If There Are Spirits Emily Dickinson Analysis

The story she is now “telling” about her life involves a kind of dissembling, or hiding under false appearances, which may be characteristic of all art. In this poem, as in others, Jennings seems to be guided by Emily Dickenson’s dictum “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” The contradiction between the statements made in the opening tercet and the ideas suggested in the rest of the poem opens the poem up to a number of probable readings. As a result of this disjunction, the poem can be read as an enactment or performance of the speaker’s mind in the process of fabricating a coherent argument to justify something she cannot really understand. The rationalization starts with the calculations, the enumerations, and the self-justifying comparisons

The first stanza considers the implications of the fanciful hypothesis of the opening lines: “If there are spirits, then they breathe in birds/ Tossed by the winds, agile in the frost.”The second stanza reiterates the familiar notion of the symbiotic relationship between humankind and nature. By the third stanza it is clear that Jennings is not apostrophizing the birds nor she is using the bird imagery as symbol merely to evoke representative responses about creativity. Jennings is concerned in the ways in which poems produce meanings, with the use of birds as symbols and with poets who use these symbols in order to approximate reality and communicate with others. The “birds,” “angels,” and “Greek Nymphs” are traditional symbols representing transcendent power: “And thought it is a fancy to/ Speculate, it’s thus we like to speak” (438) The pronoun “we” refers to the community of poets who “like to speak” in a particular way, using various figurative constructions and poetic devices. The conception of poetry suggested by this formalist statement may be reductive, but it is presented as a viable way of explaining how poets have traditionally attained a level of generality. The poets know that poetic comparisons and substitutions “are approximations but they touch / As near as men can through the boundaries/Rounding our senses’