“Rowing in Eden”: Sea and Bird Imagery in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry

Emily Dickinson is considered today to be one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century despite being portrayed by some critics as an eccentric recluse, a spinster subjugated by unrequited or lost love, and the typical “madwoman in the attic.” These theories do have some basis since it is not untrue that Dickinson did spend most of her life indoors, but in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, the introduction to Dickinson says that “her adult life was marked not so much by longing for lost love as by aesthetic and intellectual commitment to her art” (1038). The negative portrayals of Dickinson most of the time influence how an audience reads her: without a separation of author and speaker. However, despite all of these different theories, I believe that Dickinson did feel trapped, both physically and mentally, and she portrays these feelings through the usage of bird and sea imagery in her poetry.

        The Norton Anthology only contains a small sample of Dickinson’s poems, but between many of them, there seems to be a leitmotif of birds and the sea in reference to “freedom.” I put freedom in quotations here because Dickinson seems to be speaking of many different types of freedoms throughout her poetry, but the freedom she seems to express the most longing for is freedom from the constraints of reality. Particularly, in poem 445, she both compares and contrasts herself to the “Bird”; she says that like a bird, her mind could not be controlled even if her body was constrained, but unlike the bird, she cannot simply fly away and has to work harder to gain freedom. Dickinson is controlled not only by those around her (“They shut me up in Prose -” (1), “they liked me ‘still’ -” (4)) but also controlled by her inability to control her life: she desires to be free like a bird, who is unburdened by human responsibility and awareness of death. Ironically, the closest way she can achieve this escape from reality is by confining herself to her own closed off piece of the world.

In poem 269, Dickinson brings forth the idea of freedom, but this time through the symbol of the sea. The sea is seen in many literary works as a symbol of vastness, the unknown, and primal states of nature. Unlike Dickinson, the sea cannot be tamed or controlled and she expresses her desire for this in the final stanza:

    Rowing in Eden -

    Ah - the Sea!

    Might I but moor - tonight -

    In thee! (10 - 13)

By saying that the see is her “Eden,” it is evident that paradise for Dickinson is something that involves complete disconnection from the civilized, non-human world. As she says in stanza two, she is “Done with the Compass - / Done with the Chart!” meaning she is done with guiding herself by reality’s principles and limits and that she desires to be “moored”, or to become attached to, the sea.

        Separation of author and speaker sometimes gets fuzzy, especially when the author’s real life seems to parallel so perfectly with the themes explored within their poetry. However, whatever the reason for Emily Dickinson’s longing for freedom, whether it is lost love or a purely aesthetic device, it is clear that she believes it is something impossible because she portrays it through two symbols, the bird and the sea, which both explicitly reference a level of freedom incapable of being attained by human beings.