Contributor’s Marginalia: Elizabeth Knapp on “Synecdoche” by Rebecca Foust


Of all literary devices and figures of speech, I think I love synecdoche the most, probably because I associate it with one of my favorite poets, Emily Dickinson. Reading Rebecca Foust’s poem “Synecdoche,” I feel the shiver of Dickinson’s ghost throughout the lines, until the speaker finally disappears into the white space of the poem, just like the “Freezing persons” at the end of “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” I’m also reminded of the story that Dickinson’s niece, Martha, once told about her aunt inviting her into the inner sanctum of her bedroom, pretending to lock the door with an imaginary key, and then turning to her to say, “Mattie: here’s freedom.” For both Foust and Dickinson, synecdoche offers the soul an escape route from the body, a kind of radical freedom that is grounded, paradoxically, within the body, though a body in parts and pieces. In Foust’s poem, the speaker’s “head,” “heart,” “arm,” and “skin” are all stand-ins for a first person that has already “skipped-town,” “flown-coop,” leaving only the wake of a voice behind her, an “I” that is now the “ghost of this poem,” an uncanny shadow of the speaker herself. Uncanny, indeed, when one considers Foust’s poem in relation to this Dickinson stanza:

The soul has moments of escape –
When bursting all the doors –
She dances like a Bomb, abroad,
And swings upon the Hours

Like Dickinson’s “Bomb, abroad,” Foust’s speaker uses synecdoche to disassociate from the body, until her voice merges with the very instruments of her escape, “the trap tripped, its steel door swung home.” Only the echoes of the clanging steel and the bolt of the lock remain.