Emily Dickinson’s “The Only News I know”

Emily Dickinson’s “The Only News I know”

In “The Only News I know,” Emily Dickinson creates a speaker who offers a glimpse at the poet’s satisfying daily existence.  She demonstrates how she keeps her consciousness focused only on things of the Divine Realm, thus, avoiding those of the mundane, vulgar, physical existence.

Introduction with Text of  “The Only News I know”

The reality of “the news” automatically holds all manner of things that have gone wrong during ordinary life.  Accidents, illness, murders, robberies, war, deceit, political intrigue all figure in the news reports that come to one daily.  

While these topics tend to agitate, confuse, and sadden most folks who listen to “the news,” seldom does anyone offer an antidote to lessen the pain, frustration, confusion brought about by the bad news reports that accost the citizenry daily.

Although Emily Dickinson’s poem, “The Only News I know,” is obviously an exaggeration, it, nevertheless, dramatizes the most important topics with which the poet likes to engage: immortality, eternity, and God.   She likes to engage and occupy her thinking and musing with ethereal places and events.  And this creative thinking easily replaces the mundane and vulgar events that daily hem one round.

The physical world is such a cold and often desolate place for sensitive individuals and once those individuals acquire some inkling of a different world, a spiritual level of existence, or an astral world, they prefer it. 

They inquire, read, and study about the possibility of a place where the soul lives on after it leaves the gross physical encasement.  Such a place offers the individual the opportunity to live more abundantly and completely without the trammels and trappings of earthly existence. 

The thought of a “heaven” or an astral existence gives one hope that all the unseemly events reported in “the news” are only temporary and feature only a passing blight that the pure soul must put up with but only for a while.  While the physical reality is only temporary, the soul’s reality is permanent.

Emily Dickinson’s “The Only News I Know” consists of four tercets, or three-line stanzas that examine the glorious possibility of living in a world of everlasting beauty, with an always blissful feeling, and ever-new joy. 

Each tercet adheres to its own rime scheme: ABC, ABA, AAB, ABC. Each line displays six syllables, except for the final line in the final tercet, which yields only four syllables.  The four-syllable line gives the poem an abruptness that further enhances the meaning of the content: the speaker makes her claims in crispness and ends with a snap.

The Only News I know

The Only News I know
Is Bulletins all Day
From Immortality.

The Only Shows I see  –
Tomorrow and Today –
Perchance Eternity –

The Only One I meet
Is God – The Only Street –
Existence – This traversed

If Other News there be –
Or Admirabler Show –
I’ll tell it You –

Commentary on “The Only News I know”

In this poem, Emily Dickinson has created a speaker who reports brief glimpses of what it is like to create a satisfying daily existence.   Instead of “bulletins” from news reports on daily misery, her bulletins come from a mystical place where only joy permeates the soul. 

First Tercet:  Focus on the Spiritual  

The Only News I know
Is Bulletins all Day
From Immortality.

In the first stanza, the speaker asserts that the only information she recognizes is that which comes from “Immortality.” She claims that she receives brief news headlines during the whole day, implying that these brief reports come to her even as she is working. 

This speaker is more interested in mystical, that is, spiritual awareness than she is in mundane earthly things.  Thus she can easily space out the mundane and fill it with ethereal blessings.

Second Tercet:  A Permanent Frame of Mind  

The Only Shows I see –
Tomorrow and Today –
Perchance Eternity –

The speaker then avers that the only programs or performances she watches are those that pertain similarly to things and events that are everlastingly entertaining.   She then implies that the time frame in which she experiences these blessings is permanent. She leaves open some doubt by inserting the term “[p]erchance” likely only for the sake of skeptical listeners.

It becomes clear that this speaker entertains no doubt about her claims regarding the landscape of the soul—those topics that obtain for “Immortality” and “Eternity.”   She is not so naïve as to believe that in the physical world these qualities hold fast.  

If that were so, she would have no need to report on such beyond-earth loci.  She could go about simply revealing all the blessings she detects from earthly pleasures.   But because earthly paradise remains out of possibility, she has to report about mystical places with figurative language, including colorful images and metaphors.

Third Tercet:   God Alone

The Only One I meet
Is God – The Only Street –
Existence –This traversed

The speaker then reveals her startling claim, as Dickinson speakers are often wont to do: “The Only One I meet / Is God.”   And instead of further drama or explication on meeting God, she rushes on mid-line to claim that the only path she travels is that of “Existence.” This “street” is the one that she “traverse[s]” freely. 

Her interest focuses only on being.  She leaves the idea of becoming to others.  While she experiences this great eternal present of being, she remains in a state of blissful confidence. 

Fourth Tercet:    No Other News

If Other News there be –
Or Admirabler Show –
I’ll tell it You –

Then the speaker declares that if, in fact, she ever acquires any other significant information, she will let her listeners know about it. But her matter-of-fact declamations have made it quite clear that she does not expect such “Other News” to assail her consciousness. 

She is aware that she is creating her own garden of verse into which she has the ability to place anything she wishes.  In her garden of creation, she can remain in her mystical state of awareness, meeting only angels and other eternal beings. 

Every flower, every bird, every blade of grass has become endowed with the grace of the Heavenly Father, the Ultimate Reality, the Divine Being that is God.  The speaker’s dedication to such bliss becomes so full that she is urged to share her state with her audience, and she gladly complies with that urge.