Emily Dickinson and my TEQ

Emily Dickinson and my TEQ

John Bjarne Grover

I leafed in "The complete poems of Emily Dickinson" edited by Thomas H.Johnson (Little Brown and Company, Boston 1960) and observed that the total number 1775 of her poems are not far from the number of poems in my TEQ - which is 1719. I therefore looked up her #1719 just to see - would it resemble mine? Hah, it certainly did!

Dickinson #1719 is this:

God is indeed a jealous God -
He cannot bear to see
That we had rather not with Him
But with each other play.

My own TEQ #1719 contains the same observation:

"Certainly these young folks want to play for themselves".

I then looked up some other poems to see if this were a trend. The first I looked at was the one I had considered some days ago - my #248 - and then compared with her #248. Again, a very interesting parallel indeed!

Here is my own TEQ #248
Here is Dickinson's #248

How is this edition of Dickinson's poetry ordered? It seems that the editor has tried to find the chronological order although great certainty there probably isnt. However, assuming that she were into a similar project as mine, one could of course postulate that such a parallelism exists to a larger or smaller extent and try and reconstruct an order of hers in accordance with my own work - mine is very strictly chronological from beginning to end.

Some poems seem to be phonologically (or phonetically) similar - such as #1608 and #1613:

Here is my TEQ #1608
Here is Dickinson's #1608

Here is my TEQ #1613
Here is Dickinson's #1613

- others are more relevant in terms of themes - such as this #248 just referred to or #431:

Here is my TEQ #431
Here is Dickinson's #431

Some or many of Dickinson's poem in this listing appear not relevant at all - but one could of course try and postulate that this is because they are not all of them strictly in the original chronological order.

An example of such a displacement:

Here is my TEQ #762 ('hud' is norwegian for 'skin' - the word is normally masculine gender, but here neuter - 'hodet' = 'the head')
Here is Dickinson's #763

Here is my TEQ #768
Here is Dickinson's #769

I read many of her poems in the mid 1980's, but I dont think that is the reason for the parallelisms.

It seems that all Dickinson' poems are found under the following page - enumerated in Johnson's listing in the column second from the right:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Emily_Dickinson_poems

Added on 11 september 2023:

What would the explanation to these parallelisms between Dickinson and me have been? The natural explanation is that I may have met her in the poetic Elysium, as if the voice of her poem #17 were mine (I met a maid called Miss Dickinson). Clearly the 'explanation' to these encounters could have been in a 'poetic numerality' such as can be seen to be the theme of my SNEEFT COEIL chapter 7 - the theory being that every natural number has a poetic definition which also allows for fractions or reals. The chapter '20 Gedichte' in SNEEFT COEIL studies the numbers from 0 to 20 - and one can e.g. look up 'e' (= #2,718 = 'Dann fiel ich auf den Bodenstein / und rief es wie ihr alle fielt / dass jeder Gott war ewig mein') or 'π and other constants for checking the definitions. If this logic were the reason for the correlations between Dickinson's poems and my TEQ, there should be traces of it among the first 20 poems which can be checked against this chapter 7 in SNEEFT COEIL. To check this poem 17 of hers, I find the natural number 17 (as for her poem) described in this poem of mine - it is #17 in the chapter '20 Gedichte'. Dickinson's poem seems to tell of the archetypal man-on-wagon starting with a 'beckons' sign, a finger lifted up to catch the attention - a scenario which has a counterpoint in my poem in terms of the central quartet in Tizian's Bacchanal - the 'Graf' could be the man with the 'Want-Geflecht' around the hip just before the man with the carafe lifted high - the 'Rätsel-Glas' for winds in the sails, his wife seems to encounter some 'Dunkelheit' - like Dickinson an unexpected maid. The past is near, tells my poem, so maybe I could meet Emily Dickinson there. For the word 'Want', see this source or search Grimm - it seems to be a rope plaited around the behind of the ship for keeping the mast upright. Then what says my TEQ #17? The onset of type is here that 'beckons' of Dickinson - the boy who lifts a finger for attracting your attention just before the man-on-wagon starts crossing the street, pulled by the boy.

It is interesting that Tizian supports my idea of telling 'wind' on the 'riddle-glas'. This idea is repeated in poem #19 in the same numerality chapter - where humans turn their lives into 'Wehen'. Even Dickinson #19 mentions the 'Breeze'. My own my TEQ #19 tells not of a 'breeze' or 'wind' - but it has this 'acme' (culmination, highest point) in its middle - is that the 'other' of the wind?

Clearly if such correlations are found to exist between Dickinson's work and mine up to more than #1700, that could be quite strong evidence in favour of a theory of such an element of numerality in poetic logic.

Dickinson's editor Thomas H.Johnson, who ordered the poems in what he believed was a chronological order (like the poems of my TEQ - these are thoroughly chronologically written), may have had a natural intuition on this matter.

This is TEQ #436
This is Dickinson #436

Sources:

Kennedy, I.G.: Tizian. Taschen, Köln 2018.

Johnson, T.H.: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Little Brown and Company, Boston 1960.