Pam: How about page 45, Real? In serendipitous honor of our dear 45th president.
Brenna: Hell yes.
Pam: I don’t know about you, but this poem feels almost ridiculously prescient.
Brenna: I will try very hard not to say anything that could incriminate me with the secret service.
Pam: And I’ll tell you at the start that I’m reading my own views into this. I love what she’s saying there. Man in agony = great because it’s not faked.
Brenna: Yes. No one wants to appear weak. So they’re not going to fake that.
Pam: Which brings the question, I suppose: is that the only time men can be trusted to be honest? When they’re in agony? This poem might agree.
Brenna: I think it might.At any other time, they may be dissembling.
Pam: This is what you write after an awful breakup.
Brenna: But pain, and death, they cannot fake.
Pam: Ann Coulter wrote this four hours ago.
Brenna: Does she necessarily mean “men,” or does she mean “humankind”?
Pam: I guess we can be nice and say she could be referring to all mankind. I guess.
Brenna: I like this poem. It rings very, very true. And it does seem prescient. It seems like something that really could have been written four hours ago. It sounds like me when I’m ranting about Facebook. Except I don’t do it in iambic quadrameter. I hate fakeness. And I think Emily hates it, too.
Pam: Yes! It sounds like someone who is beyond fed up. I want to know what inspired this. And it’s on page 45. You can’t make this up.
Brenna: I would much rather somebody show me their ugly–their faults, their flaws. I’m much more likely to be drawn to people who are real about the ups and downs of life than the people who sugarcoat everything, insist on dogged optimism, and snapchat their food.You really can’t make this up! It’s fantastic.
Pam: Oh my goodness. YES. I can relate to regular people. I can’t relate to people who are constantly wearing Instagram filters.
Brenna: I like a look of non-orange skin / Because I know it’s real / Men do not sham compassion / Or simulate a soul.
Pam: Beautiful.
Brenna: We conclude that it is on page 45 for good reason. It is a message from Emily from beyond the grave.
Dickinson’s aesthetic in this poem is reminiscent of the Romantics and their passion for the sublime. The snow-verging hemlock is not lovely or picturesque, but austere. Such sights, the speaker argues, humans need. We thirst for them, and seek them in extremes of climate. We crave not only beauty but have “an instinct for the hoar, the bald.”
So here is your prompt: choose a sight, scene, or object that is not conventionally lovely, and write a description that makes the reader crave the sight of it. Thorny caterpillar? Bruise-colored storm clouds? Mud puddle? It’s all good. We would love to read if you care to share in the comments!
This is a tiny little gem of a poem, and I adore it. I had never encountered it before. In its concision is its brilliance, and every facet sparkles. “The show is not the show” has the ring of a paradox and an aphorism in one. It is not the ostensible show that the speaker is interested in, but the informal, unintentional show that is human behavior. She watches the watchers. Her singular “neighbor” becomes a menagerie–such is the infinite possibility within a single soul. In the penultimate line, the speaker breaks with the meter of the rest of the poem to hit hard with just two words of equal emphasis–“fair play”–which is a fantastic play (haha) on the word “play”. Dickinson begins with difference and contradiction: “the show is not the show,” the watcher becomes the watched, the neighbor and she have different motivations and aims. But the poem ends, in its very last line, by uniting the opposites. Both, after all, are there for the same ultimate purpose–“to see.”
A few days ago, going through shelves and shelves of books, I ran across my copy of a script from a college production of Come Slowly, Eden, a play about the life and poetry of Emily Dickinson. It is a weird, magical, disorienting experience to look at myself, my notes, from a distance of a couple decades–and then to read this poem. The show is not the show–or not always in the ways we expect it to be.
OF bronze and blaze The north, to-night! So adequate its forms, So preconcerted with itself, So distant to alarms,— An unconcern so sovereign To universe, or me, It paints my simple spirit With tints of majesty, Till I take vaster attitudes, And strut upon my stem, Disdaining men and oxygen, For arrogance of them. My splendors are menagerie; But their competeless show Will entertain the centuries When I am, long ago, An island in dishonored grass, Whom none but daisies know.
Brenna: The opening sentence is gorgeous, almost overwhelmingly beautiful–and then in the next sentence she hits us with how “adequate” its forms are, and I kind of snort-laugh. “The aurora borealis is amazing and beautiful and….adequate!”
Pam: This. What is even happening? I just read through it. I feel like I’ve misplaced brain cells. I have no idea what is happening here. You’re absolutely right about the gorgeous imagery and then the strange turn to “adequate.” And then we have “preconcerted,” which apparently means “arranged or organized in advance.” How can you be preconcerted with yourself? “When I am, long ago.” What even. I have lost all powers of language.
Brenna: Ohhhh, I love that! That is my favorite part!
Pam: Tell me what it means!!
Brenna: I don’t know?? But I have THOUGHTS.
Pam: I am waiting patiently, long ago.
Brenna: Okay, so she says that, as mighty and important as the aurora has made her feel in the first stanza, she will eventually die (because Emily Dickinson), while the northern lights will continue.
Pam: The island is her gravestone! Okay. That pieced it together. I’m glad you’re here with a guidebook.
Brenna: And then she does the amazing thing. She starts out using the future tense: “When I am…” And then she whips it around within the same sentence to the past tense: When she is dead long ago, i.e. when she has been dead for a long time. She’s seeing her own past in the future. Emily is badass.
Pam: She’s looking forward to a time when her grave is in forgotten grass, where only flowers know about her.
Brenna: Yes! When she is pushing daisies. When she has become daisies. I love the time warp in that second stanza. I think it’s glorious. Emily Dickinson is so metal.
Pam: Which, of course, hasn’t happened yet! Such a strange little moebius strip of reasoning that cannot become true because of her postmortem poetic fame. She will never have that prediction come true, most likely, but the poem (which outlives her) keeps this premonition alive and also incorrect.
Brenna: Well-said!
Pam: I also think it’s glorious now that you’ve explained it.
Brenna: Isn’t it fantastic?
Pam: She’s doing this earlier in the poem, too! “Till I take vaster attitudes, / And strut upon my stem”: when, in the future, I am an actual flower. She’s conflated with the aurora borealis, too! It’s eternal; it’s not going anywhere. She’s imagining a future where she is dead and her remains have become flowers, which are also impermanent, but they reseed and come back over and over again.
Brenna: And like the aurora, she will be incorporeal. It’s a pretty amazing poem. Pam. PAM. Are we starting to……UNDERSTAND Emily Dickinson??
Pam: I feel like if I agree that we understand her, we will be cursed.
Brenna: That’s not good. We are in TROUBLE. No, WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND YOU, EMILY. Haunt us no more!!
Pam: Just looking at the two poems previous this one in the book–no, I do not understand her. Yet!
Brenna: Wait….I said we’re starting to understand her. I qualified it. We are not cursed. Whew!!
Pam: Qualifiers are important! Walking back from the ledge.
Brenna: Walk it back, Pam!!
Pam: We are adequate!
Brenna: We are so adequate. Competelessly adequate. I love how excited she gets about herself in this poem. She takes “vaster attitudes,” “struts,” and disdains men and oxygen. That should be this blog’s tagline. “Disdaining men and oxygen.
Pam: YES. She is feeling her splendors in this poem.
Brenna: They are menagerie! But then once again, nature puts E.D. in her place. SMACK. “You are PUSHING DAISIES.” And why is the grass “dishonored”?
Pam: That’s a good question. Maybe not dishonored the way we think of it, but literally not honored by visitors? Forgotten?
Brenna: This poem raises a really interesting question again–did she want recognition? In some poems it feels as if she’s longing for it. In others, she wants to be “nobody.” In this poem, she goes from being nobody to spendiloquent to nobody again.
Pam: Oh, wonderful question. I wonder, too, if perhaps recognition–the desire for it–is something she grappled with, and poems like these are moves toward accepting her belief that she will not have recognition.
Brenna: Ah, this seems like a good working theory! And she reminds herself that it’s okay, in the grand scheme of things. Nature is what endures. And she does, in the very real biological sense of becoming daisies. But her display is homely and small and forgotten, overlooked, unlike the aurora, which demands attention.
Pam: Yes! What a wonderful thing to pull out. She’s in earthly planes with the homely daisies, and still underneath the splendor of the aurora.
Brenna: She still gets to witness it, or at least be in its presence.
Pam: Amelia just came in and said, “Mommy, tell me what my name is.” I told her. She said, “No, I’m a MYSTERYYYYYY.” So I think she understands Emily better than we do.
Brenna: Emily Dickinson: 20. Pam and Brenna: 2. Amelia: WINNING.
Pam: Are we at 20?
Brenna: 22!
Pam: Holy cow, we’re at 22! 22 Dickinson poems! We’ve gone past blackjack!
Brenna: Our blog can drink!
Pam [flipping through the book]: “A toad can die of light.” What.
In six lines, this poem marvels at the beauty of something pretty mundane: a new butterfly among the buttercups. How do we know the butterfly is new? She’s wearing an assumption-gown, which is likely a reference to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven (per the Catholic church). This final robe of Mary would be a likely counterpart to the final “clothing” of a butterfly who has shed its chrysalis (chrysoprase, incidentally, is green, like that of a butterfly chrysalis). How beautiful, then, the final form of the butterfly; how absurdly normal a place for it to be, in the flowers in an ordinary town.
How can we find otherwordly beauty in the regular world around us?
Your challenge: clothe an ordinary object (living, breathing, or otherwise) in an extraordinary adornment. Kitten wearing mittens? Rock with a sock? Plush Darth Vader wearing a tiara? It’s up to you! Take a picture, write a poem, come up with a story idea, or just tell us what you’re imagining.
THE MOON was but a chin of gold A night or two ago, And now she turns her perfect face Upon the world below.
Her forehead is of amplest blond; Her cheek like beryl stone; Her eye unto the summer dew The likest I have known.
Her lips of amber never part; But what must be the smile Upon her friend she could bestow Were such her silver will!
And what a privilege to be But the remotest star! For certainly her way might pass Beside your twinkling door.
Her bonnet is the firmament, The universe her shoe, The stars the trinkets at her belt, Her dimities of blue.
I wanted to find a moon poem for today, because with the Super Wolf Blood Moon coming tonight, it just felt appropriate. But I also wanted something about friendship, and I think this fits the bill there, too.
This is one of very few Dickinson poems that I feel I can understand on surface level. The narrator is musing on the moon; just a few nights ago, it was a crescent; now it’s full and bright and beautiful. The narrator describes the moon like a friend. She’s beautiful, yes, but the descriptions here don’t really veer into romantic, in my opinion. It’s more like looking at your beautiful friend and feeling lucky to be in her presence.
I’m feeling lucky for a lot of things this year. Lucky that I’m alive during a Super Wolf Blood Moon, which sounds so much like a 1980s cartoon I’m not sure it wasn’t actually one; lucky that I have a warm house to stand in while I peer through the window in my actual in-house library. Lucky to have too many books in my to-read pile. Lucky to have friends in all facets of my life–at church and at work, friends past and friends newer, friends I see around town and friends I know through the internet only.
I have a friend named Brenna. She’s an amazing mother to two smart, hilarious kids. She’s an accomplished baker. She’s a middle school French teacher, which means that she is infinitely patient. She is beautiful. She keeps bees and chickens, thereby making her basically a superhero and witch, and I mean those in the best way. She writes about beauty and pain and strength and makes me believe in all of this and more. She has an encouraging word for every disaster. She has excellent taste in books, jigsaw puzzles, chocolate, and tea. She makes my days better. She is my friend.
I hope that you have a friend like Brenna; I hope that you have somebody you look at the way this poem sees the moon.
A PRECIOUS, mouldering pleasure ’t is To meet an antique book, In just the dress his century wore; A privilege, I think, His venerable hand to take, And warming in our own, A passage back, or two, to make To times when he was young. His quaint opinions to inspect, His knowledge to unfold On what concerns our mutual mind, The literature of old;
What interested scholars most, What competitions ran When Plato was a certainty, And Sophocles a man;
When Sappho was a living girl, And Beatrice wore The gown that Dante deified. Facts, centuries before,
He traverses familiar, As one should come to town And tell you all your dreams were true: He lived where dreams were born.
His presence is enchantment, You beg him not to go; Old volumes shake their vellum heads And tantalize, just so.
Pam: This poem embodies really every Emily Dickinson poem ever. Old poem! Yes! What does she have to tell us? What am I going to learn from this? Birds? Bees? Pastoral? Yes! This is beautiful! . . . wait. What does the last line mean? This doesn’t make any sense? Why is it over? Why can’t I ask her what it means???
Brenna: Okay, so my first thought is–BOOKS! YAY! This is NOT A POEM ABOUT DEATH!!! And then I start reading, and I remember that, doh, this is Emily Dickinson, and this is totally a poem about death.
Pam: It’s ALWAYS a poem about death.
Brenna: It always is. Death is Emily Dickinson’s BIG MOOD. Okay, so in this particular poem about death…
Pam: I do love that she describes the book as “mouldering.” I feel that usually when we see that word, it’s describing dead bodies. This feels pretty Poe of her.
Brenna: It really does! Poe-riffic!
Pam: Death: of the book! Of the ideas expressed in the book, because the era of the author is long gone!
Brenna: And the juxtaposition of “pleasure” with “mouldering”…very “Fall of the House of Usher.”
Pam: Yes! A “mouldering pleasure.” Gross, and I also get it! The smell of books. Or maybe I’m just thinking of the slightly sweet mildewy smell of old books.
Brenna: I remember reading this years ago, before social media and Kindles and such, and it didn’t hit me in quite the same way it does now. This poem is APT, yo. It could be a poem written yesterday by one of the “e-readers are blasphemy” crowd.
Pam: Oh, bless. As if any method of ingesting books could be bad. At the same time, I really, really love an old book. I’m talking old. The spine has cracked. The glue has disappeared to parts unknown. The pages are dog-eared or torn or falling out. The edges are worn soft. I love that. When you get a book that old, and you let it flip open, and it falls to the same place every time and you can kind of guess that this was an important passage to somebody, so this is where they turned to a lot? I eat that right up.
Brenna: So. To sum up: She likes old books and she cannot lie.
Pam: You other poets can’t deny. We cannot do this entire song. We COULD do this entire song. But we should not do this entire song.
Brenna: When a book walks in with an itty-bitty spine and–okay. We will not do the entire song.
Pam: We will probably end up doing the entire song and posting it as an Easter egg somewhere.
Brenna: Someday people will search for it.
Pam: God bless these people.
Brenna: It will be like READY PLAYER ONE, but for the other kind of nerds.
Pam: The really desperate ones?
Brenna: The book ones. US, Pamela. !!
Pam: THE REALLY DESPERATE ONES
Brenna: DYING
Pam: Girl, you know it’s true.
Brenna: Wait–is that Sir Mixalot??
Pam: Milli Vanilli.
Brenna: RIGHT. PAM. DEAD.
Brenna: I’ma just blame that one on the rain and move on.
Pam: NOOOOOOOOOOOOoooo
Pam: You out-Milli-Vanilli-d me.
Brenna: I WIN. I’m too sexy for this chat, too sexy for this chat…Okay. POEM. FOCUS, Pam and Brenna.
Pam: I feel like this is the rare Emily Dickinson poem that’s just doing what it says on the tin!
Brenna: I really, really want to believe that.
Pam: This is like something a stoner would conceive of. Wow, old books are cool. Isn’t it weird how the people who wrote this are dead? Okay, bye.
Brenna: And yet, I feel like she’s weaving in all these references to mortality, and those have to mean something.
Pam: How much is Emily Dickinson the poet wondering whether people might read her in the future and beg of her in the same way not to go? For somebody who wrote so prolifically and published so incredibly rarely–and asked that her papers be burned, I think–she had to have considered it, right? So maybe she really is wondering a little bit about her own authorial immortality?
Brenna: She invokes Plato, Sappho, Sophocles, Dante–all these classical greats. She is also careful to underscore their mortality.
Pam: And then there’s the whole other issue of the folks who published her works after her death, and who edited them as well–so even though she has attained this kind of immortality, the words that became famous after her death were not printed as she wrote them. It’s nice that she includes Sappho, too. One could probably have a field day researching and following that down the rabbit hole.
Brenna: Her words appeared “in just the dress her century wore,” in that sense. In the sense of being sanitized for proper punctuation. From the Dickinson museum, here’s some info: https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/book/export/html/108
Pam: We Need To Read A Bio.
Brenna: TL;DR–a few of her poems were published, but it’s unclear whether she okayed this. No one knows if she wanted to be published or not.
Pam: I read something earlier today (not sure where) that she was also a prolific gardener, and used to send “posies” to her friends, along with scraps of poetry. I think Dickinson reported (or at least thought) that her friends were happier with the flowers than the verse.
Brenna: What is up with the ending? It does seem like a fairly straightforward poem, up until the point where she’s begging a book not to go and it is tantalizing her.
Pam: It’s weird, right? She always does this! I really do look at this poem the way that I look at most of her poems. I’m trucking along, and I think I get it, and then there’s a hard left turn.
Brenna: YES. It’s as if every poem is a riddle.
Pam: The reader begs “him,” the book, not to go in the way that we, the readers, are begging her not to end the poem there. So in that sense, if it’s intentional, it’s a great example of what she’s just shown us in the poem. And I can’t believe that it’s unintentional.
Brenna: But how can a book possibly “go”? In what world outside of a Miyazaki film does this make sense?
Pam: It ends!
Brenna: OOOOH. DUH.
Pam: I read it as, “Book, you are so interesting, please don’t end!” But you can’t stop it from ending.
Brenna: Wow I feel dumb.
Pam: You are not dumb!!
Brenna: I think you figured it out. Pam. YOU WIN THE POEM.
Pam: And the volume shaking its head = closing the book? WE’VE DONE IT. WE GOT ONE POEM. 1/365 is not a bad ratio, yes?
Brenna: Only three hundred and something-ty more days to go!!!
SOME things that fly there be,— Birds, hours, the bumble-bee: Of these no elegy. Some things that stay there be,— Grief, hills, eternity: Nor this behooveth me. There are, that resting, rise. Can I expound the skies? How still the riddle lies!
Editor’s Note: This conversation has been heavily hacked in the interest of anyone making any sense of it. Topics edited from this transcript include but are by no means limited to Anglo-Saxon riddles, Brenna’s theatrical angst, the epic saga of Pam reading a biography of Hamilton, a book that Pam actually did finish reading but isn’t sure she should have, the resulting excoriation of books about blonde Amazons, and nicknames referencing fish.
Pam: My first question is this: why did we choose this poem?
Brenna: We chose this poem because I flipped through the book and landed on it.
Pam: The secret of this poem is that it is a Carrollesque riddle. So chance is laughing at us.
Brenna: Okay, full disclosure: I chose this poem because I don’t understand it. As of this point, I have two different criteria for selecting E. D. poems: 1) the poem somehow fits the specific day/month/season, or 2) I don’t get it and I am really, really hoping you will explain it to me.
Pam: I chose yesterday’s poem because I wanted a sunny poem. I do not understand this one at all. BUT. Shall we attempt to come up with plausible explanations which cannot be proven at all?
Brenna: Sure! SO. Poem. Who titled this poem? Did E.D. title it? Or was it retroactively titled? Either way, it feels like some kind of smug joke. The title, that is. “I have a secret, but I’m not telling you! Especially NOT in this poem!”
Pam: The secret is that you will NEVER understand this poem.
Brenna: Oh, okay. I think you’ve got it. CASE CLOSED.
Pam: Some things fly: birds, hours, bees. Of these, she’s not writing any elegy; she’s not mourning them. Or somebody isn’t writing an elegy. Either the author is personally not mourning them, or the author is noting that these things are not mourned after they’ve departed.
Brenna: Or she’s not memorializing or reflecting on them. “Elegy” can be a lament, but doesn’t have to be, according to my just-now super-sketch Google analysis. Maybe, because they’re fleeting, she’s not going to dwell on them?
Pam: Elegy doesn’t have to be a reflection on the dead . . . but it’s usually a reflection on the dead.
Brenna: True–and birds, hours, bees all die quickly. They’re sort of defined by their ephemeral nature. “Birds, hours, bees–meh. Why would I write of such things? (despite the fact that this is literally what I write about).”
Pam: Stanza 2: some things remain forever; grief, hills, eternity. “Nor this behooveth me”: this is not my responsibility. But what isn’t her responsibility? The elegy from the first stanza? Eternity?
Brenna: I think she’s dismissing the things in stanzas 1 and 2 equally.
Pam: There’s no point mourning things that die, or time that has passed, because that’s how those things work. There’s no point in worrying about the length of grief or the prospect of eternity because you can’t change those, either.
Brenna: Stanza 3: “There are, that resting, rise”–she is deliberately leaving out the subject of the sentence.It’s a secret, a mystery. [shakes fist in general direction of Amherst]
Pam: She is deliberately being a jerk.
Brenna: Such a jerk. E.D., Mean-girl.
Pam: Mean-girl OG. But it’s Dickinson. Rest. Rest in peace? We’re talking about dead spirits who have risen, perhaps? Can she explain the skies? No, she cannot.
Brenna: Does she herself not know the answer? Maybe she’s not being mean or smug or secretive–maybe she’s struggling to express the inexpressible.
Pam: How still the riddle lies: this, for me, ties into the “rest” in the first line of this stanza. The riddle is death, or what happens to the soul afterward; the riddle is thereby still because the body is dead and unmoving. Perhaps a little bit of “why am I trying to explain this when it’s inexplicable? Why am I trying to figure this out when it’s unknowable?” “Still” is also in contrast to all of the things in stanza one–bees, birds, time. But: can grief die? Can hills? Can immortality? Is that the riddle? I love trying to figure these out, but I also feel a little bit like I’m in the labyrinth and I’ve run out of string, so I must go back to the beginning without having located the center.
Brenna: My brain hurts.
Pam: I feel like we need to add in a Dickinson biography to this project!
Brenna: I want to say that this is a good idea, but I am afeard. But we should read a Dickinson biography. We should. Should should should.
I decided to look for a sunny poem today. I needed a sunny poem today. Or, at least, today felt worthy of one. When I left the house this morning, Amelia and I bundled in heavy coats and gloves, the air outside was so frigid you could see it thrumming out of exhaust pipes and coalescing into vapor above chimneys. My car, safely tucked away in the garage all night, was free from frost; others that I saw on the road weren’t so lucky.
The sky was pinky blue: pastel colors that just screamed cold. Everything about this morning looked and felt like snow except for one thing: we had no snow.
It was cold enough that I felt bad for the car line lady who helped Amelia out of her seat and into school. It was cold enough to wear gloves for the 60-second walk from my parking spot into my building. It was cold enough to wear my coat for the first 20 minutes of class. And then it was gone. By the time 10:00 rolled around, the sun was out, temperatures were rising, and I no longer needed my scarf. I was, in fact, resentful of it as I carried a huge back of Norton anthologies into my office.
Today looks and feels like spring. That’s not uncommon in Alabama; we’ll have cold snaps and heat waves for several months yet. So when I looked for a sun poem, that’s what I thought I’d get. I should have known that I’d be wrong. This poem is not daisies and fresh-cut hay. It’s a lament. It’s the sadness of knowledge gained: I was in the shadows, and then I saw how wonderful sunlight is, and now I yearn for it and know that I’ve been missing something, and that I could miss it again.
This poem reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s short story “All Summer in a Day,” which takes place on Venus. There, residents live in perpetual darkness, because there’s only one day of sunlight every seven years. When a little girl tells her classmates what she remembers of the sun, being a more recent transplant from Earth, her cruel fellow students lock her in a closet during the sunlight so that she, the only one of them who remembers sunlight at all, misses it entirely.
I’m not sure what Dickinson’s Wilderness means, or how it changed after she saw her Sun. But it’s an interesting question, I think, of whether one might live more happily in the shade, not comprehending any light, or whether knowing about it–wilding your own Wilderness–would bring happiness, too.
The Emily Project 