Emily Dickinson and the Art of Compassion
by Danita Dodson
Emily Dickinson: Person, Poetry, & Place
National Endowment for Humanities Project at Emily Dickinson Museum, 2014
DESIRED RESULTS
What learning standards will the unit address?
RL.11-12.1: Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.
RL.11-12.4: Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone, including words with multiple meanings or language that is particularly fresh, engaging, or beautiful.
W.11-12.9: Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.
What “big ideas” would like your students to grapple with?
Poetry is a means of conveying empathy and compassion for the human condition.
Empathy can help poets to shape artistic effort in both content and purpose and encourage the reader to cultivate compassion.
What key understandings of Emily Dickinson, her work, and her world will students develop from this unit?
Dickinson’s poetry reveals an inclusive love for almost everything and everyone she observed and encountered. She often expresses agape—an unconditional feeling for family, friends, birds, snakes, soldiers, foreigners, the hungry, the poor, the heartbroken. Her era was marked by a tragic, complicated history—Civil War, disease, immigration, poverty—providing a stark backdrop for the need for a inclusive compassion for others. The poet’s acute depictions of suffering are more poignant than anywhere else in poetry; she attempts to feel the agony of other, expressing empathy to the point of imagining a dying human’s feelings in multiple poems, some from the viewpoints of a fallen soldier. For her, this universality of death transcends class, gender, and race; in the immortal landscape she envisions, all lines are blurred. She also imagines the trauma of a soldier-survivor, who has witnessed the carnage of war and feels deep, painful guilt. Furthermore, as a privileged white woman, Dickinson’s views of the less fortunate became more profound over time, moving from an expression of prejudice in a letter to her brother about Irish-immigrant students (L48) to a tender acknowledgment of the struggles of the immigrants in a poem like “The south wind has a pathos” (F883). Dickinson also imagines the hungry and the impoverished in poems like “Deprived of other banquet” (F872), “The beggar lad dies early” (F496), and “’Tis true – They shut me in the cold” (F658). To feel for others mattered to Dickinson. She writes, “The responsibility of Pathos is almost more than the responsibility of Care” (L667), and “There are Sweets of Pathos, when Sweets of Mirth have passed away” (L668). She mentions a reluctant philanthropy for an African-American servant: “We have a new Black Man and are looking for a Philanthropist to direct him, because every time he presents himself, I run, and when the Head of the Nation shies, it confuses the Foot –“ (L721). However, it is possible to see how this reluctance is overcome in the compassionate act of creating a poem like “The Malay took the pearl” (F451), wherein she imagines victory and freedom for “The Swarthy fellow.”
By reading Dickinson’s poems, we may experience empathy more profoundly and be moved toward compassion for the Other. Although considered the same, empathy and compassion are different. Both require an imaginative experience of the feelings of the person in question. However, empathy is passive; one can simply understand another’s pain. Compassion requires positive action to give comfort and alleviate a person’s pain or situation. By articulating others’ sorrow, Dickinson makes the act of creating poetry the ultimate expression of compassion. In turn, she causes the reader to contemplate compassion
What essential questions will drive instruction in the unit?
How does Dickinson express empathy and compassion in selected poems through word choices, figurative language, connotative meaning, and imagery?
How is the poetic endeavor itself an act of compassion, and how does Dickinson inspire empathy in the readers and to move them toward a recognition of the Other?
ASSSESSMENT EVIDENCE
What culminating performance task will demonstrate student understanding and skill?
After discussing how empathy and compassion are necessary to the human experience, and after exploring Dickinson’s use of figurative language to imagine the Other in selected compassion poems, the student will choose a Dickinson poem and write an analytical essay that addresses the essential questions, incorporating textual support.
LEARNING PLAN
What skills must students develop to succeed on the performance task?
Students are able to define empathy and compassion.
Students are able to understand the background of Dickinson’s era, particularly the hardships faced by humanity (such as war, disease, poverty, immigration).
Students are able to recognize poetry as a way to give voice to pain, to encourage readers to “feel” for the plight of Others, and to imagine ways they might “keep one heart from breaking.”
Students are able to analyze in writing how Emily Dickinson explored themes of pain, suffering, compassion through specific word choices, figurative language, connotative meaning, and imagery.
Students are able to write critically and use textual support in an analytic essay.
What learning experiences will enable students to develop required skills?
Lead students to define the terms empathy and compassion, exploring the difference. Explain that by experiencing Dickinson’s poems, we may be able to understand empathy more profoundly and be moved toward compassion for the Other. Guide students toward considering how Dickinson’s creative act itself was a positive action of compassion because it “gives” something to both the sufferer and the reader.
Students will read “If I can stop one heart from breaking” (F982). As a large group activity, they will identify and discuss figurative language, imagery, and meaning to reveal Dickinson’s expression of the compassionate act. Also, the teacher will share “A narrow fellow in the grass” (F1096) to reveal the poet’s empathy for creatures of nature, whereby she challenges the traditional human attitude of superiority over the earth, avoiding the opinion of the snake as a symbol of evil by treating it as a fellow creature. Explain that Dickinson, through imagery that creates authentic sensory experience for readers, forges a compassionate space for those who observe her words.
In small groups, students then will move to reading selected poems and identify figurative language that explores the human condition to which Dickinson alludes (i.e. Civil War, racial difference, poverty). They will then also read selected ED compassion poems as a whole class, giving attention to words and images that evoke empathy: “Success is counted sweetest” (F112), “’Hope’ is the thing with feathers” (F314), “If I can stop one heart from breaking” (F982), “I measure every grief I meet” (F550), “A south wind has a pathos” (F883), “Deprived of other banquet” (F872), “The Malay took the pearl” (F451), “The beggar lad dies early” (F496), “Papa above” (F151), “To fight aloud is very brave” (F138), “Undue significance a starving man attaches” (F626), “No man can compass a despair” (F714), “It would have starved a gnat” (F444), “’Tis true – They shut me in the cold” (F658), “A narrow fellow in the grass” (F1096), “To learn the transport by the pain” (F178), “Pain has an element of blank” (F760), “I can wade grief” (F312), “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” (F372), “There is a pain - so utter” (F515), “There is no silence in the world” (F1004), “My triumph lasted till the drums” (F1212), “It feels a shame to be alive” (F524), “I’m sorry for the dead today” (F582), “He scanned it – staggered” (F994), “My portion is defeat today” (F704), “I heard a fly buzz when I died” (F591), “To know just how he suffered would be dear” (F688). Possible words to explore in the Dickinson lexicon are as follows: heart, pathos, feeling, charity, deprived, beggar, famine, storm, need, defeated, woe, starving, compass, despair, Pain, starved, small, dead, died, cold, Nature’s People, Fellow, Thirst, homesick, foreign, Anguish, grief, Emigrant, Banishment, Comfort, The Grieved. Have students Students’ articulated responses will serve as a formative assessment.
As homework, students will continue to read from the packet of poems and write down interpretations of ideas and imagery (another formative assessment). The following day, distribute copies of Shawn Alfrey’s “Emily Dickinson’s Hesitation: Toward an Empathetic Sublime” from The Sublime of Intense Sociability, “Of Pictures, the Discloser -” from Aife Murray’s Maid as Muse, Azar Nafisi’s “Mysterious Connections that Link Us Together,” excerpt from Jeff Goins’ Wrecked, “The Town and the Times” from Emily Dickinson Museum. In small groups, students will individually read one of these articles. They will write a summary and report to group members. Follow with a whole class discussion of the themes in the articles.
Students will also share interpretations of poems they selected from the “empathy and compassion” collection. They will use this discussion to help them brainstorm and write their analysis paper about Dickinson’s use of particular word choices, figurative language, connotative meaning, and imagery that convey empathy (summative assessment).
As a writing or lesson extension give students an option of one the following writing prompts and have them consider the importance of Emily Dickinson’s decision to “act” creatively in compassion: (1) How might you “keep one heart from breaking” by giving yourself to others? Write a poem about a person’s situation that breaks your heart. (2) Go to a place of the Other and write about your experience. For example, this might include the following: the migrant/immigrant community, an interview with a veteran of the Afghanistan or Iraq wars, a soup kitchen, a nursing home. What do you see? What words can you choose to effectively convey your feelings? (3) Research the life of Dickinson, an often-misunderstood poet and person, and consider how you have empathy for her and her poetic endeavor.