ESSENTIAL oils are wrung: The attar from the rose Is not expressed by suns alone, It is the gift of screws.
The general rose decays; But this, in lady’s drawer, Makes summer when the lady lies In ceaseless rosemary.
I was unemployed for a long time after I finished my masters, and if there’s one thing that I heard over and over–and which helped my peace of mind exactly none–it’s this: yes, life is hard now, but this trying time will make you stronger. If there’s any true piece of advice that people hate to receive more than this, I’d love to know it.
Dickinson’s point here is that in order to extract the attar (literally, the rose’s essential oil), you have to put the rose through the ringer. You can’t ask it nicely, or wait for it to dry in the sun–you have to process it. Leave the roses on the vine? They’ll decompose. But their essential oil, the perfume that remains after the extraction, will last forever. This will preserve the smell of summer even in the coldest months, even when the lady who purchased it–or for whom it was purchased–has died, and only rosemary (the herb of remembrance) remains of her.
So the roses went through a process and the bit that was left–the distilled oil–comes out fragrant, long-lasting, desired. Part of me wants to find this beautiful. Part of me is very tired of having to be personally distilled in order to come out the other side stronger, smarter, or at least employed.
This is the first Dickinson poem that has wholly embodied melancholy this year. Here’s to coming out the other side as fresh as rosewater.
I LIVED on dread; to those who know The stimulus there is In danger, other impetus Is numb and vital-less. As ’t were a spur upon the soul, A fear will urge it where To go without the spectre’s aid Were challenging despair.
I’m finding this poem really intriguing in light of yesterday’s. In that poem, the speaker describes the “splinter” that can throw a person off course. The tone of that poem makes it clear that the splinter is not a good thing. In this poem, however, dread acts in much the same way as the splinter in the previous poem–it intrudes. In this case, however, the intrusion is welcome–and productive.
This could be the procrastinator’s hymn, really. It reminds me of every friend I’ve ever known who swore they couldn’t start a paper until the night before it was due, that they thrived under pressure, that they needed a deadline–and needed it to be imminent–in order to get anything done.
It’s interesting to note that Dickinson couches this observation in the past tense, speaking as if from beyond the grave: “I lived on dread.” She goes on to invoke all the others who understand the efficacy of danger as a motivator. Even more interesting, I think, is the ending–fear urges to soul to go where it could not go otherwise. Without fear, the speaker would be “challenging despair.” Fear as a means of avoiding despair is an intriguing thought. I’m not sure what exactly to make of it. It feels deeply significant that the poem ends on the word “despair,” as if all the speaker’s fear-driven attempts (at what?) have, in the end, still come to naught.
THE BRAIN within its groove Runs evenly and true; But let a splinter swerve, ’T were easier for you To put the water back When floods have slit the hills, And scooped a turnpike for themselves, And blotted out the mills!
This seemed like an excellent reminder for the thirteenth of January, when the sheen is beginning to rub off the year a little. Sometimes it’s habit that makes the magic possible.
With that in mind, here’s a prompt–what is the splinter that swerves you off course? What do you do to smooth the way?
THIS was in the white of the year, That was in the green, Drifts were as difficult then to think As daisies now to be seen. Looking back is best that is left, Or if it be before, Retrospection is prospect’s half, Sometimes almost more.
This morning I woke to a dusting of snow across the yard and driveway. The snow is gone now, but more hangs in the pale, heavy cloud blanket that rings my sky.
Winter is a time for introspection, and for retrospection. I like the notion that “retrospection is prospect’s half”–the looking-backward and the looking-forward dovetail, inform each other. In order to look ahead with any clarity of vision, it’s good to know where you’ve been. In order to look back with any optimism, it’s good to know you are headed somewhere.
I also like how Dickinson says that retrospection is “sometimes almost more” than prospect. “Sometimes almost” is the same thing, really, as “not ever,” but it sounds so different. There’s a suggestion here that retrospection could almost tip the balance, could weight the scales so ponderously that maybe, just maybe, it could almost change the equation.
The white-lead clouds brood overhead, heavy with unfallen snow.
’T WAS such a little, little boat That toddled down the bay! ’T was such a gallant, gallant sea That beckoned it away! ’T was such a greedy, greedy wave That licked it from the coast; Nor ever guessed the stately sails My little craft was lost!
Since this is Dickinson, and therefore the boat could be anything from a heart to a soul to a life to a dream, and since I didn’t plan my day out very well and am pressed for time, I’m going to sidestep meaning and focus on Dickinson’s word choice.
It’s the repetition here that really interests me. “Little, little,” “gallant, gallant,” and “greedy, greedy” are all two-syllable words. “Little” and “greedy” are words a child would know (and “gallant” is definitely a word that child-Emily would have known). (I’m not sure why the sea is “gallant”–could this be an emulation of the childlike tendency to misunderstand words? The sea is hardly actually gallant if it is involved in the boat’s demise.) The repetition of these short words in one small poem gives it a childlike quality–it almost sounds as if the boat is a child’s toy. Anyone who’s ever sailed a toy boat will agree that they often “toddle” rather than taking to the water like swans. After it “toddled down the bay,” the boat takes no further action–it is acted upon. It is beckoned away, licked from the coast, and lost. In the last line, Dickinson uses “little” a third time. The use of the same generic adjective three times in eight lines adds to the childish quality.
The “stately sails” that don’t notice the loss of the small craft are like adults who don’t notice or honor the force of the loss children feel. When we are very young, our hearts are broken time and again, sometimes by big things, but often by tiny ones. As adults, it’s all too easy to forget this, to say condescendingly, “It’s not the end of the world,” when to the child’s mind it is, and no adult perspective matters, can soothe the pain of loss.
Whatever the boat stands in for–whatever’s been lost–the speaker’s reaction to it is like a child’s–simple, devastated, emotional. I think in a way that’s how loss hits all of us. I think of adults I’ve known who’ve lost their parents and said, “I’m an orphan.” It doesn’t matter that they’re sixty or seventy–the loss hits them hard, strikes at them in a way that makes them feel suddenly small, young, powerless. In the face of loss, we all become childlike, adrift in the wide, wide world.
WITHIN my reach! I could have touched! I might have chanced that way! Soft sauntered through the village, Sauntered as soft away! So unsuspected violets Within the fields lie low, Too late for striving fingers That passed, an hour ago.
~Emily Dickinson
One of the loveliest moments you get to have as an English teacher is the one when you tell your students that, now that they’ve learned and mastered the rules, they get to break the rules. This is a lovely example of rule-breaking. Dickinson’s incomplete sentences here are perfect. The first line has no verb. The second has no object. The fourth and fifth have no subject. She’s breaking things all over the place. After setting up the rhythm and maintaining it for four lines, she disrupts it in the fifth. The rhyme scheme is broken, too–and it can hardly help but be, in a nine-line poem. Who writes a nine-line poem??
Dickinson never identifies the subject of the poem, either. We really have no idea who or what was within her reach. She compares it/them to violets–but we don’t know much else. This also feels like a massive rule-breaking. If you’re going to write words, people should be able to read them and know what you’re talking about, right? I mean, it’s Dickinson, so this could definitely be a poem about death….But.
On second read, the poem strikes me as masterful. Dickinson breaks all these rules, and the incompleteness of the rhyme scheme, the missing words, the lack of a clearly identified subject, all underscore with a quiet sort of fierceness the idea of missing something, and being incomplete or unfulfilled as a result.
Okay, maybe not really that, but what the poem seems to be about, more than whoever or whatever the speaker just missed, is the sobering reality that life is full of missed opportunities. Maybe the speaker doesn’t name her subject because, like the rest of us, she doesn’t know what she’s missed.
I woke up angry at my 5:30 am alarm, because I went to bed later than I should have. I left the house five minutes later than I’d like. I forgot to print new rosters for my classes this morning (which have been in a constant state of flux, since it’s the start of the semester), so I had to rig an attendance system on the fly.
In office hours, I spent a full hour assembling a particle board shelf to sit on top of my desk, frustrated with the materials, the office, the mother of the amoeba who wrote the assembly instructions, and anything else in the vicinity.
They’re piling up for tomorrow, too. My car needs gas. I have to take the kids to get haircuts after school tomorrow. I have to take my daughter to get (what will probably be expensive) clothes for her first dance class on Friday. I have to buy cupcakes for my son to bring to school on Friday. I have to finish planning food for his birthday party on Saturday. I have to bake his birthday cake and somehow make it look like Cappy from Mario Odyssey. I have to do some laundry or we are all going to drown in smelly clothing.
Or.
Or I can stop.
Or I can take a breath, and realize that all of these annoyances are things that I either caused or asked for, and step back. I can remember, like Emily Dickinson tells us above, that I can do something good with a really small action. Maybe I don’t always get the laundry done on time, but I can talk to my daughter on the way to school. I can sing her songs and wish her a good day when I drop her off.
I can go a step further, and, like the speaker in the poem, I can look for hurts to mend. You have to be looking to see someone whose heart is breaking; probably they won’t tell you when things get bad, because we all wear these masks every day so that people think that we are Fine, our jobs are Fine, our lives are Fine, when we are anything but. You have to be looking for robins’ nests to find the birds who could use a helping hand.
Last summer, an incredibly annoying pair of birds built a nest on our front porch. They were barn swallows, and they built their nest out of mud. After the first day, I went out and knocked down their half-finished effort. The next day it stormed, and they came back, bewildered, and stood on the ledge where their nest had been. They didn’t stick around for the worst of the rain, and I decided that if they came back, I’d let them stay.
They came back. They built a nest. They had babies–I’d hear them screeching right outside the laundry room window. They had too many babies. There were five baby starlings in that small nest, and when they started hopping around in there, the nest couldn’t accommodate them. I looked outside one day and saw four babies perched on the ledge, and my heart sank. Nearly eight years ago, when I was pregnant with my son, we had similar birds nest outside a different front door, and when their babies fell out of the nest, they died. It wasn’t a good thing for a pregnant woman to see.
I raced outside and found the ridiculous barn swallow nestling perched on the porch, fine as could be. I scooped him up with a piece of paper, dodging the angry parents, and plopped him back in the nest. I must have done this daily for a week before looking outside one day and finding the nest empty.
It’s such a small thing to put a baby bird back in the nest. Maybe it’s not even a necessary thing. But it’s not in vain, either.
THIS is the land the sunset washes, These are the banks of the Yellow Sea; Where it rose, or whither it rushes, These are the western mystery! Night after night her purple traffic Strews the landing with opal bales; Merchantmen poise upon horizons, Dip, and vanish with fairy sails.
fairy sails at sunset in the foothills of the Alleghenies
This immediately strikes me as a rare gem of a Dickinson poem. It is thoroughly lovely and in-the-moment, with nary a mention of buzzing flies or someone’s funeral (though I suppose the “western mystery,” the going-down-place of the sun, could be connected to death–but you know what, I’m going to stick with the prettiness this time and not read too much into it).
The phrase “the land the sunset washes” is gorgeously descriptive, and I love how light becomes water in this poem–it “washes” across the landscape. If I’m reading this right, the “Yellow Sea” is also the light in its entirety. This whole poem is one tiny, perfect, jewel-like description of a single moment–but also the eternal recurrence, “night after night,” of sunset.
There is something wonderfully profligate (to use the word in a Dickinson kind of way) about how, despite the very short length of this poem, she strews it lavishly with lush descriptions that are at once immediately evocative and yet at time a bit elusive. “Where,” “whither,” “mystery,” “vanish”–while the sensory details are precise and shimmering, painting a vivid picture, and at the same time the thrust of the poem is toward mystery, the unknown–magic.
One of the things about Dickinson’s poetry that never ceases to delight and astonish me is the way she packs so much meaning into so few words. How is this tiny poem about sunset in all its glorious specificity, and the vast mystery of, well, pretty much everything? How does she do it?? There is magic at work here, clearly.
I love, love, love that she ends the poem with “fairy sails.” The prosaic ships of merchantmen are transformed in the golden light to fae craft that work their own magic, dipping and vanishing.
As I read and re-read the poem, it strikes me that Dickinson is both describing an almost alchemical process, and also performing word-alchemy herself–light to water, water to light. This idea has set roots in my brain, and I’m wondering now–what would happen in my own writing if, the next time I described some elemental force (like air) I described it in terms of a completely different elemental force (like fire). What would happen to my language? How much richer would it grow?
So, here’s a bonus prompt, if you’ve made it this far through my raptures of delight: describe an element using the descriptive language suited to a different element. What happens if you write about earth as if it is water, fire as if it is air?
“The sky is low, the clouds are mean, A travelling flake of snow Across a barn or through a rut Debates if it will go.
A narrow wind complains all day How some one treated him; Nature, like us, is sometimes caught Without her diadem.”
Brenna: The first thing that really jumps out at me, beyond the obvious wintriness, is the gendering Dickinson has going on. A flake of snow is “it,” the wind is “him,” and Nature is “her.” As always with Dickinson, there’s this personification of nature, but I think it’s interesting here how she chooses to assign genders. Nature is stereotypically “she,” of course, but that a snowflake is “it” while the wind is “him” strikes me as interesting. Maybe not significant, particularly? Or maybe??
Pam:You know what’s wonderful? That’s not what caught my eye first. I love that we both have completely separate “Aha!” moments when reading this.I think that the gendering is significant! Why assign the wind as male, why assign nature as female, why assign the snowflake as neither?
Brenna:I like how none of the personifications in this poem are particularly flattering. A snowflake is indecisive, the wind is a whiner, and Nature is kind of a hot mess. Or a cold mess. And yet there’s a sense of her relation to all of them, despite the fact that, if these were people you were hanging out with, you might be kind of annoyed.
Pam: There’s also the implication that Nature is not in control here. She’s caught without her diadem, so she wasn’t expecting the snow (what is her tiara, exactly?). Which is a bit odd, for a poem about the weather!
Brenna: Yes! When, in a Dickinson poem, is Nature ever NOT in control?? And “caught without her diadem” is a rather different thing from “caught without pants on.” So what first catches your eye about this one?
Pam: Caught without her EpiPen. Caught without her midi hem. These are very different poems.
Brenna: Caught without her EpiPen is bad news. I mean. All those bees in Dickinson poems.
Pam: The rhyme caught my eye first. Or ears, I suppose! I think she does something very interesting with the rhyme scheme. It comes back on you when you’re not expecting it. “Low” in the first line comes back in the end of the second with “snow” and the end of the fourth with “go.” This has to be deliberate, because she uses the same pattern in the next stanza: middle of line five, “wind;” end of line six, “him;” end of line eight, “diadem.”
Brenna: I did not notice that.
Pam: Three rhyming words per four-line stanza, with the rhyme for the stanza happening first in the middle of that stanza’s first line. It’s odd, right?
Brenna: Thank goodness there is a smart person working on this project.
Pam: Maybe the rhyme scheme is meant to invoke the will-it-or-won’t-it snowflake? Or the wind sounds coming and complaining? And you are the one who caught the pronouns!
Brenna: Okay, if the rhyme is happening where it isn’t expected, maybe that’s mirroring Nature’s failure to expect/anticipate winter. And mirroring her sort-of disheveledness. Though, honestly, caught without your diadem? Not a huge prob. Unless you’re implying that Nature is hugely vain.
Brenna: I love how you always notice the rhyme scheme.
Pam: I love smart sounds in poems!
Brenna: Only semi-related, but do you ever wonder if Dickinson thought all her thoughts in the same meter? I mean, it really is true that you can sing all these poems to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” isn’t it?
Pam: I think you’re absolutely right. All of the agencied characters have problems, don’t they? What if Nature can’t find her diadem because she’s been deposed? Dun dun dunnnnnnn
Brenna: Does agency make one a hot mess? The having to choose, to make do with one’s lot, to get caught unprepared? Nature is deposed!! WHAT WOULD EMILY DO??
Pam: I did not notice the meter. Someone’s going to rescind my degree.
Brenna: LOL
Pam: They’re going to take back my eyeliner and all of my ruffled shirts. No more peasant skirts for you!
Brenna: I mostly notice because when we did “Come Slowly, Eden” in college, everybody made the point of singing ALLLLL the Emily Dickinson poems. Not in performance, of course. But I will never be 100% able to take “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” seriously.
Pam: Part of me thinks: sure, it was the style at the time, it demonstrates mastery, it’s ridiculously hard to do in short poems because you’ve got to be concise. Part of me thinks: why would you do that to yourself, woman?
Brenna: I am really kinda starting to think that her brain just worked in that meter.
Pam: Confession: I have no idea how the melody of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” goes.
Brenna: Now I want to read her letters…..are they in meter??
I LOST a world the other day.
Has anybody found?
You ’ll know it by the row of stars
Around its forehead bound.
A rich man might not notice it; Yet to my frugal eye Of more esteem than ducats. Oh, find it, sir, for me! ~Emily Dickinson
Today’s poem comes with a choice of prompts for you! At the excellent suggestion of Vanessa at Make Time Farm, at time during the course of The Emily Project we’re going to ask you to respond, whether you say it out loud or keep it to yourself. Do one, do both, share them in the comments if you like!
Prompt #1: Have you ever lost a world? What is “the row of stars” by which you could pick it out of a crowd?
Prompt #2: Choose a line from the poem. Write it at the top of a piece of paper. Use it as a starting point and see what comes next.
The Emily Project 