Had Whitman written a poem beginning "I am alive," his first three words would likely have been followed by an exuberant celebration of the wondrousness of his existence. But in Dickinson's poem, any potential of her opening words to be read in a celebratory tone ("I am alive!") is immediately cut short by two innocent-looking but devastating words: "-I guess-." How pathetic that seems: to be so lacking in self-assurance as to question whether you are alive or dead. When Lear, holding the dead Cordelia in his arms, cries out, "Lend me a looking-glass; / If that her breath will mist or stain the stone, / Why, then she lives," we understand that a father's grief impels this desperate effort to prove her still alive. But what need has Dickinson to test upon herself this "Physician's-proof of Breath"? How imperiled must be her sense of self compared with Whitman's; she could never write, as he does, "Through me the afflatus surging and surging ... through me the current and index".
But (stylistic questions aside) is it true that she could never write such a line? If we momentarily turn from J470 to J214 ("I taste a liquor never brewed-"), and compare that Dickinson with Whitman, a different picture emerges. Here she, too, is surging-although the word she uses is "reeling"; here, needing no physicians proof of breath, she announces in no uncertain terms, "Inebriate of Air-am I-." Compared with this, Whitman's declaration, "The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it", seems sober and restrained. So, too, does his "lean[ing]" at his ease and "meeting the sun", compared with the "little Tippler" Dickinson, who is more directly, more sensuously, "Leaning against the-Sun-." Can all this abandonment of self to the joy of sheer existence be reconciled with the hesitant, even skeptical author of "I am alive-I guess-"'?
The end of J470 suggests that the answer is yes. Exclamation points rarely appear anywhere in Dickinson's poems, and here in the final stanza are two, the first of which punctuates a seemingly Whitmanesque celebration of self: "How good-to be alive!" But the assertion is not Whitmanesque: Dickinson has not started with an a priori assumption of her existence, and so she can hardly start, as Whitman does in "Song of Myself," with an assumption of the positive value of that existence: "I celebrate myself, / And what I assume you shall assume". Dickinson starts from a position of radical doubt, and then, through the process of writing the poem, slowly and methodically discovers (or rediscovers) a fundamental existential truth about her own self: not only is she alive, but the value of that life is nothing less than infinite.
The recognition of that infinite value, with its two exclamation points, may seem as though it suddenly bursts upon the scene, a mystical flash of insight, and to a certain extent, it does. But it is also true that the insight is the earned product of a systematic, rational journey through various epistemological possibilities that Dickinson tries out in the course of the poem. The possibility that is easiest for us to understand, the one with which the poem opens, is the empirical evidence offered by her physical senses: the feel of "Morning Glory," the wan-nth of "Carmine," the sight of her breath on a glass. This kind of empirical confirmation of the sensing self is exhilarating for Whitman: he smells perfumes, both conventional and "odorless", observes the smoke of his own breath, hears the sound of his own voice, sees the "play of shine and shade on the trees", and from such manifold sensations he derives "the song of me".
But for Dickinson these empirical proofs are inadequate, and so she moves on to the next epistemological weigh station: logic. "I am alive-because / . . . " she reasons; and then two stanzas later, once again: "I am alive-because / . . ." It is here that we as readers experience the most difficulty, for her logic is not in the rationalist tradition of Descartes's "I think, therefore I am." If this were enough, she might have stopped at the first line: to guess one is alive is to think about being alive, and to think about it would be for Descartes proof of it. In Dickinson's logic, however, the ratiocinations of consciousness are as inconclusive as the evidence of physical sensations. "Was it conscious-when it stepped / in Immortality?" ask the "Visitors." Other people may look at a corpse (hers, perhaps, although there is no mention of a fly buzzing in this parlor) and speculate about its departed consciousness, but she suspects that what she is-alive-and who she is-a self identified by the word "Emily," her "Girlhood's name"-are not encased and viewable in the "Room" of her individual consciousness, just as after her death, what and who she is will not be encased in the "Room" or the "House" of her body, the one whose breath now blurs the glass. If proof of her existence and her identity are to be found, it will not be by making the Visitors' "mistake," which they think consists in coming to the wrong "Door." For Dickinson, the true mistake is the assumption that she owns the "House" of the self, and therefore that her name on its "Door" is a meaningful identification by which we brief "Visitors" to her life "may know" who she is. Selfhood is not in the same class of being as labels on "Doors" and "Keys"; we are not each '.entitled" to a "self-precise--/ And fitting no one else-."
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