XC
A murmur in the trees to note,
Not loud enough for wind;
A star not far enough to seek,
Nor near enough to find;
A long, long yellow on the lawn,
A hubbub as of feet;
Not audible, as ours to us,
But dapperer, more sweet;
A hurrying home of little men
To houses unperceived,—
All this, and more, if I should tell,
Would never be believed.
Of robins in the trundle bed
How many I espy
Whose nightgowns could not hide the wings,
Although I heard them try!~emily dickinson
But then I promised ne’er to tell;
How could I break my word?
So go your way and I’ll go mine,—
No fear you’ll miss the road.
Today is the spring equinox. The robins are back. The sun is shining, and the world is coming fully alive again after its long cold sleep. Night and day balance on an invisible fulcrum. Anything is possible.
This is a poem about magic, about the possibility of the impossible, about the glorious intangible. Okay, it’s an Emily Dickinson poem, so it’s probably somehow about death, but I have decided that I am going to read this as a poem about faeries and how they are Real, dangit. You can read it however you want–“go your way and I’ll go mine,” as the poet says. “No fear you’ll miss the road.” It’s almost as if she’s instructing us to read this poem however we like.
That, after all, is one of the great beauties of poetry–its multiplicities of possibility, of meaning, its ability to be all things to all people. This May, I’ll be substitute teaching a couple of middle school English classes for a friend on maternity leave. I get to teach the poetry unit, and it’s the last lines of this poem that I want to take as my mantra, my teaching philosophy. There is magic in poetry, and teaching can suck that right out if it’s not done well.
The magic is there for each of us to find. Maybe we find the same magic. Maybe we don’t. But it’s there.
The Emily Project 