of Joints, where Harvests were –
Recordless – but for them –
It Ruffles Wrists of Posts –
As Ancles of a Queen
Then stills it’s Artisans – like Swans
Denying they have been –26
Rather than remaking the world in a fantastic jumble (Emerson), or burying it in a winding sheet (Allen), Dickinson’s “It”—at first the snow, then something more mysterious—gives the world a sinister facelift, covering up signs of devastation. Like a cosmetician, it “powders all the Wood” and “fills with Alabaster Wool / The Wrinkles of the Road.” Fixing up the landscape might not seem so bad, until we hear that “It makes an Even Face” and an “Unbroken Forehead” of the entire world, “from the East, / Unto the East, again.” That leaves us to wonder, if the globe is a head, where the rest of the body is. It also suggests that a face is made up for posthumous viewing. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust discusses the advances in embalming during the Civil War. Families who could afford it hired embalmers near the front to prepare bodies for shipment home—often a long way by train for Union soldiers—so that loved ones could be seen one last time and given a proper burial.27 Embalmers and other middlemen in this process quickly realized that there was money to be made identifying and preserving the dead for distant burial. Dickinson’s image of filling wrinkles with wool on a bodiless face begins to suggest the detached, clinical gaze that would accompany such engagements with the Civil War dead.
Dickinson’s “even face” updates the “universal face[s]” of both Thomson and Cowper. Thomson’s snowy visage shows nature’s indifference to human suffering:
Earth’s universal face, deep hid, and chill,
Is one wild dazzling waste, that buries wide
The works of man.
In Thomson’s poem, winter is a murderer, but the focus is on individual casualties, like that of the “swain” who “sinks / Beneath the shelter of a shapeless drift” while his family waits for him to come home. Dickinson’s snow buries countless bodies—a world of bodies—beneath a shapeless drift of global proportions. She emphasizes the enormity of the burial by nodding to and magnifying Thomson’s depiction; a snowstorm that can “make [ ] an even face / Of Mountain – and of Plain –” leveling peaks and valleys, would have precipitation levels of hundreds or thousands of feet. Snow would have to be that deep, Dickinson implies, to cover the massive number of casualties. The unimaginable proportions death takes in modern warfare summons a hallucinatory depiction. Dickinson has given up on crafting an appropriate affective response; in the “even face” response has been overwhelmed, the onlooker numbed in a mimic facsimile of the distant masses of dead soldiers she cannot summon to the mind’s eye. Death has become so remote and so vast that registering and absorbing the fact of it is inconceivable; the poem asks us simply to think about the blankness of shock that would accompany such an encounter. Dickinson’s “even face” exaggerates the transformation “by most unfelt” of “the face of universal nature” that in Cowper signified a kind of numbness.28 She elevates that numbness to shock.
The poem foregrounds the fragmentation not only of poetic understanding and worldview, as Allen’s “Snow” does, but also of the human body. “It sifts” through images of body parts, vainly trying to reassemble the human, an aesthetic task, Dickinson indicates, that inevitably accompanies modern warfare. Countless Civil War reports of battlefields (Dickinson replaces the first version’s “Wood” with “Field” in this second version, strengthening the military association) covered with wounded and dead soldiers used metaphors of autumn harvest (discussed in Chapter 2), underscoring the gruesome yield of war. Dickinson also aligns the botanical world with human anatomy; “stump” can refer to both botanical and human portions (the hospital where Silas Weir Mitchell worked was known as the “Stump Hospital”). Once that association is established, we can read “Stem” as shorthand for human decapitation, and “stack” for human corpses piled like so much hay. The next phrase, “Acres of Joints,” fully inverts the metaphoric valence, so that now human dismemberment signifies agricultural harvest; we do not commonly refer to mowed fields as full of “Joints.” If “Acres of Joints” are “where Harvests were,” then we can understand that, rather than metaphoric equivalence, Dickinson has moved to a literal description of substitution: where grain was harvested now lie human bodies and their dismembered parts. Simultaneously closing and opening the distance between Southern battlefields and Northern home fronts, the snow of winter covers the summer’s field, where the remains of harvest evoke amputation.
Out of supposedly “recordless” carnage, a new body of poetry arises, albeit in parts, parts that recall those just-buried pieces. The harvest of the dead may be “recordless” (Faust notes that many bodies were buried without record during the war), or their records may be resurrected in altered and denied form.29 As if covering wounds that have no possibility of healing, “it flings a Crystal Vail,” doling out forgetfulness or numbness to the condition. Buried in the snow of amnesia, the stumps, stacks, stems, and joints are left to memorialize themselves. Yet the poem does register the ramifications of remote violence in its shattered language and logic. The ruffling of the posts’ wrists suggests that the speaker has difficulty distinguishing body parts from other things, so that her simile is oddly doubled and broken: ruffling the posts’ wrists is like ruffling the Queen’s “Ancles.” Corporeal disaggregation haunts the poem, disrupts a more conventional form of troping, and records the ramifications of the recordless dead that the poem on the face of it—the artificially composed face—denies.
While Dickinson makes plain her poetic debt to Emerson, Cowper, Thomson, and perhaps Allen, she also reaches back to Greek literary associations of winter and war. The variant for “Artisans” is “Myrmidons,” the warlike people that Achilles led to battle against Troy. This single word summons the story of the Trojan War, as depicted in Homer’s Iliad, in the language of Alexander Pope’s translation (that translation was in her family library, as were volumes by Thomson and Cowper).30 An extended passage in the Iliad compares in detail a warlike snowstorm with the Greeks’ blizzard-like bombardment of Troy with stones:
And now the Stones descend in heavier Show’rs.
As when high Jove his sharp Artill’ry forms,
And opes his cloudy Magazine of Storms.31
This excerpt suggests that Dickinson’s poem is infused with the metaphoric logic of the Iliad: the heaviness and minerality, for lack of a better word, of her snow metaphors—lead, alabaster—summon the storm of rocks in the epic. Her sifting and powdering “It” suggests Jove’s godly impersonality; both deliver lethal, aerial messages to humans without concern for the consequences, but Dickinson’s “It” is so far removed that it doesn’t have a name or a place in a belief system as Jove does. Even so, in one way “It” is more intimate, for it is engaged in domestic activities that are suitable for a war at home. The poems also share “fleeces” as an evocation of snow:
The circling seas, alone absorbing all,
Drink the dissolving fleeces as they fall:
So from each side increased the stony rain,
And the white ruin rises o’er the plain.
Dickinson’s synonym for fleeces, “alabaster wool,” further underscores the connection: Alabaster is a word derived from Greek for a fine white stone from which ornamental vessels and sculptures
