I never hear the word “Escape”
Without a quicker blood,
A sudden expectation –
A flying attitude!I never hear of prisons broad
~Emily Dickinson
By soldiers battered down,
But I tug childish at my bars
Only to fail again!
À mes amis français, bonjour et bonne fête nationale!
If you’re unfamiliar with France’s most important national holiday, you can read more about it here. Joyeux quatorze!
I envy seas whereon he rides,
I envy spokes of wheels
Of chariots that him convey,
I envy speechless hillsThat gaze upon his journey;
How easy all can see
What is forbidden utterly
As heaven, unto me!I envy nests of sparrows
That dot his distant eaves,
The wealthy fly upon his pane,
The happy, happy leavesThat just abroad his window
Have summer’s leave to be,
The earrings of Pizarro
Could not obtain for me.I envy light that wakes him,
And bells that boldly ring
To tell him it is noon abroad,—
Myself his noon could bring,Yet interdict my blossom
~Emily Dickinson
And abrogate my bee,
Lest noon in everlasting night
Drop Gabriel and me.
Though it’s not a sonnet by any stretch, that’s what this poem reminds me of most–a plaintive love song wherein the speaker envies anything and everything in proximity to the beloved. It’s evocative of Romeo’s wish to be a glove upon Juliet’s hand that he might touch her cheek. Dickinson’s speaker wishes to be the sea beneath the beloved’s ship, the wheels of his carriage, the hills he passes, the nests under his eaves, the fly on his window, the leaves of nearby trees. Even the wealth of Pizarro, in the form of earrings, couldn’t buy her the delights these things enjoy in being close to her beloved.
As in a sonnet, there’s a shift toward the end of this poem, beginning with the telling Yet. In the final stanza, she asks that her blossom be prohibited, her bee done away with (presumably these are forms she might take in order to be close to him, and of course they carry their own romantic/sexual imagery). The “noon” she longs for, the fully developed connection to her beloved, might drop her into “everlasting night,” and that would be worse than her current longing.
Morning is the place for dew,
~Emily Dickinson
Corn is made at noon,
After dinner light for flowers,
Dukes for setting sun!
One of the side-effects of growing up is that you start to inadvertently recall all the wise old sayings you detested as a child. When I read this poem, the one that springs to mind is, “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” These lines aren’t concerned with human order, however–the artificial arrangement of our worlds–but with the natural order of things. Dew belongs in the morning. Corn ripens in the hottest part of the day, and the afternoon sun nourishes blossoms. They are followed by sunset, which is the place for dukes. Dukes may be human, of course, but this post by Susan Kornfeld makes an excellent argument for the Duke owl, which would of course emerge after sunset to hunt.
Nature has its perfect order. Everything is where it should be. There is a time for everything, a place for everything, and when everything is in its place, all is right with the world.
I started early, took my dog,
And visited the sea;
The mermaids in the basement
Came out to look at me,And frigates in the upper floor
Extended hempen hands,
Presuming me to be a mouse
Aground, upon the sands.But no man moved me till the tide
Went past my simple shoe,
And past my apron and my belt,
And past my bodice too,And made as he would eat me up
As wholly as a dew
Upon a dandelion’s sleeve—
And then I started too.And he—he followed close behind;
I felt his silver heel
Upon my ankle,—then my shoes
Would overflow with pearl.Until we met the solid town,
No man he seemed to know;
And bowing with a mighty look
At me, the sea withdrew.
There’s so, so much I love about this poem, and so much I could say. It has the feel of the best kinds of fairy tales–the old ones–lovely and darkly glimmering, beautiful and somehow ominous, and just familiar enough for its strangeness to feel bone-chillingly strange.
On this reading, the thing that strikes me is the perspective in the poem–not just the speaker’s voice, but the physical position from which she is speaking. It begins in an ordinary way–she rises early, and goes to the shore with her dog. Then things begin to get interesting. The mermaids in the “basement” are presumably rising up from the depths of the sea; the frigates ride atop it, in the upper floor. To the mermaids, fantastical creatures of myth, the human speaker is the curiosity; to the massive frigates, she is merely a stranded mouse.
The speaker stands by the sea as the tide comes in–past her shoes, apron, belt, bodice, threatening/promising to swallow her completely. This would seem ominous, but then we get the odd line, “And then I started too.” Started what? To become the sea? To rise like the tide?
Suddenly now she is not in the sea but with it, being followed by it, the sea brushing her ankle, her shoes overflowing. Speaker and sea arrive at a town, and the line “No man he seemed to know” echoes the earlier line “But no man moved me,” again linking water and woman, and excluding man. Finally, the sea bows and withdraws, seeming to understand that it must leave her in the realm of land-dwelling things.
The whole poem reads almost like one of those Greek myths in which human and nature collide and coalesce in strange and unexpected ways. There is magic here, certainly, whether it is the magic of mermaids and sentient waters, or merely the magic of language to evoke the wondrous and strange.
An everywhere of silver,
~Emily Dickinson
With ropes of sand
To keep it from effacing
The track called land.
A riddle–not even a complete sentence, but a suggestive fragment, in Dickinson’s characteristic painterly style with words. The ocean is an everywhere, a water planet, though we land-dwelling creatures tend to forget this. It is only a narrow band of sand that separates the realm of the mermaids from our own narrow track.
There came a wind like a bugle;
~Emily Dickinson
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 panting 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!
Storms here begin with a slight shift of the light, a fluttering at the margins of the day. First the wind rises, kindled before the approaching tempest. Pine boughs toss and nod to slim locusts and walnuts, polite at first, until their branches begin a frenzied tangle. The first few premature walnut leaves tear loose and fall like golden teardrops dashed away by an invisible hand. Distant harbingers of autumn, they are sobering in their brightness, shimmering reminders that all things come to an end.
But the storm is not truly imminent until the Alleghenies are lost behind a cloak of blue-grey, first blurring and then vanishing as if into legend. When the mountains disappear, and only then, is the onslaught inevitable. Then we batten down the hatches, dash for the laundry, and wait. Though, more often than not, there isn’t time to wait before the first few spattering drops, dashed sideways by the courier wind, cut sideways through the whirling air.
As I write, the rain has stopped blowing sideways and is falling almost straight down, thunder grumbling above and lightning just flashes barely illuminating the lowering clouds. Some time after the end of June, summer thunderstorms cease to have the look of downpours that bring rainbows and instead take on the tints of autumn, hints of long rainy days that fade seamlessly into lengthening nights. Every season comes hard on the heels of the one before and ties itself into knots with the next. Sometimes I think there are either no seasons, or three hundred sixty-five of them. Maybe even twenty-four seasons a day…
This rain falls on already damp red clay, on tomatoes and peppers that have had quite enough, thank you, on chickens who don’t seem to mind too much as long as it’s not a hurricane. The bees have tucked themselves away safely in their boxes. How dry and warm it must be inside, the air heavy with warmth and pollen and the hum of tens of thousands of wings.
Yesterday was a garden day, a yard day, a swimming pool day. A day to overdo the fresh air and sunshine, because really, such things cannot be overdone. Today is a day for tea and introspection, a day to draw back out of the elements and open a book of poetry.
A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides –
You may have met him? Did you not
His notice instant is –The Grass divides as with a Comb,
A spotted Shaft is seen,
And then it closes at your Feet
And opens further on –He likes a Boggy Acre –
A Floor too cool for Corn –
But when a Boy and Barefoot
I more than once at NoonHave passed I thought a Whip Lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled And was gone –Several of Nature’s People
I know, and they know me
I feel for them a transport
Of CordialityBut never met this Fellow
~Emily Dickinson
Attended or alone
Without a tighter Breathing
And Zero at the Bone.
This is one of my favorites. If you don’t like snakes, consider yourself warned: snake stories follow.
My most recent snaky encounters were at the beach, if you don’t count the five-foot blacksnake skin festooned through our shed last week. On a nature trail at the Outer Banks, coming back along the path through a marshy area one afternoon, a rustle of movement in the grass caught my son’s and husband’s attention. A long, thick fellow was riding through the scrubby undergrowth. We couldn’t identify him, despite the interesting markings on his back, and thus weren’t too keen to get close. We tried to snap pictures for later identification, but still haven’t succeeded in figuring out exactly who he was.
We were headed back toward the car, content with our excitement for the day, when something rustled on the other side of the path, about ten yards or so from the first fellow. It was another indeterminate brown snake, smaller than the first but rather lively and not inclined to welcome visitors. As best we can determine, this was a water snake of some sort, but again, we weren’t terribly interested in snuggling up to discuss with him the finer points of his taxonomy.
Earlier this summer, we were at a cookout with friends and family. Everyone had eaten all the burgers and s’mores they could stand, and twilight was falling thick around us. Evening is typicaly not a snaky time, so the sudden movement in the gloaming grass didn’t immediately clue me in. It came closer, and I realized a small snake was headed right for me in the dark. As I hollered “Snake!!” and everyone crowded around (we are the kind of people who usually run toward snakes), the snake decided to curl up on the apparent safety of my right shoe. It was a milk snake–a really lovely little being–normally very docile, but camera shy. As the lights came on, the snake on my right shoe, failing to associate its safe haven with the nearly identical object next to it, attacked my left shoe. So I got bit by a snake this summer, but in the best possible way.
Other snaky encounters this summer have included repeated visits from a large blacksnake who insists on getting tangled up in netting in the neighboring garden, and who must periodically be untangled and released with gentle hands and stern warnings. It’s been a good summer for snakes. I’m still waiting for the magical teensy-tinsy ringneck snakes who like to bask on our warm carport cement on a summer evening.
Even though I happen to be one of the people who loves and appreciates snakes, Dickinson is absolutely spot-on in her description of encountering them unexpectedly. Whenever I am out berry-picking and a sudden rustle in the grass draws my eye to the flicker of a disappearing scaly tail, the first words that jump into my mind are the last ones of this poem–“Zero at the Bone.”
Two swimmers wrestled on the spar
Until the morning sun,
When one turned smiling to the land.
O God, the other one!The stray ships passing spied a face Upon the waters borne,
~Emily Dickinson
With eyes in death still begging raised,
And hands beseeching thrown.
Maybe I’ve been watching too much BBC lately, but this sounds like a murder to me. I haven’t found any reference to this yet, but the image of the swimmers wrestling on the spar, with one succeeding and surviving, the other drowning, is suggestive.
It’s also curious the way the speaker inserts herself as observer. The broken exclamation, “O God, the other one!” sounds as if she is somehow watching the drama unfold, if only in her very vivid imagination.
The poem also reads like a riddle. Who or what do the two swimmers represent? What do you think?
From cocoon forth a butterfly
As lady from her door
Emerged—a summer afternoon—
Repairing everywhere,Without design, that I could trace, Except to stray abroad
On miscellaneous enterprise
The clovers understood.Her pretty parasol was seen
Contracting in a field
Where men made hay, then struggling hard With an opposing cloud,Where parties, phantom as herself,
To Nowhere seemed to go
In purposeless circumference,
As ’t were a tropic show.And notwithstanding bee that worked,
And flower that zealous blew,
This audience of idleness
Disdained them, from the sky,Till sundown crept, a steady tide,
~Emily Dickinson
And men that made the hay,
And afternoon, and butterfly,
Extinguished in its sea.
Dickinson here articulates perfectly the air that butterflies give off. While everything around them is purposeful, bursting and growing and hunting and prowling and photosynthesizing and raising babies, butterflies are just fluttering around. They appear so purposeless in their beauty that they are not even active enough to be idleness itself–they’re simply the “audience of idleness.” They’re spectating idleness rather than participating in it, so idle are they.
Dickinson describes the apparent aimlessness of butterflies wonderfully. They fly “without design,” “miscellaneous enterprise,” communing with “phantom” parties in a “purposeless circumference.”
Of course butterflies are doing something. They just look like they’re not. In the process, though, they are a reminder to slow down, to take the long, fluttering route, to savor each drop of every sweet summer day before it vanishes into the sea of night, into the onset of autumn, and the distant memory of winter.
Who never lost, are unprepared
A coronet to find;
Who never thirsted, flagons
And cooling tamarind.Who never climbed the weary league—
Can such a foot explore
The purple territories
On Pizarro’s shore?How many legions overcome?
The emperor will say.
How many colors taken
On Revolution Day?How many bullets bearest?
~Emily Dickinson
The royal scar hast thou?
Angels, write “Promoted”
On this soldier’s brow!
Because no revolution comes without a price.
The Emily Project 