Experience

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I stepped from plank to plank
So slow and cautiously;
The stars about my head I felt,
About my feet the sea.


I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch,—
This gave me that precarious gait
Some call experience.

~Emily Dickinson

This is a fascinating little poem. The central metaphor seems like a nautical one, but is the speaker referencing a pier? a ship? Without specifying, she still conveys a sense of precariousness. It sounds as if she’s up high–“the stars about my head I felt”–or at least feels as if she is, balanced above the sea. In just a few short lines, Dickinson manages to convey that tentative balancing act.

There’s something lovely about the notion of having one’s head in the stars, and I can’t help but think that Dickinson intends us to think this in addition to giving a sense of great height and precariousness. And the idea of feeling the stars…that is simply magical.

In the second stanza, the speaker conveys her uncertainty–she is inching forward, not knowing if’when she will lose her footing. It is this inching, this tentative advance, she says, that gives her the “precarious gait/Some call experience.”

How often do we look at those around us who are playing it safe and assume that they know what they’re doing, that they somehow “have it all together” because they’re not falling, when all they’re doing is inching along? Is it better to be cautious or to plunge forward into life, come what may?

“Forgot”

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There is a word
Which bears a sword
Can pierce an armed man.
It hurls its barbed syllables,—
At once is mute again.
But where it fell
The saved will tell
On patriotic day,
Some epauletted brother
Gave his breath away.


Wherever runs the breathless sun,
Wherever roams the day,
There is its noiseless onset,
There is its victory!
Behold the keenest marksman!
The most accomplished shot!
Time’s sublimest target
Is a soul “forgot”!

~Emily dickinson

I like the way this poem is a riddle that contains its own answer–it reminds me a little of the Old English riddle poems. Dickinson’s subject is a weighty one–the forgetting of souls. Some of Dickinson’s poems express a fear that the poet will slip into obscurity, but this one feels different–she’s being more philosophical here, I think. The forgotten soul is time’s target, ironically, in that time does not remember it. It’s a strange elision.

Whether she’s talking about herself or souls in general, though, there’s also a poignancy to this poem. The image of the wounded soldier forgotten on the battlefield clinches this, but it’s something many (most? all?) of us think about–who will remember us when we are gone? Will anyone? Does what we do now matter?

In which we disagree about childhood

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Softened by Time’s consummate plush,
How sleek the woe appears
That threatened childhood’s citadel
And undermined the years!


Bisected now by bleaker griefs,
We envy the despair
That devastated childhood’s realm,
So easy to repair.

~Emily dickinson

I’m going to have to take issue with The Myth on this one. Well, not so much take issue as offer an opposing viewpoint. The world is full of adult humans who would no doubt agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment expressed in this poem: when we’re children, we experience griefs and woes and setbacks that seemed enormous at the time, but now, in retrospect, are enviable in their simplicity, their relative mildness, to what we experience as adults.

But here’s the thing–I suspect that those adults who look back on childhood as some sort of golden age are the grownups who’ve forgotten what it was like to be a child. Perhaps childhood’s griefs–at least for the privileged some of us–are not as “serious” as adulthood’s, but that doesn’t mean they’re any less important or impactful. The storms that rock our childhoods mattered every bit as much then as adult ones do now, and they probably shaped us more, occurring as they did in our formative years.

How can anyone quantify anyone else’s grief, anyone else’s hardship? I frequently hear people–okay, women, it’s almost always women–comparing their griefs and losses to other people’s and concluding that other people have it worse, that they themselves should shut up and just be grateful. But there’s no yardstick for grief. We feel it how we feel it. And when we are children, we feel it keenly. It molds us, carves us, lathes us into what we will become. Childhood’s griefs are no less important that those of adulthood, no less “serious” just because they may appear lesser in magnitude to things that seem important to adults.

Adults too often have forgotten what’s truly important. It’s as if a veil settles over our eyes, clouding our vision of the world. We begin to accept that it’s the things of adulthood that matter, forgetting that entire world of childhood, the world that makes us. Childhood’s griefs are not necessarily “easier to repair”–I’d argue that they’re harder. There is no going back.

So, for all the grownups out there who remember what it was like to be a child, who consciously and eternally hold within their adult shells the children they were (and still are), I see you. Your childish griefs matter. They were real, and they are real. Don’t forget what it was to be a child. The children who have not yet hardened into adults need you to remember.

Dawn

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Not knowing when the dawn will come
I open every door;
Or has it feathers like a bird,
Or billows like a shore?

~Emily Dickinson

What if I did this? What if I rose before sunrise and flung every door wide? What if I waited, in the dew-chill silence of early morning, for the sunrise? What if I welcomed each day in like a long-expected guest?

“Only a balloon”

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You’ve seen balloons set, haven’t you?
So stately they ascend
It is as swans discarded you
For duties diamond.


Their liquid feet go softly out
Upon a sea of blond;
They spurn the air as’t were to mean
For creatures so renowned.


Their ribbons just beyond the eye,
They struggle some for breath,
And yet the crowd applauds below;
They would not encore death.


The gilded creature strains and spins,
Trips frantic in a tree,
Tears open her imperial veins
And tumbles in the sea.


The crowd retire with an oath
The dust in streets goes down,
And clerks in counting-rooms observe,
“’T was only a balloon.”

~Emily dickinson

This poem is meeting me right where I am today. Lately, my life has seemed overfull of clerks in counting-rooms who cannot or will not see the wonder all around us. I’m reminded anew of why I teach–because kids, of any age, have not yet succumbed to all the world’s shoulds and supposed tos. Kids still see the magic in balloons, and this is part of what makes them infinitely better company than a great many adults.

I feel sorry for the clerks. How dreary to be somebody who only sees the surface of things, whose soul does not intuit beyond the obvious to the possible–to the impossible, even. What are we if we accept the current possible and refuse to imagine what seems in this moment impossible? How much art, science, literature, beauty, wonder in the course of human history would never have happened if we all looked at balloons and said, “Hmph. Only a balloon and nothing more”? How often do we let the clerks have the last word?

Only clouds.

Dragons!!

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FAR from love the Heavenly Father
Leads the chosen child;
Oftener through realm of briar
Than the meadow mild,


Oftener by the claw of dragon
Than the hand of friend,
Guides the little one predestined
To the native land.

~emily dickinson

I want to do an alternate reading of this poem wherein the little child is delighted to be led by giant dragons who, let’s be real here, are way more interesting than the generic “friend.” The Realm of Briar is a faerie court of wonderfully fey beings, and maybe when the child arrives at the “predestined” land, she turns around and goes back to have the adventure all over again rather than settling for the ease of a life of milk and honey.

But I know what Dickinson is really saying, and I’m feeling it. It’s been a dragony week–a dragony month, beset with obstacles and setbacks of all kinds. I am trying to take comfort in these words, in the idea that all of this struggling is leading somewhere better. It’s hard to see the promised land for the briars when you’re smack in the middle of them, though.

Of robins and gardens and the pathetic fallacy

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HOW dare the robins sing,
When men and women hear
Who since they went to their account
Have settled with the year!—
Paid all that life had earned
In one consummate bill,
And now, what life or death can do
Is immaterial.
Insulting is the sun
To him whose mortal light,
Beguiled of immortality,
Bequeaths him to the night.
In deference to him
Extinct be every hum,
Whose garden wrestles with the dew,
At daybreak overcome!

~emily dickinson

Nature always dares to continue her cycles, no matter what we small humans are up to. I remember learning about the pathetic fallacy as a student–the literary tendency to describe Nature as reflective of human emotions. If I’m writing a heart-wrenchingly tragic scene, rain is falling–if everything finally worked out, the sun bursts from behind a cloud.

In this poem, however, the speaker calls Nature out for refusing to comply with the human emotional state. How dare birds sing joyfully from the trees when humans suffer and die? The sun is “insulting.” There is a realism to this view, morbid though it may sound. Nature doesn’t react to our feelings. Our passing doesn’t imprint much upon the physical world.

I love the image at the poem’s end of the garden of the deceased “wrestling with the dew.” The garden is a place where humans attempt to contain and control Nature. As any gardener can tell you, this never works out perfectly for the humans, but still we try. When we have passed on, our gardens succumb, back to the wilderness from which they were first wrested.

Spring springs eternal

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A LADY red upon the hill
Her annual secret keeps;
A lady white within the field
In placid lily sleeps!


The tidy breezes with their brooms
Sweep vale, and hill, and tree!
Prithee, my pretty housewives!
Who may expected be?


The neighbors do not yet suspect!
The woods exchange a smile—
Orchard, and buttercup, and bird—
In such a little while!


And yet how still the landscape stands,
How nonchalant the wood,
As if the resurrection
Were nothing very odd!

~Emily dickinson

There’s a lovely quality of waiting to this poem–the anticipation of something beautiful and familiar, something expected and consistent. Spring is like that–we can depend upon it. It always comes, bringing with it its usual cast of characters. Though there may be fluctuations from year to year, it always arrives essentially on time.

Dickinson absolutely crams this poem with personification–it’s everywhere, in almost every line. The red and white ladies are probably specific plants she’s thinking of, but they could be any red and white spring blooms. I like how the poem ends with the notion of the earth itself not being overwhelmed by anticipation, as we human creatures often are when spring is near. The landscape is “still,” the wood “nonchalant.” Nature always trusts that spring is coming. It’s we humans who forget that, who get overwhelmed, distracted, who lose hope. But nature waits, patiently, knowing that all things arrive in their season.

Who?

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BRING me the sunset in a cup,
Reckon the morning’s flagons up,
And say how many dew;
Tell me how far the morning leaps,
Tell me what time the weaver sleeps
Who spun the breadths of blue!


Write me how many notes there be
In the new robin’s ecstasy
Among astonished boughs;
How many trips the tortoise makes,
How many cups the bee partakes,—
The debauchee of dews!


Also, who laid the rainbow’s piers,
Also, who leads the docile spheres
By withes of supple blue?
Whose fingers string the stalactite,
Who counts the wampum of the night,
To see that none is due?


Who built this little Alban house
And shut the windows down so close
My spirit cannot see?
Who ’ll let me out some gala day,
With implements to fly away,
Passing pomposity?

~Emily dickinson

This is peak Dickinson. This is perhaps The Most Emily Poem of all time. For starters, it’s a riddle. Dickinson piles on question after question, never answering them. There’s also a lot of exclaiming and rapture about nature. She mentions robins. She mentions bees. She even describes bees as “debauchee of dews,” a phrase she uses in another poem, the better-known “I taste a liquor never brewed.”

There are lots of unanswerable questions, lots of breathless delightings in the glories of nature. There are oodles of gorgeous and quirky descriptions: “how many dew,” “astonished boughs,” “withes of supple blue,” and on and on. There’s an obscure references–what is an “Alban house”? Is she talking about Scotland? Why?? Or is she referencing the saint? Again, why?? And, of course, in true Dickinsonian fashion, the poem ends in death–with the promise of resurrection.