that they can hold onto the memories in their death. Even in religion it is not necessarily a belief that life will continue the same on death as it did on earth. Jane presents these two opposing ideas of the surgeon as the pharaoh and Hall as the pharaoh to show that society’s view of greatness is skewed-we often associate greatness with strength and power when we should measure it by the courage that people show in death.

Because both Hall and Kenyon battled cancer, they understood the fragility of the topic and knew how to speak about it both honestly and delicately. This ability is what allowed so many people, including poetic scholar Warren Woessner whose wife died of cancer at age 39, to relate and benefit from their poetry. He ends his analysis of Hall’s memoir by saying,

“Reading The Best Day would make the ‘war on cancer’ much more tangibile for people proffessed to be committed to winning it.”

Source Citation:Woessner, Warren. “The Best Day The Worst Day–Life with Jane Kenyon.” The Midwest Quarterly 47.3 (Spring 2006): 301(3). Expanded Academic ASAP. Gale. Library of Michigan. 25 Mar. 2009
<http://0-find.galegroup.com.elibrary.mel.org/itx/start.do?prodId=EAIM>.

“She thinks about her relation to God, a God who is distant, and rather clumisily arbitrary. In many of my poems I am searching, clumsily for God. We are both full of terror, finally, and puzzlement, at the creation.”

This quote demonstrates Kenyon’s honesty regarding the subject of religion. Although forced to be religious when she was a teen, Kenyon later discovered a yearning for spirituality once she was not forced to find it. She continues that search in her poetry and invites the audience to do it with her, even though she may do it in an unorganized, wandering kind of way. When talking about God, she does not advocate organized religion necessarily, but the importance of finding spirituality, a sense of peace with one’s self and his or her relationship to God. Although spiritually grounded, she is not afraid to question God. In fact, this questioning is what often makes her more grounded in her spiritual beliefs. For example, in her poem Once There was Light, she pictures herself in heavan with the entire human race, “completely calm…no longer hat[ing] having to exist. ” In this line it seems as though she is picturing heaven as an ideal place where all of the worries and stresses of her life simply fall away. Because she struggled with depression and battled cancer in her life, this imagining of heaven seems to be her way of showing how much she cannot wait to arrive at a place where everyone can live in harmony with God. However, a few lines later, she seems to express dissappointment in God. After picturing a moment of peace, she then sees her husband coming to get her from the rest of the people in heaven, what I see as a metaphor for bringing her back to life during her cancer when she was close to death. After she dreams that he comes to rescue her she writes “after that I wept for days.” I think she cries this moment because she is so tired of the pain and suffering, both physically with cancer and emotionally with depression, that she wanted a chance to finally surrender to death, because even that would be better than her pain filled life. This poem seems to reflect her disappointment that God is toying with her in a way, presenting her with this wonderful, peaceful world, only to have it be so radically different than the agonizing life she must live. By writing this poem, she wants to ask him, “Why would you tempt me with a world of no problems when you can’t help me with those that I struggle with on earth?” This same uncertainty about how to feel towards God is shared by Emily Dickinson. William Franke, author of “The missing all” says,

I contend that Dickinson’s poetry is best understood as a form of negative theology, or as what I will call apophatic discourse…Dickinson’s explorations of modes of negation enable her to express negative theological forms of belief.

I admit, when I read this quote, I had know idea what this guy was talking about. So I turned to the holder of all knowledge, dictionary.com. This website defined the word apophatic as “relating to the belief that God can be known to humans only in terms of what he is not (such as ‘God is unknowable’). This definition made me disagree with Franke’s quote that Dickinson expressed negative feelings toward God in her poetry. I think that by her saying that God is unknowable she is simply questioning her relationship to God and how concrete that is, but I do not think that she condems God in any way. As with Kenyon, questioning God is how she furthers her own spiritual development. Poem #6 describes her spiritual attitude. Part of it says,

“God made a little gentian/it tried to be a rose/And failed, and all the summers laughed/But just before the snows/there came a purple creation: Creatorthe ! shall I bloom?”

In this poem, I think Emily is questioning her role here on earth. She is little gentian created by God, full of potential which she is unsure of how to release in the best way. She is looking for God’s help in figuring out her role before she blooms and he leaves her questions unanswered, just like the gentian in the poem waits all winter to spring up because it is looking for guidance on how to proceed once it has entered the world. When its calls for guidance also go unanswered, it decides to take the initiative to come alive when least expected. Just after it emerges, that moment of confidence when it decided to pop up is gone and the gentian is back to doubting its potential to succeed in the harsh winter, and feels the need to ask God, once again for approval. This may be a metaphor for Dickinson’s apprehension about enntering into the world of poetry amidst so may accomplished poets that she fears may criticize or outshine her. These poets would be represented as the summers that laughed when the gentian tried to bloom. On the other hand, it may not be have to be that complex. Dickinson, still represented as the gentian, may simply be asking God for guidance in life, her asking him to relieve her questions about the truth in religion. Dickinson herself says, “that religion/that doubts as fervently as it believes.” In this quote, like Jane Kenyon does in Once there Was Light, she is confronting God with a question of:”You put me on this earth for a reason, now tell me what it is.” Doubt is as important in any spiritual journey as reassurance. If people were completely confident in their spirituality, it would not be a journey at all.