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Poem 1400 What Mystery Pervades a Well

Made by Nabilah Chowdhury Copyrighted

Dickinson contrasts a man made well with natural sources of water. Both are unfathomable. The well is a mystery because of its depth and potential for danger, it is compared variously to a neighbour in a jar, a lid of glass or the ultimate horror; an abyss. Nature is also unknowable, inexplicable or inscrutable because even those who are closest to it are overwhelmed by its complexity. Nature is a stranger yet - compared to a haunted house or ghost . Words communicate by association; they resonate through suggestion, nuances, innuendo so responders may glean or infer a variety of messages. The word abyss is the explosive one in this poem because of its potential for meaning. It suggests profound danger the boundary between ecstasy and horror, between life and death, between heaven and hell. This could suggest that Dickinson suffers from a phobia (an irrational morbid fear) about water (aqua or hydrophobia) or enclosed spaces (claustrophobia) later reinforced by the ambiguity of the word awe. On one hand it means awe-inspiring, while conversely it could just as easily be awful - frightening. Following two stanzas on man-made sources of water, Dickinson turns to nature for the next four. Nature appears much more serene and tranquil; the grass shows no sign of fear while the sedge betrays no timidity to stand so close to the sea. The major paradox is that those who live close to nature are as baffled by it as those who are removed from it. The closer you get to something, the more difficult it can be to understand it; sometimes you need distance or detachment. Sometimes you cannot see the forest because the trees are in your way; you need distance to get a new perspective; an overview.

It's a strange poem, "floorless", in a sense, and perhaps not flawless. The well appears to be a real one, not a metaphysical source of spiritual refreshment, but Dickinson's first stroke in the poem is to defamiliarise it, transform it into a kind of black hole. There's no friendly face at the bottom as there is for Seamus Heaney, another poetic well-fancier. The startling personification of the water as "A neighbor from another world / Residing in a jar," may briefly conjure thoughts of the genii in the bottle but only briefly. The "lid of glass" takes us down further into the unfathomable depths of the jar, bringing the realisation that only the surface of the water would be visible. There's a lot more beneath. In a jaunty tone, Dickinson offers us the "abyss". The grass beside the well, buoyantly undisturbed, leads to an analogy with sedge which is growing near the sea on much shakier ground. "Floorless" is such a brilliantly unsettling word, it seems that Dickinson wants to stop us in our tracks with it. So she shortens that line, making it the end-word, and adds the leftover foot-and-a-bit of "and does no" to the next: "And does no timidity betray". Note that the grass and sedge are personified, like the water, and are also masculine. Nature remains traditionally feminine. The repeated "e" rhymes in the third and fourth stanzas sound awkward. A run of four (he/me/be/sea), the last two unexpectedly consecutive, must be deliberate. Like the sedge as the waves break over it, the fourth stanza struggles for foothold, and seems designed to remain a little unfinished. There's an earlier poem that begins, "Bring me the sunset in a cup, / Reckon the morning's flagons up / And say how many Dew, / Tell me how far the morning leaps - / Tell me what time the weaver sleeps, / Who spun these nets of blue!" Nature here is as immeasurable as in the "well" poem, but "she" is still resplendently present and active. Dickinson is a poet of vivid sight: her work records innumerable sunsets, flowers and bees in glowing, specific colour. The well, by contrast, is colourless; sinister and still. The fact that the well is a man-made object doesn't deter Dickinson from identifying it with the natural world. But the images by which Nature is evoked a haunted house, a ghost are disturbing. The Nature that impinges on the human world, and interests the speaker, remains a stranger. Is it only a shadow, like the shadows in Plato's cave? Haunted houses are best avoided, of course. But "ghost" has a bigger theological meaning than mere spook. To "simplify" Nature's ghost might be to "know the mind of God." Ultimately, the experience broached seems incomplete. The poem withdraws into a warning against arrogance: the arrogance of science, perhaps, and the arrogance of poetry. The narrator surely includes herself among those who know Nature, but whose knowledge turns out to be insufficient. The aphoristic last lines are a little lesson on humility.

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