Summer’s dregs

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THESE are the days when birds come back,
A very few, a bird or two,
To take a backward look.

These are the days when skies put on
The old, old sophistries of June,—
A blue and gold mistake.

Oh, fraud that cannot cheat the bee,
Almost thy plausibility
Induces my belief,

Till ranks of seeds their witness bear, 1
And softly through the altered air
Hurries a timed leaf!

Oh, sacrament of summer days,
Oh, last communion in the haze,
Permit a child to join,

Thy sacred emblems to partake,
Thy consecrated bread to break,
Taste thine immortal wine!

~Emily Dickinson

These are the last hot days of summer, returning in full force here at the end of September. In the Valley, temperatures are climbing. It’s about time to put the garden to bed, but it feels like it’s time to water it.

Bursts of dragonflies explode from the pine trees on our evening walks in the heavy evening heat. The sun beats down as if it is mid-July. But it will dip below the horizon much, much sooner. Bright red globes of tomatoes still punctuate the garden.

These are strange and precious days, heavy with summer yet whispering in the slant of the light, in the dripping gold walnut leaves, of fall. Hummingbirds still visit the feeder, still war over its sweet sugar syrup.

But tomorrow is the Autumn Equinox, Mabon, the harvest holiday. Tomorrow the balance will tip, and thought the two butterflies tangling their flights outside my window don’t know it yet, the long dark of the year is waiting in the wings.

Before I got my eye put out-

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Before I got my eye put out –
I liked as well to see
As other creatures, that have eyes –
And know no other way –

But were it told to me, Today,
That I might have the Sky
For mine, I tell you that my Heart
Would split, for size of me –

The Meadows – mine –
The Mountains – mine –
All Forests – Stintless stars –
As much of noon, as I could take –
Between my finite eyes –

The Motions of the Dipping Birds –
The Morning’s Amber Road –
For mine – to look at when I liked,
The news would strike me dead –

So safer – guess – with just my soul
Opon the window pane
Where other creatures put their eyes –
Incautious – of the Sun –

~Emily Dickinson

Today you get a video, because this is pretty fantastic: John Green’s literature crash course on Emily Dickinson. Enjoy!

Esoteric time

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’T WAS later when the summer went
Than when the cricket came,
And yet we knew that gentle clock
Meant nought but going home.

’T was sooner when the cricket went
Than when the winter came,
Yet that pathetic pendulum
Keeps esoteric time.

~Emily Dickinson

So much human thought is devoted to time, which bemuses me, since time is something we’ve constructed. We invented it, and then got ourselves all bent out of shape over it. We talk about time management, worry about it, pay people to do it for us. And yet we never quite seem to fully understand it. We’ve created a creature that’s grown beyond our understanding. Esoteric indeed.

Autumn is almost here. Monday is the Autumn Equinox. The sun will cross the equator and we will cross into the dark side of the year. We will celebrate the darkness at Halloween, and then in December we will light a hundred thousand million lights to try to hold it back.

Our relationship with time is a fascinating one.

too far!

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I know that He exists.
Somewhere – in silence –
He has hid his rare life
From our gross eyes.

’Tis an instant’s play –
’Tis a fond Ambush –
Just to make Bliss
Earn her own surprise!

But – should the play
Prove piercing earnest –
Should the glee – glaze –
In Death’s – stiff – stare –

Would not the fun
Look too expensive!
Would not the jest –
Have crawled too far!

–Emily Dickinson

It’s not just the mention of silence in the first stanza but also the continued metaphor of play and contrast between bliss and pain that calls to mind Robert Browning’s Tempest-inspired “Caliban upon Setebos.” In Browning’s poem Caliban, the monster enslaved by Prospero, muses on his understanding of the divine. It’s a fantastic poem–read it here, and see what you think.

Is Heaven a physician?

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IS Heaven a physician?
They say that He can heal;
But medicine posthumous
Is unavailable.

Is Heaven an exchequer?
They speak of what we owe;
But that negotiation
I ’m not a party to.

~Emily Dickinson

For today’s poem, a prompt: compare a place or state of being to a person, as Dickinson does in this poem with Heaven and a physician/an exchequer. It’s an odd comparison, but it works. What place or state of being can you compare to a human being in a way that unpacks some of its significance?

A Thought

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A Thought went up my mind today —
That I have had before —
But did not finish — some way back —
I could not fix the Year —

Nor where it went — nor why it came
The second time to me —
Nor definitely, what it was —
Have I the Art to say —

But somewhere — in my Soul — I know —
I’ve met the Thing before —
It just reminded me — ’twas all —
And came my way no more —

~Emily Dickinson

This isn’t the first poem we’ve encountered here that deals with the elusiveness of thought. I love that this is something that seems to preoccupy Dickinson. She’s known for poems about love and God, but my favorites, as a group, are her poems about thinking. I love how she grapples with the nature of thought itself, with its seeming randomness and propensity to appear and disappear on a whim. Good stuff.

In this poem, the thought that eludes her is a character unto itself. It appears, reminds her of its existence, and flits away–it’s a perverse little thing, annoying and teasing. She isn’t able to say when she’s encountered it before, where it came from, why it came, or even what it is. All she can do is record that feeling of vague frustration in poetry.

delight // pain

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Delight becomes pictorial
When viewed through pain,—
More fair, because impossible
That any gain.

The mountain at a given distance
In amber lies;
Approached, the amber flits a little,—
And that ’s the skies!

~Emily Dickinson
Image via Pexels.com.

I don’t know how much I have to add to this. It’s so true! When we’re suffering, all the good times appear “pictorial.” All the possible connotations fit. Something that is pictorial is not only lovely, but also unreal–a picture, after all, is not the real thing. In times of pain, delight seems not only lovely, but impossibly so.

The second stanza elaborates. When we’re at a certain distance from happiness, mired in the morass of our own misery, that happiness is tinged with different colors–colors that the real thing doesn’t possess. This poem is a tightly-constructed and well-thought-out mini-meditation on the nature of suffering and what it does to our experience of happiness.

The culprit

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Surgeons must be very careful
When they take the knife!
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the Culprit – Life!

~Emily Dickinson

I’ve read this short poem over and over, and am still struggling to make sense of it. Surgeons have to be careful because what’s at fault is life itself? Maybe she means that life is imperfect, that we only get sick and injured, need mending and healing, because we are alive? Surgeons have to be careful not to kill people, because life itself is what’s to blame for all our ailments? I think that’s it…..what do you think?

In which Emily is not G-rated and there is a whole lot going on

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The thought beneath so slight a film
Is more distinctly seen,—
As laces just reveal the surge,
Or mists the Apennine.

~Emily Dickinson

So much going on in this tiny poem. It’s just a simile, really, but there is all sorts of stuff to unpack. First, Emily Dickinson talking about boobs. !! Definitely not one I ever saw in a middle school English textbook. Then there’s the comparing of the “surge” to mountains, which is a pretty clichéd metaphor for breasts, but still lovely with the correspondence between lace and mist.

But the real gist of the poem is that thoughts are clearer when slightly clouded, and this is a fascinating idea. I wonder what the “film” is that she’s talking about. She seems to be thinking of something specific–“so slight a film”–but the reader has no real clue as to what that film is. Is she talking about language? tone? something else?

I don’t know…but I do know I’ve already expended many more words in trying to unpack this poem than Dickinson ever needed to write it, and that is as good a definition of what poetry is as anything else I can think of.

A question:

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FOR each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy.

For each beloved hour
Sharp pittances of years,
Bitter contested farthings
And coffers heaped with tears.

~Emily Dickinson

I find this one perplexing. In the first stanza, the speaker tells us that for every happiness, there must be an equal sorrow, and perhaps this is true. But in the second stanza, she shifts her argument to the extreme. Now she’s arguing that for each happy hour, we pay for it for years in bitterness and tears.

What is she doing here? I really don’t know quite what to make of this one. What do you think?