This is for everyone who, after struggling through February, emerged hopefully into March to discover that it’s actually February in disguise. It’s below freezing here in what is supposed to be the South. The daffodils are having second thoughts. Sometimes things are not what they ought to be, or what we want them to be. Here’s to making our way through the mist into the light of day, of spring, of fresh hopes and dreams realized.
Dear March – Come in – How glad I am – I hoped for you before – Put down your Hat – You must have walked – How out of Breath you are – Dear March, how are you, and the Rest – Did you leave Nature well – Oh March, Come right upstairs with me – I have so much to tell –
I got your Letter, and the Birds – The Maples never knew that you were coming – I declare – how Red their Faces grew – But March, forgive me – And all those Hills you left for me to Hue – There was no Purple suitable – You took it all with you –
Who knocks? That April – Lock the Door – I will not be pursued – He stayed away a Year to call When I am occupied – But trifles look so trivial As soon as you have come
That blame is just as dear as Praise And Praise as mere as Blame –
Why we are not as jazzed about March as Emily. Exhibit A: Alabama.
Brenna: The thing about this poem that interests me most is that she seems to want to prolong March, and is annoyed by the prospect of April cutting March short.
Pam: This makes me wonder what’s so wonderful about March in Massachusetts.
Brenna: This is an excellent question.
Pam: Because, let me be honest here, March in Alabama is absolutely horrific.
Brenna: March in New England has got to be rougher than March in Virginia, too.
Why we are not as jazzed about March as Emily: Exhibit B: Virginia.
Pam: We had deadly tornadoes on Sunday and we’ve had a ridiculous amount of rain and today it’s 30ish degrees outside with a windchill in the 20s.
Brenna: I did google the red maples, and it turns out that they do briefly turn red in spring before they turn green. But March is NOT a friendly month. It’s freezing here today–lows in the teens this week.
Pam: Perhaps the best thing about March is that February is over?
Brenna: March is breathless–that’s a great description–but it isn’t kind.
Pam: So at least there’s the hope of nicer weather ahead, and green growing things?
Brenna: Yes!I have noticed on walks lately that the birds are singing differently. March is the promise of spring, even if it’s not here yet. And the chickweed and wild onions are green, even if nothing else is yet.
Pam: We have a tremendous amount of growing things. Daffodils are almost done here, actually; they started blooming in the last week of February. The tulip trees are going bonkers. Grass is greening up. But this ridiculous, ridiculous cold weather is 100% February and I am sick of it. I suppose the annoying thing about April is that February does all the work of getting to spring, and then April takes over right as things are getting good.
Brenna: So in March, spring is imminent, but we’re not out of the woods yet. Why is she so reluctant to let April in?Is it something specific about March? Maybe it’s March’s storminess. We’ve talked before about how cold and storms seem to serve as her metaphors for passion, and March is a passionate kind of month meteorologically.
Pam: She’s a little bit scandalous about March, too, isn’t she? Taking it right inside and upstairs and closing the door?
Brenna: Yes! Emily and March–get a room!! It’s as if March and April are suitors. April has stayed away for a year. April is the guy you’re secretly in love with who’s completely uninterested in you until you have a boyfriend, and then he makes a move.
Pam: And, interesting–although of course she had nothing to do with this–the next poem begins “We like March.” We do like March!
Brenna: We LOVE March because IT IS NOT FEBRUARY.
Pam: YES. In Huntsville, we wish that March would stop trying to be February. We feel a little bit like March and February divorced, and we’re spending our week with February before we get a weekend with March. So maybe March is not necessarily her first choice, but she is not going to let April know that.
Brenna: That is a fantastically apt description. Maybe she is angry at April for being absent so long, and so she’s trying to make it jealous by taking March upstairs.
Pam: Beginnings are so fun, aren’t they? When you see the first daffodil shoots, and the first bulbs about to open. And at least here, April doesn’t get any of that. So maybe it’s that March is doing the work for spring and April just gets to breeze on in and take up the mantle, and she’s resentful.
Brenna: As the daughter who stayed home and never married, I can see that resonating with her. Oh, no, wait, Lavinia didn’t get married, either: https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/lavinia_dickinson This is fascinating. Apparently, Lavinia burned Emily’s letters, as Emily requested, but Emily left no instructions about the poems. So the publication of the poems was not in any way counter to Emily’s wishes, as far as anyone can tell.
Pam: What was in the letters, though??
Brenna: Who knows??? But I don’t want anyone reading my letters after I’m dead!!
Pam: Same, but I want to read Emily’s.
Brenna: I always feel weird reading famous people’s letters.
Pam: I understand this is selfish. But Lavinia, WHY?
Brenna: Because Emily said, and she was the oldest sister, and apparently Lavinia was devoted to her. BUT. Did Lavinia read them before burning them??
Pam: Lavinia. What did you know??
Brenna: I’m poking around online and finding references to Dickinson’s letters that suggest that some of them are still out there. ???
It’s all I have to bring today— This, and my heart beside— This, and my heart, and all the fields— And all the meadows wide— Be sure you count—should I forget Some one the sum could tell— This, and my heart, and all the Bees Which in the Clover dwell.
Emily Dickinson
All I have to bring today is–everything. The dance lesson in an hour and fifteen minutes. The groceries I ordered because I have no time (or patience) to brave the plague-riddled folk in the store. The student emails that never end. The grading that has, quite frankly, become laughable. The three poems currently in edit mode in my head, and the two nonfiction essays waiting to be drafted. The partial rejection that arrived today after I sent off requested material thirteen months ago. The cold that is a slap in the face if you try to breathe outside. The daffodils I forgot to plant. The ponies holding court in the dining room floor. The broken sippy cups leaking in backpacks. Our department secretary, who has retired, and the empty office that needs filling. My coffee cup, which needs a spigot.
A quality of loss is affecting my content today as, after a sunny, breezy early spring day yesterday, I woke to sleet that quickly turned to snow. The afternoon light is wintry now, the snow changed again to rain. But I can take refuge in this poem, and dream of warmer, sunnier days.
THE robin is the one That interrupts the morn With hurried, few, express reports When March is scarcely on.
The robin is the one That overflows the noon With her cherubic quantity, As April but begun.
The robin is the one That speechless from her nest Submits that home and certainty And sanctity are best.
Emily Dickinson
Ah, the poem where I am a bird.
How much have I been waiting and hoping for February, and its cold, dreary, infinitely rainy days, to end? How much hope have I placed in March for warmer and dryer and sunnier days?
My entire Saturday was consumed with a conference for English professors. I told my son on Friday night that I’d have to leave early, and I probably wouldn’t see him before my ride came to pick me up (too early). But he did wake up in time, and came downstairs to say bye. And then he started crying.
“I never get to see you,” he said. “You’re not supposed to have to go to work on Saturday.”
The last two Saturdays I’ve had work commitments, it’s true. And I’ve had other late evenings, too. And this absolutely broke my heart. I hugged him, and promised him that I’d play Mariokart with him when I got back. I’m going to keep that promise.
LXXXVIII We like March, his shoes are purple, He is new and high; Makes he mud for dog and peddler, Makes he forest dry; Knows the adder’s tongue his coming, And begets her spot. Stands the sun so close and mighty That our minds are hot. News is he of all the others; Bold it were to die With the blue-birds buccaneering On his British sky.
I find this oddball poem completely delightful. Its bizarre syntax and quirky excitement perfectly capture how topsy-turvy giddy I felt this morning upon realizing that we made it through February! While the sun is not particularly close or mighty (the dog and I walked through the icy remnants of last night’s wintry mix), the birds sound like spring. The first wild herbs of March are greening along fencerows. Trees are budding, their sap on the move. Winter is passing, and though the blue-birds are not yet buccaneering as far north as Virginia, they are on their way.
What does she mean? That we outgrow individual loves for specific people? Or that we outgrow love itself? Whatever the answer, this poem seems like a fitting farewell to our month of Emily Dickinson love poems. We haven’t outgrown them–we’ve scarcely begun to grow into them–but it’s been a rich and interesting month for the Emily Project.
Again and again I’m struck by how breathlessly I can adore one Emily Dickinson poem, and how much I can chafe at another. Despite the similarities between her poem in terms of length, syntax, and style, they form a fascinatingly diverse body of work.
This poem seems especially fitting because of its multiplicity of possible interpretations. Four lines should be straightforward, but they aren’t. How do we “put love in the drawer”? If it’s “in the drawer,” doesn’t it still exist? Don’t you still have it, albeit hidden? If we “put it in the drawer” until it looks outdated, are we putting it away before we should? As has become par for the course, Dickinson raises more questions than she answers. Perhaps that’s really what poetry is for.
I suppose this project, this blog, is our love letter to Emily Dickinson. No relationship is without its ups and downs, or its moments of transcendence. Good ones include tears, frustrations, challenges ,and laughter. I have found all of these in Dickinson’s poetry.
This is our letter to the poet who didn’t write to us–and yet somehow did.
“Going to him! Happy letter! Tell him— Tell him the page I did n’t write; Tell him I only said the syntax, And left the verb and the pronoun out. Tell him just how the fingers hurried, Then how they waded, slow, slow, slow; And then you wished you had eyes in your pages, So you could see what moved them so.
“Tell him it was n’t a practised writer, You guessed, from the way the sentence toiled; You could hear the bodice tug, behind you, As if it held but the might of a child; You almost pitied it, you, it worked so. Tell him—No, you may quibble there, For it would split his heart to know it, And then you and I were silenter.
“Tell him night finished before we finished, And the old clock kept neighing ‘day!’ And you got sleepy and begged to be ended— What could it hinder so, to say? Tell him just how she sealed you, cautious, But if he ask where you are hid Until to-morrow,—happy letter! Gesture, coquette, and shake your head!”
There are many strange and interesting things happening in this often-anthologized poem. Why is the entire thing in quotation marks? The speaker is addressing the letter she’s just written, which is fascinating. She’s essentially written a letter to the letter she just wrote, telling it about all the things she hasn’t written.
According to the speaker, the letter she’s just written omits verb and pronoun. In this short poem, she uses forty-four verbs and forty pronouns. I cannot think of another poem that makes such enthusiastic use of the word “it.” Interestingly, the speaker repeatedly refers to herself as “it,” while the letter is always “you.”
This entire poem is about all the things a letter doesn’t say: “the page I didn’t write,” “I only said the syntax,” “Tell him–No.” But the third stanza is where things get especially strange. She has already asked the letter to tell its recipient about the circumstances of its writing. But now she implores the letter to not tell him where it is hidden. How can it tell him where it’s hidden if it’s hidden and he doesn’t know where it is?
I think that what’s happening here over the course of the poem is the gradual conflation of the speaker with the letter–of the writer with her writing. We talk about how writers pour their hearts into their work, and in this case the act seems literal. In writing the letter, the speaker has poured herself out into it, become it. They have almost switched places–she has become “it,” while the letter is a human “you” that can tell, wish, get sleepy, flirt.
There’s something lovely in this notion that the writer becomes the writing, particularly when it comes to letters. It’s an oft-repeated platitude that handwritten letters are more personal, more intimate–and it’s true. We touch them, impart to them warmth, scent, energy, intent. We touch something that someone else then touches. We make something with our naked hands rather than by machine. We make it for one person, and one only. In writing a letter, we send a little fragment of ourselves.
We do not know how our letters will be received (on rare occasions they aren’t). To write them, to send them, to pour ourselves into the creation of them, is an act of trust. The nervousness Dickinson describes is palpable, and it reminds me of the little flip in my stomach every time I slip a letter into that irrevocable brass slot in the post office wall. A little piece of me has gone out into the world, never to return. As soon as the envelope, slim and svelte or bulging with scribbled words and glitter, falls from my fingers, I can no longer control its destiny. Often, as soon as it’s beyond my control, I think of all the things I didn’t say, the things I forgot, the things I wasn’t sure how to articulate in the moment. It’s tempting to want to call the letter back, to explain, to contextualize, to add on and flesh out.
Letter writing seems to be having a bit of a resurgence. Like the slow-food movement, it’s an attempt to be more mindful, more intentional, to slow down and appreciate–above all, to connect. This renaissance is due at least in part to the overwhelm of the internet, with its impersonal emails (Gmail now offers to finish your sentences for you with canned phrases) and shiny social media posts with premade filters that can give your restaurant meal the perfect lighting and your face the perfect makeup. A handwritten letter is not like these things. It is by definition imperfect because it is by definition human. Letters are deeply personal. We touch them, leave skin cells behind on them, lick envelopes. There is something visceral about them. In an age of filters and facebrags, letters are authentic. We send them out into the world, imperfect, and we cannot take them down, take them back, tweak them or revise them once they’ve left our hands.
There is a huge vulnerability in this irrevocability. It’s a vulnerability that modern technology discourages. It’s old-school, like the souls who still write letters. The beauty of Dickinson’s poem is that it’s still as true as the day she wrote it–maybe even truer. When we write a letter, we become that letter. We transform ourselves into words, speak ourselves into being, and then send our minds, hearts, souls, selves winging out across time and distance.
Pam: Well, I still have no idea what is happening.
Brenna: Okay. “Apocalypse.” !! That’s not ominous.
Pam: END of the WorLd
Brenna: Who the hell titled this poem??
Pam: That is a wonderful question. If she’s wife, what has she finished?
Brenna: Being a little girl. And it’s weird that she finds being a wife “safer.” RUN, EMILY. IT IS NOT SAFE. DANGER, WILL ROBINSON.
Pam: We know that she was not a wife. Am I meant to assume some other narrator? Is she being obscure for the heck of it? Is she a nun? Is she married to God? What is HAPPENING I seriously do not know.
Brenna: She likes to write as if she’s a wife. From a wife’s perspective.
Pam: Why? Please school me.
Brenna: I guess for the reason any poet writes from any other perspective?Also it could be a God poem. Or a dude poem. Either one. I think she must have liked imagining she was married. Imagining is for sure safer.
Pam: Okay, so: she’s wife now. She’s Czar, so she gets to be in charge, unlike in her unwedded state.
Brenna: I think she’s writing from the perspective of a married woman. She’s left behind childhood, girlhood. Where it gets weird for me is her assertion that being a wife is safer.
Pam: Yes! How is this safer?
Brenna: Wives die in childbirth. It’s not safer, Emily!!
Pam: I was just typing that!! Safer economically, perhaps, assuming the husband is a decent provider?
Brenna: Maybe it’s safer because now she’s in a relationship? Now she’s married and no longer searching. She’s a “heart in port,” safe from the tempestuous passion of “wild nights” and from temptation? And then she reflects on how strange childhood looks from her womanly perspective, and that makes sense to me. It’s surreal to take on an adult role. I wonder how many of us ever really feel fully adult. I remember my mom telling me that when she was married with young children, she used to sometimes look around in a daze and wonder where the grownups were.
Pam: The way she describes the two states is very interesting to me. We have wife, czar, woman, and safer vs. that and that other state.
Brenna: Yes! super interesting and weird. And “czar” is a male role. So by becoming a wife she’s become a man? Because she’s joined with a man?
Pam: And that last rhyming couplet is such a childlike thing to say!
Brenna: It is! It’s like she reverts at the end.
Pam: There’s this image of the grownup married woman saying these ridiculously simple rhymes.
Brenna: And I think that’s telling.
Pam: Yes! It subverts the idea that marriage = adult, grownup, more wise. It’s like the person who tells you how incredibly humble they are.
Brenna: “This being comfort, then/ That other kind was pain”. This is a weird thought. “Because marriage is comfort, then it logically follows that childhood was NOT comfort.” It’s like she’s trying to convince herself with bad logic. So there’s this reversal. The wife doth protest too much. She opens with “It’s so great to be a wife!” but then flip flops at the end. “It MUST be great to be a wife because everybody says so and I’m supposed to want this.”
Pam: Yes! We have to wonder who the audience is, if it’s not just the speaker saying these things to convince herself.
Brenna: “But why compare?/ I’m wife! Stop there!” It’s as if, looking back at childhood from her current reality of marriage, which is supposed to be better, she’s trying to tell us that it’s not better. But as a wife, she’s not allowed to say that. She has to make it sound good, but she has serious reservations. She has to shut herself up so she doesn’t say what she’s really thinking. I wonder…is this Emily trying to convince herself that it’s better to remain single??
Pam: Or, at least, to show us that being a wife doesn’t mean that your problems go away.
Brenna: Hell no they do not go away. You just end up with kids who get the plague and then you are stuck at home cleaning things and cooking soup and going out of your mind. Of course it is possible that my current mental state is coloring my reading of this poem… Maybe the speaker is imagining what it’s like to be a wife. She wonders if she’s missing anything. She thinks at first that she is–comfort, stability, a steady relationship to depend on. But as she thinks about it, she realizes what she’s losing.
Pam: Yes! I think this is why the rhyme scheme switches in the last stanza, too.
Brenna: I love reversals in poems. I geek out about this kind of thing.
Pam: She’s exploring in the first two stanzas, and in the last she’s come to a decision–but it’s not the one she expected. This may be why she reverts to this more childlike rhyme scheme; the first two stanzas are still AABB, but they are very, very loose rhymes. You can’t tell me that anybody, even in the 1800s, actually thought that that/state was anything other than a slant rhyme. But we have perfect rhyme in compare/there. Your current mental state is RELEVANT to this poem.
Brenna: I love how you always bring it back to the rhyme scheme. I forget to do that.
Pam: I can’t help but to check the rhyme scheme first every time. What do you think? Have we done it justice?
Brenna: I think we have done it all the justice we can possibly do it at this moment. Stop there!
IT dropped so low in my regard I heard it hit the ground, And go to pieces on the stones At bottom of my mind;
Yet blamed the fate that fractured, less Than I reviled myself For entertaining plated wares Upon my silver shelf.
Emily Dickinson
I’m going to get a little bit personal with this blog: I have never had so many disinterested classes of English students in my life as I have this spring semester. Is there something in the water? Do teaching strategies that worked the last few years no longer hold interest?
I feel like the speaker in this poem every time I prepare a classroom activity, or assign a short story or poem, or walk into class. I’m ready to have a great day, and then comes the crash. Nobody wants to do the activity, very few students bothered to bring in the assignment, and there are so many absences I begin to wonder if the actual bubonic plague has descended upon my students.
And I feel like it’s my fault, too, just as the speaker feels that it’s her own fault that the plates have cracked. Maybe if I’d tried another activity, or assigned a different reading. Maybe if I were a different teacher entirely. If I had a better personality. If my students liked me more. If, if, if.
As with most Emily Dickinson poems, I don’t have an easy answer. If the speaker hadn’t placed that metaphorical plate on her metaphorical high shelf, she wouldn’t have metaphorical shards to sweep. If I didn’t care so much whether my students find learning my classes enjoyable, I guess I wouldn’t be so upset when they’re obviously Just Not That Into It.
Maybe the trick is not that we shouldn’t collect the breakable plates. The speaker isn’t suddenly switching to Corelle. The trick is to find that balance, that correct shelf, that place for everything (and everything in its place): that allows us to not ward off breaking entirely, but give fragile things their best chance.
The Emily Project 