Pam: How about page 45, Real? In serendipitous honor of our dear 45th president.
Brenna: Hell yes.
Pam: I don’t know about you, but this poem feels almost ridiculously prescient.
Brenna: I will try very hard not to say anything that could incriminate me with the secret service.
Pam: And I’ll tell you at the start that I’m reading my own views into this. I love what she’s saying there. Man in agony = great because it’s not faked.
Brenna: Yes. No one wants to appear weak. So they’re not going to fake that.
Pam: Which brings the question, I suppose: is that the only time men can be trusted to be honest? When they’re in agony? This poem might agree.
Brenna: I think it might.At any other time, they may be dissembling.
Pam: This is what you write after an awful breakup.
Brenna: But pain, and death, they cannot fake.
Pam: Ann Coulter wrote this four hours ago.
Brenna: Does she necessarily mean “men,” or does she mean “humankind”?
Pam: I guess we can be nice and say she could be referring to all mankind. I guess.
Brenna: I like this poem. It rings very, very true. And it does seem prescient. It seems like something that really could have been written four hours ago. It sounds like me when I’m ranting about Facebook. Except I don’t do it in iambic quadrameter. I hate fakeness. And I think Emily hates it, too.
Pam: Yes! It sounds like someone who is beyond fed up. I want to know what inspired this. And it’s on page 45. You can’t make this up.
Brenna: I would much rather somebody show me their ugly–their faults, their flaws. I’m much more likely to be drawn to people who are real about the ups and downs of life than the people who sugarcoat everything, insist on dogged optimism, and snapchat their food.You really can’t make this up! It’s fantastic.
Pam: Oh my goodness. YES. I can relate to regular people. I can’t relate to people who are constantly wearing Instagram filters.
Brenna: I like a look of non-orange skin / Because I know it’s real / Men do not sham compassion / Or simulate a soul.
Pam: Beautiful.
Brenna: We conclude that it is on page 45 for good reason. It is a message from Emily from beyond the grave.
In six lines, this poem marvels at the beauty of something pretty mundane: a new butterfly among the buttercups. How do we know the butterfly is new? She’s wearing an assumption-gown, which is likely a reference to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven (per the Catholic church). This final robe of Mary would be a likely counterpart to the final “clothing” of a butterfly who has shed its chrysalis (chrysoprase, incidentally, is green, like that of a butterfly chrysalis). How beautiful, then, the final form of the butterfly; how absurdly normal a place for it to be, in the flowers in an ordinary town.
How can we find otherwordly beauty in the regular world around us?
Your challenge: clothe an ordinary object (living, breathing, or otherwise) in an extraordinary adornment. Kitten wearing mittens? Rock with a sock? Plush Darth Vader wearing a tiara? It’s up to you! Take a picture, write a poem, come up with a story idea, or just tell us what you’re imagining.
THE MOON was but a chin of gold A night or two ago, And now she turns her perfect face Upon the world below.
Her forehead is of amplest blond; Her cheek like beryl stone; Her eye unto the summer dew The likest I have known.
Her lips of amber never part; But what must be the smile Upon her friend she could bestow Were such her silver will!
And what a privilege to be But the remotest star! For certainly her way might pass Beside your twinkling door.
Her bonnet is the firmament, The universe her shoe, The stars the trinkets at her belt, Her dimities of blue.
I wanted to find a moon poem for today, because with the Super Wolf Blood Moon coming tonight, it just felt appropriate. But I also wanted something about friendship, and I think this fits the bill there, too.
This is one of very few Dickinson poems that I feel I can understand on surface level. The narrator is musing on the moon; just a few nights ago, it was a crescent; now it’s full and bright and beautiful. The narrator describes the moon like a friend. She’s beautiful, yes, but the descriptions here don’t really veer into romantic, in my opinion. It’s more like looking at your beautiful friend and feeling lucky to be in her presence.
I’m feeling lucky for a lot of things this year. Lucky that I’m alive during a Super Wolf Blood Moon, which sounds so much like a 1980s cartoon I’m not sure it wasn’t actually one; lucky that I have a warm house to stand in while I peer through the window in my actual in-house library. Lucky to have too many books in my to-read pile. Lucky to have friends in all facets of my life–at church and at work, friends past and friends newer, friends I see around town and friends I know through the internet only.
I have a friend named Brenna. She’s an amazing mother to two smart, hilarious kids. She’s an accomplished baker. She’s a middle school French teacher, which means that she is infinitely patient. She is beautiful. She keeps bees and chickens, thereby making her basically a superhero and witch, and I mean those in the best way. She writes about beauty and pain and strength and makes me believe in all of this and more. She has an encouraging word for every disaster. She has excellent taste in books, jigsaw puzzles, chocolate, and tea. She makes my days better. She is my friend.
I hope that you have a friend like Brenna; I hope that you have somebody you look at the way this poem sees the moon.
I decided to look for a sunny poem today. I needed a sunny poem today. Or, at least, today felt worthy of one. When I left the house this morning, Amelia and I bundled in heavy coats and gloves, the air outside was so frigid you could see it thrumming out of exhaust pipes and coalescing into vapor above chimneys. My car, safely tucked away in the garage all night, was free from frost; others that I saw on the road weren’t so lucky.
The sky was pinky blue: pastel colors that just screamed cold. Everything about this morning looked and felt like snow except for one thing: we had no snow.
It was cold enough that I felt bad for the car line lady who helped Amelia out of her seat and into school. It was cold enough to wear gloves for the 60-second walk from my parking spot into my building. It was cold enough to wear my coat for the first 20 minutes of class. And then it was gone. By the time 10:00 rolled around, the sun was out, temperatures were rising, and I no longer needed my scarf. I was, in fact, resentful of it as I carried a huge back of Norton anthologies into my office.
Today looks and feels like spring. That’s not uncommon in Alabama; we’ll have cold snaps and heat waves for several months yet. So when I looked for a sun poem, that’s what I thought I’d get. I should have known that I’d be wrong. This poem is not daisies and fresh-cut hay. It’s a lament. It’s the sadness of knowledge gained: I was in the shadows, and then I saw how wonderful sunlight is, and now I yearn for it and know that I’ve been missing something, and that I could miss it again.
This poem reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s short story “All Summer in a Day,” which takes place on Venus. There, residents live in perpetual darkness, because there’s only one day of sunlight every seven years. When a little girl tells her classmates what she remembers of the sun, being a more recent transplant from Earth, her cruel fellow students lock her in a closet during the sunlight so that she, the only one of them who remembers sunlight at all, misses it entirely.
I’m not sure what Dickinson’s Wilderness means, or how it changed after she saw her Sun. But it’s an interesting question, I think, of whether one might live more happily in the shade, not comprehending any light, or whether knowing about it–wilding your own Wilderness–would bring happiness, too.
ESSENTIAL oils are wrung: The attar from the rose Is not expressed by suns alone, It is the gift of screws.
The general rose decays; But this, in lady’s drawer, Makes summer when the lady lies In ceaseless rosemary.
I was unemployed for a long time after I finished my masters, and if there’s one thing that I heard over and over–and which helped my peace of mind exactly none–it’s this: yes, life is hard now, but this trying time will make you stronger. If there’s any true piece of advice that people hate to receive more than this, I’d love to know it.
Dickinson’s point here is that in order to extract the attar (literally, the rose’s essential oil), you have to put the rose through the ringer. You can’t ask it nicely, or wait for it to dry in the sun–you have to process it. Leave the roses on the vine? They’ll decompose. But their essential oil, the perfume that remains after the extraction, will last forever. This will preserve the smell of summer even in the coldest months, even when the lady who purchased it–or for whom it was purchased–has died, and only rosemary (the herb of remembrance) remains of her.
So the roses went through a process and the bit that was left–the distilled oil–comes out fragrant, long-lasting, desired. Part of me wants to find this beautiful. Part of me is very tired of having to be personally distilled in order to come out the other side stronger, smarter, or at least employed.
This is the first Dickinson poem that has wholly embodied melancholy this year. Here’s to coming out the other side as fresh as rosewater.
I woke up angry at my 5:30 am alarm, because I went to bed later than I should have. I left the house five minutes later than I’d like. I forgot to print new rosters for my classes this morning (which have been in a constant state of flux, since it’s the start of the semester), so I had to rig an attendance system on the fly.
In office hours, I spent a full hour assembling a particle board shelf to sit on top of my desk, frustrated with the materials, the office, the mother of the amoeba who wrote the assembly instructions, and anything else in the vicinity.
They’re piling up for tomorrow, too. My car needs gas. I have to take the kids to get haircuts after school tomorrow. I have to take my daughter to get (what will probably be expensive) clothes for her first dance class on Friday. I have to buy cupcakes for my son to bring to school on Friday. I have to finish planning food for his birthday party on Saturday. I have to bake his birthday cake and somehow make it look like Cappy from Mario Odyssey. I have to do some laundry or we are all going to drown in smelly clothing.
Or.
Or I can stop.
Or I can take a breath, and realize that all of these annoyances are things that I either caused or asked for, and step back. I can remember, like Emily Dickinson tells us above, that I can do something good with a really small action. Maybe I don’t always get the laundry done on time, but I can talk to my daughter on the way to school. I can sing her songs and wish her a good day when I drop her off.
I can go a step further, and, like the speaker in the poem, I can look for hurts to mend. You have to be looking to see someone whose heart is breaking; probably they won’t tell you when things get bad, because we all wear these masks every day so that people think that we are Fine, our jobs are Fine, our lives are Fine, when we are anything but. You have to be looking for robins’ nests to find the birds who could use a helping hand.
Last summer, an incredibly annoying pair of birds built a nest on our front porch. They were barn swallows, and they built their nest out of mud. After the first day, I went out and knocked down their half-finished effort. The next day it stormed, and they came back, bewildered, and stood on the ledge where their nest had been. They didn’t stick around for the worst of the rain, and I decided that if they came back, I’d let them stay.
They came back. They built a nest. They had babies–I’d hear them screeching right outside the laundry room window. They had too many babies. There were five baby starlings in that small nest, and when they started hopping around in there, the nest couldn’t accommodate them. I looked outside one day and saw four babies perched on the ledge, and my heart sank. Nearly eight years ago, when I was pregnant with my son, we had similar birds nest outside a different front door, and when their babies fell out of the nest, they died. It wasn’t a good thing for a pregnant woman to see.
I raced outside and found the ridiculous barn swallow nestling perched on the porch, fine as could be. I scooped him up with a piece of paper, dodging the angry parents, and plopped him back in the nest. I must have done this daily for a week before looking outside one day and finding the nest empty.
It’s such a small thing to put a baby bird back in the nest. Maybe it’s not even a necessary thing. But it’s not in vain, either.
“The sky is low, the clouds are mean, A travelling flake of snow Across a barn or through a rut Debates if it will go.
A narrow wind complains all day How some one treated him; Nature, like us, is sometimes caught Without her diadem.”
Brenna: The first thing that really jumps out at me, beyond the obvious wintriness, is the gendering Dickinson has going on. A flake of snow is “it,” the wind is “him,” and Nature is “her.” As always with Dickinson, there’s this personification of nature, but I think it’s interesting here how she chooses to assign genders. Nature is stereotypically “she,” of course, but that a snowflake is “it” while the wind is “him” strikes me as interesting. Maybe not significant, particularly? Or maybe??
Pam:You know what’s wonderful? That’s not what caught my eye first. I love that we both have completely separate “Aha!” moments when reading this.I think that the gendering is significant! Why assign the wind as male, why assign nature as female, why assign the snowflake as neither?
Brenna:I like how none of the personifications in this poem are particularly flattering. A snowflake is indecisive, the wind is a whiner, and Nature is kind of a hot mess. Or a cold mess. And yet there’s a sense of her relation to all of them, despite the fact that, if these were people you were hanging out with, you might be kind of annoyed.
Pam: There’s also the implication that Nature is not in control here. She’s caught without her diadem, so she wasn’t expecting the snow (what is her tiara, exactly?). Which is a bit odd, for a poem about the weather!
Brenna: Yes! When, in a Dickinson poem, is Nature ever NOT in control?? And “caught without her diadem” is a rather different thing from “caught without pants on.” So what first catches your eye about this one?
Pam: Caught without her EpiPen. Caught without her midi hem. These are very different poems.
Brenna: Caught without her EpiPen is bad news. I mean. All those bees in Dickinson poems.
Pam: The rhyme caught my eye first. Or ears, I suppose! I think she does something very interesting with the rhyme scheme. It comes back on you when you’re not expecting it. “Low” in the first line comes back in the end of the second with “snow” and the end of the fourth with “go.” This has to be deliberate, because she uses the same pattern in the next stanza: middle of line five, “wind;” end of line six, “him;” end of line eight, “diadem.”
Brenna: I did not notice that.
Pam: Three rhyming words per four-line stanza, with the rhyme for the stanza happening first in the middle of that stanza’s first line. It’s odd, right?
Brenna: Thank goodness there is a smart person working on this project.
Pam: Maybe the rhyme scheme is meant to invoke the will-it-or-won’t-it snowflake? Or the wind sounds coming and complaining? And you are the one who caught the pronouns!
Brenna: Okay, if the rhyme is happening where it isn’t expected, maybe that’s mirroring Nature’s failure to expect/anticipate winter. And mirroring her sort-of disheveledness. Though, honestly, caught without your diadem? Not a huge prob. Unless you’re implying that Nature is hugely vain.
Brenna: I love how you always notice the rhyme scheme.
Pam: I love smart sounds in poems!
Brenna: Only semi-related, but do you ever wonder if Dickinson thought all her thoughts in the same meter? I mean, it really is true that you can sing all these poems to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” isn’t it?
Pam: I think you’re absolutely right. All of the agencied characters have problems, don’t they? What if Nature can’t find her diadem because she’s been deposed? Dun dun dunnnnnnn
Brenna: Does agency make one a hot mess? The having to choose, to make do with one’s lot, to get caught unprepared? Nature is deposed!! WHAT WOULD EMILY DO??
Pam: I did not notice the meter. Someone’s going to rescind my degree.
Brenna: LOL
Pam: They’re going to take back my eyeliner and all of my ruffled shirts. No more peasant skirts for you!
Brenna: I mostly notice because when we did “Come Slowly, Eden” in college, everybody made the point of singing ALLLLL the Emily Dickinson poems. Not in performance, of course. But I will never be 100% able to take “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” seriously.
Pam: Part of me thinks: sure, it was the style at the time, it demonstrates mastery, it’s ridiculously hard to do in short poems because you’ve got to be concise. Part of me thinks: why would you do that to yourself, woman?
Brenna: I am really kinda starting to think that her brain just worked in that meter.
Pam: Confession: I have no idea how the melody of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” goes.
Brenna: Now I want to read her letters…..are they in meter??
Today’s poem is about water. Well, sort of. It’s complicated. And, as with most Emily Dickinson poems, blessedly short: you can find it contained here, within just six short lines that achieve quite a bit.
“Water is taught by thirst”: I suppose you could interpret this a couple of ways. Is water learning thirst? I don’t think so. I think I’m going to go with the path of least resistance here, the easier read, and say that water’s not learning to be thirsty, but some unspoken someone is learning to be thirsty for want of water. Because it’s a new year, and you do you, but in this year I’m inclined to go with my gut.
And because it’s such a visceral line. Yes, we learn thirst when we lack water, just like we learn seasonal depression when we lack sunlight. Happy January!
So: we miss water (or need it, which may and may not be two separate things) when we’re thirsty; we miss land when we’re traveling through vast oceans. “Transport, by throe”: Mirriam-Webster tells me that “throe” means a severe pain, like childbirth. Okay, traveling is painful, that’s fair. Peace is earned through battles; love by a memorial mould, which I’m imagining as a tombstone: you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
Birds are taught by the snow.
Record screech. Four days in and I’m learning that Emily Dickinson and the hard right turn are well acquainted. But at the same time that I’m thinking no, hold on, this doesn’t make sense, I also understand it in a fundamental way. Like Sheriff Hartwell says in my favorite episode of The X-files, “I ain’t hearing any birds singing, right? Course, it’s winter, and we ain’t got no birds.”
Aptly stated. We notice things when they’ve gone; do we appreciate them when we’re here? I don’t much care about the water that comes out of my faucets every time I turn the knob–but there was one morning, several years ago, when I awoke early to get ready for a job interview, and the taps didn’t work. The city had shut off all the water to fix a busted water main somewhere else, and that morning, I knew several kinds of thirst. Once the water came back, I wasn’t really very appreciative; I was angry that it had been gone, and I treated it as something that I deserved, not as something to be treasured.
Here’s to a year of treasuring the small, glinting jewels in our paths while the sun still shines, so that when it’s nighttime, we don’t miss them so much.
A Deed knocks first at Thought
And then—it knocks at Will—
That is the manufacturing spot
And Will at Home and well
It then goes out an Act
Or is entombed so still
That only to the ear of God
Its Doom is audible— ~Emily Dickinson (draft here)
I am flying solo with this one, and I don’t know what to do with it past a certain point. I am beginning to wonder if this is how an Emily Dickinson poem works–it lures you in with some lovely tidy little aphorism that of course you understand, and then BOOM!! you get hit over the head by syntax and the thing with feathers is flying in circles around your skull, cheeping like in cartoons when someone gets bludgeoned with a falling Acme anvil.
Every act manifests first as thought, and then you have to actually summon the will to…
And here is our conversation, lightly edited for clarity. Our credentials: one of us has an MFA in poetry and one of us once played Emily Dickinson in a play and still gets kind of emotional about it.
P: Dickinson XL, yes?
B: Yes! Dickinson XL sounds funny.
P: Doesn’t it? It sounds very millennial.
B: It sounds like athletic wear.
P: I have no idea about the ending of this one. I understand it for four lines, and then it takes a train elsewhere. But I love that opening line. That “when.”
The Emily Project 