A PRECIOUS, mouldering pleasure ’t is
To meet an antique book,
In just the dress his century wore;
A privilege, I think,
His venerable hand to take,
And warming in our own,
A passage back, or two, to make
To times when he was young.
His quaint opinions to inspect,
His knowledge to unfold
On what concerns our mutual mind,
The literature of old;
What interested scholars most,
What competitions ran
When Plato was a certainty,
And Sophocles a man;
When Sappho was a living girl,
And Beatrice wore
The gown that Dante deified.
Facts, centuries before,
He traverses familiar,
As one should come to town
And tell you all your dreams were true:
He lived where dreams were born.~Emily Dickinson
His presence is enchantment,
You beg him not to go;
Old volumes shake their vellum heads
And tantalize, just so.
Pam: This poem embodies really every Emily Dickinson poem ever. Old poem! Yes! What does she have to tell us? What am I going to learn from this? Birds? Bees? Pastoral? Yes! This is beautiful! . . . wait. What does the last line mean? This doesn’t make any sense? Why is it over? Why can’t I ask her what it means???
Brenna: Okay, so my first thought is–BOOKS! YAY! This is NOT A POEM ABOUT DEATH!!! And then I start reading, and I remember that, doh, this is Emily Dickinson, and this is totally a poem about death.
Pam: It’s ALWAYS a poem about death.
Brenna: It always is. Death is Emily Dickinson’s BIG MOOD. Okay, so in this particular poem about death…
Pam: I do love that she describes the book as “mouldering.” I feel that usually when we see that word, it’s describing dead bodies. This feels pretty Poe of her.
Brenna: It really does! Poe-riffic!
Pam: Death: of the book! Of the ideas expressed in the book, because the era of the author is long gone!
Brenna: And the juxtaposition of “pleasure” with “mouldering”…very “Fall of the House of Usher.”
Pam: Yes! A “mouldering pleasure.” Gross, and I also get it! The smell of books. Or maybe I’m just thinking of the slightly sweet mildewy smell of old books.
Brenna: I remember reading this years ago, before social media and Kindles and such, and it didn’t hit me in quite the same way it does now. This poem is APT, yo. It could be a poem written yesterday by one of the “e-readers are blasphemy” crowd.
Pam: Oh, bless. As if any method of ingesting books could be bad. At the same time, I really, really love an old book. I’m talking old. The spine has cracked. The glue has disappeared to parts unknown. The pages are dog-eared or torn or falling out. The edges are worn soft. I love that. When you get a book that old, and you let it flip open, and it falls to the same place every time and you can kind of guess that this was an important passage to somebody, so this is where they turned to a lot? I eat that right up.
Brenna: So. To sum up: She likes old books and she cannot lie.
Pam: You other poets can’t deny. We cannot do this entire song. We COULD do this entire song. But we should not do this entire song.
Brenna: When a book walks in with an itty-bitty spine and–okay. We will not do the entire song.
Pam: We will probably end up doing the entire song and posting it as an Easter egg somewhere.
Brenna: Someday people will search for it.
Brenna: It will be like READY PLAYER ONE, but for the other kind of nerds.
Pam: The really desperate ones?
Brenna: The book ones. US, Pamela. !!
Pam: THE REALLY DESPERATE ONES
Brenna: DYING
Pam: Girl, you know it’s true.
Brenna: Wait–is that Sir Mixalot??
Brenna: I’ma just blame that one on the rain and move on.
Pam: NOOOOOOOOOOOOoooo
Pam: You out-Milli-Vanilli-d me.
Brenna: I WIN. I’m too sexy for this chat, too sexy for this chat…Okay. POEM. FOCUS, Pam and Brenna.
Pam: I feel like this is the rare Emily Dickinson poem that’s just doing what it says on the tin!
Brenna: I really, really want to believe that.
Pam: This is like something a stoner would conceive of. Wow, old books are cool. Isn’t it weird how the people who wrote this are dead? Okay, bye.
Brenna: And yet, I feel like she’s weaving in all these references to mortality, and those have to mean something.
Pam: How much is Emily Dickinson the poet wondering whether people might read her in the future and beg of her in the same way not to go? For somebody who wrote so prolifically and published so incredibly rarely–and asked that her papers be burned, I think–she had to have considered it, right? So maybe she really is wondering a little bit about her own authorial immortality?
Brenna: She invokes Plato, Sappho, Sophocles, Dante–all these classical greats. She is also careful to underscore their mortality.
Pam: And then there’s the whole other issue of the folks who published her works after her death, and who edited them as well–so even though she has attained this kind of immortality, the words that became famous after her death were not printed as she wrote them. It’s nice that she includes Sappho, too. One could probably have a field day researching and following that down the rabbit hole.
Brenna: Her words appeared “in just the dress her century wore,” in that sense. In the sense of being sanitized for proper punctuation. From the Dickinson museum, here’s some info: https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/book/export/html/108
Brenna: TL;DR–a few of her poems were published, but it’s unclear whether she okayed this. No one knows if she wanted to be published or not.
Pam: I read something earlier today (not sure where) that she was also a prolific gardener, and used to send “posies” to her friends, along with scraps of poetry. I think Dickinson reported (or at least thought) that her friends were happier with the flowers than the verse.
Brenna: What is up with the ending? It does seem like a fairly straightforward poem, up until the point where she’s begging a book not to go and it is tantalizing her.
Pam: It’s weird, right? She always does this! I really do look at this poem the way that I look at most of her poems. I’m trucking along, and I think I get it, and then there’s a hard left turn.
Brenna: YES. It’s as if every poem is a riddle.
Pam: The reader begs “him,” the book, not to go in the way that we, the readers, are begging her not to end the poem there. So in that sense, if it’s intentional, it’s a great example of what she’s just shown us in the poem. And I can’t believe that it’s unintentional.
Brenna: But how can a book possibly “go”? In what world outside of a Miyazaki film does this make sense?
Brenna: OOOOH. DUH.
Pam: I read it as, “Book, you are so interesting, please don’t end!” But you can’t stop it from ending.
Brenna: Wow I feel dumb.
Pam: You are not dumb!!
Brenna: I think you figured it out. Pam. YOU WIN THE POEM.
Pam: And the volume shaking its head = closing the book? WE’VE DONE IT. WE GOT ONE POEM. 1/365 is not a bad ratio, yes?
Brenna: Only three hundred and something-ty more days to go!!!
The Emily Project 