is a sorrow.
Joy is a thrilling rapture.
Light yields a shooting joy through the human (heart).
Light is as sweet as honey, but
Darkness is bitter as salt, and more than vinegar.
Light is finer than gold and even finest gold.
Joy is a real light.
Joy is a blazing flame.
Darkness is frosty.
A good sleep is a white curtain,
A bad sleep is a black curtain.
The language of this poem points to Bridgman’s absorption of the rhetoric of the dichotomy of light and dark, in which darkness represents the negative, the evil, and absence. These terms were experientially meaningless to Bridgman’s daily experience, for light and dark would have had no effect on her personal navigation of the world. However, through her reading experiences and her communication with others, she absorbed the cultural construction that considered the darkness—and perhaps even the blindness that is associated with darkness—as a “sorrow.” Whereas sighted people may understand evil through the metaphor of darkness, Bridgman reverses the tenor and vehicle of the metaphor to understand darkness through the notion of evil.
Bridgman’s poem also employs sensory imagery of vision, taste, and touch. Her use of visual description is understandable because her topics of light and darkness are visual phenomena; Bridgman would have absorbed this vocabulary of the visual through her experiences with language.115While she uses the language of taste in describing light as sweet and dark as bitter, these terms are again metaphorical descriptions of positive and negative attributes rather than about the actual experience of tasting light and dark. The place where Bridgman is perhaps less metaphorical in describing her sensory impressions is in linking light to the warmth of a flame and darkness to frostiness. As someone who navigated her world by touch, Bridgman would have primarily experienced light, whether produced by the sun or by the flames of lamps and fires, in terms of warmth. Like the genre of sounds unheard poetry, Bridgman’s seemingly synesthetic representations of light and darkness reveal what is sometimes imperceptible when we consider poetry: descriptions of sensory experience are often more about metaphor and cultural understandings of what constitutes poetic language than they are about the actual materiality of the body.
While Bridgman’s poetry does not adhere to a fixed pattern of rhyme or meter, it does have a very clearly defined rhythm. The structure of “Light and Darkness” alternates between descriptions of light and dark and dwells on the intertwining of light and joy. Where light “yields a shooting joy through the human (heart)” (line 8), joy itself is “a real light (12)” She uses a parallel couplet structure throughout, including her last two lines: “A good sleep is a white curtain, / A bad sleep is a black curtain.” Although Bridgman carefully composed these English words that she could not hear or see into a rhythmic pattern to bring light and darkness into direct comparison with each other, adherents to sound-based theories of poetry refused to consider her poetic efforts legitimate. For instance, those who wrote about Bridgman’s poetry engaged in linguistic contortions to describe it within a model of poetry centered on sound. These commentators struggled to indicate that Bridgman’s writing both was and was not poetry. In her book Life and Education of Laura Dewey Bridgman, the Deaf, Dumb and Blind Girl, one of Bridgman’s teachers, Mary Swift Lamson, details Bridgman’s educational progress in diary form. At the very end of her book, Lamson notes, “[Bridgman] has written, within a few years, two compositions which she calls ‘poems.’”116Lamson refuses to categorize these texts as “poems”; instead she relies upon quotation marks to qualify Bridgman’s label. In their book Laura Bridgman: Dr Howe’s Famous Pupil and What He Taught Her, Maud Howe and Florence Howe Hall, the daughters of Bridgman’s famous teacher Samuel Gridley Howe, use the same awkward qualifier to introduce Bridgman’s poetry. In their book they provide an example of “those compositions which she called poems.”117They suggest that Bridgman must have been taught the “rules of versification” “unsuccessfully” because “there is neither rhyme nor rhythm in her poetry; and yet she was not wrong in calling these effusions poems, for they surely express poetical ideas.”118For the Howe sisters, poetry requires particular fixed patterns of rhyme and meter. However, while refusing to use the term poem, they affirm the accuracy of Bridgman’s appellation because of its appropriateness to the content of the poems. The Howe sisters’ inconsistency stems in part from their adherence to the sound-based theory of poetry. Nevertheless, the fact that Bridgman’s writing was an effusion—some kind of expression of the self—as well as the fact that it included “poetical ideas” mattered to the Howe sisters when determining its generic status. Furthermore, the Howes suggest that Bridgman’s writing is valuable only insofar as it intersects with Bridgman’s disabilities: “[T]he interest excited by [Bridgman’s] writings is essentially non-literary, it is human and psychological. Having no conception of the value of sound, the quality which we call style was not be hoped for in anything she could write.”119Despite their assertion that there is no room for literary interest in Bridgman’s poetry, the Howes append an essay titled “The Writings of Laura Bridgman” to the end of their book. This essay was written not by a literary critic but by a psychologist, E. C. Sanford, who argues that “a word upon Laura Bridgman’s ‘poems’ is sufficient.”120Like Lamson and the Howe sisters, Sanford distances himself from the use of the term poetry for Bridgman’s poems. He highlights the speciousness of the label through enclosing it in quotation marks and dismisses the poems through indicating that they can be dealt with in only “a word.”
Even Gallaudet, the promoter and defender of deaf poetry, sidesteps the use of the term poetry when referring to Bridgman’s writing. In his Harper’s article “Poetry of the Deaf,” he writes, “[I]t is a fact that Laura Bridgman, the mere mention of whose name touches a chord of sympathy in every heart, has lately, in the evening of her days, given expression to her reflections in a form that is highly poetic, even though her lines do not follow the modern models of versification.”121The sentimental tone of Gallaudet’s introduction, typical of writings about Bridgman, coupled with his refusal to refer to her writing as “poetry” in favor of the noncommittal phrase “reflections in a form that is highly poetic,” demonstrate that even he holds to the necessity of fixed patterns of versification. In fact, every poem he includes in “Poetry of the Deaf,” aside from Bridgman’s, has a very regular pattern of rhyme and meter even though the poets he quotes from did not always write such tightly rhymed and regularly metered poems.
Beyond the ways that deaf poetry could be denied generic authority through how it was framed, the forms of publication of deaf poetry restricted its reach at times. Most deaf poets published their work in forums for deaf audiences, such as deaf journals and newspapers. Other deaf poets, as Gallaudet notes, were students and professors working at the National Deaf-Mute College in Washington, D.C.; at this college, the existence of a deaf poet was rather commonplace. In fact, public presentations of occasional poetry written by deaf people were often used to mark important events at the college. Furthermore, the authorial decision to target a narrow, specific, or marginalized audience instead of curry favor with a wider reading public was often constructed as deliberate. For instance, at the end of her poem “The Realm of Singing,” Searing explicitly reveals her social aims: the singing bird-poet decides to sing of her struggles to “the sick, the sad, the maimed, the feeble, the betrayed and the lonely ones” (212). In fact, she refuses the invitation of the elite birds higher in the tree of poetry to join them. The bird decides that it is her calling to stay “down low” and sing to “sweeten [the] sorrow” of those who, like herself, have been trampled by the world (212). Her absurd, inaudible melodies are best suited to the plight of “the weariest of all the world’s wayfarers” (212). Searing’s bird deliberately rejects the standards of song in the “Realm of Singing” and chooses instead to honor her “absurd singing”
