I love all of Dickinson’s advocation for the creepy critters amongst us. Her descriptions are spot-on and delightful. My favorite is of the bat in flight as a “small umbrella, quaintly halved.” The bat is an “Elate philosopher,” and while he is “empowered with…malevolence,” he withholds it. The Creator of the bat deserves praise for this creation as well as others. Dickinson ends on the notion that the oddness of creation is goodness, and I could not agree more.
In the thin darkness before dawn, temperatures plummeted to low single digits here in the north of the South. Before sunrise I bundled up and went outside to break the crust of ice from the chickens’ water. The coming sunrise was a yolk-colored watercolor wash along the horizon, brightening against the lightening sky, and the thin fingernail moon hung high, framed by piercing stars. The cold was so violent it burned, the air sere and searing.
I chose this poem for today simply because it seemed pleasant to think about anything white-hot on a day like today. As I read and reread it, I am first reminded of John Donne’s “Batter my heart, three person’d God” from his Holy Sonnets. Both Donne and Dickinson invoke a creator who makes through violent change, through extreme trial, by pushing the raw material to its limits. The difference is that while Donne begs God to bludgeon him into shape, Dickinson envisions the end of the process as the newly-refined material repudiating the forge.
Here’s where Dickinson gets supremely Dickinsonian. “Repudiate” is a fascinating choice here, with a couple of possible meanings: “to refuse to accept,” or “to reject as untrue or unjust.” Refusing to accept the creator/circumstances of creation is one thing; rejecting them as untrue or unjust is another. They are similar, but there is a significant shade of difference.
As I continue mulling over this poem, the second thing that strikes me is that the current extreme cold is an opposite yet similar metaphor–opposite in temperature, but similar in function. Heat refines in one way, cold in another. I think of how allergists tell people to either wash linens in hot water or seal them in plastic and put them in the freezer to kill dust mites. Heat and cold can both burn. We talk about long-lingering food in freezers as being “freezer-burned.” I think of this line from the poem “Angus McGregor,” by B. D. Pancake: “The hills at thirty below have teeth.” On my drive home this evening, I heard on the news that eight people in the midwest have died from the cold this week. The forge is metaphorical. The forge is real.
It is telling that Dickinson begins the poem with a dare: “Dare you see a soul at the white heat?” Can you handle bearing witness to the process of creation?
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