Tag: ambition

Enough?

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

A modest lot, a fame petite,
A brief campaign of sting and sweet
Is plenty! Is enough!
A sailor’s business is the shore,
A soldier’s—balls. Who asketh more
Must seek the neighboring life!

~Emily Dickinson

The multiple exclamations make me wonder if the lady doth protest too much. Does Dickinson really feel this way–is this what she really wants–“A modest lot, a fame petite”? It almost feels as if she’s trying to convince herself. With the lines about sailor and soldier, the seeker seems to be reminding the listener (perhaps herself?) to stay in her own lane, not to ask for anything but what she’s been given–a very New England Puritanical philosophy. The last line, while it can read as a caution, could also be a challenge. Don’t like what you’ve been allotted? Go elsewhere! Strive! Break all the boundaries and seek the life you really want!

It’s strange how little we know about Emily Dickinson’s motivations–how little is certain. Recent scholarship is upending the notion of the reclusive lovelorn spinster too shy to show her poetry to the world. The old infantilizing view of Dickinson held sway for so long–generations of American schoolchildren were raised on it. How is it possible that the motivations of someone who lived such a comparatively short time ago are so mysterious?

I wonder what Dickinson would say if she could see us now. I suspect she would laugh.

To meme or not to meme?

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We never know how high we are
Till we are called to rise;
And then, if we are true to plan,
Our statures touch the skies.


The heroism we recite
Would be a daily thing,
Did not ourselves the cubits warp
For fear to be a king.

~Emily Dickinson

A cursory internet search suggests that this may be one of the most often-memed Emily Dickinson poems. This bemuses me because I’m not sure the poem is really so meme-able–it strikes me on first reading as one that sounds like an easy aphorism but holds much more than it appears to, like the enchanted tent the Weasleys use at the Quidditch World Cup.

The first stanza is the straightforward one. We never know what heights we can achieve until we are asked or forced to attain them–we can’t know our true potential until we achieve it, and in that moment, if all goes well, we are nearly limitless. We can achieve great things. So far, extremely meme-able.

But the second stanza complicates things. The general sense of it seems to be that we get in our own ways, that it’s our fear of success that prevents us from succeeding. But what is “the heroism we recite”? Is she talking about the heroic deeds of others that we recount, thinking we will never achieve such greatness? Is she saying that we talk big but don’t deliver? I’m not sure how to read this line.

And what are the cubits about? She’s reverting to old Biblical measurements–but why? For the meter alone? Or as a sly allusion to the heroes of the past, who will always seem higher than ourselves? We “warp” the cubits because we are afraid “to be a king.” Are we afraid of greatness itself? Of power? Of the responsibility success brings?

There’s so much packed into this tiny poem–so many interpretive possibilities. It may look like an easy meme about success on the surface–Don’t get in your own way! Do the thing! You are awesome!–but there’s a lot more going on beneath the surface.

Can we meme poetry? What does this do to it, to our experience of it? To transmogrify a poem into a meme is to encapsulate it, to package it for quick consumption, to suggest that what it contains is easily digestible in one quick gulp. But that feels to me like the exact opposite of what poetry is, what it is meant to do. What do you think?

To fail with land in sight

Pam and Brenna2 Comments

It might be easier

To fail with land in sight,

Than gain my blue peninsula

To perish of delight. ~Emily Dickinson


Brenna here–this one’s going to be more of a personal reaction, because I have failure and blue peninsulas on the brain.

As a writer who’s been querying various novels for a decade now, I feel like I’m getting closer and closer to success. I’ve gone from rejections that critique my plotting to rejections that essentially say, “It’s not you, it’s me”–my craft is solid, but a particular agent just isn’t in love with my book enough to take it on, or that agent already has something similar, or the YA market is flooded. I feel like I’m getting closer–but you can infinitely halve the distance between two points and never truly have them meet. So I don’t know if I’m close enough.

Failure terrifies me. I am afraid of pouring myself into stories that no one will ever read, afraid that the time I’m writing (and thus not doing anything else) will not pay off in the writing career I dream of. I hit a low point this past November after a three-rejection week–a novel rejection, a short story rejection, and a grant rejection. The dark night of the soul got so dark that it ceased to be a night and was more like a fortnight. It took me a while to dig my way out of the pit.

It was such a rotten time, in fact, that it prompted me to allow myself one day of despair per month. That way I can keep the angst contained. So far, so good. When I get a rejection, I tell myself that I can get bent out of shape about it and rail against fate as soon as despair-day comes, and not a moment sooner. I have tricked myself pretty effectively, I think.

But every once in a great while, I imagine the seemingly impossible happening. What if I don’t fail? What if I (gasp) succeed?

This possibility can be just as terrifying. After all, success is counted sweetest, as the poet says, by those who never attain it. To succeed means to have made it, to have attained the rarefied stratosphere of the great and successful and brilliant and amazing–but the thing we get may not be quite as sweet as we imagined it to be, and at least half the fun of anything is in the anticipation.

But Dickinson here isn’t talking about sweetness–she’s talking about  ease. It’s easier to fail.

Well, she and I might have to have it out about that one at a later date–but I see what she’s getting at. Giving up is the only way to truly fail–as long as you haven’t given up, you’re trying, not failing. And giving up is wildly easier than persevering.

With this poem, though, I get a bit hung up on the qualifier–failing “with land in sight.” That doesn’t seem easy. That seems horrible. You’re within sight of the promised land and you give up then? Who does that?? Someone who’s afraid of succeeding. And a lot of us, I think, are conditioned to think that we don’t deserve success. As a woman, wife, and mother, I feel a bit like a carnivorous unicorn when I start talking about ambition–are moms supposed to even have ambitions? Maybe to take over the PTA, but certainly not pretensions to literary greatness or anything highfalutin’ like that. Fortunately, one of the gorgeous things about hitting your 40s is that you suddenly cease to care whether people are looking at you as if you are a meat-eating unicorn, and you just bare your teeth and flash your horn and smile. Still, being over 40 does not make failing easier. If anything, it makes it harder. Some days it feels like time is loudly ticking.

I keep reminding myself that every time I hear of a writer “making it,” becoming “an overnight success,” that writer has worked for years to become an overnight success.

Nights can be very, very long.

~Brenna