Tag: insects

summer sounds

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

Farther in summer than the birds,
Pathetic from the grass,
A minor nation celebrates
Its unobtrusive mass.

No ordinance is seen, 5
So gradual the grace,
A pensive custom it becomes,
Enlarging loneliness.

Antiquest felt at noon
When August, burning low, 10
Calls forth this spectral canticle,
Repose to typify.

Remit as yet no grace,
No furrow on the glow,
Yet a druidic difference 15
Enhances nature now.

~Emily Dickinson

The crickets’ song in this poem begins as “pathetic,” “minor,” “unobtrusive.” By the end of the poem, however, it has become “pensive,” “spectral,” even “druidic.” The humble cricket-song takes on magical and mythological significance.

Your prompt is to take one of the sounds of summer and magnify it, tease out all its meanings and correspondences. What is it on the surface, and what lies beneath?

And so the night became

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

The cricket sang,
And set the sun,
And workmen finished, one by one,
Their seam the day upon.

The low grass loaded with the dew,
The twilight stood as strangers do
With hat in hand, polite and new,
To stay as if, or go.

A vastness, as a neighbor, came,—
A wisdom without face or name,
A peace, as hemispheres at home,—
And so the night became.

~Emily Dickinson

It’s amazing what you can learn on the interwebs. For example, if you google the first lines of this poem, the first several hits you get are links to videos of people playing this as a song on marimbas. Who knew?

It’s a lovely poem, and does some wonderful things with language. The first line is a conventional sort of opening, but the second begins to work the poem’s magic. “A cricket sang,/And set the sun” can read as, “A cricket sang, and the sun set” or “A cricket sang, and made the sun set.” I love it–this suggestion that the cricket’s tiny melody could be the spell that sings down a star from the sky. The workmen act in a similar way–they leave a “seam” upon the day itself, as if knitting it together, completing it.

The second stanza begins with another conventionally poetic image–“The low grass loaded with the dew”–but then we get some wonderfully Dickinsonian personification. The twilight stands politely waiting. Though we know it is definite, certain, unavoidable, it acts as if we have a choice. It is gentle, reserved.

It makes sense, then, that twilight brings with it wisdom and peace. In the third stanza, it’s compared now not to “strangers” but to “a neighbor.” Though it has neither face nor name, it is familiar, comforting, settling.

I love the way that the first and last lines, taken together, crystallize the entire poem: “A cricket sang,” “And so the night became.”

“A toad can die of light!”

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

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.