the moon – The Emily Project

PROUD of my broken heart since thou didst break it,
Proud of the pain I did not feel till thee,
Proud of my night since thou with moons dost slake it,
Not to partake thy passion, my humility.
Emily Dickinson

Another day, another love poem that may not really be a love poem. The first thing that strikes me about this poem is the repetition: three of the four lines begin with “proud.” Given that this poem is one long sentence, that’s a lot of pride to display in such a short punch of a poem. So what’s the speaker proud of?

Firstly, she’s proud of her broken heart, “since” the unnamed lover broke it. Curious, here, is the double meaning of “since”: is the speaker proud because the lover broke her heart, or is she proud from the period of time since it has been broken?

Secondly, she’s “proud of the pain I did not feel till thee.” Sure, this is pretty self-explanatory, but it’s interesting that this is a new pain. Is she proud because this is the first time her heart has been broken, or because she’s loved deeply enough to have been deeply affected?

Thirdly, the speaker becomes entirely to attached to her rhyme scheme. “Proud of my night since thou with moons dost slake it” is a line that practically shouts STOP RHYMING THIS POEM. It also requires some unpacking, because the narrator is doing literary gymnastics to fit this line in her scheme. She’s proud of her night, since you, Mr. Ex, are feeding it with moons. Hold up. What?

Not only does this make little sense on first read, it also breaks the scheme set up in the first two lines. You broke my heart – past tense. You hurt my feelings – past tense. “Thou dost slake” – present tense. If the narrator is heartbroken, how is she also being slaked? The idea of being slaked means not just having something to eat or drink, but to have that foodstuff to satisfy a hunger.

But what else could night be hungry for, than light? Here the speaker is telling us that, yes, she might be in the dark, but she’s not bothered. Even though Mr. Ex–or Mr. Never Was–isn’t with her, he’s still giving off enough light to satisfy her thirst. I hate to say it, and perhaps I’m reading this wrong, but here the narrator seems like nothing more than a moth, battering herself against a light that pays her no notice.

The fourth and final line gives us our last break from repetition. No longer is the speaker proud: now, she’s professing her humility! She is entirely too humble to have any hope of passion with this person; perhaps it is her humility which is holding her at length.

The Moon is distant from the Sea –
And yet, with Amber Hands –
She leads Him – docile as a Boy –
Along appointed Sands –

He never misses a Degree –
Obedient to Her eye –
He comes just so far – toward the Town –
Just so far – goes away –

Oh, Signor, Thine, the Amber Hand –
And mine – the distant Sea –
Obedient to the least command
Thine eye impose on me –
~Emily Dickinson

I chose this poem in honor of February’s full moon, the Snow Moon. Last night the clouds hung heavy with snow and the light of the moon, amber or otherwise, didn’t touch my little patch of earth. But the moon is still there, irrevocable as the tides, pulling and tugging at consciousness even when invisible.

This is yet another in the category of “Is It a Love Poem??” It easily could be, but the “Signor” could be God as easily as the beloved. Rather than comment on that, I want to focus instead on the gender reversal in this poem.

Dickinson begins with the Moon as “She” and the sea as “Him.” The moon has for thousands of years been associated with the feminine, so there’s nothing surprising her. The interesting thing happens in the third stanza–the female speaker takes the place of the masculine sea, and “Signor,” whoever he is, takes on the feminine role of the moon. I love this kind of gender-bending; it happens occasionally in Dickinson’s poems, and while I don’t know what exactly it means, I find it fascinating.

If we go with a religious reading, there’s precedent for this, of course, in descriptions of God as not only a masculine force, but also a mother bird gathering her chicks under the nurturing shelter of her wings. But why the gender reversal partway through the poem?

Maybe it’s because, in any sustained relationship, socially-constructed notions of gender have to blur from time to time. No one can be the sole nurturer; no one can be the sole protector. Our roles wax and wane over the cycles of time like the phases of the moon. Roles that are stereotypically “feminine” can and should be played by both partners in a relationship, and so should the stereotypically “masculine” ones. I can’t know if Dickinson was thinking anything along these lines, but the fact that she so easily compares the influence of the masculine (God, the beloved) to a feminine power (the moon) is suggestive.

There are so many interesting features in this poem–the gorgeous evocations of the moon’s amber light, the poignancy of the repeated emphasis on the impossible distance between the speaker and the object of her devotion, the sheer beauty of Dickinson’s language. No matter how you read it, it’s a lovely poem to read under the light of the full moon.

Tag: the moon

Consecration

“The Moon is distant from the Sea”