Ellman's rewriting of Dickey turn "Falling" into a narrative of punitive reparation for the stewardess's sexuality, independence, and strength, a narrative whose tendency runs totally opposite to the poem's true course; her paraphrase does not admit of the tremendous energy of the poem or the fabulous series of powers that the stewardess acquires. The key point Ellman misses is, as noted earlier, that Dickey's poem reverses the tragic journalistic narrative (which begins the poem) by converting a mortal stewardess into an earth goddess who lives and dies in the perpetual, natural alternation of generation and decay.
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To say that the stewardess is merely a "sacrificial victim"--a term derived from Kenneth Burke and René Girard--renders her passive in a way that does not reflect her true dynamic and dramatic character. We need thus to trace more fully the process of empowerment (the "plot" or "form" of the poem) that the stewardess undergoes by looking at the kind of mythological activity (the "genre") this process resembles.
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In Dickey's poem, what is prophetic (and "healing") about the stewardess's visioning powers is not that she attains a truth that can be put in the form of an oracle or conceptual proposition, but, rather, that the panoramic faculty of her eye and its streaming "openness"--that of Apollo, Nietzche's "sculptor god"--result in her "accessibility" to the Dionysian powers of the "more than human," to "metamorphosis and transfiguration." That is, though she faces certain death, the energy from her Apollonian rush of consciousness and its Dionysian content "prophesizes" (i, e., foretells and foreshadows) an ecstatic, life-affirming reversal of her fate; for not only are "Her eyes opened wide by wind" so that she sees the earth approaching, but also she lying in one after another of all the "positions for love / Making dancing" in a vibrant Dionysian ecstasy.
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In "Falling,"Dickey's Lady of the Animals not only possesses the vision of hawks and owls, but also their "fearsome" power over prey and, most importantly, their powers and instruments of flight. With "a taste for chicken overwhelming / Her" and "The air beast-crooning to her warbling," the stewardess arranges her skirt "Like a diagram of a bat" and thus "has this flying-skin / Made of garments." These diverse animal traits dramatically enable her to change both her activity and her character. Her fall becomes purposive, no longer the formless result of an unintended accident, but instead "a long stoop a hurtling a fall / That is controlled that plummets as it wills." As the velocity of her fall accelerates, an effect conveyed brilliantly by Dickey's spectacular visual imagery, so too the stewardess' plummeting will-to-power increases. At one point, she alters the very laws of nature as she "Turns gravity / Into a new condition, showing its other side like a moon shining / New Powers." And shortly thereafter she begins to become fully active by determining her own fate; that is, she will not "just fall just tumble screaming all that time." She will "use / It" (italics in original).
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The stewardess becomes a goddess--as, does the reader, participating emotionally with her--precisely through this Dionysian state of intoxicating new vision, itself a delirious peripety. Her frenzy is a "rapturous transport," a "narcotic potion," which, like certain varieties of mysticism, erases "all sense of individuality in self-forgetfulness," or, we might add, like a mystical transport that produces movement transfiguring the vulnerable self into a greater power, when, for example, one feels the sensation of being intoxicated by speed. . . .