Musicians wrestle everywhere:
~Emily Dickinson
All day, among the crowded air,
I hear the silver strife;
And—waking long before the dawn—
Such transport breaks upon the town
I think it that “new life!”
It is not bird, it has no nest;
Nor band, in brass and scarlet dressed,
Nor tambourine, nor man;
It is not hymn from pulpit read,—
The morning stars the treble led
On time’s first afternoon!
Some say it is the spheres at play!
Some say that bright majority
Of vanished dames and men!
Some think it service in the place
Where we, with late, celestial face,
Please God, shall ascertain!
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The sun is about to crest the horizon. While I have sat at my desk this morning, the sky has bled from black to whisper-pale violet and coral to predawn blue. Birds have begun singing, though their chorus is nowhere near as exuberant as it was a month ago.
What is the music Dickinson is talking about in this poem, and who are the musicians? She tells us that they are not birds–but then, what are they? Is their music even audible, or is she describing a sound beyond sound, one of those ethereal experiences of insight into a world past our own?
Is she referring to the music of the spheres, the ancient notion that the movements of the planets in the heavens corresponded to a kind of song? There is something very Dickinson-y about this.
Maybe she is talking, too, about inspiration, or its source. It is invisible. It comes from seemingly nowhere and everywhere, and not everyone can hear it at all times. In the final stanza, the speaker merely puts forward others’ theories–some say it is the spheres, some say it is the departed (ghosts? angels?), and some say it is the sound of Heaven itself.
She ends on this note. Uncertainty. But also possibility. Whence does the music flow? One day, hopefully, we will learn.
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