Dickinson’s Hummingbirds, Circumference, and Chinese Poetics

Abstract

This essay reads Dickinson’s two hummingbird poems, “Within my Garden, rides a Bird” (Fr370) and “A Route of Evanescence” (Fr1489) together, highlighting the hummingbird’s effects of slowness in one poem and effortlessness in the other and tracing the trajectory of the development of Dickinson’s poetics through their embedded wisdom and aesthetic consciousness. This discussion illuminates Dickinson’s exploration of “Circumference” as re-conceptualized in relation to the idea of non-action ( wuwei ) propounded by Daoism. In this framework, Dickinson’s idea of non-possession (which entails an aesthetic attitude toward life by effacing the acquisitive ego), her preferences for both idleness or non-action ( wuwei ) over action and retreating over pushing forward, as well as a negative tendency resembling Daoism, are explored in relation to her image clusters. Dickinson’s poetry achieves a non-mediating effect, manifesting the essence of Daoism’s non-action ( wuwei ) by both effacing the speaker’s “I” (which promotes the ego) and by creating a purity of image. Her aesthetic trajectory makes her later work akin to the spirit of Daoism and classical Chinese poetry that expresses Daoist ambience, which the shift of poetics in her two hummingbird poems registers. My reading of these poems proposes that Chinese philosophy, or a transcultural perspective, can aid us in understanding both these particular poems and Dickinson’s poetry in general.