Tag: speech

Irrevocable

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

YOU cannot put a fire out;
A thing that can ignite
Can go, itself, without a fan
Upon the slowest night.

You cannot fold a flood
And put it in a drawer,—
Because the winds would find it out,
And tell your cedar floor.

~Emily Dickinson

What a weird and wondrous little poem. “You cannot put a fire out”? But you can. I’m not initially sure what Dickinson is getting at here. She begins by saying you can’t put out a fire, but goes on to say that a thing that can ignite can burn without help. I’m not sure how these two ideas are connected, besides both being about fire.

In the second stanza, she goes on to say that you cannot “fold a flood” and put it away. This makes more sense. But then she gives her reason–you can’t do this because the winds would find out and tell your floor? The “cedar” here feels forced, thrown in for the sake of the rhyme and nothing else.

What is this poem about? Dickinson seems to be saying that certain things are irrevocable–once out in the world, they cannot be taken back. Fire can burn unchecked once started, can rage out of control. Floods, too, cannot be controlled. I wonder if what she’s really talking about here is speech, language. Once said, a word cannot be unsaid. It can rage like a fire or a flood, and its originator can do nothing to check its spread. The winds telling the floor could be the power of rumor, the tendency of spoken words to spread beyond the speaker’s intended audience.

the little implement

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

Prayer is the little implement
Through which men reach
Where presence is denied them.
They fling their speech

By means of it in God’s ear;
If then He hear,
This sums the apparatus
Comprised in prayer.

~Emily Dickinson

Prayer can seem like such a small thing.

I have always had a sense of my own prayers as balloons, rising softly only to get stuck bumping around in a corner of the ceiling, never getting where they are supposed to be going. Other people’s prayers, I am certain, find their destination, wing their way right to where they’re supposed to be.

We fling our speech heavenward, hoping for an answer, a cure, absolution, redemption. Where does it go? Where do words go once they are spoken? Where does that sound go?

The “If” in the second and final stanza is so interesting to me. If God hears, then that is prayer. Prayer has been achieved. It isn’t prayer, apparently, if the “little implements” never arrive at their destination.

I wonder what I have been doing all this time.