While at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, 17-year old Dickinson attended several revival meetings. Yet, she developed an individualist’s skepticism, even though she was a child of the devout, evangelical Amherst, Massachusetts and her father—a descendant of the Great Puritan Migration—was one of the community’s public pillars.
According to Richard Wilbur, who wrote in his 1959 essay “The Three Privations of Emily Dickinson”, Dickinson remained skeptical of traditional religious concepts such as ‘original sin’, ‘salvation’, and ‘hell.’ Following these revival meetings, she began to pull away from conventional religion, and became as Wilbur calls her, “an unsteady congregation of one.”
Dickinson’s three-stanza, 12-line poem is an individualist’s statement, which makes clear that she rejects conventional church-going and seeks a more immediate proximity to God through nature. Nature, which Dickinson often personifies in her poems, enjoys frequent feature and is characterized as one of her dearest friends.
First Stanza
In the first stanza, Dickinson indicates that while others attend conventional church on Sundays, she remains at home. Her choir is avian: a bobolink is a six-inch long bird. (The male of the species in black, with a yellow neck, white rump, and white scapulars.) Dickinson’s church is nature. Her church does not bear the traditional architectural elements, as her dome is comprised of orchard trees.
Second Stanza
The second stanza again makes comparisons between conventional religious approaches and Dickinson’s individualism. While clergy wear ‘surplices’, which are long-sleeved, half-length tunics made of finely-spun cotton or linen, Dickinson wears her wings. This is an abstract reference, not unlike the iconic, if cartoonish, use of the golden-ringed halo, which characters wear when on good behavior. The metaphor indicates the poet’s state of mind on stepping into the church of nature, and it fits perfectly with the reference to the sexton, which follows. Dickinson concludes the stanza with the image, “And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,/Our little Sexton – sings”. The sexton referred to seems again to be avian.
Third Stanza
In this final stanza, Dickinson reveals her intent: she seeks closer proximity to God and to remove the intervention of human translators, which characterize conventional worship. With a tongue-in-cheek tone, whose subtext indicates her disapprobation of religion’s human interlopers, she notes, “God preaches, a noted Clergyman –“. Here, Dickinson seeks direct counsel with God, an undeviating Spiritual connection that cannot be manipulated by priestly translations.
The final lines seem to indicate that by maintaining this spiritual proximity—without clerical hindrance—she is not diverted by humanity’s religious constructions or unduly burdened by the imposition of guilt. Heaven is not something that will finally reach at the end. She is already on a path towards Heaven that includes a glimpsed experience of it in nature. She writes, “So instead of getting to Heaven, at least –/ I’m going, all along.”
With “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church”, Dickinson reveals her religious skepticism and the resolute nature of her individual spirituality. Her references reveal that no human intervenes in her private rituals, only nature and the omnipotent power that sets the natural world in motion. In this way, she feels closer to God than in any man-made church, where only human-defined spiritualism is offered.
