Emily Dickinson's"Circumference" : Her Way of Making Immortality

Circumference is a famous word in Emily Dickinson's poetry. This paper shows how the shape metaphor of "Circumference" becomes is the structure of Immortality itselfin her poetry.First two poems on "Heaven, " P374 "I went to Heaven, " and P399 "A House upont idea, "Eclipse, " the word alsoclosely examined in her letter and poem.What is clarified by "Eclipse" is that Dickinson does not negate the existence of God, Heaven, or Immortality, but she makes us conscious of its absence. Being conscious ofits absence is not the same as its total negation. For, when the moon is eclipsed, it is notthe moon itself but the light that disappears. In the same manner, when we are consciousof the eclipsed body of, for example, God, by the very image of "Eclipse, " we, unaware, follow the unseen line around what might be crossed out as unidentified.Then, three poems on Immortality, P306 "The Soul's Superior instants, " P679"Conscious am I in my Chamber, " and P721 "Behind Me-dips Eternity, " are examined.In the first two poems, we find not merely a graphic representation of "Immortality" butwhat enables this graphic representation-the abstract shape of Immortality, Circumfer-ence, an empty circle. And in the last poem, we find the necessity of a disappearance of"Immortality" in our regular sense of the meaning, and the creation of a new one, whichis identified as her own by the speaker of the poem as "Maelstrom-in the sky." Here, the "I" of the poem takes hold of her own "Immortality" in chaos, where even death isnot reliable.Further analysis is made on the device of an empty circle which dose not onlyenclose but exclude what is labeled inside or outside of the circle. For example, if youdraw a circle and write inside "Time", then this circle or circumference, dose not onlybecome a boundary, or enclosure for "Time", but an awakening for what is excluded by"Time" - "Eternity, " as found in P802 "Time feels so vast that were it not."And finally, by P1138 "A Spider sewed at Night, " we realize not only the Immortalshape of Circumference, but why it is important in the way the speaker portrays thespider as "Of Immortality His Strategy Was Physiognomy."What we find here is a "radical correspondence, " if I use Emerson's words, betweenthe content and the shape. And because of this abstract shape of an empty circle, Circumference, Dickinson can take us into the world of her poetry, where, this time, itis us who would struggle with the application of this circle, and where we can touch andsee the pain, exultation, sorrow, and pride of what Dickinson registered as found in ourLife.8KJ00002499830departmental bulletin pape