March – The Emily Project

Bluebird

March 24, 2019 Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

Before you thought of spring,
Except as a surmise,
You see, God bless his suddenness,
A fellow in the skies
Of independent hues,
A little weather-worn,
Inspiriting habiliments
Of indigo and brown.

With specimens of song,
As if for you to choose,
Discretion in the interval,
With gay delays he goes
To some superior tree
Without a single leaf,
And shouts for joy to nobody
But his seraphic self!
~emily dickinson

Yesterday my dad was cleaning out birdhouses. He hadn’t seen a bluebird yet, he said. The tree swallows had come and gone suddenly, and he seemed certain it was because the birdhouses needed clearing out. Birds have a way of making their opinions known. Last summer, hummingbirds would hover outside my kitchen window, staring in at me as if to say “Get a move on!!” while I cleaned and refilled their feeder. So I suspect Dad was not wrong about the tree swallows.

This afternoon, while my husband and I walked the dog in the field behind our house, a bird burst from one of the newly-cleaned houses–probably a mockingbird or catbird, judging from its size and the flash of grey. Not a bluebird.

Then, suddenly, wings blazed blue across the winter-brown field. A bird perched on top of another birdhouse and sat there, watching us. I stared against the sun, trying to discern its exact color. A bluebird. They are back, and with them, hope and warmth and light, and permission, for those of us who needed it, to shout for joy to no one but ourselves.

Visible

March 20, 2019 Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

XCII
To my quick ear the leaves conferred;
The bushes they were bells;
I could not find a privacy
From Nature’s sentinels.

In cave if I presumed to hide,
The walls began to tell;
Creation seemed a mighty crack
To make me visible.
~Emily dickinson

It’s been a week, so for today, I’m just going to leave this here for you. It was a little sparkling breath of wonder for me on a busy and exhausting day that began at the hospital (everyone’s fine–scheduled procedure), continued with a trip to the vet (everyone’s fine but very expensive), and ended with the arrival of friends returning after decades away. So it’s been a good day, but also the kind of day when you just need to pause, take a breath, and indulge in a very small poem.

May you be visible in all the best ways.

Riddles in the Dark

March 17, 2019 Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

XCVIII
It’s like the light,—
A fashionless delight,
It’s like the bee,—
A dateless melody.

It’s like the woods,
Private like breeze,
Phraseless, yet it stirs
The proudest trees.

It’s like the morning,—
Best when it’s done,—
The everlasting clocks
Chime noon.
~Emily Dickinson

After many sodden months, the March winds have finally arrived. They howl like wild things, like Grendel alone and friendless outside the mead hall. They sigh fitfully. They gust and caress, rant and hum through the bowing branches of the pines.

The local joke this summer when people complained about the wet weather was that it only rained twice–once for forty days, and once for thirty days. It’s been soggy here, the woods burgeoning with fungus, paths carved out by water. Autumn and winter were wet, too. Rain. Snow. Freezing rain. Sleet. Rain. Again.

At last the winds are here, and their cries are a benediction, better than a rainbow after flood. Gardens are beginning to dry out enough to till. The paths through the woods are no longer treacherously slick. Pearly songs burst from the throats of the little birds that fluff their feathers in the welcome sunlight.

I chose today’s poem because, in my edition of Dickinson’s poems, it’s titled “The Wind.” But each time I read it, I feel pulled farther away from that notion. Wind is like light. It is a dateless melody, it’s phraseless, and it does stir the trees. But other parts of this riddle-poem just don’t seem to work if the answer is really “the wind.” This is a poem I can imagine fitting neatly into Bilbo and Gollum’s riddle-contest. Just when you think you know the answer, the riddle makes a twist. Who would compare the wind to a breeze? What kind of clue is that?

We know that Dickinson didn’t title her poems–they were titled posthumously. In many cases, I have to wonder what the poem-titler was thinking. This is definitely one of those cases.

So what is she writing about? If I’d had to answer this one, I’d probably have had to throw on my invisibility ring and slip out the back way. I don’t know what she’s talking about. It’s the last stanza that really throws me–the notion that morning is best when it’s done. I like morning when it’s happening, but Dickinson seems to be using morning as a metaphor for something that’s best gotten through, gotten over with.

I have no answers for this one. What do you think?

Benediction and Badinage

March 12, 2019 Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

XCIV
High from the earth I heard a bird;
He trod upon the trees
As he esteemed them trifles,
And then he spied a breeze,
And situated softly
Upon a pile of wind
Which in a perturbation
Nature had left behind.
A joyous-going fellow
I gathered from his talk,
Which both of benediction
And badinage partook,
Without apparent burden,
I learned, in leafy wood
He was the faithful father
Of a dependent brood;
And this untoward transport
His remedy for care,—
A contrast to our respites.
How different we are!
~Emily Dickinson

It finally feels like spring is about to visit the Shenandoah Valley. The world still looks groggy and half-asleep, the grass dead, the leaves mulch on the forest floor. It doesn’t look like spring, but the air is beginning to carry that lightness that means flowers will soon be blooming, bees buzzing. Soon the world will come alive again, resurrecting from the muck of winter.

The birds’ songs have shifted, too. They sound different in the spring. There are new visitors, of course, swinging by on their northern migrations, but the birds that remain here through the winter sound different, too, as if they’re unleashing their most golden notes to meet the newly gilded light that pours across the mountain ridges as the sun sets blessedly later.

I had never come across this poem before, but I love it. It came just when I needed it. Life has been hectic lately–one kid in a regional competition, the other working on not one but two major projects at school within days of each other, animals due for vet appointments, humans due for dental appointments, no hope of a haircut in sight, fruit trees and grapevines in need of pruning before the temperatures set their sap flowing.

Life has felt overly crammed. It’s all good stuff, but there’s a heck of a lot of it. There’s a lot of racing around, not a lot of sleeping. I need to channel the outlook of the bird in this poem, his jaunty attitude, his ability to at once engage in benediction and badinage. He’s a parent, too, and of an entire brood. If he can do it–if he can sing despite his cares–then maybe I can, too.

Maybe we are not so different, after all.

Yellow & Gold

March 10, 2019 Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

This evening, as the sun still lingers above the sloping shoulders of the Alleghenies and the air is suddenly balmy, the world has turned to gold. Spring is finally coming.

Today’s post is a little bit different–instead of a response to an Emily Dickinson poem, we’re offering you two poems in conversation. One, of course, is by Dickinson; the second is by Robert Frost. Read them, mull over them, let them sit together and have a conversation. See what happens.

Dickinson’s short poem “Nature rarer uses yellow” seems meant to be followed by Frost’s famous “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” Read them together and see what you think.

Have a golden evening.

Alone

March 8, 2019 Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

The wind tapped like a tired man,
And like a host, ‘Come in,’
I boldly answered; entered then
My residence within

A rapid, footless guest,
To offer whom a chair
Were as impossible as hand
A sofa to the air.

No bone had he to bind him,
His speech was like the push
Of numerous humming-birds at once
From a superior bush.

His countenance a billow,
His fingers, if he pass,
Let go a music, as of tunes
Blown tremulous in glass.

He visited, still flitting;
Then, like a timid man,
Again he tapped- ‘t was flurriedly-
And I became alone.
~Emily Dickinson

Pam: Is this really an entire poem about a gust of wind in her house?

Brenna: I think it is.

Pam: Emily.

Brenna: And, of course, the wind is a dude.

Pam: Emily.

Brenna: The wind taps like a tired man but then enters rapidly. I guess that’s the gusting? The wind lulls and then blows in fits and starts. That seems like a very March wind. My first question: how does one “hand a sofa” to someone?

Pam: Can I just say that you have got to be lonely as everything to be sad when the wind, your only visitor, leaves? Yes, she’s hitting us over the head with the “he is incorporeal” stuff.

Brenna: I love the description of his speech, though–“like the push of numerous hummingbirds.” And I like the reference to the glass instrument–is it the glass harmonica?

Pam: Oh, good question! I have no idea. I’ve never heard of a glass harmonica. I was thinking of water glasses, how you can fill them halfway and run your fingers around them rim to make them sing. But I imagine that you are closer to the truth! As always, I am wondering why the rhyme changes in the last stanza. “man/alone” disrupts the rather straightforward rhyme scheme in lines 2/4 of the previous stanzas (pass/glass, push/bush).

Brenna: Yes! That’s a glass harmonica! Benjamin Franklin invented it as a mechanized instrument, but it’s basically glasses. Okay, you have got to listen to one before we go any further.I am going to google right now.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQemvyyJ–g I just watched that. It’s gorgeous!!Isn’t it magical?I wonder if that’s what she’s referring to in the poem–it does sound like the wind!It’s gorgeous. I want this instrument in my daily life.Agreed.Back to rhyme scheme? Man/alone disrupts.Sounds about right.

Pam: Yep. It’s the nail in the coffin of “yes, I’m really alone,” which we can tell because the rhyme scheme is different–and there’s emphasis on the man in that particular rhyme scheme, so we’re left wondering about him, too.

Brenna: And “flurriedly.” Um. Emily. That is hard to say. And is it just me, or does “and I became alone” feel like a very weird way to put it? The contrast between the speaker “boldly” admitting the wind early in the poem, and the wind as “timid” near the end is interesting.

Pam: Yes! In the beginning she’s active–she boldly answers–and in the end she becomes alone, passive.

Brenna: Is she becoming like the wind? She isn’t alone until she knows she is.

Pam: I wonder if the conceit of this poem is what might happen if you thought you heard a knock at the door, but opened it to find only wind, and realized that you were lonelier than you’d originally imagined. Someone knocks, I’m excited because I think I have a visitor, I open the door–and it’s just the wind, and now I am definitely lonely.

Brenna: Yes. That seems spot on to me.

Pam: Boom. Poem cracked like a nut.

Brenna: You win! Shall we call it a day?

Pam: Let’s do.

An Emily Dickinson Herbarium

March 8, 2019 Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

“Whose are the little beds,” I asked,
“Which in the valleys lie?”
Some shook their heads, and others smiled,
And no one made reply.

“Perhaps they did not hear,” I said;
“I will inquire again.
Whose are the beds, the tiny beds
So thick upon the plain?”

“‘T is daisy in the shortest;
A little farther on,
Nearest the door to wake the first,
Little leontodon.

“‘T is iris, sir, and aster,
Anemone and bell,
Batschia in the blanket red,
And chubby daffodil.”

Meanwhile at many cradles
Her busy foot she plied,
Humming the quaintest lullaby
That ever rocked a child.

“Hush! Epigea wakens! —
The crocus stirs her lids,
Rhodora’s cheek is crimson, —
She’s dreaming of the woods.”

Then, turning from them, reverent,
“Their bed-time ‘t is,” she said;
“The bumble-bees will wake them
When April woods are red.”
~Emily Dickinson