To make a prairie Dickinsons Liminal (Human) Animal Daydream

Writing in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1924), Emily Dickinson’s niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi reminds readers that Dickinson’s “solitude was never idle” (vii). When surveying Dickinson’s poems about nonhuman animals, the question of Dickinson’s “solitude” proves generative in discussion on multi-species imagination. Dickinson’s poem “To make a prairie” expresses a sense of co-dependent creation that is at times playful and in other moments expansive. Playful with its sparse diction and simple actors, “a clover”, “a bee”, and “revery”; expansive in suggesting the power of a human animal daydream to act when “bees are few.” The human animal daydream may be thought as secular from the nonhuman animal actors, but the poem’s lines explain that “revery” manifests “if bees are few”, which acknowledges loss while simultaneously constructing a reality of co-dependence that supports an “Emphatic Mutualist Human” flourishing to use botanist Robin Kimmerer’s phrasing (45).

My paper “’To make a prairie’: Dickinson’s Liminal (Human) Animal Daydream” argues that Dickinson’s use of simple nonhuman animal actors not only consider the more than human realm and the implication of its loss but also invites a transformation to reader’s own production of reality through recognition of that distance between the human animal and nonhuman animal, or to be more specific—what Cary Wolfe suggests he and Jacques Derrida would agree upon—that “infinite space” and “abyss” among different kinds of animals, human and nonhuman (Wolfe in Cavalieri 126-7). Dickinson’s poem—when read through an ecological posthuman lens—opens interpretation upon the role of human self-reference and kinship with other species that also interrogates and invites readers into this liminal space amongst nonhuman and human animal experiences. Such treatment to Dickinson’s “To make a prairie” enriches the importance of a sustained human attention to nonhuman animals’ mutual role in ruminating on the liminal “revery” Dickinson says, “alone will do, if bees are few.” Through her poem, Dickinson makes a case for human curiosity as an essential driver within the liminal (human) animal daydream.

Works Cited

Dickinson-Bianchi, Martha. Introduction. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, by Emily Dickinson, Little, Brown, and Company, 1924, pp. v-ix.
Kimmerer, Robin W. Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. Scribner, 2024. Wolfe, Cary. “On a Certain Blindness of Human Beings.” The Death of the Animal, edited by Paola Cavalieri, Columbia University Press, 2009, pp. 123-133.