Between the lives of poets Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson there are surprising similarities that manifest within their poetry. Poe, who was born on January 19th in Boston, Massachusetts in 1809, died only forty years later in 1849, nineteen years after the birth of Dickinson in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1830. The elder poet’s early life was riddled with death, having lost both his parents by the age of two. Poe’s obsession with death and loss, grief and mourning is apparent in his poetry. In comparison, Dickinson lived a reclusive life following her formal schooling prior to the age of fifteen, and her experience was marked by the death of several close friends within a short period of time. For Dickinson, death was a touchstone for life, and through her poetry she explored the mystery of death by imagining both her own as well as those she had experienced firsthand. The themes of Poe and Dickinson group the poets within the genre of the Gothic.
One common thread between the two poets is their attention to color in their poems. Scholar Wilson O. Clough writes in “The Use of Color Words by Edgar Allan Poe” that: “Few poets or tellers of tales would seem at first thought to offer more interesting or more definite material for color analysis than Edgar Allan Poe” (599). By reading Poe and Dickinson’s poems through the work of Edmund Burke’s 1759 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful which presents the groundwork for the concept of the Gothic Sublime and argues that particular colors evoke different experiences of the sublime, the particular attention both Poe and Dickinson devoted to the colors of the world around them presents itself as a representation of the unique symbolism of the colors of the Gothic tradition.
In Burke’s Sublime and Beautiful he writes that color is considered as productive of the sublime—that color is a product of the grandeur of the sublime, a representation of the awe and terror of the human experience. To Burke, particular colors evoke the sublime, whereas others “deaden the whole taste of the sublime” (XVIII.65). Burke writes: “Among colors, such as are soft, or cheerful, (except perhaps a strong red which is cheerful) are unfit to produce grand images. An immense mountain covered with a shining green turf, is nothing in this respect, to one dark and gloomy; the cloudy sky is more grand than the blue; and night more sublime and solemn than day” (XVIII.64). For Burke, the shades of dark and mysterious colors were those capable of evoking the sublime.
Dickinson seemed to acknowledge the sublimity of darkness, as she illustrates a personification of Death sweep away lighter shades of blonde and umber in her poem “Color - Caste - Denomination” (970). Dickinson illustrates the loss of color and the blackness of the unconscious. “In sleep - all Hue forgotten” (5) she writes, going further to explain once Death is faced with light colors he carelessly puts them away: “If Circassian - He is careless - / If He put away / Chrysalis of Blonde - or Umber” (9-11). In this poem, Dickinson illustrates Death’s aversion to shades of light colors, choosing to deliberately put them away and shield them from the eye. The personification of death and the all encompassing darkness of the unconscious are depicted through her choice of colors in this poem, straying away from the lightness and sticking to Burke’s suggestion of the sublime of solemn darkness.
In Poe’s poem “The Bells” he explores a similar illustration of Burke’s definition of the sublime colors. His poem is set in the “icy air of night” (5), evoking the darkness of night and the sublimity of the atmosphere. Poe continues to establish the sublime experience of the night by contrasting the stark golden bells “by the side of the pale-faced moon” (50). Clough points out that in Poe’s poetry, light colors, the ones Burke would argue do not evoke the sublime, are never presented as bright whites, but instead “whites dimmed by the night shadows … taking on a shade of deeper terror against the black background” (599). This terror that Burke argues evokes the sublime is similarly found in Dickinson’s poetry.
The Gothic sublime in Dickinson’s poetry relates to her morbid fascination with death as something that cannot be understood but evokes the sublime in its relative presence to human life. Colors appear in Dickinson’s verse, as in Poe’s as a representation of the world around her. Death in the work of both poets is commonly related to the colors red, black, purple, and the muted tones of white previously mentioned. In Dickinson’s poetry in particular, colors such as purple and red are often contrasted against the dark shades of black and gray that Burke argues are the sublime colors. In Burke’s definition of the sublime colors is an element of the everyday, the common. Both Poe and Dickinson observed colors that were common but presented them through the lens of the Gothic as grand depictions of the sublime.
The colors that Dickinson writes of are those that she encountered in her everyday life, as Nicholas Ruddick writes in his article “Emily Dickinson’s Spectrum” that “Emily Dickinson watched the changing colors of the seasons from her solitude and, for want of other subject-matter, wrote again and again about those colors” (5). Burke’s sublime fits well with the commonality of Dickinson and Poe’s choice in everyday colors, writing that color’s sublime appears “where an uniform degree of the most striking sublimity is to be produced” (64). In other words, Burke believed that the capacity colors had for evoking the sublime would be noticed in instances where color is observed, “for it ought to be observed, that this melancholy kind of greatness, though it be certainly the highest, ought not to be studied in all sorts of edifices, where yet grandeur must be studied” (XVIII.64-65).
Poe, too, understood the importance of observing the natural world and the details that evoke the sublime. Dennis Pahl focuses on Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” in his article “Poe’s Sublimity: The Role of Burkean Aesthetics.” Pahl writes that “Poe’s discussion of the poet’s acquiring inspiration directly from the realm of nature may lead readers to draw similar transcendental conclusions, inasmuch as the poet’s soul is said to be nourished by ‘the bright orbs that shine in Heaven,’ the ‘waving of the grain-fields,’ the ‘repose of sequestered lakes,’ the ‘songs of birds,’ and the ‘scent of the violet’” (32). Poe, like Dickinson, observed the light and color of the world he found himself in.
In the sense of everyday observations, both Dickinson and Poe appeal to the ideal of the transcendentalists who believed a poet’s sources of inspiration should occur in close relation to their natural surroundings. For Poe, these colors were used most commonly in his two volumes of Tales of Horror, with research conducted by Clough producing the findings that Poe used the colors red and brown, orange, yellow, green, violet, purple, and black nearly four hundred times. In his poetry, Poe mentioned these colors approximately seventy-seven times.
One color that appears in both Dickinson and Poe’s poetry is the color purple. In “The Raven,” Poe depicts the color purple as nearly interchangeable with the color black. Both are presented as colors evoking terror and mystery. The symbolism of the color purple represents the inner world of the speaker of “The Raven.” The curtains in his room are purple: “And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain / Thrilled me– filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before” (13-14). Poe is illustrating the Burkean aesthetics of the sublime in this line, describing how the color of the purple curtains evoke the terror and thrill in their presentation. Poe personifies the curtains themselves with their “sad, uncertain” presence in the speaker’s room. With this description the purple curtains are presented as almost anticipating the arrival of the raven.
The raven itself in Poe’s poem follows the Burkean idea of the sublime colors. Instead of merely being described as “black,” Poe uses the color ebony: “Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, / By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore” (43-44). Ebony is a color that is characterized by its inclusion of both brown and black, with a more mysterious appearance that attributes the greatness of the color. The color of the Raven is mirrored in the presence of the sublime curtains, and to some degree, even the velvet seat on which the speaker collapses after conversing briefly with the bird. “Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking / Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore” (69-70) the speaker announces, expressing the sublime experience of encountering a raven in the night. Poe chooses to depict the velvet itself as being “violet,” another shade of the purple curtains: “On the cushion’s velvet lining and the lamp-light gloated o’er, / But whose velvet-violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o’er” (76-77). In this section, both the color of the velvet chair in the room is described as well as the interaction with that color and the lamp light that illuminates the darkness.
In the article “Symbolism of Purple in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry,” scholar Hazha Hassan points out that the color purple itself represents more than meets the eye, “it represents perfect balance as it is a combination of red (the warmest color) and blue (the coolest color)” (7) he writes, “it refers to death, mourning, and the coming of the spring… historically it has been considered as a nobel color” (7). For Dickinson in particular, Hassan argues her use of purple represents death itself, “she relates purple to the sphere of the afterlife. Even when she describes the physical scene of nature in spring, purple is connected with the life after death” (6). He continues, “Dickinson used the color purple to indicate the beauty of nature in spring as representing that life after death” (6).
As Poe uses purple to represent the mystery of his surroundings as sublime, Dickinson chooses to use purple to represent the mystery of death’s sublime. In her poem “A Day,” Dickinson uses the color purple to evoke a Burkean depiction of the sublimity of the sunset. She twice refers to the wonder of the sun in shades of purple, with the “steeples swam in amethyst” (3) and “there seemed a purple stile” (10). Dickinson herself admits that she does not understand the mystery of the sun, despite her witnessing it. “But how he set, I know not. / There seemed a purple stile” (9-10) she writes, presenting the color purple as a mystery, one that has drawn her in with its awe and sublime. Had she described the setting sun as, for example, red or yellow, it would not evoke the sense of mystery and awful wonder that the shade purple depicts.
In Burke’s description of the sublime color he argues that it is the darker and more mysterious environments that evoke the sublime. He believes soft and cheerful colors are unfit to produce awful images, and instead believes that melancholy greatness needed for the sublime appears in darker images. One element of Poe’s “The Raven” follows this rule in particular. Throughout the poem there is a subtle yet detectable absence of color. The narrator plainly remarks, “Darkness there and nothing more” (24). The narrator avoids directly describing the items in his room, and only occasionally refers to an object as having a color. This negation of color ties into Burke’s sublime in that it leaves the appearance of this room the speaker is in a mystery.
Poe begins the poem with the lines “Ah, distinctly I remember it was in bleak December; / And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor” (7-8). Despite the lack of color terms, these lines are filled with a particularly sublime illumination. The mention of December establishes that it is in winter, and as it is night, it is dark and gloomy outside of his window. Poe describes the light emitting from a fire composed of “dying embers” as weak depictions of a warm color. Even in the presence and depiction of color from the fire, death is present in his use of “dying” and “ghost.” The color of the embers themselves appear as ghosts, suggesting the deception of a translucent color, or even the negation of color all together. In this mention of death, we are reminded of the Dickinson lines of death covering all color, removing every color from the eye of the speaker, as if in sleep.
Both Dickinson and Poe utilized specific depictions of color in their Gothic poetry. With the repeated mentions of purple, white, black, ebony, and amethyst, both poets followed the Burkean idea of sublime color theory to create poems in which color provides a sense of awe, a sense of terror, and a sense of melancholy. Color is related in both poet’s work with death itself, with the mystery of what comes after life. With the color purple in particular, the meanings these two poets attach to the color diverges. For Dickinson, purple represents the life after death, a sense of rebirth. Yet for Poe, purple seems to take on a more royal and mysterious presence in his work. It is a source of the sublime unknown that does not carry with it a sense of life. In the work of both poets, their Gothic sensibilities allow for their inclusion of particular colors to represent more than merely aesthetic choices. Both Dickinson and Poe embody Burke’s “melancholy kind of greatness” (XVIII.64) needed to evoke the Gothic sublime.
Works Cited:
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 1759 (2nd edition).
Clough, Wilson O. “The Use of Color Words by Edgar Allen Poe.” PMLA, vol. 45, no. 2, 1930, pp. 598–613. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/457812. Accessed 3 Apr. 2023.
Deppman, Jed. “Dickinson, Death, and the Sublime.” The Emily Dickinson Journal. Vol. IX, No. 1. January, 2000.
Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Johnson, Thomas H. Back Bay Books. 1976.
Hassan, Hazha. “Symbolism of Purple in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry.” Al-Rafidayn. Vol. 67. 2013.
Pahl, Dennis. “Poe’s Sublimity: The Role of Burkean Aesthetics.” The Edgar Allan Poe Review, vol. 7, no. 2, 2006, pp. 30–49. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41506003. Accessed 3 Apr. 2023.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. Signet Classics. 2008.