Assignment 7

CULTURE AND IDENTITY: POETRY

Emily Dickinson: "What Soft–Cherubic Creatures" (p. 594)

Dickinson begins her scathing satire on fashionable ladies with a stanza that seemingly praises them for those genteel qualities much prized in her day. They are gentlewoman, soft and utterly feminine. But the compliment here is ambiguous, for lines 3 and 4 suggest that the women are superficial and decorative, as well as coldly remote in an explicitly sexual sense.

So rarefied are these ladies that they are horrified by ordinary human nature, “freckled” suggesting both a healthy outdoor quality (in contrast to the images of decorative fabrics the ladies are associated with) as well as the imperfections of humankind. Such attitudes are tantamount to being ashamed of Christ, who befriended thieves and prostitutes and died on the cross to redeem them and all “freckled” humankind. These ladies will never understand that the “Glory” of salvation is “common,” not just for the wealthy and well placed and sophisticated but for everyone, and especially the lowly, like those “Fishermen” (not gentlemen!) who became Christ’s apostles. Such “Brittle,” supercilious ignorance makes “Redemption” ashamed of them.