Emily Dickinson's Translation of Christian Words.
In Emily Dickinson's poems, the most sacred figures and words Protestant-Calvinist church tend to symbolize the exact opposite of the intended meaning and challenge its conformity to religion. The powerful connotations of words like Redemption; images of baptism and crucifixion; the theological and cultural ideals of Christian faith and sacrifice "all are recast to serve her revolutionary poetics. Richard Wilbur has said of Dickinson, "She inherited a great and overbearing [Calvinist] vocabulary which, had she used it submissively, would have forced her to express an established theology and psychology. But she would not let that vocabulary write her poems for her-(Critics on Dickinson, 127). Dickinson's refused to submit to the vocabulary of Calvinism (she referred to its dogma as having "defrauded- her family [Letters of Dickinson, Letter 391] and she expressed this through her creation of a poetics that also acknowledges value and beauty in that vocabulary.
Dickinson's use of Puritan-Calvinist language is not only complex and filled with tension, but it is purposive. In "Better - Than Music- (Poems of Dickinson, Poem 503), she defines her poetics in terms of an epiphany during which she becomes able to break free of the structures that social convention - religious orthodoxy in particular - imposes upon thought, and she glimpses what she herself might have called "Possibility- or "Circumference.""(E. D. and her Culture, 243) The figure she uses to describe this revelation is that of music transformed into something unbound by any conventional structure or expectation:.
Better - than Music! For I - who heard it -.
I was used - to the Birds - before -.
This - was different - Twas Translation -.
Of all tunes I knew - and more -.
Twas'nt contained - like other stanza -.
No one could play it - the second time -.
But the Composer - perfect Mozort -.
