Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

I
aimed my Pebble – but
Myself
Was all the One that fell -
Was it Goliah – was too
large -
Or + was 
myself
– too small?
+ just 
myself
– Only 
me
– 
I
-
(F660/J540; F 30, lines 7–12)
The first use of ‘Myself ’ in this stanza is predicted by the projection of the subject
‘I’ into the contrasted mental space set up by ‘but’. The second ‘myself ’ is interesting.
It occurs in a mental space set up by ‘Or’. If the originating space is the sentence
immediately preceding, then ‘Goliah’ is the subject of that space, and ‘myself ’ should
not be triggered, as the variants indicate. However, if both spaces are multiply
projected from the first sentence of the stanza, ‘I aimed my Pebble -’, then ‘myself ’
would be triggered, as indicated in the original and first variant offered. It is, of
course, impossible to know what Dickinson was thinking in her suggested variants,
but this example raises interesting questions about structuring domains and speaker
point of view and perspective. As multiple mental spaces are generated, the grounding
perspective or point of view can shift from one space to another. [. . .]
Examples (8) and (9) seem to indicate that the 
-self
anaphor deictically grounds
the self in the mental space into which it is projected. The following discussion shows
that this is in fact the case.
It would appear that whenever there is anaphoric reference in a mental space to
the subject/topic of the originating space, the 
-self
anaphor should occur. However,
in example (10a), where a mental space is created through the space-builder
‘wondered’, the anaphor is ‘me’, not ‘myself ’:
[10a]
I 
wondered which would
miss 
me
, least,
And when Thanksgiving, came,
If Father’d multiply the plates -
To make an even Sum -
And would it blur the
Christmas glee
My Stocking hang too high
For any Santa Claus to reach
The Altitude of 
me
-
(F344/J445; Fascicle 16: stanzas 4–5)
The poem, which begins ‘’Twas just this time, last / year, I died’, is a narrative, being
told from the perspective of the grave. Through the space-builders, ‘know’, ‘thought’,
‘wondered’, the speaker in the grave projects the events of real life that are going on
without her. Had Dickinson used the 
-self
anaphor in these stanzas, she would have
been deictically projecting the speaker into that mental space of life, thus ‘grounding’
11
111
11
111
C O G N I T I V E S T Y L I S T I C S : T H E P O E T R Y O F E M I L Y D I C K I N S O N
207

---

the speaker in the objective scene (Langacker 1987, 1991). However, the very point
of the stanzas is that the speaker is physically absent from the mentally projected
scene of real life, as she imagines the people in that space missing her presence. In
these stanzas, then, when she refers to herself, the speaker crosses over from 
the mental space of life to her reality space of death and therefore the anaphoric
reference does not take the 
-self
form.
The last stanza contrasts the mental spaces of the entire poem, between life and
death:
[11b] But this sort, grieved 
myself
,
And so, I thought the other
way,
How just this time, some
perfect year -
Themself
, should come to 
me
-
(stanza 6)
Now the 
-self
anaphor occurs, as thinking about life creates a mental space in which
the speaker projects her grief. The poem ends in yet another projected space, ‘some
perfect year’, and in this ‘other way’ space, the 
-self
form is attributed to they who
are agents in that other space in life and who will come to the speaker’s reality space
in death: ‘Themself, should come to me -’.
When crossovers occur with shifts in focus, perspective, and point of view, 
-self
anaphors may thus not appear. In the poem that begins ‘Those fair – fictitious
People -’, for example, three lines with parallel linguistic forms appear to be incon-
sistent in pronoun use:
Remembering ourselves (line 14)
Anticipating us (line 20)
Esteeming us (line 24).
The poem creates mental spaces for both the dead and the living, and the 
-self
anaphor
occurs only when the subject self in the mental space of the living is projected 
into the mental space of the dead. The speaker, looking at representations of the
dead, and wondering where they are, trusts they are ‘in places perfecter’ (stanzas
1–3). The next stanza projects into the space of the dead from the speaker’s reality
space through the space-building phrase ‘trust’, triggering the 
-self
anaphor in the
projected mental space as the dead become the subject of that space. Starting with
the next line, the 
perspective
also shifts from the reality space of the speaker to that
of the dead through the space building comparative terms ‘yet’ and ‘where’,
contrasting the state of the dead in their space to that of the living in the originating
(speaker’s reality) space:
[11a] Remembering