Supreme Music, Believable Eternity

Jefferey Simons, “Supreme Music, Believable Eternity: Allegory in Dickinson Hearing the Wind” (pp. 237–264) Pursuing lyric allegory, a scarcely understood facet of Emily Dickinson’s figural thought, this essay argues that the poet hears the wind allegorically as human, Orphic, and theophanic, and as a momentary answer to the most searching question she faced, the afterlife. The essay’s argument develops in three steps. The first step distinguishes the poet as a keen naturalist from the poet as a lyric allegorist and shows that Dickinson hears the wind allegorically as human. The lyric allegory adduced here is “The Wind – tapped like a tired Man.” The essay’s second step surveys the contexts in which Dickinson perceived the wind and shows in “Of all the Sounds despatched abroad,” a second lyric allegory, that she hears it as Orphic. And the essay’s third step evidences the role of Dickinson’s imagination, alongside Scripture, when hearing the wind as theophanic in a third lyric allegory, “By my Window have I for Scenery.” Over the course of its argument, the essay relates Dickinson hearing the wind to her search for an answer to the question of the afterlife. She found one answer, if fleetingly, in the sounds of the moving air.