I died for beauty, but was scarce
I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.He questioned softly why I failed?
“For beauty,” I replied.”
And I for truth – the two are one;
We brethren are,” he said.And so, as kinsmen met a-night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.
The poem starts with an unnamed ‘I’ lying dead for ‘Beauty’ in ‘the Tomb’ while the ‘One who died for Truth’, another unnamed figure, ‘was lain / In an adjoining Room’. ‘I’ and ‘One’ represent the voices of Beauty and Truth respectively. Helen Vendler argues that this poem is a fable stemming from John Keats’ motto: ‘Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty’.
In ‘On a Grecian Urn’, John Keats depicts the paintings on an urn. There are lovers nearly kissing each other, while another scene portrays a religious ceremony, with a heifer walking to the altar. At the end, the urn is given a voice, saying to the coming generation: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’
However Keats’ bold assertion is not accepted as a universal truth. John Bailey brings up Coleridge, who distinguishes truth from beauty, to the discussion. Coleridge hopes Wordsworth can mix the two together; he does not think Wordsworth succeeds, though Bailey thinks it otherwise.
Can philosophical truth and poetic truth be made synonymous, or is there an inevitable gap between them? Coleridge thought there was not: and he hoped that Wordsworth’s great poem would demonstrate their compatibility, by being the first truly philosophical poem. The reality sadly disappointed him. And with Coleridge’s capitulation it became natural for the later Romantics to make the separation between the meaning and ideas in a poem, and the imaginative power with which it makes its impact on the reader. (Bailey, 60-61)
In response to the debate, Dickinson joins in and seconds Keats with her poem ‘I die for Beauty, and scare’.
At first, Beauty and Truth don’t have a clear relationship. They are ‘Brethren’; but in the find stanza Truth successfully convinces Beauty to acknowledge their kinsmanship (‘And so, as Kinsmen’). Vendler suggests that Beauty seems to have not thought about their relationship.
~
For Vendler, nature (‘the Moss’) ultimately resolves the distinctions between Beauty and Truth. No names, no singularity. There is just one plural voice speaking (‘our lips’; ‘our names’) in the final stanza.
Sharon Cameron, however, reads the close differently. Her focus is on the temporal nature of the united voice.
I have suggested that finished actions constitute the predicate of utterance, its ground, and that all lyrics are referential in their harking back to an earlier moment. What they refer to is what they seek to convert—the fixity of time and of the single identity conferred by time. (Cameron, 210)
Cameron is saying Dickinson’s poem refers to the past; but the conversation is supposed to be silenced and it survives. In her poetry the past images are made present again. The Moss has already silenced the voice; and yet it survives to narrate the poem. Beauty and Truth initially have had their spokesmen before merging into one. It’s our habitual conception that a stone is always a stone, despite some changes in shape. But it can be ground into sand, which we hardly call ‘tiny stones’. That’s what Cameron is trying to say. Beauty and Truth are analogously two stones ground to a patch of sand which is both inseparably Beauty and Truth. Identity keeps changing across time and is not fixed.
Reference list
John Bailey, The Romantic Survival: A Study in Poetic Evolution (1957). Constable.
Sharon Cameron. Lyric Time (1981). John Hopkins University Press.
Helen Vendler. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries (2010). Harvard University Press.