It would have starved a Gnat —
It would have starved a Gnat —
To live so small as I —
And yet I was a living Child —
With Food's necessity
Upon me — like a Claw —
I could no more remove
Than I could coax a Leech away —
Or make a Dragon — move —
Not like the Gnat — had I —
The privilege to fly
And seek a Dinner for myself —
How mightier He — than I —
Nor like Himself — the Art
Upon the Window Pane
To gad my little Being out —
And not begin — again —
When Helen Vendler suggests that in this poem Dickinson ‘pose[s] the question of the starvation of the soul’ (Vendler, 209), she extends the meaning of food beyond the literal into the metaphorical. Here, Dickinson’s soul is yearning for nourishment, though what kind remains unclear. Religion? Family love? Perhaps.
The idea of ‘Food’ (nourishment) sits firm at the centre of the poem. Stanza 1 presents a hyperbolic comparison between ‘a Gnat’ (a fly) and Dickinson herself when she was young (‘a living Child’). Dickinson was starving for nourishment; she was ‘small’, that is, dependant, metaphorically infirm, and stripped of the very sustenance she needed most. She might have the idea of childhood in mind during the composition; but it is not certain whether she really refers to her childhood experience. When we take the word ‘Food’ literally, Dickinson very likely indicts her family. They might not have given enough attentive care or literally food to Dickinson, though I find unlikely the latter implication. Susan Kornfeld, in her blog, sheds light on the connection between this poem and Dickinson’s real life:
The poem reads as a bitter indictment of her culture, schooling, and family. Her mother was weak and unable to provide emotional nourishment, requiring it instead from her children. Her father was austere and undemonstrative. The church was strict, the cultural more conventional, the opportunities for a woman who danced to the music of a different dervish slim. (https://bloggingdickinson.blogspot.com/2013/05/it-would-have-starved-gnat.html)
In Kornfeld’s biographical reading, this poem indeed strikes a chord with Dickinson’s reality where her parents failed to provide what she needed — motherly protection, emotional bonding, nourishment, among other possibles. The poem is written in 1862 about the time she took care of her infirm mother; perhaps Dickinson expressesed this sentiment around that period while covering it up with the metaphor of childhood.
To supplement the connection, we may turn to Millicent Todd Bingham. In his book Emily Dickinson’s Home: Letters of Edward Dickinson and His Family, Bingham argues that Dickinson’s mother has played a key role in Dickinson’s personality shaping. For Bingham, Mrs Dickinson fails as a mother, leaving the ‘voracious love-hunger’ of Emily Dickinson, her most sensitive child, never satisfied (Bingham, 101). However, the insights of Kornfeld and Bingham should be read with skepticism. As Richard B. Sewall argues: ‘On the practical side, there is ample evidence that, as far as her strength permitted, she was a loving and attentive mother and did all she could to anticipate and meet the wants of her family’ (Sewall, 86). Whether Mrs Dickinson is the evil villain to the poetess’ imaginative formative is still debatable.
If Dickinson in fact draws from her childhood experience, Alfred Habegger’s interpretation of her early preoccupations is relevant to our discussion.
In narrating a subject's early years, a biographer tries to assemble the scattered and fragmentary evidence into a truthful portrait of a mind in process of formation. Among other things, that means not letting the occasional drama or sensation obscure the mundanity of life. With Dickinson, whose later retrospects were apt to be pungent, extreme, and free of context, not so much reporting as transforming the original facts, the work becomes doubly treacherous. We must not ignore the documented grimnesses and certain shocking claims (I never had a mother"), yet we have to keep the fundamentals steadily in view: the parents' devotion to their firstborn daughter and that daughter's attach-ment, adhesion, to them. When she was fourteen and a friend was left motherless, her response was to "pity her very much she must be so lonely without her mother." Young Emily was an affectionate and spirited child, and the home she grew up in had a close, regular, anxious feel. Her parents believed in simplicity, systematic planning, steady disci-pline, and hard work, but the work fell on their own shoulders rather than the children's and the punishments were less frequent than the re-wards. It is clear that Emily experienced major trauma as a girl, but probably not before 1844.
Which is not to say there were no shadows from the outset: tight living quarters, financial insecurity, insistent parental anxieties, threats of sickness, fears of death and the afterlife, and an extreme imbalance of power between father and mother. (Habegger, 76)
Perhaps young Dickinson felt insecure and unsettled by death, both of which were transported to this poem written in her adult life.
Stanza 2 further portrays the terrifying grasp of ‘Food’s necessity’, the need for nourishment. It preoccupies Dickinson all the time; it does not give her pause. It is as difficult to break off the ‘Claw’ of the need as to remove a ‘Leech’ and a ‘Dragon’.
Unlike Dickinson, the Gnat is free to go anywhere. It can search for food (‘the privilege to fly’) and nourishment itself, without being dependant. Dickinson expresses her jealousy for the Gnat in stanza 3. She wishes to be able to fly and ‘seek a Dinner for myself’. And yet, the image of a child still lurks behind; she is dependant on her caregivers.
It is not just the Gnat’s flying ability that arouses Dickinson’s envy; its ‘Art’ to kill itself captivates the poet even more. The word ‘gad’ stems from ‘gadabout’, meaning a person who move restlessly; therefore, the Gnat flies restlessly ('gad') to hit the window and kills itself. Dickinson appreciates its suicide as a piece of art. After all, art is about freedom and imagination that break through the barriers we have in real life, is it not? Shakespeare’s Hamlet is another examplar treating death as art. Fintan O’Toole, in his Shakespeare Is Hard, So Is Life, wittily writes that Hamlet is like a connoisseur on death.
But wait, the line ‘To gad my little Being out’ is interesting. Dickinson should be using ‘his little Being’; has not she been talking about the Gnat all the time? Vendler draws our attention to the first person pronoun (‘my’). When Dickinson talks about the Gnat, we expect that it should be ‘to gad his little Being out’. Yet the poet gives us something different: she now shifts into her own perspective, pondering death and its reward — ‘not begin — again —‘. The ultimate end would be not to begin another day, that is, death. Dickinson’s characteristic em dashes create heavy pauses for the moment when she makes this assertion. She seems to have hesitated, not being completely confident and assertive.
Like Hamlet, as well as all of us, Dickinson cannot be certain if death is a good idea despite her evident yearning for it.
Reference list
Alfred Habegger. My Wars Are Laid Away In Books (2002). Modern Library.
Helen Vendler. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries (2010). Harvard University Press.
Richard B. Sewall. The Life of Emily Dickinson (2003). Havard University Press.
Millicent Todd Bingham. Emily Dickinson’s Home: Letters of Edward Dickinson and His Family (1955). Harper.