Tag: spring

Altered

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AN altered look about the hills;
A Tyrian light the village fills;
A wider sunrise in the dawn;
A deeper twilight on the lawn;
A print of a vermilion foot;
A purple finger on the slope;
A flippant fly upon the pane;
A spider at his trade again;
An added strut in chanticleer;
A flower expected everywhere;
An axe shrill singing in the woods;
Fern-odors on untravelled roads,—
All this, and more I cannot tell,
A furtive look you know as well,
And Nicodemus’ mystery
Receives its annual reply.

~Emily Dickinson

April is here at last, bearing with it all the telltale signs. The light looks different in spring, as if the whole world is breathing in deeply yet quietly. The redbud trees are beginning to flush with a faint haze of purple. Flies are making their way in, somehow. Spiders have been plying the corners all year long, of course, but now that the flies are back, there’s cause for much celebratory and anticipatory web-construction. My chanticleer definitely has an added strut, though here we call him Louis XIV, and he does his best to live up to the name, loudly greeting the sun well before it appears and shepherding the hens around the yard, fussing them to safety when a red-tailed hawk soars by overhead. Around here, there aren’t so many axes ringing out–the sharp echoes here are from distant neighbors testing the sights on shotguns, preparing to scare crows and groundhogs away from spring plantings. The smell of spring is lush, wet, mineral. It smells at once like rain, pollen, and groundwater, like sunshine and sap and hope. It’s difficult to adequately describe–it’s a sight glimpsed briefly, a faint scent, a fleeting sound.

What does spring look, smell, taste, sound, feel like in your corner of the world?

“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.

Bluebird

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Image source: Pixabay,
https://pixabay.com/images/search/bluebird/

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.

Spring magic

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XC
A murmur in the trees to note,
Not loud enough for wind;
A star not far enough to seek,
Nor near enough to find;


A long, long yellow on the lawn,
A hubbub as of feet;
Not audible, as ours to us,
But dapperer, more sweet;


A hurrying home of little men
To houses unperceived,—
All this, and more, if I should tell,
Would never be believed.


Of robins in the trundle bed
How many I espy
Whose nightgowns could not hide the wings,
Although I heard them try!


But then I promised ne’er to tell;
How could I break my word?
So go your way and I’ll go mine,—
No fear you’ll miss the road.

~emily dickinson

Today is the spring equinox. The robins are back. The sun is shining, and the world is coming fully alive again after its long cold sleep. Night and day balance on an invisible fulcrum. Anything is possible.

This is a poem about magic, about the possibility of the impossible, about the glorious intangible. Okay, it’s an Emily Dickinson poem, so it’s probably somehow about death, but I have decided that I am going to read this as a poem about faeries and how they are Real, dangit. You can read it however you want–“go your way and I’ll go mine,” as the poet says. “No fear you’ll miss the road.” It’s almost as if she’s instructing us to read this poem however we like.

That, after all, is one of the great beauties of poetry–its multiplicities of possibility, of meaning, its ability to be all things to all people. This May, I’ll be substitute teaching a couple of middle school English classes for a friend on maternity leave. I get to teach the poetry unit, and it’s the last lines of this poem that I want to take as my mantra, my teaching philosophy. There is magic in poetry, and teaching can suck that right out if it’s not done well.

The magic is there for each of us to find. Maybe we find the same magic. Maybe we don’t. But it’s there.

Bittersweet blossoms

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LXVIII
As children bid the guest good-night,
And then reluctant turn,
My flowers raise their pretty lips,
Then put their nightgowns on.


As children caper when they wake,
Merry that it is morn,
My flowers from a hundred cribs
Will peep, and prance again.

~Emily dickinson

Crocuses have begun peeping from the barren earth. Incongruously bright against the dead grass, they dot the brown with tiny firework-explosions of white and purple.

Each plant sends forth a single bloom, so when my newly ten-year-old son comes running with a minuscule blossom clamped between two fingers, I am lanced with bittersweetness. That flower is done, gone. My little boy, not so little anymore, still brings me the first flower he finds every spring.

Parenthood is like that, love laced with delight and punctuated by constant reminders that no moment is forever.

Still

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LII
New feet within my garden go,
New fingers stir the sod;
A troubadour upon the elm
Betrays the solitude.


New children play upon the green,
New weary sleep below;
And still the pensive spring returns,
And still the punctual snow!

~Emily Dickinson

My feet and fingers are itching to get in the garden. Right now, though, it’s a soggy mess–a mud pit churned by months of rain and snow. My seeds wait patiently in their packets–seeds are made of waiting–but I am chafing to put them in the earth.

Outside, birds are unleashing their spring songs. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a flit of movement and turned just in time to recognize the little personage who burst away into flight–a house wren, little investigator of nooks, crannies, and perches, possibly seeking out a place for a nest. House wrens are wonderful busybodies.

The spring is certainly pensive at the moment, unsure whether it’s really here or not. Today looks like spring. The light looks like spring. The birds are singing spring–but just a few days ago, the world was covered in snow.

I want to give myself over to spring, like the birds, pour a full-throated song into the heedless air, but the memory of winter makes me pause. Spring is always there, waiting, beneath winter’s white blanket–but then winter is always waiting, too, deep in the earth, in the cool dark of caverns, its fingers itching and twitching to claw their way back up to the waiting world.

Benediction and Badinage

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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

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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.

An Emily Dickinson Herbarium

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“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
My trees are waking up to spring.
A few days ago, they were absolutely riddled with soft, white blossoms. Now they’re giving way to leaves green as a luna moth.
Welcome, daffodils. Or, more correctly: goodbye, daffodils. They’ve been in bloom for over a week, and they’re already starting to die.
Welcome, irises. I dug these from a huge clump in my front yard at the end of last summer and planted them without much hope in the backyard.
I planted this native azalea last spring. It never flowered, but now it has rosy pink buds forming.
I planted these flowers in October, watered them maybe twice, and then left them to their own devices. Thanks for sticking around, violas.
And, finally, my absolute favorite sign of spring: my husband ran over this St. John’s wort last summer, thinking it was a weed. (It was not.) Cue much crying from me and a well-chastised husband. Now the plant is putting out new leaves. Thanks for sticking around. Thank you for trying to live.

Afterwards–day!

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II
Our share of night to bear,
Our share of morning,
Our blank in bliss to fill,
Our blank in scorning.


Here a star, and there a star,
Some lose their way.
Here a mist, and there a mist,
Afterwards—day!

~Emily Dickinson

This is for everyone who, after struggling through February, emerged hopefully into March to discover that it’s actually February in disguise. It’s below freezing here in what is supposed to be the South. The daffodils are having second thoughts. Sometimes things are not what they ought to be, or what we want them to be. Here’s to making our way through the mist into the light of day, of spring, of fresh hopes and dreams realized.