Tag: animals

bees abashless

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Source: Emily Dickinson Archive, https://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/236551

Where every bird is bold to go
And bees abashless play
the foreigner before he knocks
must thrust the tears away–

Reading Dickinson’s poems in her own hand, it’s hard to understand how and why all those pesky punctuation marks and capital letters ended up in the printed versions.

In this poem, Dickinson is of course talking about death, because there has never been a poet more on brand. What’s lovely and poignant, in a multilayered way, about this one is the contrast between birds/bees and the presumably human “foreigner.” Dickinson’s word choice implies that while birds and bees are part of nature and therefore exist comfortably within its cycles of life and death, human animals are different–we get upset about it.

The image of the foreigner thrusting away tears is a touching one, but deeper down there’s another level of tragedy–the fact that we human critters have become so distanced from the natural world that we cannot be bold, cannot play “abashless,” but must always be not only aware of but in fear of our inevitable end.

Forbidden fruit

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Forbidden fruit a flavor has
That lawful orchards mocks;
How luscious lies the pea within
The pod that Duty locks!

~Emily Dickinson

I will probably not eat this peach, but not from any sense of duty. If this summer is anything like the last few, ravenous nocturnal critters will emerge like clockwork exactly twenty-four hours before the fruit is ripe enough to pick, and they will denude both peach trees in one spectacular all-night fruit-gorging orgy. They mock my lawful orchard.

Sigh.

If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to salvage enough for a pie or two. There will be a handful of peaches for eating fresh. And they will be the sweetest of all, not because they are forbidden, but because they are hard won.

“A toad can die of light!”

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There’s a sentence I never thought I’d type.

CXXXVII
A toad can die of light!
Death is the common right
Of toads and men,—
Of earl and midge
The privilege.
Why swagger then?
The gnat’s supremacy
Is large as thine.

~emily dickinson

This is a strange puzzle of a poem. It’s pretty obviously about not getting cocky just because we’re human, or just because we carry a certain rank. Both earls and midges alike will die eventually (ah, an Emily poem about death! Surprise!!). A gnat and a human being are equally alive, and when dead, are equally dead–death is the great leveler.

But why a toad? And what on Earth is up with that first line?

In searching for answers, I found nothing that gave me what I was looking for. I was hoping to find some obscure reference to some archaic belief that sunlight kills toads. No such luck. I mean, the toads I’ve known have been twilight creatures, happiest in the gloaming or even the dark of night, but I hardly think a little light would kill one. The closest thing I found to an answer was a reference to a study that used UV and blacklight to attract insects and thus an invasive toad species for trapping in Australia.

I’m pretty sure this isn’t what Dickinson is talking about.

So as far as the reference to light goes, I’ve got nothing.

The choice of toad is interesting, though, even without that reference. Toads in folklore have been associated with the powers of evil, particularly via their roles as the familiars of witches. Another contrasting tradition says that toads have jewels embedded in their heads.

Again, I’m struggling to see what this could have to do with the meaning of the poem.

Dickinson must have been aware of the multiple significances of toads. I wonder, though, if she’s choosing here to disregard them to focus on the toads she likely encountered as a gardener–not magical, witchy toads, and not sparkly, bedazzled amphibians, but ordinary garden toads that would have sought refuge among the foliage during the heat of the day. Nothing seems closer to the Earth in a very literal sense than a toad. It is physically close, but also earth-colored, a being that looks as if it could have been hastily sculpted from the soil in which it dwells.

A toad is a humble thing, at least in human terms. But we are, after all, also made of dust, and to dust we all return. So we are no better than toads, or the midges and gnats on which they prey. No living thing is any more alive than any other living thing, regardless of stature. No reason to swagger.