On 601

("A Still–Volcano–Life") Essay, Research Paper

Kamilla Denman

Emerson, in his famous lecture on "The American

Scholar," declared: "The human mind … is one central fire, which flaming now

out of the lips of Etna, lightens the capes of Sicily; and, now out of the throat of

Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out

of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men."’ The volcano that

animates Dickinson’s writing, however, is a far more violent force, an image of

devastating linguistic expression erupting out of silence: "Vesuvius dont

talk—Etna—don’t–one of them—said a syllable–a thousand years ago, and

Pompeii heard it, and hid forever–" (L 233). Dickinson’s volcano emits not only

light but consuming lava:

[. . . .]

In contrast to Emerson’s image of benevolent spiritual enlightenment, Dickinson’s

volcano consumes, burns, and destroys. The volcano is an unpredictable, subversive force,

more appalling when it erupts because it has been so long silent. Yet the subtlety of the

volcano persists even in the eruption, which is only a hiss, and in the destruction, which

is an oozing away. Far from being limited by its constraining rock, the volcano’s power of

expression is so great that it can swallow up the exterior that seems to confine it. As

such, it offers an image of Dickinson writing from within the confines of her society,

exploding the language by which her culture seeks to limit and define her. . . .

Dickinson’s disruption of social structures, like her poetic image of the volcano, is

primarily a linguistic one. The volcano destroys cities that are, like conventional

language and grammar, constructions of civilization. But just as the fiery lava and ash

also resculpt the landscape and enrich the soil, Dickinson’s disruption of conventional

discourse also reshapes and enriches language.

From "Emily Dickinson’s Volcanic Punctuation" in The Emily Dickinson

Journal (1993).

Cristanne Miller

"A still — Volcano — Life — " begins by making disruptive thoughts or

feelings of "Life" concrete through the metaphor of a (nongendered) volcano. . .

.

The poem’s first two stanzas emphasize the secrecy of such a life. At the end of the

second stanza, however, Dickinson moves out from the abstract soul to the physical (and in

this case implicitly gendered) body to give more intimate and immediate impact to her

metaphor:

The North cannot detect

The Solemn — Torrid — Symbol –

The lips that never lie –

Whose hissing Corals part — and shut –

And Cities—ooze away–

The multiple suggestive aspects of female sexuality in the final stanza’s images (the

speaker’s undetected, clearly non-phallic, metonymic ability to "ooze"; the

coral lips which might belong either to the mouth or to the more frighteningly

"quiet" vagina; and perhaps even the volcanic heaving bosom) point to the

centrality of the body in imagining this Life’s eruption.

As with all of Dickinson’s metaphors of grotesquerie, this stanza offers two surreal

pictures. In the first, a speaker’s "hissing Corals" part to release lava–like

words, expressions, or fluid so destructive that "Cities" are destroyed. One of

the more chilling aspects of this image lies in the lack of anger or intention in the

volcano’s action: whether the speaker utters curses or merely parts her lips in a smile,

the result is equally destructive. At the same time, the metaphor depicts a volcanic

mountain with the "lips" of a siren, sensuously "hissing,"

"part[ing]" and "shut[ting]" as it slowly releases its molten rock. In

either case, the body disappears except for the magnified and red lips, which give

immediate and frighteningly controlled release to the "Volcano — Life" within.

In a grotesque metonymy, a woman becomes a mouth–or that other dangerous and lipped

female orifice–spewing violent destruction. Here there is no obvious humanity to which a

victim of the "hissing Corals" might appeal.

[. . . .]

A human volcano, with lips prominent and sensual, whose expressions make "Cities

– ooze away" evokes horror, disbelief, but also amusement at the incongruity of the

speaker’s self-aggrandizing fantasy: the speaker implies that she might at any time choose

to open her coral lips and release destruction, that beneath her white dress lies volcanic

fury. . . .

This poem suggests a sensibility that values a sexually female power wholly alien to

(or in tension with) notions of femininity in a staid New England community. . . .

[T]he speaker reveals a kind of glee in knowing what the "North cannot

detect" . . . . The speaker is not interested in politeness but in volcanic honesty

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