bouquet

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South winds jostle them,
Bumblebees come,
Hover, hesitate,
Drink, and are gone.

Butterflies pause
On their passage Cashmere;
I, softly plucking,
Present them here!

~Emily Dickinson

This is a lovely little poem. Though on its face it reads like a riddle, never naming its subject, the reader knows that the poet is talking about flowers. The language is typically evocative–jostling winds, drinking bees, and butterflies “On their passage Cashmere.” The whole thing sounds like it could have been lines penned and pinned on a bouquet of flowers gathered for a friend–a gift to be presented with love and reverence.

Gossip?

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The leaves, like women, interchange
Sagacious confidence;
Somewhat of nods, and somewhat of
Portentous inference,

The parties in both cases
Enjoining secrecy,—
Inviolable compact
To notoriety.

~Emily Dickinson

In my edition of Dickinson’s poems, this one has been titled “Gossip.” It’s interesting how a title can interpret and shift the meaning of a poem. Is Dickinson really talking about gossip? Does she mean to imply all that that loaded word conveys?

I’m not sure what to do with this poem, and it’s possibly at least in part because of that superimposed title. We’ve all been taught that gossip is bad. But what about “sagacious confidence”? That doesn’t sound bad. Is Dickinson being facetious? What does she mean by this?

It seems significant that the simile here is between women and leaves, a part of the natural world that, in “whispering” in the breeze, are doing exactly what leaves are supposed to do. No judgment there. Yet human gossip is a bad thing–and an activity stereotypically linked to women.

If the leaves are part of nature, aren’t the women part of it as well? Maybe the focus isn’t so much on what they’re saying as why they’re saying it in this way. I wonder how much of women’s whispered gossip has historically been subversive. Women in Western cultures have traditionally been silenced, left to whisper amongst themselves, their “sagacious confidence” dismissed as “gossip,” painted as petty and harmful.

Whose is the notoriety here? That of the people being talked about, or the women themselves? I have so many questions about this small poem, but I feel like Dickinson wouldn’t just go for the obvious–oh, look gossipy women, bad!! I feel like there’s more to her words than appears on the surface–I’m just not exactly sure what that is.

Image via pexels.com:
https://www.pexels.com/search/autumn%20leaves/

a bird

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A Bird, came down the Walk –
He did not know I saw –
He bit an Angle Worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,

And then, he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass –
And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass –

He glanced with rapid eyes,
That hurried all abroad –
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought,
He stirred his Velvet Head. –

Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers,
And rowed him softer Home –

Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plashless as they swim.

~Emily Dickinson

Though I love digging deep into poems for their secret meanings, I’m content to appreciate this one on its surface. It’s a lovely close observation of one tiny element of nature–a bird hopping down a path.

The speaker’s delight in the observation spills over in her language. There’s a wonderful contrast between the first stanza, which makes the bird out to be almost cannibalistis–the angleworm he eats is described as a “fellow”–and the second stanza, where the bird courteously yields right-of-way to a passing beetle.

The final stanza is loveliest of all. Dickinson’s description of the bird’s flight is as flawless as that flight itself. The bird is so intimately a part of its surroundings that its flight does not rend the air but becomes part of it, and the human observer can only look on in wonder.

a permission slip

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I held a jewel in my fingers
And went to sleep.
The day was warm, and winds were prosy;
I said: “’T will keep.”


I woke and chid my honest fingers,—
The gem was gone;
And now an amethyst remembrance
Is all I own.

This is yet another straightforward poem in the tradition of many others. The speaker has lost something precious, and is left with a lovely memory.

What strikes me about this poem is the fifth line: “I woke and chid my honest fingers.” The speaker blames herself for her loss, but acknowledges that she is not really to blame. This rings so true for me as a woman–so often I blame myself for something that isn’t my fault because I’ve been taught to capitulate, to be diplomatic, to soothe other’s feelings first while bottling up my own.

So today, in honor of this poem, I’m offering you a permission slip. Today, you get to forgive yourself for all the things you’ve been feeling guilty about that aren’t really your fault. Today, you get to let those go.

Try it. See what happens.

Which, sir, are you?

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In lands I never saw, they say,
Immortal Alps look down,
Whose bonnets touch the firmament,
Whose sandals touch the town,—

Meek at whose everlasting feet
A myriad daisies play.
Which, sir, are you, and which am I,
Upon an August day?

~Emily Dickinson

One of the gorgeous things about poetry is that it often unfolds slowly, like a flower. You have to wait for it. Its meanings unfurl gradually, and you can read a poem several times before the magical reading that suddenly unlocks the final key to its meaning.

That has been my experience of this poem. I’ve read it several times while paging through my copy of Dickinson’s poem. Each time, I thought, “I have no idea what to do with this. It’s just Emily being all Emily in the most annoying way–“Big strong man, I am so small!”

Somehow, though, I read it yet again a few days ago and it fell open, like one of those puzzle boxes that unlatch easily the moment you hit on the right spot to press. This poem is Emily being all Emily, but in the best way.

It initially reads as flirty Emily, which is definitely not the Emily we’re all taught to know in English classes. She starts out sounding very innocent and ignorant: “In lands I never saw,” and follows it up with “they say,” suggesting that she’s getting her information secondhand, that she doesn’t probably really know what she’s talking about. She then proceeds to personify the Alps as if she has seen them, right down to the little daisies playing at their feet.

The Alps are “immortal,” they “look down,” their “bonnets touch the firmament,” their feet are “everlasting.” They stand in stark contrast to the “meek” daisies playing around them. The Alps are eternal, the daisies fleeting.

Dickinson ends her poem with a question to an unnamed man: “Which, sir, are you, and which am I,/ Upon an August day?” It’s this question that truly unlocks the meaning of the poem, like that last little piece you press on the puzzle box when you’ve just about given up.

The tone here is so flirty and coy. Of course she’s the daisies and he’s the immortal Alps. She’s flattering him, setting him up.

But.

She poses the question, and it’s the fact that it is a question that unlocks the wonderful subversiveness of this poem. The man is going to read this and think, “I’m the Alps, duh!” But Dickinson’s ending with the question itself makes us ask. Which one is which? The fact that the end of the poem is a question mark opens it up to interpretation. What if he’s the daisies and she’s the Alps? What if the woman is eternal and powerful and not the man?

But again, she ends with a question, and this to me is the real meaning and genius of the poem. The fact that she does ask, that she does set up a potentially subversive answer, is important. The poem isn’t really about who’s the Alps and who’s the daisies–it’s about the fact that she dares to pose this as a question in the first place.

Clouds like listless elephants

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On this long storm the rainbow rose,
On this late morn the sun;
The clouds, like listless elephants,
Horizons straggled down.

The birds rose smiling in their nests, 5
The gales indeed were done;
Alas! how heedless were the eyes
On whom the summer shone!

The quiet nonchalance of death
No daybreak can bestir; 10
The slow archangel’s syllables
Must awaken her.

~Emily Dickinson

Surprise! It’s an Emily Dickinson poem about…death!

This poem follows the same sensibility of many of Dickinson’s poems on the subject. Either a man or a woman has died, while all around them, life goes on as usual. There is a sense of bereavement from those left behind, but in the grave, all is quiet, accepted.

What strikes me as particularly marvelous about this Dickinson poem about death is the simile of the elephants in the first stanza. Exactly halfway through the poem, there is a very clear shift from images of beauty in nature and a sense of relief at coming through the storm to a sense of loss–a shift from life to death.

The elephantine clouds in the first stanza, however, are the foreshadowing. While the rest of nature is bright and vibrant, the clouds are “listless” and straggle down the horizon. It sounds like these elephants are on their last legs. There’s a sense of heaviness, too, in the choice of elephants, which is wonderfully paradoxical–clouds are light, floating.

Dickinson goes on to mention birds, a gale, and an archangel–all light things, flying things. The elephants in the sky, listlessly straggling down the horizon, stand in stark contrast. It’s a wonderful simile, and an excellent example of Dickinson on her A-game–offering up a view of the world from a surprising and challenging perspective.

Prompt: The wind

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Of all the sounds despatched abroad,
There ’s not a charge to me
Like that old measure in the boughs,
That phraseless melody

The wind does, working like a hand 5
Whose fingers comb the sky,
Then quiver down, with tufts of tune
Permitted gods and me.

When winds go round and round in bands,
And thrum upon the door, 10
And birds take places overhead,
To bear them orchestra,

I crave him grace, of summer boughs,
If such an outcast be,
He never heard that fleshless chant 15
Rise solemn in the tree,

As if some caravan of sound
On deserts, in the sky,
Had broken rank,
Then knit, and passed 20
In seamless company.

~Emily Dickinson

There’s so much loveliness in this poem–the wind as music permitted to be heard by both gods and humans; the “fleshless chant,”; the “caravan of sound”…….I could wax rhapsodic about this one. I love how Dickinson literally breaks ranks with her own stanza length by throwing in an extra line in the final stanza where she describes the wind as a caravan breaking rank.

But today’s post is not me geeking out or being baffled by another Dickinson poem. It’s a prompt for you.

What visceral effect does the wind have on you? Is it thrilling? Unnerving? Uplifting? Write a poem or paragraph in which you tease out that feeling through simile and metaphor à la Dickinson.

Summerspell

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A something in a summer’s day,
As slow her flambeaux burn away,
Which solemnizes me.

A something in a summer’s noon,—
An azure depth, a wordless tune, 5
Transcending ecstasy.

And still within a summer’s night
A something so transporting bright,
I clap my hands to see;

Then veil my too inspecting face, 10
Lest such a subtle, shimmering grace
Flutter too far for me.

The wizard-fingers never rest,
The purple brook within the breast
Still chafes its narrow bed; 15

Still rears the East her amber flag,
Guides still the sun along the crag
His caravan of red,

Like flowers that heard the tale of dews,
But never deemed the dripping prize 20
Awaited their low brows;

Or bees, that thought the summer’s name
Some rumor of delirium
No summer could for them;

Or Arctic creature, dimly stirred 25
By tropic hint,—some travelled bird
Imported to the wood;

Or wind’s bright signal to the ear,
Making that homely and severe,
Contented, known, before 30

The heaven unexpected came,
To lives that thought their worshipping
A too presumptuous psalm.

~Emily Dickinson
“As slow her flambeaux burn away”…….

I’ve been studiously avoiding this poem for a while because the syntax baffled me in places and I didn’t know what to say about it. I’ve read and re-read it, thinking that I’d write about it, and every time, I came up short. Suddenly, as I’m staring at the end of summer and the start of the school year, I realize that maybe my wordlessness is the point.

Despite the fact that this is a long poem by Dickinson’s usual standards, she too seems to have trouble pinning a word to the experience she’s describing. For the first three stanzas, she repeats the words “a something,” as if she’s struggling to say what she means–or is acknowledging that some things can’t be trapped by language, affixed on paper like pinned insects.

This sense of vagueness continues through the rest of the poem, maintained by words like “veil,” “subtle,” “rumor,” “dimly.” The funky syntax in places helps to sustain this vagueness, too. I’m still not sure exactly how to parse the eighth stanza–“no summer could for them”?!? Really, Emily? But I think now that all this verbal meandering and twisting out of reach is extremely intentional. Dickinson is recreating summer in the form of a poem.

There’s something ephemeral about this sweet hot season–it slips away before we’ve completely made sense of it, fully enjoyed it. Like the poem, with its longer-than-usual length but shorter-than-usual stanzas, summer seems both long and short. And like the poem, it is hazily dreamlike, magical. The three-line stanzas begin to feel incantatory. Dickinson uses language like “shimmering” and “wizard-fingers.” The summer’s day is described as simultaneously solemn, ecstatic, and transporting. It’s a religious experience in the last stanza, with words like “heaven,” “worshipping,” and “psalm.”

I wonder if what Dickinson is doing here is not so much trying to define summer as capture our human experience of it. It is a magical season, a holy one–but then, they all are. Summer is elusive, fleeting. As I read through the poem yet another time, I realize that this is one that will continue to echo in my consciousness as I watch my children swimming underneath the August stars, running wild on the dark dew-soaked grass.

The soul

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The soul unto itself
Is an imperial friend,—
Or the most agonizing spy
An enemy could send.

Secure against its own,
No treason it can fear;
Itself its sovereign, of itself
The soul should stand in awe.

~Emily Dickinson

Oh, Emily. So few words, yet so much to unpack. The soul is “imperial,” sovereign–each of us ultimately has final authority over our own selves. Yet the soul is both “an imperial friend” and “the most agonizing spy.” We are our own worst enemies. This rings true on both the individual and societal levels. The first stanza feels pretty straightforward.

It’s in the second that things get interesting. She’s just said that the sovereign soul is also its own worst enemy, but now she describes it as “Secure against its own,” and says that it cannot fear any treason. Wha??

Maybe the first two lines of the second stanza aren’t meant to describe how the soul actually is, but how it perceives itself. It feels “secure against its own,” and it is incapable of fearing treason–but this doesn’t mean that treason is impossible. After all, it’s when we’re most comfortable that we let our guard down. And if the ultimate enemy is yourself, then your enemy is always closer than you think.

I like the typically Dickinsonian religious rebellion implied here, too. The soul is its own sovereign–not any external power. Each person’s soul is responsible for itself. There’s a sort of blasphemy mixed with New England Puritan emphasis on responsibility here, and somehow it works.

I wonder how often any of us “stand in awe” of our own souls and the power they wield. If we made a regular practice of this, I imagine the world might be a very different place.

“this bequest of wings”

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He ate and drank the precious words,
His spirit grew robust;
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was dust.
He danced along the dingy days,
And this bequest of wings
Was but a book. What liberty
A loosened spirit brings!

~Emily Dickinson

What is it about our favorite books–not the ones we liked or even loved, but the ones we need almost as viscerally as breath? There are books I revisit from time to time, stories that never grow old but rather new, richer, stories that unfold a little more each time I return to them. These are the “precious words” Dickinson is talking about–the ones that can change everything, that transport us, that have the power to save us from our circumstances and even ourselves.

I don’t know why, but I haven’t felt my usual need to read this year. It feels odd to not be in the midst of a book, to not have a pile of them stacked up and waiting, to not binge-read hundreds of pages in a couple of days. But for some reason, since the beginning of this year, I just haven’t wanted to read.

About a month ago, though, I picked up my well-read and pencil-marked copy of Moby Dick. I am not sure I’ll ever be able to articulate why a 21st century feminist writer/French teacher/wife/mother would need this book the way I do–but I do. I need it. It is, for me, one of those life-giving books. I even like the tedious chapters on whale body-parts. I realize this makes me something of a freak. I could not care less.

I haven’t been blowing through the book the way I usually do. Instead, I’ve been reading it in bits and pieces, slowing down, finding new passages to underline. By the time I’m eighty I will probably have underlined half the words in the book. It’s fascinating the way a very conscious, deliberate re-reading of a familiar book can become a reading of oneself as a reader, too. The things that years-ago me found necessary to underscore are still vital, but now there are more things, new things, words I missed fully appreciating on all my previous read-throughs. This book keeps transforming itself in my hands. Like Janet in the tale of Tam Lin, I keep hold of it, but just barely. Sometimes it threatens to twist out of my grasp.

Wings indeed. A book is perhaps the truest form of freedom, not only because it frees us from this world for a little while, but because the story itself is free to grow, change, eternally become.