I Told My Soul to Sing: Finding God with Emily Dickinson

by Kristin Lemay

Overview

Many readers think that Emily Dickinson rejected religion and wanted nothing to do with God. And yet her poetry and life tell a deeper story. Looking closely at twenty-five rare and resonant poems, this intimate portrait reveals how Dickinson occasionally believed, thoughtfully doubted, and in her divine wrestling, met God. In chapters on belief, prayer, mortality, immortality, and beauty, Kristin LeMay uncovers the riches of Dickinson's spiritual life and tells of her own search for God between the lines of the poems Dickinson called "hymns."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781612611631
Publisher:	Paraclete Press
Publication date:	10/01/2012
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Kristin LeMay studied at Harvard Divinity School and Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She teaches writing at Ohio University in the Appalachian foothills. Visit her website at kristinlemay.org.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 Belief I could not find my "yes" 17

conversion

scripture

doubt

belief

proof

2 Prayer Prayer is the little implement 75

Hymn

prayer

intercession

Jesus

God

3 Mortality The tranquiller to die 127

incarnation

learning to die

mortality

crucifixion

easter

4 Immortality I stand alive - Today 167

life

afterlife

resurrection

silence

immortality

5 Beauty The Bird her punctual music brings 209

ecstasy

portrait

grasped by God

revelation

beauty

Acknowledgments 255

Notes 256

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“LeMay elegantly combines accessible literary analysis with her own spiritual memoir of
search, doubt, and faith.”– Sojourners Magazine

“Creative and soul-stretching…Many of those who identify themselves as spiritual
but not religious might adopt this American poet as their patron saint after reading this
fascinating book.”– Spirituality & Practice

“Kristin LeMay's captivating I Told My Soul to Sing: Finding God with Emily Dickinson
is a hybrid of devotional writing, spiritual memoir, and literary analysis—and the kind of
book we wish we saw more often. It is a daring endeavor: as Tweetspeak Poetry said, "an
interesting combination of genres and approaches that could have easily gone awry." But
LeMay deftly combines literary analysis with her faith experiences in a way that enriches
the well-loved poems of Emily Dickinson, while simultaneously widening the genre of
spiritual autobiography. . . . We have to agree with Parnassus editor Herbert Leibowitz;
this cross-genre gem is "a smart, seriously playful, winning, and readable commentary."
Or, if we could borrow the words of Emily Dickinson herself, we might say that LeMay
achieves "the Heart's portrait—every Page a Pulse.” Widen your understanding of the
highly personal ways in which art and faith intersect.” – Image

“For anyone who appreciates good poetry (Dickinson), good writing (LeMay), or
thoughtful engagement with modern concerns (beauty, mortality, prayer, for instance),
this would be a good read.” –Religious Herald

“It’s an interesting combination of genres and approaches that could have easily gone
awry. But it works, and it works well. Dickinson, in LeMay’s hands, becomes more
than a poet; she is a friend (LeMay refers to her as “Emily” throughout), a mentor, a
fellow pilgrim in a spiritual journey, and eventually a kind of saint. The author had a
strong sympathy for and identification with her subject but never subsides into idealizing
Dickinson or glossing over her flaws. The poet is in turn skeptic, doubter, ardent believer,
rebel and conformist, and often all at the same time. In short, LeMay’s Dickinson is
remarkably human.” – Tweetspeak Poetry

“This is great stuff – knowledge and data mixed with insight and imagination, which
informs and enriches not only our reading of the poem, but our way of understanding
God.”– Thinking Faith

Editorial Reviews

"In 1860, when she was just thirty, Emily Dickinson wrote a poem meditating on Jacob's nightlong wrestling with an unseen stranger in Genesis 32. "I will not let thee go / Except thou bless me," she quotes Jacob as saying, then pivots on his realization, moments later as the sun rises, that the stranger who had stooped to struggle with him was God himself: "And the bewildered Gymnast / Found he had worsted God!" (Poem 145). The poem explodes in wonder that God would permit himself to be known in this way. As Kristin LeMay argues in this striking series of meditations on twenty-five Dickinson poems, this is exactly the realization arrived at by the over eighteen hundred poems and one thousand letters Dickenson wrote, visible if you read them slowly and carefully enough, allowing them to goad and challenge you, rattle you in their inconsistencies, and comfort you in spelling out what you had never seen articulated before. As LeMay puts it, Dickinson was "a poet who called herself a pagan, foreswore prayer, never gave a confession of faith, and left the church" (p. 164), and yet, for all of her resistance, was finally a poet who could describe herself in a late fragment as "grasped by God" (p. 234). She seems to have spent a lifetime wondering at a God who would come near, take on her wild blows, and continue to hold on, whispering out of love's weakness, "Then have I / Nothing to show / But Calvary--" (Poem 652).

I think LeMay is correct in this view of Dickinson, but that is not the real strength of this work, for, as she notes, you can find a version of this position in such scholars as Roger Lundin, James McIntosh, and Alfred Habegger. What is remarkable about the book is the personal struggle it enacts. Much like Dickenson herself, LeMay begins the book with Jacob's opening confidence--"I won't let her go until she blesses me" (p. 11)--but ends with Jacob's chastened awareness that the real wonder is that the poet had been the one holding on all along. Twice, in her last year 1886, Dickinson turned Jacob's words and wrote to dear friends, "I will not let thee go, except I bless thee" (p. 254). LeMay concludes with this thought--that the true wonder is that poetry, and through poetry, God himself stoops or condescends to be wrestled with, intending all along to bless in coming near. I read this book, then, as a spiritual memoir, accomplishing deeply inward work through what would seem the very ordinary tasks of literary criticism--working out linguistic puzzles, charting poetic breakthroughs, tracking down biographical details, holding on to these twenty-five poems over the course of a decade and allowing them to "challenge and deepen my spiritual life, my beliefs and doubts."

--Thomas Gardner, Anglican Theological Review

"Through her deep engagement with Dickinson's poems--by turn prayers, partners, revelations, songs--LeMay has written a book that is, in Dickinson's words, 'the Heart's portrait - every Page a Pulse, ' every page a kind of faith." --Sarah Sentilles, author of Breaking Up with God: A Love Story

"Part spiritual autobiography, part homage to Dickinson's inexhaustible poetic genius, and part exuberant close readings of the astonishing poems in which she wrestles with questions of faith and belief, I Told My Soul to Sing is a valuable study of the poet's heterodox imagination. LeMay does not shackle Dickinson to a procrustean bed of doctrine and piety, dilute the poet's astringent ironies, or flatten the provocative ambiguities. She has a gift for choosing unfamiliar poems from the canon and for judiciously quoting and interpreting them. A smart, seriously playful, winning, and readable commentary on a quintessentially elusive, thorny, and linguistically daring American poet." --Herbert Leibowitz, editor, Parnassus: Poetry in Review

"A hybrid of devotional writing, spiritual memoir, and literary analysis--and the kind of book we wish we saw more often. It is a daring endeavor: as Tweetspeak Poetry said, 'an interesting combination of genres and approaches that could have easily gone awry.' But LeMay deftly combines literary analysis with her faith experiences in a way that enriches the well-loved poems of Emily Dickinson, while simultaneously widening the genre of spiritual autobiography. Widen your understanding of the highly personal ways in which art and faith intersect." --Image Journal

From the Publisher