death – Page 2 – The Emily Project

Before the ice is in the pools

December 2, 2019 Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

Before the ice is in the pools,
Before the skaters go,
Or any cheek at nightfall
Is tarnished by the snow,
Before the fields have finished,
Before the Christmas tree,
Wonder upon wonder
Will arrive to me!
What we touch the hems of
On a summer’s day;
What is only walking
Just a bridge away;
That which sings so, speaks so,
When there’s no one here,—
Will the frock I wept in
Answer me to wear?
~Emily Dickinson

I love the icy imagery in this poem. As I read through it for the third or fourth time, though, what I’m imagining is an Emily Dickinson blog post-writing bot. It could select from various options, the most common of which would be “this is a poem about death.”

As Emily Dickinson death poems go, however, this is a lovely one. Death is described as “Wonder upon wonder.” My favorite part is the third stanza. The idea that another world lingers just at the edge of our vision is a compelling one. This is definitely not an angsty Dickinson death poem. Death here is like the turning of the seasons, a natural part of the cycle of life, and is couched as such–but with a magical spin.

Pathos!!

December 1, 2019 Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

A poor torn heart, a tattered heart,
That sat it down to rest,
Nor noticed that the ebbing day
Flowed silver to the west,
Nor noticed night did soft descend
Nor constellation burn,
Intent upon the vision
Of latitudes unknown.
The angels, happening that way,
This dusty heart espied;
Tenderly took it up from toil
And carried it to God.
There,—sandals for the barefoot;
There,—gathered from the gales,
Do the blue havens by the hand
Lead the wandering sails.
~Emily Dickinson

Dickinson is definitely going for the pathos with this one. “A poor torn heart, a tattered heart.” Intent upon its visions, the “heart” does not see the ebbing day, the encroaching night. It slips away, into the embrace of angels who carry it to God. I don’t know what to say about this one because it seems too obvious. And maybe a little cutesy, too, compared to the angst and existential dread of which Dickinson is so capable.

This is the kind of poem that makes me really, really wonder who Dickinson was. Was she this person? Or the person who wrote about the numbness of death? Or was she both? I suppose we all contain multitudes, and all of these are her. But some of her poems are rather difficult to reconcile with other ones. This feels like the kind of poem that would have been written by Emily Dickinson, Good Christian Girl. Very different from yesterday’s, which was clearly penned by Emily Dickinson, Preacher’s Kid Gone Wild.

But hey! It wraps up a month of (largely) shipwreck poems with a reference to salvaged ships, so it’s all good.

Two worlds

November 29, 2019December 1, 2019 Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

Departed to the judgment,
A mighty afternoon;
Great clouds like ushers leaning,
Creation looking on.
The flesh surrendered, cancelled,
The bodiless begun;
Two worlds, like audiences, disperse
And leave the soul alone.
~Emily Dickinson

At numerous times over the course of this year-long Emily Dickinson project, I have suspected that I am gradually becoming stupider. Some of Dickinson’s poems hit me like a flash of insight, clear and bracing. Others completely befuddle me, to the point that I wonder if I have forgotten how to word.

The first stanza of this poem is very straightforward. Of course it’s about death! The second stanza? Tricksier. Okay, death means the surrendering of the flesh, the beginning of a bodiless state. But what are the “Two worlds” that “disperse” “like audiences”? Has she named two worlds?

Maybe the two worlds are a reference to the “clouds,” representing heaven, and “Creation,” representing this life, in the first stanza. If this is the case, then what is Dickinson saying about death? That the soul after death has nothing to do with either this world or the next? It’s almost like this woman was not raised by a preacher. Or like she’s the stereotypical P.K., pushing allll the boundaries and challenging alll the beliefs.

Thanksgiving day

November 28, 2019December 1, 2019 Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

ONE day is there of the series
Termed Thanksgiving day,
Celebrated part at table,
Part in memory.
Neither patriarch nor pussy, 5
I dissect the play;
Seems it, to my hooded thinking,
Reflex holiday.
Had there been no sharp subtraction
From the early sum, 10
Not an acre or a caption
Where was once a room,
Not a mention, whose small pebble
Wrinkled any bay,—
Unto such, were such assembly, 15
’T were Thanksgiving day.
~Emily Dickinson

What a weird one, Emily.

It starts out ordinarily enough. Out of all the holidays in the series of the year, Thanksgiving is one. We celebrate it with meals and with remembrance. So far so good.

“Neither patriarch nor pussy”–wtf, Emily? Neither an old man or a cat? I have no idea what she’s getting at. Somewhere between an old man and a cat?? Skipping this. Moving on. “I dissect the play.” This echoes other Dickinson poems in which she speaks of observing others as being like her own private theatrical experience (see, “The show is not the show”). Thanksgiving seems to the speaker like a “reflex holiday”–perhaps a day when one is on automatic pilot, when we go through the motions. This is an interesting take on the day, for sure, and yet one that probably resonates for many people.

In the next stanzas, the syntax completely loses me. If there hadn’t been any subtraction–any loss–then what? I am completely flummoxed by the ending. If we hadn’t ever lost anything, we wouldn’t know how to be thankful?? If we hadn’t ever been subtracted from, we wouldn’t be who we are, looking back on the past and those who were subtracted?? Emily Dickinson, is this yet another poem about death???

I’ve got nothing here. So I’ll just say this–may your Thanksgiving be a heck of a lot easier to understand than this poem.

Wrecked, solitary

November 26, 2019 Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.
And when they all were seated, 5
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb.
And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul 10
With those same boots of lead, again.
Then space began to toll
As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,
And I and silence some strange race, 15
Wrecked, solitary, here.
~Emily Dickinson

This is probably one of Dickinson’s most well-known poems, particularly the first stanza, and the first line. Much has been said and written about this poem–its opening, the notion of feeling a funeral, the masterful use of repetition. Rather than focusing on the beginning, I want to pay close attention to the end, because it’s here that Dickinson brings in one of her favorite metaphors–shipwreck.

Amherst, Massachussetts is not particularly near the ocean. Yet Dickinson frequently invokes the ocean and ships in her poetry. For most of this poem, she writes about the sensation, particularly the sound, of the “funeral in my brain.” The imagery is that of a funeral, with mourners and footsteps. But then, in the very last line, she switches gears, and suddenly the speaker is “Wrecked, solitary, here.” From funeral, she moves abruptly to shipwreck. It’s a strange, transitionless shift–and yet that’s how shipwrecks must seem. Abrupt, sudden, everything expected ripped away.

Like the speaker, the reader is left shipwrecked at the end of the poem, disoriented, torn from one world and dropped suddenly in another, left alone with silence.

Crescent

November 25, 2019 Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

Each that we lose takes part of us;
A crescent still abides,
Which like the moon, some turbid night,
Is summoned by the tides.
~Emily Dickinson

We are carved out, hollowed by our losses. Each one chips away a little more at us, the lost one taking part of us with them to wherever souls go. But there is never nothing left. “A crescent still abides,” a sliver of light, of hope. And maybe, like the moon, it isn’t so much that we’re taken from as we’re obscured, darkened. Maybe everything is still there–just in shadow.

On this date

November 15, 2019 Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

GLEE! the great storm is over!
Four have recovered the land;
Forty gone down together
Into the boiling sand.
Ring, for the scant salvation!
Toll, for the bonnie souls,—
Neighbor and friend and bridegroom,
Spinning upon the shoals!
How they will tell the shipwreck
When winter shakes the door,
Till the children ask, “But the forty?
Did they come back no more?”
Then a silence suffuses the story,
And a softness the teller’s eye;
And the children no further question,
And only the waves reply.
~Emily Dickinson

This poem reminds me of a song sung by William Pint and Felicia Dale, so I’m including the lyrics here in full, though there are rather a lot of them. They recount a true story–the loss of the British lifeboat The Mary Stanford on this date ninety-one years ago. It’s a tragic tale, made all the more tragic by the fact that the vessel which The Mary Stanford was sent out to rescue was already saved by the time the English lifeboat launched. It seems like the kind of story that would have struck a chord in Dickinson’s imagination.

When master John Stanford of London town died
They read out his will and his legacy spied
It said take this bequest for to build me a craft
So that with it my name shouldn’t die
And give it to the R.N.L.I.

So they fashioned a lifeboat of Liverpool class
38 feet from the stem to the aft
With a close reefed mainsail on a 20 foot mast
And to grant the last wish of his life
Named it Mary after his wife

She went into service in 1916
And 63 times from the boathouse she screamed
Cross the shale of Rye Bay
Through the teeth of the storm
And into the mouth of the waves
All sailors lives there to save

Johnny come home they all sing from the pier
On the 15th day of November each year
And one day the sea she will give up her dead
And home will come young Johnny Head
Home will come young Johnny Head

Young Johnny Head
Had just turned seventeen
And to serve on the lifeboat was
Young Johnny’s dream
His father was the coxswain
His brother in the crew
And to serve he was willing to die
On the Mary Stanford of Rye

On November 15th
With the storm at its height
The Alice of Riga was losing her fight
Seven miles from Dungeness
She was drifting and lost
And the crew prayed and cried
To the moon
That’s when they heard the maroon

It was four in the morning
When young Johnny Head
On hearing the signal
He leapt from his bed
With his father and brother
They ran like the wind
That whipped up the furious waves
But there were lives to be saved

To haul out the lifeboat
Took blood, sweat and tears
It took them two hours
Must have seemed like two years
Exhausted and spent, they set her afloat
And into the barbarous waves
Rowed Mary to Alice’s aid

It was 6:45 when the shoremen lost sight
of the Mary
As she pitched out into the night
And at 6:51 the coastguard he rang,
Saying “Stand down your lifeboatmen
brave
For the Alice is already saved.”

Nobody knows from that day to this,
Why the coastguard got word
At eleven past six
But the message he kept forty minutes
or more
While seventeen brave men of Rye
Rowed into the tempest to die

It was almost noon on the terrible morn
And the families and launch crew had
Waited since dawn
When suddenly somebody
Pointed and cried
And there in the surf and the spray
The Mary Stanford she lay

Her body was battered
Her keel was upright
No close-reefed mainsail
No crewman in sight
They hauled her ashore
And they knelt round and prayed
Then gazed out again at the main
And the tears they ran like the rain

Then one by one
The sea gave up her dead
First Willie Clark then young Jimmy Head
Then Albert and Rob, the two Cutting boys
And three from the Pope family
And nine more sons of the sea

But young Johnny Head
He never came home
He lies out somewhere in the ocean alone
His comrades lie buried
In the churchyard at Rye
And they keep him a space for his bed
One day they’ll find Johnny Head

So the next time you sail
Around Hastings and Rye
Look to the distance and keep out an eye
And if you see a young man from the R.N.L.I.
Standing guard over the foam
You’ll know that Johnny’s come home

~Allen Maslen, “The Mary Stanford of Rye”

Beyond time

November 14, 2019 Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

GREAT streets of silence led away
To neighborhoods of pause;
Here was no notice, no dissent,
No universe, no laws.
By clocks ’t was morning, and for night
The bells at distance called;
But epoch had no basis here,
For period exhaled.
~Emily Dickinson

How do you write about nothing? How do you imagine it–how is it even possible to conceive of? Dickinson’s description in this poem reminds me of Ursula K. LeGuin’s depiction of the land of the dead in her Earthsea books.

Both LeGuin and Dickinson conceive of death as a paradoxical place of nowhereness, a thing of nothing.

The forest of the dead

November 13, 2019 Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

OUR journey had advanced;
Our feet were almost come
To that odd fork in Being’s road,
Eternity by term.
Our pace took sudden awe, 5
Our feet reluctant led.
Before were cities, but between,
The forest of the dead.
Retreat was out of hope,—
Behind, a sealed route, 10
Eternity’s white flag before,
And God at every gate.
~Emily Dickinson

For someone who often wrote of Death as a courteous gentleman, Dickinson wrote some pretty macabre stuff, too. The line that jumps out at me from this poem is “the forest of the dead.” In the poem, it’s the obstacle between the speaker and the “cities.” The line reminds me of Carrie Ryan’s YA zombie novel The Forest of Hands and Teeth, which is a great read even if, like me, you are squeamish about all things zombie.

As a country-dweller, I’m often bemused by how often in the human imagination cities are associated with goodness, order, intellectualism, etc.; while nature, particularly very rural parts of it, are scary, benighted, chaotic, deadly. I feel safer in the middle of the woods than in any city.