Lucie Brock-Broido’s The Master Letters was inspired by three letters Emily Dickinson wrote to an anonymous recipient. In the letters the recipient is addressed only as “Master,” hence the title of Brock-Broido’s collection. The subject of this essay, the poem “Like Murder For Small Hay in the Underworld,” takes inspiration from Brock-Broido's “mis-reading of a handwritten facsimile of Robert Frost’s Tribute to E.A. Robinson—‘I was tried without feeling or sentiment like murder for small pay in the underworld.’” [1]
            The line she misreads is from an essay where Frost excoriates the younger generation’s avant-garde approach to poetry while praising Robinson’s allegiance to tradition: “[poetry] was tried without capital letters…it was tried without metric frame…it was tried without ability…it was tried premature like the delicacy of unborn calf in Asia…it was tried without feeling or sentiment like murder for small pay in the underworld.”[1] And here is Brock-Broido’s misreading: “it” becomes “I” and “pay” becomes “hay,” the latter misreading coalescing with the poem’s other inspiration in “native American hunting ritual.” [2]
              While it's not clear which tribe or tradition Brock-Broido is referring to either in the poem or the explanatory note, a loving relationship between hunter and prey is central to “Like Murder for Small Hay In The Underworld"; the first line of the poem—“Dear one” [3]—is a salutation suffused in tenderness. For the speaker, there is no need to further identify the “one” by name, suggesting an intimate, familiar relationship like that of hunter and animal. Additionally, the anonymity allows the “one” to hold many possible identities, setting the stage for the poem to operate as a chorus of voices. These voices are captured and released in the shifting subject position of the speaker, cycling between the realms of the living and the dead.

Uncrippled in the kingdom of petition

I am bent in the shape of the bow

Arcked out toward the particular wound

Of the animal felled [4]

This first section of the poem begins in a cryptic manner. Why is the first characterization of the speaker something they are not—“uncrippled”— rather than something they are? I believe that Brock-Broido wanted the connotations of “crippled” to be a part of the poem, even though the word, like the previous indigenous figuration, does not accurately characterize her speaker. The answer seems to be in tagging on the prefix “un.” “Uncrippled” gains more context in the next three lines, where the speaker becomes associated with the act of hunting, perhaps as the arrow fitted in the bow, then lodged in “the animal felled” or perhaps as the wounded animal itself, “bent in the shape of the bow.” The first stanza establishes the slippery identities between hunter and prey, a pattern that continues throughout the poem.
            The setting—“the kingdom of petition”—further destabilizes the delineations of hunter and hunted. If the speaker and prey both inhabit this place, it implies that both are petitioners. It then follows that as petitioners they both lack power, suggesting the existence of a third figure—one who can grant spiritual succor to all who petition them, speaker and prey included. When faced with this ultimate deity, the relational gap between prey and speaker becomes minute, nearing the relative equality the anthropologist Adrian Tanner observes between hunter and prey, something of an “‘animal friendship’  [5]  


        

Sing to her, sing to her.
I did not go to it. I did not bring to her

I did not nurse the deer on its side.
No maize or small hay, offering.

I did not send her, spirit, on her way. [6]

A tonal shift: a perhaps new speaker embodies the subject-position of the deity in the “kingdom of petition,” commanding that a mortally wounded animal be honored by singing. The command is followed by an expression of regret for failing to do so, which appears to come from the original speaker of the poem. Regret is conveyed in the interjection of “spirit” in the fifth line of this excerpt, which can be read as a petition to a higher power. However, “spirit” could just as easily refer to the soul of the dying animals, either the unnamed “her” or the unidentified “it.” The “it” is identified as “the deer”; the “her” remains unidentified and apparently stuck in a sort of purgatory, and, as the poem unfolds, the boundary between the identity of the prey and the unnamed her is another one that grows slippery.




Midway through the sixth couplet, the point of view mutates again, this time into the first-person testimony of a dying animal:

what was it as I lay aloft face-up,

Awake & let me offer me, to you,

Afloat, aroused, I am afraid,

To die, the wildering. [7]

The identity of the dying animal—is it the “her” or the deer?—is complicated, and so is the nature of their suffering. “Lay aloft’ suggests that the dying animal (the “I” in the above stanzas) is above the forest floor, above where one would picture a deer dying, and instead floats in a kind of purgatory for the unfed. Despite the animal’s suffering, they still show moral beneficence, viewing the speaker—transposed for this stanza into the “you”—as requiring comfort: “let me offer me, to you.” The slipperiness of the pronouns reveals a mutual recognition between the dying animal (either the “her” or the deer) and the speaker (here figured as the “you”) or perhaps an entirely internal monologue within the speaker themself. Everyone is vulnerable and accordingly “afloat” in the chaos of the “wildering.”
            While the identity of the speaker in the above lines is ambiguous, it is clear that they capture the voice of the dying. The word “aroused,” then, is anomalous, as it conveys an influx of energy or feeling. Perhaps the word gestures at the intense lucidity often experienced prior to death. But, another reading suggests something more numinous: that in the world of this poem, death is not a finality. Here, Dickinson’s poetic influence on Brock-Broido looms large. For the dying animal, life is finite, marked by struggle, avoiding hunters, predators, and angry gods, and it is only at the hinge between life and death where the animal, albeit still “afraid,” is truly free because the risk of capture no longer exists, as death is actively happening.

Repetition was my angel then, hovering

At my side like a Beauty growing old.

How simply at the last the Fathom comes.

Not captive, prey, not kill.

Do you know how cold I am?

I was a jealous angel then.
I am a jealous angel, now.

I did not sing to her. [8]

The first italicized line of this section quotes from an 1883 letter Emily Dickinson wrote to her sister-in-law, expressing grief for the death of Susanna’s eight-year-old child. “Dear Sue - The Vision of Immortal Life has been fulfilled — How simply at the last the Fathom comes.” [9] Dickinson’s words, as they do elsewhere in her writing, convey death as an enveloping, though not necessarily sinister, force.
            The next line further cements a reading of peaceful resolution in death. Because the animal is dying, or dead, they are no longer “captive” nor “prey,” as these are subject positions only embodied by the living, while “not kill” implies that the dying animal should have never been considered prey or “kill” in the first place, perhaps an autobiographical gesture towards Brock-Broido’s vegetarianism. But how does the animal have a consciousness after death?  The italicized portion “Do you know how cold I am?”— which appears to be Brock-Broido’s own words—furthers this question. Corpses, of course, are cold. Yet the animal’s awareness of their cold contradicts the notion that they are resting in peace. The shifting veil of identity makes a precise reading difficult. Is this “I” hunter or prey or the unnamed her, and is it worth carrying on this line of questioning? To say anything about “Do you know how cold I am?” requires greater context. The final line “I did not sing to her” serves this aim; regardless of the ambiguous identity, the “I” remains cold and not sung to, two states that act synonymously to convey that the animal is unsettled, rather than at peace, in death. What is clear at the end of the poem is that the ritual was not properly enacted, leaving the fate of the “I” unknown and the speaker full of regret. 






Works Cited

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“Correspondence with Susan Dickinson H B79.” H B79. Accessed April 17, 2024. https://archive.emilydickinson.org/working/hb79.htm.

Robert Frost. Introduction. In King Jasper, v–viii. The Macmillan Company, 1935.

Lucie Brock-Broido, The Master Letters: Poems (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1997).

Adrian Tanner. Bringing home animals: Religious ideology and mode of production of the Mistassini Cree Hunters. London: C. Hurst, & Co., 1979.



Notes

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[1] Brock-Broido, The Master Letters, 81.

[2] Frost, “Introduction,” v.

[3] Brock-Broido, 81-82.

[4] Brock-Broido, The Master Letters, 55

[5] ibid

[6] Tanner, Bringing Home Animals, 139.

[7] Brock-Broido, The Master Letters, 55.

[8] ibid

[9] ibid

[10] Dickinson Electronic Archives