Tag: mortality

That dark parade

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THERE’S been a death in the opposite house
As lately as to-day.
I know it by the numb look
Such houses have alway.

The neighbors rustle in and out, 5
The doctor drives away.
A window opens like a pod,
Abrupt, mechanically;

Somebody flings a mattress out,—
The children hurry by; 10
They wonder if It died on that,—
I used to when a boy.

The minister goes stiffly in
As if the house were his,
And he owned all the mourners now, 15
And little boys besides;

And then the milliner, and the man
Of the appalling trade,
To take the measure of the house.
There ’ll be that dark parade 20

Of tassels and of coaches soon;
It ’s easy as a sign,—
The intuition of the news
In just a country town.

~Emily Dickinson

There is so, so much very deeply creepy stuff going on in this poem.

It’s frequently anthologized, but I know it best by just that first line. I didn’t remember all the disturbing detail from my past encounters with this poem–just that first line. The first stanza is interesting, with its suggestion that what transpires within a house affects the appearance of its exterior. This works on a symbolic level, too–what happens within us can be written on our faces, or at least give off a feel that hints at what’s going on inside.

The second and third stanzas, though, are where things really start to get dark. The second stanza ends with a window opening “like a pod,” and I am too much a product of my times not to imagine some kind of sci-fi business there. In the third stanza, the mattress of the deceased goes flying out that window, and the speaker identifies with children wondering “if It died on that.” Shudder. The dehumanizing of the dead person is brief but chilling. And then we learn that the speaker, in a rare twist from Dickinson’s usual M.O., is male.

Then we get the litany of the folks in all the death-related trades who enter the house, and things do not get less unsettling. The minister goes in as if he owns the house, mourners, and all the little boys, too. The milliner (why do we need a hat??) and “the man/Of the appalling trade,” presumably the funeral director, then enter.

The speaker ends by imagining the “dark parade” that is about to transpire, and then pulls back the focus by presenting this as just one of many such incidents “in just a country town.”

In many of Dickinson’s poems about the deaths of individuals, the focus is entirely on the deceased and that person’s impact on those s/he left behind. This poem is different–the deceased is never even really described as human. The entire thrust of the poem is toward the wrongness of death, the dehumanization of it.

It’s a disturbing poem on many levels.

Though pyramids decay

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’T is an honorable thought,
And makes one lift one’s hat,
As one encountered gentlefolk
Upon a daily street,

That we ’ve immortal place,
Though pyramids decay,
And kingdoms, like the orchard,
Flit russetly away.

~Emily Dickinson
Image via Pexels.com

This poem has some things to say to this other poem, so I’ll just put them both here and let them talk it out. The following poem has chatted with Dickinson’s work here before, but I need pretty much no excuse to reread “Ozymandias” for the gazillionth time.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

~Percy Bysshe Shelley

How to be forgotten

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AFTER a hundred years
Nobody knows the place,—
Agony, that enacted there,
Motionless as peace.

Weeds triumphant ranged, 5
Strangers strolled and spelled
At the lone orthography
Of the elder dead.

Winds of summer fields
Recollect the way,— 10
Instinct picking up the key
Dropped by memory.

~Emily Dickinson

It’s simple, really. Just let a hundred years pass. In a hundred years, the scenes of our suffering will be sanded down by time, glossed over, our traces removed. No one will know, remember. A few may guess, but certainty ended a long time ago.

The places that marked the unforgettable moments of our lives become overgrown, naturalized to their former wildernesses. The last vestiges of our existences, if such remain, are curiosities merely, a line to be idly wondered at, a few lost grave goods.

The wind, perhaps, carries a sense of what went before. Now, when we pass a place where great joy, great sorrow, great intensity of emotion has occurred, we hesitate, a few of us. There is a tinge of something on the breeze, a suggestion. A prickling at the back of the neck. A sudden incalculable rush of feeling. Signs that someone was here, once.

In a hundred years, someone else will perhaps wonder the same thing.

Ghost

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THE ONLY ghost I ever saw
Was dressed in mechlin,—so;
He wore no sandal on his foot,
And stepped like flakes of snow.
His gait was soundless, like the bird, 5
But rapid, like the roe;
His fashions quaint, mosaic,
Or, haply, mistletoe.

His conversation seldom,
His laughter like the breeze 10
That dies away in dimples
Among the pensive trees.
Our interview was transient,—
Of me, himself was shy;
And God forbid I look behind 15
Since that appalling day!

~Emily Dickinson

This is a fascinatingly spooky little poem. The first line is fantastic–“The only ghost I ever saw,” the speaker says, as if she might be expected to have seen many more–or as if she is recounting a shared experience. You’ve seen ghosts; I’ve seen one, too. This ghost, she tells us, “was dressed in mechlin,” a kind of lace. This seems to be the ghost of one long-dead–she identifies it as “he” but tells us additionally that not only is he quiet and fast, he is “quaint.”

In the second stanza, we get more information about the ghost’s behavior. He speaks seldom, but interestingly, he also laughs. The speaker tells us that the encounter was “transient,” as one might expect from a ghost.

There’s nothing about this particular ghost that seems disturbing, other than, of course, the obvious fact that he is a ghost. He converses, laughs a little, apparently goes on his way after a brief encounter. The speaker even tells us that the ghost was shy of her.

So the final two lines come as a bit of a twist: “God forbid I look behind/Since that appalling day!” Other than the fact of the ghost’s existence, there’s nothing about him that seems creepy or particularly threatening. The ghost himself appears afraid of the living. So why does the speaker suddenly do an about-face at the end, describing the meeting as “appalling,” and painting a picture of herself as terrified from that day forward to look behind her?

Perhaps it is precisely the ghost’s ordinariness that is distressing. This ghost is not anything more than the spirit of an ordinary human being–a person not unlike the speaker. He is a reminder of the speaker’s own mortality–an insistence that she, too, is never far from her own death, that death is something that waits for us all.

truth // beauty

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I DIED for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed? 5
“For beauty,” I replied.
“And I for truth,—the two are one;
We brethren are,” he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms, 10
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.

~Emily Dickinson

This is another of my favorites. There’s something beautifully macabre about the notion of two dead people striking up a conversation, finding in death a kinship. This poem is ultimately about my favorite subject of all, which is connection. The dead characters in the poem recognize their likeness, and proceed to converse as long as possible, “Until the moss had reached our lips / And covered up our names.” The similarity between the two continues through death into oblivion–both are alike in the reason they died, and they simultaneously become forgotten.

There is so, so much going on here–whole papers on death, obscurity, connection, the nature of truth and beauty…..I could ponder and write about this one for days. However, this poem very obviously would like to have a conversation with John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” so I’m going to leave them alone to talk it out.

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

~John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

An overcoat of clay

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DEATH is a dialogue between
The spirit and the dust.
“Dissolve,” says Death. The Spirit, “Sir,
I have another trust.”

Death doubts it, argues from the ground.
The Spirit turns away,
Just laying off, for evidence,
An overcoat of clay.

~Emily Dickinson

As the death-poems go, this one is pretty hopeful. The notion of death as a dialogue is an evocative one, though the metaphor quickly gets mixed in the third line. In the first two lines, death is the dialogue between spirit and flesh. In the third line, however, Death is a participant in the dialogue, and is talking with the Spirit. There is an implicit equation between Death and dust, death and body, as opposed to Spirit.

The dialogue begins with an imperious command from Death to the Spirit to “Dissolve,” and the dialogue quickly becomes an argument. The Spirit refuses the order, Death doubts this, and argues “from the ground,” implying that Death now inhabits the “dust” of flesh and that Spirit is already ascending to “another trust.”

The Spirit refuses to be drawn into the argument. Death is arrogant and bossy, but the Spirit finds expression in actions rather than words. It turns away, and lays off the trappings of the flesh.

It’s a very Puritan reading, this notion of the body as dust. It’s the reading many of us have been taught to accept—that flesh is somehow other than us, that our bodies are just shells for our souls. The body in this poem feels superfluous—while we’re told initially that Death is a conversation between flesh and soul, we quickly learn that the body here is silent—it’s Death and the Spirit that get to speak. The physical is almost extraneous, not really a part of the deceased, but merely “An overcoat of clay.”

Monument

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She laid her docile crescent down,
And this mechanic stone
Still states, to dates that have forgot,
The news that she is gone.

So constant to its stolid trust,
The shaft that never knew,
It shames the constancy that fled
Before its emblem flew.

~Emily Dickinson

During my family’s vacation, we visited the Wright Brothers Memorial in North Carolina. It’s a well-designed monument–it sweeps upward from the crest of a hill, evoking the idea of flight–but I’m still struck by our human need to memorialize that which is fleeting in nearly immortal stone. There is a strange contrast between the seeming weightlessness of flight and the tons of rock we use to commemorate it, the weightlessness of the human soul and the stones we erect when it has fled. Heaviness in an attempt to pin down something that won’t be pinned down, that will not stay. Permanence to mark the passing of something that could never last forever. We find ways to ensure the remembrance of our own mortality.

The monument I visited is a different thing from the tombstone Dickinson evokes, but they have this in common–their underscoring of the ways in which we humans try to immortalize the mortal, to make permanent that which cannot last.

“A toad can die of light!”

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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.

In which we discover that we are adequate.

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CIX

OF bronze and blaze
The north, to-night!
So adequate its forms,
So preconcerted with itself,
So distant to alarms,—
An unconcern so sovereign
To universe, or me,
It paints my simple spirit
With tints of majesty,
Till I take vaster attitudes,
And strut upon my stem,
Disdaining men and oxygen,
For arrogance of them.
My splendors are menagerie;
But their competeless show
Will entertain the centuries
When I am, long ago,
An island in dishonored grass,
Whom none but daisies know.

~Emily Dickinson

Brenna: The opening sentence is gorgeous, almost overwhelmingly beautiful–and then in the next sentence she hits us with how “adequate” its forms are, and I kind of snort-laugh. “The aurora borealis is amazing and beautiful and….adequate!”

Pam: This. What is even happening? I just read through it. I feel like I’ve misplaced brain cells. I have no idea what is happening here. You’re absolutely right about the gorgeous imagery and then the strange turn to “adequate.” And then we have “preconcerted,” which apparently means “arranged or organized in advance.” How can you be preconcerted with yourself? “When I am, long ago.” What even. I have lost all powers of language.

Brenna: Ohhhh, I love that! That is my favorite part!

Pam: Tell me what it means!!

Brenna: I don’t know?? But I have THOUGHTS.

Pam: I am waiting patiently, long ago.

Brenna: Okay, so she says that, as mighty and important as the aurora has made her feel in the first stanza, she will eventually die (because Emily Dickinson), while the northern lights will continue.

Pam: The island is her gravestone! Okay. That pieced it together. I’m glad you’re here with a guidebook.

Brenna: And then she does the amazing thing. She starts out using the future tense: “When I am…” And then she whips it around within the same sentence to the past tense: When she is dead long ago, i.e. when she has been dead for a long time. She’s seeing her own past in the future. Emily is badass.

Pam: She’s looking forward to a time when her grave is in forgotten grass, where only flowers know about her.

Brenna: Yes! When she is pushing daisies. When she has become daisies. I love the time warp in that second stanza. I think it’s glorious. Emily Dickinson is so metal.

Pam: Which, of course, hasn’t happened yet! Such a strange little moebius strip of reasoning that cannot become true because of her postmortem poetic fame. She will never have that prediction come true, most likely, but the poem (which outlives her) keeps this premonition alive and also incorrect.

Brenna: Well-said!

Pam: I also think it’s glorious now that you’ve explained it.

Brenna: Isn’t it fantastic?

Pam: She’s doing this earlier in the poem, too! “Till I take vaster attitudes, / And strut upon my stem”: when, in the future, I am an actual flower.
She’s conflated with the aurora borealis, too! It’s eternal; it’s not going anywhere. She’s imagining a future where she is dead and her remains have become flowers, which are also impermanent, but they reseed and come back over and over again.

Brenna: And like the aurora, she will be incorporeal. It’s a pretty amazing poem. Pam. PAM. Are we starting to……UNDERSTAND Emily Dickinson??

Pam: I feel like if I agree that we understand her, we will be cursed.

Brenna: That’s not good. We are in TROUBLE. No, WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND YOU, EMILY. Haunt us no more!!

Pam: Just looking at the two poems previous this one in the book–no, I do not understand her. Yet!

Brenna: Wait….I said we’re starting to understand her. I qualified it. We are not cursed. Whew!!

Pam: Qualifiers are important! Walking back from the ledge.

Brenna: Walk it back, Pam!!

Pam: We are adequate!

Brenna: We are so adequate. Competelessly adequate. I love how excited she gets about herself in this poem. She takes “vaster attitudes,” “struts,” and disdains men and oxygen. That should be this blog’s tagline. “Disdaining men and oxygen.

Pam: YES. She is feeling her splendors in this poem.

Brenna: They are menagerie! But then once again, nature puts E.D. in her place. SMACK. “You are PUSHING DAISIES.” And why is the grass “dishonored”?

Pam: That’s a good question. Maybe not dishonored the way we think of it, but literally not honored by visitors? Forgotten?

Brenna: This poem raises a really interesting question again–did she want recognition? In some poems it feels as if she’s longing for it. In others, she wants to be “nobody.” In this poem, she goes from being nobody to spendiloquent to nobody again.

Pam: Oh, wonderful question. I wonder, too, if perhaps recognition–the desire for it–is something she grappled with, and poems like these are moves toward accepting her belief that she will not have recognition.

Brenna: Ah, this seems like a good working theory! And she reminds herself that it’s okay, in the grand scheme of things. Nature is what endures. And she does, in the very real biological sense of becoming daisies. But her display is homely and small and forgotten, overlooked, unlike the aurora, which demands attention.

Pam: Yes! What a wonderful thing to pull out. She’s in earthly planes with the homely daisies, and still underneath the splendor of the aurora.

Brenna: She still gets to witness it, or at least be in its presence.

Pam: Amelia just came in and said, “Mommy, tell me what my name is.” I told her. She said, “No, I’m a MYSTERYYYYYY.” So I think she understands Emily better than we do.

Brenna: Emily Dickinson: 20. Pam and Brenna: 2. Amelia: WINNING.

Pam: Are we at 20?

Brenna: 22!

Pam: Holy cow, we’re at 22! 22 Dickinson poems! We’ve gone past blackjack!

Brenna: Our blog can drink!

Pam [flipping through the book]: “A toad can die of light.” What.