NB: This essay was initially a submission for ModPo, an online course on poetry.
In poem, “XXI. A Book,” by Emily Dickinson, we discover that the legacy of the writer highlighted in Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is also crucial for Dickinson. The poem portrays a man receiving the inheritance of a written work, presumably poetry, from an unnamed, unaddressed writer. The omission of writer is crucial: whereas Whitman “follow[s] you, whoever you are”, Dickinson refuses to introduce the reader to the creator of their work. For Dickinson, then, the most important step of the interaction between poet and reader is the receipt of “precious words”; reading (and wrestling with a text’s possibilities) allows for a freedom which the writer wishes to gift their reader.
The phrase “bequest of wings” highlights this idea. The implication with ‘bequest’ is that the writer leaves their work behind. The freedom wings provide, to leave the flat plane and explore the third dimension, is given to the reader, when they learn to explore a text. This freedom is also emphasised through the rejection of objective knowing, through the line “He knew no more that he was poor,” comparing prosaic certainty to poverty. Indeed, while in the world of possibility, the reader “ate and drank,” the cold, unchanging reality gives one nothing.
Turning to the structure of the poem, we see that the rhyme scheme loosely approximates an ABABCDCD pattern. There are two crucial deviations, however. Line 3 slant-rhymes “word” with “poor”, and the penultimate line’s “liberty” is a far cry from the sounds in “days.” What we see, then, is a separation from tradition and rigid structure, an embracing of creativity, through the form. This idea is furthered through two instances where Dickinson rhymes away from end-words (“knew no more that he was poor” and “dingy days / … wings / … brings”). The result is once again a loosening of structure. She seems to say “I can place my rhyming sounds wherever I want!”
An interesting aspect of the poem is how it explores privilege and opportunity. Dickinson chooses the main actor of this poem to be masculine. One can imagine an alternate poem reading “I ate and drank…”, or “You ate and drank…” but instead we get a third person masculine. One implication of this is that men can readily receive these freedoms, and women cannot. Returning to ‘bequest’ we see that the writer gives a reader the opportunity to be freed from reality, but does not seem to receive this gift themselves (in fact, the receipt of the gift is implicitly paired with the writer’s death).
A final point is that by choosing to refer to reading as a solution (or at least a distraction) to mortality (“He knew no more … that his frame was dust”), Dickinson effectively creates a space for the writer to also interact with immortality: so long as there are readers to immortalise themselves through the writers open work, there will be chances for the writer to continue to impact people, and a wide reach at that, successfully becoming “a loosened spirit.”