Blog 13: Quote-Response Dickinson

I love Emily Dickinson! She reduces huge natural phenomena to managable size and wrestles with big philosophical questions like, will I be able to recognize my loved ones after death? In "The Lightening is a yellow Fork" (606) Dickinson does both. She uses understatement about lightening to imply the power and negligence of whoever lives in the sky.

In the poem, lightening becomes a fork dropped from a table, which makes the reader wonder about who lives up there. In imagining a person in the sky who has dropped a fork, Dickinson also implies negligence on the part of any diety: he has "inadvertent fingers" to carelessly drop something so powerful as a lightening bolt. This probes whether God is actually paying attention and caring about humans.

Because heaven, the "mansions," never appear clearly, we can't know anything about God, but the lightening reveals the awful truth: God's "Apparatus" is "Dark." He keeps us in ignorance, only revealing his power and lack of caring in the moment when lightening strikes.

Despite my interpretation of this poem, I don't think Dickinson was an atheist. I think she just practiced a very questioning faith through her poetry, avoiding the convenient assumptions about God that keep people comfortable.