Lonely houses

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I KNOW some lonely houses off the road
A robber ’d like the look of,—
Wooden barred,
And windows hanging low,
Inviting to 5
A portico,

Where two could creep:
One hand the tools,
The other peep
To make sure all ’s asleep. 10
Old-fashioned eyes,
Not easy to surprise!

How orderly the kitchen ’d look by night,
With just a clock,—
But they could gag the tick, 15
And mice won’t bark;
And so the walls don’t tell,
None will.

A pair of spectacles ajar just stir—
An almanac’s aware. 20
Was it the mat winked,
Or a nervous star?
The moon slides down the stair
To see who ’s there.

There ’s plunder,—where? 25
Tankard, or spoon,
Earring, or stone,
A watch, some ancient brooch
To match the grandmamma,
Staid sleeping there. 30

Day rattles, too,
Stealth ’s slow;
The sun has got as far
As the third sycamore.
Screams chanticleer, 35
“Who ’s there?”

And echoes, trains away,
Sneer—“Where?”
While the old couple, just astir,
Think that the sunrise left the door ajar!

~Emily Dickinson
Image via Pexels.

So begins a very October series of poems–Dickinson on the creepy, the macabre, the night-dwelling creatures, in honor of the spookiest month of the year.

I cannot adequately express how much I love this poem. This is the Dickinson poem I had no idea I needed. It’s deliciously creepy, linguistically playful, and just generally delightful.

This poem seems to represent a whole other side of Dickinson. The sight of “lonely houses” far from the road leads her into a dark little thought-experiment in which she at times seems to be imagining the scene from the perspective of the robber. This is definitely not what I was ever taught about Dickinson in school, and I love how unexpected it is.

She sets the scene so well–the lonely houses, the robber creeping in, the silence threatened by the smallest of sounds, the elderly couple asleep, in peril. What Dickinson is this??

What follows is even better–Dickinson’s wildly inventive use of language to personify the objects and creatures in the house: the gagged clock, the barking mouse, the stirring spectacles, the aware almanac, winking mat, nervous star, and that gorgeous image of the moon sliding “down the stair.” And then that final description of the old couple waking to find the door ajar and surmising that it was the sunrise who left it thus.

The structure is fun, too–uneven line lengths mimicking the tentative steps of the pair of robbers as they strive not to wake the old couple and alert their sentient possessions; and the final stanza, which has one less line than all the rest, as if the robbers have stolen that along with tankard, spoon, and antique jewelry.

I seriously cannot get enough of this poem. I keep reading and rereading it, struck each time by the nuances of some little detail or other, as well as by the entire mood of it, and the sheer unexpectedness of it. It’s a perfect October poem–though Dickinson never mentions the season, it feels like it has to be autumn.

Coming up this month–bats, mice, mushrooms, spiders, ghosts, cobwebs, spirits, graves, and, of course, death. Because Emily Dickinson.

Into the beautiful

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AS imperceptibly as grief
The summer lapsed away,—
Too imperceptible, at last,
To seem like perfidy.

A quietness distilled,
As twilight long begun,
Or Nature, spending with herself
Sequestered afternoon.

The dusk drew earlier in,
The morning foreign shone,—
A courteous, yet harrowing grace,
As guest who would be gone.

And thus, without a wing,
Or service of a keel,
Our summer made her light escape Into the beautiful.

~Emily Dickinson

Imperceptible indeed. This summer has hung on longer than the last, it seems. The days are still, for the most part, hot and sunny. The weather has been dry, the few clouds stingy with their rain.

Yet the shift is happening. This morning, the predawn world is cloaked in an autumnal mist, though the temperature is already in the seventies. Only crickets sing outside my window. The drooping boughs of the evergreens are black against the paling sky.

Summer’s escape this year is light, so light that it seems not to have left. It trails heat after it, though the light of June, July, August is already fading. Where does summer go? Into the beautiful? What and where is that? Some fey country, no doubt, where leaves never fall and flowers do not fade.

After the oppressive heat of summer, though, I will happily take this mortal beautiful–the beauty of blazing leaves, then bared branches, then a landscape cloaked quietly in snow. Snow seems like magic these early autumn days, as impossible as summer seemed half a year ago.

meek mornings

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The morns are meeker than they were – 
The nuts are getting brown –
The berry’s cheek is plumper –
The rose is out of town.

The maple wears a gayer scarf –
The field a scarlet gown –
Lest I sh’d be old-fashioned 
I’ll put a trinket on. 

~Emily Dickinson

5:59 a.m. The sun has not yet risen, has not sent even a whisper of pink over the horizon. A month ago the skies would have been a riot of predawn color, the birds jubilant. Meeker now, indeed.

These are strange and precious days–the adolescent days of autumn, as awkward and unpredictable as a child growing into her skin. Like an almost-teen, these autumn/summer days sometimes hang on to the past like grim death, refusing to acknowledge that change is inevitable. Other times, they bolt forward, early out of the gate, overeager for whatever is next.

Here, autumn is having a Lost Boys moment, reluctant to grow up. The days have been swelteringly hot, not unusual for September but always disconcerting. It’s supposed to have been autumn for eight days now. It hasn’t felt like it.

Even so, the pumpkins are swelling in the garden. The hummingbirds who did battle over the feeder in the back yard haven’t shown themselves for a few days. The Canada geese who raised their family in the cattle pond down the road have been gone for a while now.

Things are shifting. The world tilts, spins, shifts, rebels a little against the sun. Meek mornings are a sign of silent insurrection, not of any underlying actual meekness.

The dark days are coming. They are here. Let us light candles and bonfires in the darkness, draw close to hearth and home, bring in the harvest, and spin the long nights into stories.

Apparently with no surprise

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Apparently with no surprise
To any happy flower,
The frost beheads it at its play
In accidental power.

The blond assassin passes on,
The sun proceeds unmoved
To measure off another day
For an approving God.

~Emily Dickinson

What a weird and wonderful little poem! The flower is unsurprised by its own death, the speaker tells us. Yet the flower is happy anyway, at least until the moment of beheading. The frost which kills it is “accidental,” just playing around. Dickinson goes on, however, to refer to the frost as an “assassin” in the second stanza, which does not sound accidental at all. “Unmoved” by all the drama below, the sun continues marking off days, and God approves of all of this.

What if we were more like flowers, happy as much as we could possibly be, knowing and accepting that the assassin will eventually come for us, in season, too? What if we accepted life’s cycles instead of fighting them at every turn? The last stanza of this poem sounds so cold, but it might also read as God’s approval for the rightness of meeting nature where it is, not warring against it. The frost is playing, the flower is happy, and death will be the end of the latter–but this is as it should be.

Odd secrets of the line

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Just lost when I was saved!
Just felt the world go by!
Just girt me for the onset with eternity,
When breath blew back,
And on the other side
I heard recede the disappointed tide!

Therefore, as one returned, I feel,
Odd secrets of the line to tell!
Some sailor, skirting foreign shores,
Some pale reporter from the awful doors
Before the seal!

Next time, to stay!
Next time, the things to see
By ear unheard,
Unscrutinized by eye.

Next time, to tarry,
While the ages steal,–
Slow tramp the centuries,
And the cycles wheel.

~Emily Dickinson

The phrase “Odd secrets of the line” has snared my imagination. It reminds me of these lyrics, so today’s post is a conversation between two poems. I’ll put them both here and let them talk it out.

Heaven’s a bar down by the dock
Where the liquor is free they keeps a great stock
There’s always a place, always a smile
For a sailor come home from sea
Girls they are beauties they dance and they sing
They treat an old tar like a lord or a king
Heaven’s a bar down by the dock
Where there’s liquor for all and it’s free

Heaven’s a bar down by the dock
Where the liquor is free they keeps a great stock
There’s always a place, always a smile
For a sailor come home from sea

There in the snug drinking with me Shipmates return from the seven salt seas Tarry tailed tars, gold buckles shoes
The cream and the dregs of the crew.
Just sailors on shore with a dream in their eyes
Who saw the world’s end where the sea meets the sky
Vision remains, wonders recalled By the trinkets that hang on the walls

Late in the night clouds hurry past
The moon winks and goes, the doors are barred fast
The charts are laid out, the contraband found The crossbones laid out on the ground
The figurehead does it she never gets tired She beckons a breeze from her berth by the fire
Songs roll around, waves hit the bar
Til the bottles wash up on the shore

~”Heaven’s a bar,” via Warham Whalers

The music of the spheres

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Musicians wrestle everywhere:
All day, among the crowded air,
I hear the silver strife;
And—waking long before the dawn—
Such transport breaks upon the town
I think it that “new life!”

It is not bird, it has no nest;
Nor band, in brass and scarlet dressed,
Nor tambourine, nor man;
It is not hymn from pulpit read,—
The morning stars the treble led
On time’s first afternoon!

Some say it is the spheres at play!
Some say that bright majority
Of vanished dames and men!
Some think it service in the place
Where we, with late, celestial face,
Please God, shall ascertain!

~Emily Dickinson
Harmony of the World
Image via Wikipedia.

The sun is about to crest the horizon. While I have sat at my desk this morning, the sky has bled from black to whisper-pale violet and coral to predawn blue. Birds have begun singing, though their chorus is nowhere near as exuberant as it was a month ago.

What is the music Dickinson is talking about in this poem, and who are the musicians? She tells us that they are not birds–but then, what are they? Is their music even audible, or is she describing a sound beyond sound, one of those ethereal experiences of insight into a world past our own?

Is she referring to the music of the spheres, the ancient notion that the movements of the planets in the heavens corresponded to a kind of song? There is something very Dickinson-y about this.

Maybe she is talking, too, about inspiration, or its source. It is invisible. It comes from seemingly nowhere and everywhere, and not everyone can hear it at all times. In the final stanza, the speaker merely puts forward others’ theories–some say it is the spheres, some say it is the departed (ghosts? angels?), and some say it is the sound of Heaven itself.

She ends on this note. Uncertainty. But also possibility. Whence does the music flow? One day, hopefully, we will learn.

the little implement

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Prayer is the little implement
Through which men reach
Where presence is denied them.
They fling their speech

By means of it in God’s ear;
If then He hear,
This sums the apparatus
Comprised in prayer.

~Emily Dickinson

Prayer can seem like such a small thing.

I have always had a sense of my own prayers as balloons, rising softly only to get stuck bumping around in a corner of the ceiling, never getting where they are supposed to be going. Other people’s prayers, I am certain, find their destination, wing their way right to where they’re supposed to be.

We fling our speech heavenward, hoping for an answer, a cure, absolution, redemption. Where does it go? Where do words go once they are spoken? Where does that sound go?

The “If” in the second and final stanza is so interesting to me. If God hears, then that is prayer. Prayer has been achieved. It isn’t prayer, apparently, if the “little implements” never arrive at their destination.

I wonder what I have been doing all this time.

White Martyrdom

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To learn the transport by the pain,
As blind men learn the sun;
To die of thirst, suspecting
That brooks in meadows run;

To stay the homesick, homesick feet
Upon a foreign shore
Haunted by native lands, the while,
And blue, beloved air—

This is the sovereign anguish,
This, the signal woe!
These are the patient laureates
Whose voices, trained below,

Ascend in ceaseless carol,
Inaudible, indeed,
To us, the duller scholars
Of the mysterious bard!

~Emily Dickinson

This poem is an interesting contrast to yesterday’s, in which the poet argues that something attained is worth less than it was before–that when a starving man finally gets food, that food loses its deliciousness simply by being available. This poem, on the other hand, argues that to never be able to reach something longed for is torment–“the sovereign anguish,” “the signal woe!”

Which one is it, Emily?

She is a study in contradictions. I’ve read I don’t know how many mentions and discussions of the paradoxes within Dickinson’s poems, but her whole body of work is rife with contradiction between one poem and the next, too.

I don’t know what to do with this poem, but I know that, aside from the infernal paradoxes, what intrigues me most is the second stanza. The speaker gives the example of someone far from home, longing for familiar places. She repeats the word “homesick” for emphasis, an interesting choice in a short poem that makes me wonder if this is really what this poem, at its heart, is all about.

Of course, because this is Dickinson, this is all liable to be heavily metaphorical and probably has a lot to do with death. But what it reminds me of is the concept of white martyrdom.

It seems that there is some disagreement over whether it is properly labeled “green” or “white,” but I’m going with “white” since that’s how I first encountered the term. In the lives of saints, martyrdom is typically bloody–“red martyrdom.” People die for their faith in spectacularly gory ways. But the desert hermits and many of the Irish monks pursued a different kind of holiness-through-suffering. They left behind the familiar, the beloved, and struck out for new and forbidding terrains, where landscape itself served as a reminder that this world is only temporary. Giving up your life and ascending to everlasting reward is one thing. Giving up your homeland and living out your days in separation from home is another. There is pain and privation in both, and while death is the ultimate sacrifice one can make in this world, the giving-up of home is a more prolonged suffering.

When Columcille and his monks set out in their curraghs for what would come to be called Skellig Michael, they were pursuing white martyrdom, leaving behind the green hills of Ireland for an existence eked out on a barren rock in the sea. Their experience must have been nearly identical to what Dickinson describes in this poem–except that they chose their lot, while the tone of the poem seems to suggest otherwise.

savory distance

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Undue significance a starving man attaches
To food
Far off; he sighs, and therefore hopeless,
And therefore good.

Partaken, it relieves indeed, but proves us
That spices fly
In the receipt. It was the distance
Was savory.

~Emily Dickinson

What a bizarre little poem.

The main idea is solid. That which we don’t have, which we can’t get, seems wonderful, even perfect. When we attain it, we realize its imperfections, its failure to be everything we thought and hoped it could be.

But here’s where I get a little lost–the first two lines. “Undue significance a starving man attaches/To food.” Um. Emily. “Undue significance”? If a person is truly starving, they probably aren’t going to care too much about spices and flavors. Is it even possible for food to have “undue significance” to a starving person when that significance is the difference between life and death?

The speaker acknowledges that, “Partaken, it relieves indeed,” but then goes on to say that food loses its flavor when tasted.

I think she’s trying to say here that when we attain something we’ve wanted (needed?), we find it doesn’t live up to our expectations, that anticipation is greater than experience, and I’m totally on board with that argument.

But.

To compare it to food and starvation? That feels really off to me. For someone as sensitive to the plight of suffering beings as Dickinson, the metaphor feels tone-deaf. Unless–which is completely possible and probably likely–she’s chosen it for some clever and arcane Emily reason I haven’t managed to figure out yet.

There’s a lot of privilege in being a white woman in the nineteenth century. A lot of privation, certainly, but also a lot of privilege. Maybe my twenty-first century perspective is fatally skewing my reading of this poem. Maybe I’m a little distracted by the kid with the concussion and the students who are stressed out and the million responsibilities of home and work. Maybe I need to revisit this one another day. Not every poem is for every moment.

memory awake

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Remorse is memory awake,
Her companies astir,—
A presence of departed acts
At window and at door.

Its past set down before the soul,
And lighted with a match,
Perusal to facilitate
Of its condensed despatch.

Remorse is cureless,—the disease
Not even God can heal;
For ’t is His institution,—
The complement of hell.

~Emily Dickinson

This is a fascinating poem. The notion that “Remorse is memory awake” rings very true–it’s when we remember that we regret, repent. Remorse sounds like an army in the first stanza, “Her companies astir,” and is also the “presence” of that which we thought was “departed.”

This all seems pretty straightforward and apt. It’s in the final stanza that things get really interesting. The speaker claims first that “Remorse is cureless,” which may be, but then goes on to argue that even God cannot heal it. This questioning of God’s omnipotence is very Dickinson. She then goes on to say that God cannot heal it because it is his own creation and “The complement of hell.”

There is so much going on here. God is powerless against remorse. God created remorse. Remorse is God’s, and is the complement of hell. A complement, according to Merriam-Webster, is ” something that fills up, completes, or makes better or perfect.” So remorse is the perfection of hell, completing it.