Emily Dickinson's Little Apocalypse

by Mike Bendzela

The term “Little Apocalypse” is borrowed from New Testament studies, referring to the Olivet Discourse in Jerusalem. This speech first appeared around the year 70 CE, in Chapter 13 of the original written gospel, the Gospel of Mark. After the scene of the cleansing of the temple, before the Last Supper and the arrest, one of the disciples draws attention to the massive stones of the temple, evoking from Jesus the promise that the temple would be destroyed. They sit “on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple” (hence “Olivet Discourse”), and the disciples ask Jesus to elaborate, thus prompting his long monologue predicting the End, when “Heaven and earth will pass away,” a view to be developed later in what might be called the “Big Apocalypse,” the Book of Revelation.

“Apocalypse” in its Greek sense means an “unveiling,” particularly when a visionary prophet or writer is vouchsafed a revelation of God’s plan. Emily Dickinson’s vision of the cosmic order in the poem “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” is much briefer than Jesus’s Little Apocalypse but is no less striking. Her vision extends beyond traditional Christian boilerplate imagery to encompass something distinctly more up-to-date.

The poem’s first stanza discloses a portrait of the Christian dead lying in their tombs, awaiting the End of Days:

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—
Untouched by Morning—
and untouched by noon—
Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection,
Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone—

The utter stasis of the scene is housed in a single inverted sentence, in which the predicate comes first, with the sentence’s only verb–“sleep”–continually delayed by those “untouched” phrases. Then, finally, appears the subject, “the meek members of the Resurrection,” lying there inertly near the end of the sentence. The whole thing is capped off with a metaphor of a dwelling, the “Satin” interiors of their coffins represented as “Rafter” and the “Stone” tomb covering as “Roof.”

It’s peaceful in these tombs, depicted as idealized bedrooms or “Chambers,” where the dead “sleep” away the millennia until the day that “Roof of Stone” will be peeled away, as promised by the stone rolled away from Jesus’s tomb. “Alabaster” is gypsum, an ornamental material, like the jar containing “expensive perfume” brought to Jesus in Bethany (Mark 14:3). It is not long-lasting like marble, and perhaps that’s the symbolic point–these tombs don’t need to last: the Elect shall soon be gathered from them! The Saved are just that–“Safe”–inside them; after all, they are the blessed “meek” who have signed up for the final “Resurrection.” They slumber away, “untouched” or unbothered by any light of day, insensate to temporal matters.

Thus has Dickinson depicted the reigning order up to her time: unchanging, unconscious, inert–entombed.

Meanwhile, above ground:

Grand go the Years,
In the Crescent above them—
Worlds scoop their Arcs—
and Firmaments—row—
Diadems—drop—
And Doges surrender—
Soundless as Dots,
On a Disk of Snow.

When the poet’s eye glances upwards from those tombs, the true unveiling begins. Millennia spin by so fast that the cosmos virtually flies apart. In another grammatical inversion, the “Years” simply “go,” and “Grand”-ly at that (Bigly, as it were). “Grand” is a marvelous touch given that it can mean by the “thousand.” (It’s American slang that arose after Dickinson wrote, but what the hell.) In that word published in 1862, I hear an echo of Darwin in 1859–“There is grandeur in this view of life.”

“Crescent” evokes the ever-shifting phases of the moon as the years go by, or the curved sliver of sky visible above those tombs. Suddenly, she reverses those inversions and begins piling on the verbs, which she has all but withheld from the first stanza: “Worlds scoop their Arcs–.” Seen in a sort of time lapse, the planets whiz like yo-yos along their curved orbital paths across the sky. And how about that sky? “Firmaments–row–.” She casts the King James Version of the vault in a new light: the whole panoply of stars becomes a sort of galley leisurely clipping along at oarsmen’s speed. This evokes for me not just the seasonal shift of the constellations across the sky but precession, whereby the seemingly permanent position of the “Firmament” seems to change depending on the wobble of the Earth on its axis. Hence, the multiplicity indicated by the plural “Firmaments.”

Whole civilizations and world views vanish, clause by simple clause: “Diadems–drop–/And Doges surrender–.” Whereas Jesus, in his Little Apocalypse, quotes Isaiah–“the stars will fall from the sky”–Dickinson depicts jeweled crowns falling like meteors. Paralleling Jesus’s evocation of Armageddon, “Nation will rise against nation,” Dickinson’s “Doges” (Renaissance Italian heads of state; the word is related to “duke”) have already given up the battle.

The drip . . . drip of alliteration of those “d” sounds, indicating time’s relentless dilation, descends even into the closing image with its simile, “Soundless as Dots,/On a Disk of Snow.” In this poet’s revelatory vision, the Earth is reduced to a sort of ice cap, as if the glacial stage of the Quaternary Ice Age has returned. In that final image, senses converge in a synesthesia, “Soundless . . . Dots,” whereby the auditory and the visual dissolve together, like alabaster over time.

Thus Dickinson depicts an updated view of the cosmos–immense, dynamic, seemingly eternal, bracing.

There is something so geological about her sensibility. Is it possible that she was influenced by the geological findings of her century? I searched, and indeed it is. There is a whole literature on the subject of Emily Dickinson’s geological imagery. It turns out that at Amherst Academy, Dickinson took geology from “Reverend Professor” Edward Hitchcock, who not only wrote the textbook for the class but was a good friend of Dickinson’s family. As a “natural theologist,” he was aligned with Earth scientists (such as glaciologist Louis Agassiz) who rejected Charles Darwin even as they embraced the deep-time vision of James Hutton.

Therefore, it is perhaps no accident that in Dickinson’s Little Apocalypse we catch a whiff of Hutton’s famous quotation about geologic time, “we see no vestige of a beginning,–no prospect of an end.” The poem itself, in fact, can be seen as representing a sort of uncomformity, a geological feature Hutton was famous for having discovered at Scotland’s Siccar Point: Below lies an ancient Silurian Period rock layer which has been upended and eroded flat; overlain on this primordial base (after millions of years of weathering), newer rock of a different type from the Devonian Period is piled up, like a ship run aground.

Let the image function as an emblem for Dickinson’s revelation of her times, of a new world superseding an old one.