By Stuart Mitchner
I fought the idea of security for a very long time because I really value normalcy…
—Taylor Swift, 2014
I read Taylor Swift’s thoughts on security on December 8th, the 45th anniversary of the assassination of John Lennon, who lived and died according to the same rationale. This week, which also marks the birthdays of Swift (December 13, 1989) and Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830), I’ve been listening to Taylor’s 2024 album Tortured Poets Department on the car stereo. Since Dickinson died in 1886, too soon for Edison to record her reading poetry that could famously “take the top of your head off,” I’ve settled for the cocked and fully loaded songs of her Pennsylvania-born sixth cousin three times removed.
Sixth Cousins
As far as I can tell, Swift has yet to acknowledge the news reported in the March 4, 2024 Guardian (online) that she and Dickinson “both descend from a 17th-century English immigrant — Swift’s ninth great-grandfather and Dickinson’s sixth great-grandfather, who was an early settler of Windsor, Connecticut.” Although Swift seemed to indicate a relationship four years earlier on December 10, 2020, by announcing the midnight release of her album evermore, she made no mention of the fact that it coincided with Dickinson’s 190th birthday. Predictably, Swifties everywhere have been busy discovering similarities between Swift’s songs and Dickinson’s poems, the most popular relationship being that both the song “Evermore” and the album’s title were inspired by Dickinson’s poem “One Sister I Have In Our House,” which ends with the word “forevermore.”
In Emily’s House
Fourteen summers ago I was in Emily’s bedroom, with its big windows facing on Main Street in Amherst. The middle-aged guide was droning on about how Emily loved to play games with children, how widely read she was, how she loved the Brontës, even naming her dog after the one in Jane Eyre. Just as I was feeling the onset of house-tour ennui, the guide delivered the standard message, that Dickinson’s poetry was the opposite of “genteel, airy-fairy” verse, and in case I doubted her, she read the poet’s own words from a piece of paper trembling in her hands: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,
I know that is poetry.”
For a few seconds it was as if the stately old house had spoken through the medium of the guide, who actually seemed embarrassed, as if she’d been making those explosively personal remarks about her head and her body. Later that day, when I bought the Modern Library edition of Dickinson’s Selected Poems, I opened it at random to the untitled poem that begins “I know some lonely Houses off the Road,” and felt, as I read, a chill on my back and a tingle like a touch on the top of my head.
Imagination a Loaded Gun
In These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson (W.W. Norton 2020), Martha Ackmann quotes from a letter 21-year-old Emily sent to her uncle Joel Norcross: “Harm is one of those things that I always mean to keep clear of but somehow my intentions and me don’t chime as they ought — and people will get hit with stones that I throw at my neighbor’s dogs” and “insist upon blaming me instead of the stones and tell me that their heads ache.” After calling it “the greatest piece of folly on record,” she refers to a story in which “one man pointed a loaded gun at a man — and it shot him so that he died and the people threw the owner of the gun into prison — and afterwards hung him for murder,” which she says makes him “another victim of the misunderstanding of society.” As if to make her point, she adds, in the dash-driven style of her verse, “Now when I walk into your room and pluck your heart out that you die — I kill you — hang me if you like — but if I stab you while sleeping the dagger’s to blame — it’s no business of mine.”
Ackmann’s comment on this stunning statement is that Emily “was trying to understand if writers were responsible for the feelings they prompted in others: if hurling a word had the same effect as throwing a stone. Was imagination — like a loaded gun — the one pulling the trigger? Emily seemed to say she wanted the freedom to hurl her words without consequences.”
Ackmann places the letter to Uncle Joel (unsurprisngly omitted from the 2024 edition of Dickinson’s Letters) directly ahead of a paragraph about how Dickinson’s brother Austin “could not always understand what Emily was saying, and it exasperated him….” Ackmann notes that the letter also prefigures the 1863 poem “My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun,” which concludes: “For I have but the art to kill — Without the power to die.”
Swift’s “Quill Songs”
Two years ago, when I read Helena Hunt’s anthology Taylor Swift In Her Own Words (Agate 2019), I had no way of knowing if Swift, who also has a brother named Austin, had ever acknowledged
the connection with Emily Dickinson. The consensus in the Swiftie universe is that the only time she ever mentioned the Belle of Amherst was in a speech at the Nashville Songwriter Awards in September 2022, where she said, “I categorize certain songs of mine in the ‘Quill’ style if the words and phrasings are antiquated, if I was inspired to write it after reading Charlotte Brontë or after watching a movie where everyone is wearing poet shirts and corsets. If my lyrics sound like a letter written by Emily Dickinson’s great-grandmother while sewing a lace curtain, that’s me writing in the Quill genre.”
In fact, Swift’s lyrics and Dickinson’s poems seldom if ever resemble anything written by anyone’s lace-curtain-sewing great grandmother. Quoted In Her Own Words about the song “Ready for It” from her 2017 album Reputation, Swift refers to her fondness for “this kind of crime and punishment metaphor … about robbers and thieves and heists and all that,” which is “basically like finding your partner in crime…. Let’s rob banks together.” The rap-inflected song features lyrics like “Knew he was a killer first time that I saw him / Wondered how many girls he had loved and left haunted / But if he’s a ghost, then I can be a phantom holdin’ him for ransom.”
The Lonely House
Swift’s “robbers and heists” terminology brought to mind the poem that surprised me the day I entered Dickinson’s bedroom, “I know some lonely Houses off the Road / A Robber’d like the look of,” with its references to “Windows hanging low” and “A Portico, / Where two could creep — One — hand the Tools — The other peep — To make sure All’s Asleep….” The stanzas that follow could be from a whimsical ghost story for children. There’s a clock in the “Kitchen … by night … But they could gag the Tick — And Mice won’t bark — And so the Walls — don’t tell — None — will —.”
Who else but Dickinson could imagine two thieves gagging the tick of the kitchen clock? According to These Fevered Days, although Emily avoided ever using the word “nightmare,” she created one in a poem-letter from early 1964 to her beloved sister-in-law Susan Gilbert that begins, “One need not be a Chamber —
to be Haunted — One need not be a House — The Brain has Corridors — surpassing Material Place.”
Taylor’s Nightmare
From In Her Own Words (circa 2014): “The sheer number of men we have in a file who have showed up at my house or my mom’s house, threatened to kill me, kidnap me, or marry me. This is the strange and sad part of my life that I try not to think about…. The dream and nightmare of being framed…I could do nothing wrong, I could sit in my house with the cats all day, and somehow there could be an article about me buying a house in a place I’ve never been or dating a guy I’ve never met. But then you take it a step further, and in nightmare world, it’s being framed for murder.”
Who’s Afraid?
Given realities of time and space and my penchant for taking outrageous liberties, I think that just as Swift would admire Dickinson’s dynamics, Dickinson would be responsive to her sixth cousin’s spirit and fortitude and lyrical forcefulness, in spite of the profanities including the f-words Swift neatly turns into a language of her own. In “Down Bad,” the second song on Tortured Poets, the f-word occurs throughout, and in every chorus, all of which are sung with the mix of humor and sly wit and understatement that make me wish Emily had been recorded so I could compare their voices and styles. “Did you really beam me up in a cloud of sparkling dust just to do experiments on?”
After beautiful songs like “So Long, London,” with its haunting chorus (“Stitches undone, two graves, one gun, you’ll find someone”), “Fresh Out the Slammer” has her playing the criminal in that “Let’s rob banks together” fantasy, sung with loving sweetness and delicacy, “Now pretty baby I’m running back home to you … all those nights you kept me going, swirled you into all my poems,” and the perfect last line: “But it’s gonna be all right, I did my time.”
Probably my favorite song is the most spirited, the funniest, and the most defiant, “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” where “the scandal was contained, the bullet had just grazed, at all costs keep your good name, you don’t get to tell me you feel bad…. If you wanted me dead, you should’ve just said…Nothing makes me feel more alive.” Then the chorus, sung with crazy joy, “So I leap from the gallows and I levitate down your street, crash the party like a record scratch as I scream, “Who’s afraid of little old me?” —
“’Well you should be. You should be.’ “
“Nobody Told Me”
Viewers of Vince Gilligan’s new series Pluribus may wonder about the music playing over the closing credits of the first episode. Since there were no words, it took some time to recognize John Lennon’s posthumous song, “Nobody told me there’d be days like these / Strange days indeed.” Such is the power of poetry, one word sung by John Lennon brings forth one of Emily Dickinson’s best-known lines. “I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you — Nobody — too?”