His spirit grew robust;
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was dust.
He danced along the dingy days,
And this bequest of wings
Was but a book. What liberty
A loosened spirit brings!
In “XXI. A Book”, we discover that the legacy of the writer highlighted in Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is equally 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 the 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, in the world of possibility, the reader “ate and drank,” yet the cold, unchanging reality gave nothing.
Turning to the structure of the poem, we see that the rhyme scheme loosely approximates an ABXBCDXD pattern. Thus there are two crucial deviations to what could have been a well-behaved pattern. 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, can be described 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 masculine character. If we consider the speaker to be Dickinson herself, then the pronoun choice, together with the word ‘bequest’, suggests that the writer enables a reader to be freed from reality, but does not herself receive this gift (in fact, the receipt of the gift is implicitly paired with the writer’s death). It is interesting to think about how this relates to the ideas of author-reader relationships which insist that the author is not the final authority of their work. In this line of argument, the writer releases agency to the reader and in that sense dies metaphorically, much like the theme of this poem. For Dickinson the writer is not the point, clearly contrasting Whitman’s emphasis on remaining through his work.
A final point, however, 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, in their own way, 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 group at that, successfully becoming “a loosened spirit.”
NB: This essay was initially a submission for ModPo, an online course on poetry.