Dickinson's Color—Caste—Denomination

The Futility of Human Classification

Aug 25, 2009 Linda Sue Grimes

Emily Dickinson's keen intellect serves her well as she allows her speaker to demonstrate a profound truth that is still today widely and tragically misconstrued.

The speaker in Emily Dickinson’s “Color—Caste—Denomination” (#970 in Thomas H. Johnson's Complete Poems) demonstrates a profound understanding about the futility of human classifications based on race, class, gender, and religion. The theme of this poem is likely influenced by Galatians 3: 28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

First Stanza: “Color — Caste — Denomination”

In the first stanza, the speaker makes the perspicacious claim that the soul has no race, no class, and no religious affiliation. These classifications are delusions belonging to the mayic realm of existence which is under time’s sway, “These—are Time’s Affair.” That such classification is artificial and at best a tool of material existence can be inferred from their banishment through death.

“Death’s diviner Classifying” refers to the soul. Death cannot classify the living, but when it classifies the soul, it finds that the soul’s purity lacks those limiting qualities that humanity assigns itself.

Second Stanza: “As in sleep — All Hue forgotten”

The speaker, desiring to further clarify her claim, then compares “death” to “sleep”—in sleep, the human being forgets his race, class, gender, and religion. These “tenets” are abandoned and the sleeper, if he dreams, may dream himself a different race, class, gender, or religion, and as long as he dreams those classes will seem reality.

Sleep, like Death, has “large—Democratic fingers” that are capable of erasing the marks of human classifications that circumscribe the individual in ordinary, waking consciousness. The dreamer understands his images and relates to them exactly as he does while awake.

Third Stanza: “If Circassian — He is careless”

The Circassians comprised a civilization in Diaspora, routed by the Russians and the Ottoman Empire. Their classifications would be tenuous at best; thus their ability to classify themselves would difficult, as many other civilizations have experienced. Peoples who live in contiguity to other conquering peoples have found it difficult to maintain a unified identity; such has also been the lot of the Jewish people.

But even the “Circassian” who attempts to identity his classification would find that like a butterfly, whether it be “Blonde—or Umber,” he would still remain “Equal Butterfly.” The usefulness of names on the material plane can never taint the soul. The soul remains perfectly unclassifiable by mayic limitations.

Fourth Stanza: “They emerge from His Obscuring”

Each human soul is not “obscured” by any attempt to classify it by the delusive limitations of race, class, gender, or religion. Death knows this, the speaker again emphasizes. Even the tiniest inferences the human mind makes regarding that futile act of classifying will remain “unplausible.”

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Emily Dickinson