TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

In the Goods
of Day -
(F 1203)
Jackson's thesis that lyric poetry ought not be disentwined from its historical place
of utterance, that "historical determination appears indistinguishable from figurative
power," is tested here against preceding readings of poems in which she has found
particular empirical addressees. She finds in the figurative language of this poem a
similar universe of actual empirical reference. Jackson acknowledges that the usual
lyrical affectation of an "I," by-passing any individual "You" in its addressing of a
universal "We," is achieved here but, at the same time, argues that if we are truly alert to
the silent assumptions that Dickinson could be suggesting we might agree that this poem
does have a single empirical addressee in mind. This addressee could distinguish between
a general reader of a universal theme, and themselves, as a particularly intended reader
interested in some discrete event shared with Dickinson. To paraphrase Jackson's
argument, the scene of writing (the poet's work) is intentionally confused with the
performance of direct address (Dickinson's message to a particular reader). Jackson reads
this poem's eighth line, "Misery, how fair" as plaintively elegiac and as a coded
personification available to a specific and intended reader. She writes, "Or is ‗Misery‘
here a figure of address, another name for ‗you?‘ If read as the latter, then this ‗you‘ has
slipped from cause to effect or, like the morning, partakes of the qualities of both" (207).
For Jackson this doubled referentiality in the poem and the presence of an apostrophe to
some particular "You" coded as "Misery" bends the inner timing and sequentiality of the
poem's form: "Like the other apostrophes we have remarked in Dickinson's poems, the
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