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Prompt: From the Chrysalis

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MY cocoon tightens, colors tease,
I’m feeling for the air;
A dim capacity for wings
Degrades the dress I wear.

A power of a butterfly must be
The aptitude to fly;
Meadows of majesty concedes
And easy sweeps of sky.

So I must baffle at the hint
And cipher at the sign,
And make such blunder, if at last
I take the clew divine.

Emily Dickinson

Today’s poem is written from the perspective of a butterfly that is still unhatched inside its chrysalis. What kind of other living things could you personify as they are aware of the world around them, but not part of it yet? Baby robins inside eggs? Roses unfurled from their buds?

Forbidden Fruit

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HEAVEN is what I cannot reach!
The apple on the tree,
Provided it do hopeless hang,
That “heaven” is to me.

The color on the cruising cloud,
The interdicted ground
Behind the hill, the house behind,–
There Paradise is found!

Emily Dickinson

Have we had a poem with a stronger first line than this? I’m not sure. The speaker tells us in the first line–in an exclamatory statement–that she can’t make it to heaven. But why?

Well, line two might have the answer: she’s not really looking for it. She’s finding it here on earth.

Heaven, for her, is found in forbidden places. The fruit, of course, alludes to the forbidden fruit that tempted Eve, but it’s also desirable here because it’s hopeless–she wants it “provided” that it has this characteristic, not in spite of it. Color on a cruising cloud is ephemeral, likely to last a very short time; “interdicted ground” is a place that’s prohibited–you’re not supposed to go there.

Easy enough to figure out, right? Hold on.

This poem likes its rhyme scheme. Look in the last stanza. See that repeated “ou” sound? It’s in every single line: cloud, ground, house, found. Now check stanza one: there’s something missing. The repeated sound for this stanza is a long “e,” which can be found in reach, tree, and me. The “hopeless hang” of the apple is the one line in this stanza that doesn’t contain the rhyme.

What does this tell us about the speaker? Is she conflicted about wanting this hopeless, short-lived joy? Or is the apple not quite as hopeless as she’s making out?

The Tulip

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SHE slept beneath a tree
Remembered but by me.
I touched her cradle mute;
She recognized the foot,
Put on her carmine suit,–
And see!

Emily Dickinson

For such a short poem–only six lines!–there are interesting things happening here.

The tulip is female. She’s also, apparently, a child, since she’s still in the cradle–but if the poet remembers her, then she’s not a newly planted bulb.

She’s brought to life by a touch from the poet. We don’t know what state the tulip was in when the poet touches her, but she’s definitely not blooming, since she’s still sleeping. Tulips are funny that way: they seem to bloom, and then die, overnight.

The poet is speaking to someone else. That last line, “And see!,” is directed. Is she talking to the reader? To someone she brought to see the flower in bloom? We don’t know, but the tulip is definitely the most important thing in the poem–at least she gets pronouns.

There are only two rhymes in the poem, but they’re split. “Mute/foot/suit” all follow one another in lines 3, 4, and 5, but the long e sound of lines 1 and 2, “tree/me,” doesn’t repeat again until line 6 with “see.”

Every line contains six syllables, except for the sixth line, which only has two. It feels almost like two poems: reverence for the tulip, and then remembering that someone else is there, and hastily addressing them, too.

There came a wind like a bugle

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THERE came a wind like a bugle,
It quivered through the grass.
And a green chill upon the heat
So ominous did pass.
We barred the windows and the doors
As from an emerald ghost;
The doom’s electric moccason
That very instant passed.
On a strange mob of passing trees,
And fences fled away,
And rivers where the houses ran
The living looked that day.
The bell within the steeple wild
The flying tidings whirled.
How much can come
And much can go,
And yet abide the world!

Emily Dickinson

Today’s post is brought to you by the looming storm that has been creeping closer and closer all day, and which is now imminent: write a poem about a storm, using as many of the five senses as possible. Dickinson describes the look here quite fully, but she also gives us sound–the steeple bell–and feeling, too, in the green chill. How could you add taste or smell?

I shall know why, when time is over

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I SHALL know why, when time is over,
And I have ceased to wonder why;
Christ will explain each separate anguish
In the fair schoolroom of the sky.

He will tell me what Peter promised,
And I, for wonder at his woe,
I shall forget the drop of anguish
That scalds me now, that scalds me now.

Emily Dickinson

I have been trying lately (if by “lately” you understand that I mean something like the last two days) to stop worrying so much. If I have faith in God, and if I believe in loving my neighbor like myself, and if I carry Christ’s crucifixion like a stone in my heart, then I should be able to rest on the surety that everything is going to be fine. Y’all, this is hard.

Everything always turns out okay in the end. But when I’m going through this stuff, it’s the Worst Time Ever and Everyone Hates Me and Nothing Will Ever Go Right Again and Why Must This Happen To Me?

It’s actually kind of affirming to know that Emily both dealt with this stuff and grappled with the difficulty of these kinds of situations. Too often I think Christians believe that being doubtful or downright angry about knotty situations must mean that we’re doubting God–or that being in a situation means that you’re being punished for something. In reality, I can be angry about a situation I’m in, and worried about it, and unhappy about going through it, while still believing that my faith is pretty okay. Also, bad things happen to everybody. It’s just life.

The speaker here knows that her troubles aren’t necessarily that important, in the grand scheme of things. They’re already superimposed against the enormity of life, death, and heaven, and her current troubles will soon be nothing more than a child’s lesson. She also knows that, with enough time, she’ll forget her worries, too.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t hurt now, though, which is scored so powerfully in the repetition in the last line.

My son scraped his hand at the school playground today. He told me about it in the car after I picked him up. “It’s a big scrape,” he told me. “My teacher had to give me two band-aids, but they fell off. It was bleeding and everything.” Said scrape is, of course, the size of an actual mustard seed, and it has not bled one bit. It’s a big deal to him, though, until he forgets it tomorrow.

But the important part is that it’s a big deal. It hurts. It doesn’t matter how small the hurt looks to me. It doesn’t matter that it won’t matter tomorrow. It doesn’t matter that the speaker won’t remember this hurt by the end of her life. Acknowledging the pain is important, and necessary, and normal.

When my son tells me that he needs a band-aid for what is going to be less than a memory tomorrow, I don’t always love having to drag one out, but today I did it. I pulled out the Neosporin and the Spiderman band-aid, and he was happy. How often do we resist offering the band-aids for small hurts? And what, in the end, does that gain us?

Spiderman band-aid, ice cream, handwritten letter: give out the small comforts today.

Refuge

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The clouds their backs together laid,
The north began to push,
The forests galloped till they fell,
The lightning skipped like mice;
The thunder crumbled like a stuff–
How good to be safe in tombs,
Where nature’s temper cannot reach
Nor vengeance ever comes!

Emily Dickinson

Everything about this poem is odd.

The nature images are striking in their action: the forests gallop, the lightning skips, the thunder crumbles. The only safe place here is a tomb, which means that safety can only be found while dead. But speaker tells us this is good: there’s no vengeance to be found in a tomb.

The rhyme, too, is interesting, because it’s off kilter: there’s really no rhyme scheme here to speak of, unless we do some real reaching for slant rhymes. I’ll give you that tombs/comes was probably an intended rhyme, but push/mice? There are rhymes and repetitive sounds within the lines, though; consider till/fell, the long i of lightning/like/mice, the u of thunder/crumbled/stuff, good/tombs.

It’s unbalanced, too: in an 8-line poem, we have 5 lines about how terribly dangerous a storm can be, and 3 about the wonderful safety of being dead.

XVII

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AS children bid the guest good-night,
And then reluctant turn,
My flowers raise their pretty lips,
Then put their nightgowns on.

As children caper when they wake,
Merry that it is morn,
My flowers from a hundred cribs
Will peep, and prance again.

Emily Dickinson

As so many of these poems do, this one makes me wonder what kind of flowers the poet was imagining, and how different they are from mine. This time of year, the only things blooming are my scrappy purple violas, but the daylilies are putting out new leaves like it’s their job. When they start blooming, somewhere around the end of May or beginning of June or Whenever They Feel Like It, each individual flower will stick around for just one day.

I didn’t know that when I bought them. Imagine me, burying five daylilies in the front yard bed in late September and then waiting, watching as the green leaves browned and wilted and fell away, as the green shoots began pushing forward in March, as the stems grew taller and taller–three or four or five per plant, as the stems birthed buds, as the squirrels began to eat the buds and I began to lose my absolute mind in battle with them, as the first flower opened–and was gone the next day.

Such a long wait for something that isn’t here very long. I’m not sure if I think of the daylilies as babies, exactly; they’re more like sulky teenagers who take forever to wake up and then wave at you from across the house for a minute before you lose them for the day.

The Grass

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THE grass so little has to do,–
A sphere of simple green,
With only butterflies to brood,
And bees to entertain,

And stir all day to pretty tunes
The breezes fetch along,
And hold the sunshine in its lap
And bow to everything;

And thread the dews all night, like pearls,
And make itself so fine,–
A duchess were too common
For such a noticing.

And even when it dies, to pass
In odors so divine,
As lowly spices gone to sleep,
Or amulets of pine.

And then to dwell in sovereign barns,
And dream the days away,–
The grass so little has to do,
I wish I were a hay!

Emily Dickinson

I keep expecting these things to be unrelatable, given the hundred and fiftyish years between us and our poet, and the poems keep on scratching right at my particular itch for the day. Perhaps that’s why Dickinson has remained relevant so long: we can continue to read ourselves, easily, into her poems.

I can imagine the speaker now, looking at the grass after a long, hard day, and thinking, ‘You know, it must be great to just have to be a blade of grass.’ I’ve had that kind of day. The one that starts with a raging thunderstorm as you’re driving to work, and continues with forgetting the textbook for your 8 am class, and crescendoes to the part where you have 20 or so research paper rough drafts to critique and not enough hours in the day. Oh, and remember when you promised to build a fort with your daughter and play pirates? Good, because she hasn’t forgotten. Find somewhere to fit that in between dance practice, dinner, and breathing.

I’m not quite ready to be a hay just yet, but I can definitely see the appeal.

A lot of questions about: Cocoon

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DRAB habitation of whom?
Tabernacle or tomb,
Or dome of worm,
Or porch of gnome,
Or some elf’s catacomb?

Emily Dickinson

While this is a short poem, it’s absolutely full of questions. First of all: who in the world lives in this little cocoon? We aren’t given any context clues; we don’t know what flower or branch might be holding the thing, or what color it is; we aren’t sure of the season, either. But the speaker isn’t done with questions.

“Tabernacle or tomb”: is this a place of religion–reverence, life–or is it a place of death? Put plainly, is a butterfly going to come out of this chrysalis, or has it already exited? Is it lying dead in its self-made coffin, unknown to us?

“Or dome of worm”: is the worm not yet turned into a butterfly? Have we happened on the site too early to have witnessed any change? Or are we talking about the worm here in the Shakespearean sense, as that little worker between body and burial?

“Or porch of gnome, / Or some elf’s catacomb?”: is this something entirely supernatural? And if so, is it a porch–the place where something might currently be living–or a burial ground?

Is this poem about life, or death? And what is a cocoon, anyway? Sure, the caterpillar lives on as a butterfly, but the caterpillar self is dead (as is the cocoon dead organic matter after the butterfly escapes). What’s left of the original thing? Is the cocoon a reminder of the new life that’s about to begin, or of the old one–or the second death the caterpillar will experience when the butterfly, too, dies?

Prompt: Proof

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THAT I did always love,
I bring thee proof:
That till I loved
I did not love enough.

That I shall love alway,
I offer thee
That love is life,
And life hath immortality.

This, dost thou doubt, sweet?
The have I
Nothing to show
But Calvary.

Emily Dickinson

Today’s prompt: say you have to actually show the physical proof that you love someone. What would that look like? Tolerating the smell of an egg salad sandwich? Rewashing clothes in the washing machine, because they forgot to transfer them to the dryer again? Picking up a bundle of flowers on the way home?