similes – The Emily Project

Of all the sounds despatched abroad,
There ’s not a charge to me
Like that old measure in the boughs,
That phraseless melody

The wind does, working like a hand 5
Whose fingers comb the sky,
Then quiver down, with tufts of tune
Permitted gods and me.

When winds go round and round in bands,
And thrum upon the door, 10
And birds take places overhead,
To bear them orchestra,

I crave him grace, of summer boughs,
If such an outcast be,
He never heard that fleshless chant 15
Rise solemn in the tree,

As if some caravan of sound
On deserts, in the sky,
Had broken rank,
Then knit, and passed 20
In seamless company.
~Emily Dickinson

There’s so much loveliness in this poem–the wind as music permitted to be heard by both gods and humans; the “fleshless chant,”; the “caravan of sound”…….I could wax rhapsodic about this one. I love how Dickinson literally breaks ranks with her own stanza length by throwing in an extra line in the final stanza where she describes the wind as a caravan breaking rank.

But today’s post is not me geeking out or being baffled by another Dickinson poem. It’s a prompt for you.

What visceral effect does the wind have on you? Is it thrilling? Unnerving? Uplifting? Write a poem or paragraph in which you tease out that feeling through simile and metaphor à la Dickinson.

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?

Tag: similes

Prompt: The wind

Riddles in the Dark