Tag: water

…well.

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What mystery pervades a well!
The water lives so far,
Like neighbor from another world
Residing in a jar.

The grass does not appear afraid;
I often wonder he
Can stand so close and look so bold
At what is dread to me.

Related somehow they may be,—
The sedge stands next the sea,
Where he is floorless, yet of fear
No evidence gives he.

But nature is a stranger yet;
The ones that cite her most
Have never passed her haunted house,
Nor simplified her ghost.

To pity those that know her not
Is helped by the regret
That those who know her, know her less
The nearer her they get.

~Emily Dickinson

Dickinson’s description of the well is evocative and powerful. It is a thing of mystery, otherworldly. Words like “afraid,” “dread,” “fear,” “stranger,” “haunted,” and “ghost” paint a vivid picture of the speaker’s visceral response to the well. It is mysterious, terrifying, alien, even though it is part of nature.

Compare this to yesterday’s poem, in which Dickinson uses a well as a metaphor for marriage–marriage is the dropping of a life into a well. What do you think? Are these poems meant to speak to each other?

Rain and not bees

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A drop fell on the apple tree
Another on the roof;
A half a dozen kissed the eaves,
And made the gables laugh.

A few went out to help the brook,
That went to help the sea.
Myself conjectured, Were they pearls,
What necklaces could be!

The dust replaced in hoisted roads,
The birds jocoser sung;
The sunshine threw his hat away,
The orchards spangles hung.

The breezes brought dejected lutes,
And bathed them in the glee;
The East put out a single flag,
And signed the fete away.

~Emily Dickinson

If we were having the kind of summer shower Dickinson is writing about, I would be picking up my bees today. No such luck. Bees, like other witches, do not appreciate getting wet. They get downright grouchy. When the barometer falls, otherwise lovely honeybees become Not Very Nice People.

So today, instead of picking up my bees, I am daydreaming of bees, reading Dickinson’s poems about or referencing bees, and wondering when this rain is going to end.

This is not a summer shower. This is a summer monsoon. It’s just not stopping. It’s supposed to rain all day tomorrow, too, so no bees until Tuesday.

I’ve waited two years. I guess I can wait a little longer.

Experience

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I stepped from plank to plank
So slow and cautiously;
The stars about my head I felt,
About my feet the sea.


I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch,—
This gave me that precarious gait
Some call experience.

~Emily Dickinson

This is a fascinating little poem. The central metaphor seems like a nautical one, but is the speaker referencing a pier? a ship? Without specifying, she still conveys a sense of precariousness. It sounds as if she’s up high–“the stars about my head I felt”–or at least feels as if she is, balanced above the sea. In just a few short lines, Dickinson manages to convey that tentative balancing act.

There’s something lovely about the notion of having one’s head in the stars, and I can’t help but think that Dickinson intends us to think this in addition to giving a sense of great height and precariousness. And the idea of feeling the stars…that is simply magical.

In the second stanza, the speaker conveys her uncertainty–she is inching forward, not knowing if’when she will lose her footing. It is this inching, this tentative advance, she says, that gives her the “precarious gait/Some call experience.”

How often do we look at those around us who are playing it safe and assume that they know what they’re doing, that they somehow “have it all together” because they’re not falling, when all they’re doing is inching along? Is it better to be cautious or to plunge forward into life, come what may?

Prompt: Loyalty

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SPLIT the lark and you’ll find the music,
Bulb after bulb, in silver rolled,
Scantily dealt to the summer morning,
Saved for your ears when lutes be old.

Loose the flood, you shall find it patent,
Gush after gush, reserved for you;
Scarlet experiment! sceptic Thomas,
Now, do you doubt that your bird was true?

Emily Dickinson

Continuing in the fashion of is-this-a-love-poem poems: is this a love poem? It seems more like an I-told-you-so poem. The speaker is telling an unnamed person that music can be found inside a lark, if you split it open. The music is described beautifully–“bulb after bulb, in silver rolled”–and it persists in memory even after the lark is gone. Consider, too, what happens if we unleash a flood: it does what floods do! It floods!

The speaker then closes with an address, referring to the unnamed as a “sceptic Thomas”–slightly off from the usual “doubting Thomas” that I’m used to hearing, but the meaning is the same. Thomas, who refused to believe that the risen Jesus was, in fact, the risen Jesus, until he could feel the wounds from the cross, inspires the narrator’s own doubter: where does the lark’s music really come from? What happens if I open this dam and let the water out?

The speaker in this poem is, I believe, the lark, but that’s a discussion for another day. What I find far more interesting is the idea of questioning how a thing works, and then destroying it to find its source: and, of course, losing the thing in the process.

For today’s prompt, consider some natural phenomenon that seems magical, and which you might be able to slice through to suss out its mysteries. What happens then? What do you learn, or keep, or not?

In which we are not sure whether this is actually a love poem:

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IX


Have you got a brook in your little heart,
Where bashful flowers blow,
And blushing birds go down to drink,
And shadows tremble so?


And nobody, knows, so still it flows,
That any brook is there;
And yet your little draught of life
Is daily drunken there.


Then look out for the little brook in March,
When the rivers overflow,
And the snows come hurrying from the hills,
And the bridges often go.


And later, in August it may be,
When the meadows parching lie,
Beware, lest this little brook of life
Some burning noon go dry!

~Emily Dickinson

Brenna, haphazardly choosing today’s poem: On page 18, IX strikes me as kind of a weirdo one.”Have you got a brook in your little heart.” WHY DOES THIS MAKE ME LAUGH

Pam: Let me flip over. I’ve lost my book. Give me a minute!0

Brenna: I shall paraphrase for you thusly: Your love is a little brook. It is smol and secret. But in March WATCH OUT, PASSION and other things polite nineteenth-century ladies only speak of via euphemism. But then by August, your love is dried up and DEAD and everything Emily Dickinson writes is about DEATH.

Pam: Oh my goodness. Flipping over now.

Brenna: I may be feeling a little punchy…

Pam: I think punchy is the right way to approach this one.”Have you got a brook in your little heart” Emily what even. Everything is bashful and blushing and trembling!

Brenna: Usually she reserves “little” as an epithet for herself, but here it’s second person. But I still get the feeling she’s talking to/about herself.And if you don’t watch out, you will be Overcome! And then die.When your love is in full flood, it will take out bridges!! Beware!!

Pam: I absolutely think she’s talking about herself, and that’s what cracks me up the most. It’s disguised to look humble and it’s doing the exact opposite. Look at me, I am so dainty and I have this very tiny love, which I am shouting about in a poem!

Brenna: YES. My love is very smol and cute and dainty, but then it gets huge and ragingly powerful and it will TAKE YOU DOWN. And then it dies.

Pam: Are you also reading the torrents of March as just inexpressibly huge lust? Is that just me? I’m honestly equating this with the animals going twitterpated in Bambi. Spring = birds and bees!

Brenna: I am reading this exactly the same way. Spring=innocent puppy love. March=lust. It will destroy you and everything else in its path. August=you are OLD and DRIED UP and love is no longer for you. So there!!

Pam: Exactly!!We have the cold in this poem, too! The snows hurrying from the hills. What were you saying about cold in Dickinson’s poems?

Brenna: Cold=passion. Aha!! It still holds true! My Cold Theory of Dickinson!!

Pam: It’s an I Am Very Special poem.

Brenna: It is! It strikes me that rather a lot of her poems are “I Am Very Special” poems. Like Poe, who wrote that from earliest childhood he was totally and completely unlike anyone else. There is so freaking much exceptionalism in poetry. Maybe just American poetry?? Or maybe white people poetry…

Pam: I honestly think it’s just a poet characteristic. I’m not going to say I’m also like that, but I’m also like that. I think if you didn’t have such an inflated sense of self-worth, you’d probably choose a saner career than poet.

Brenna: Is that why we write? Then how do we explain the constant and crippling self-doubt?? She had it too! Why are we paradoxes???

Pam: I think being a writer makes one automatically a parodox. So what do we do with this wilting flower?

Brenna: Hmmm…..Well, let me ask you this– Do you have a brook in YOUR little heart, hmm? Why is this even in the “Love” section? We’re only assuming it’s love because it’s in that section, but this could be ANYTHING. I don’t know what to do with this weirdo poem. Maybe we post it along with a single question–what on earth does she mean??

Pam: Oh, goodness. I don’t have a brook in my heart. My heart is composed primarily of lost socks and pizza.

Brenna: I want to laugh and cry at the same time, that is so true. Lost socks and pizza….yes….It’s the freaking METER. The meter is what makes this poem so very especially weird. Meter and rhyme scheme. It sounds like one of those horrible poems written just to rhyme.

Pam: YES. The poem bends itself in knots to fit the rhyme.

At this point, dear reader, we just gave up.

Say!

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XI


MY river runs to thee:
Blue sea, wilt welcome me?


My river waits reply.
Oh sea, look graciously!


I’ll fetch thee brooks
From spotted nooks,—


Say, sea,
Take me!

~Emily Dickinson

We had fun discussing this weird little poem, but our conversation took a number of twists and turns, including a digression in the direction of The Golden Girls, so instead of that conversation, we’re offering you a prompt born of our discussion.

As we make our way through Emily Dickinson’s poems, we often find ourselves wondering about her life. Why write poems if you never want anyone to read them? Why write poems to the beloved if you never intend to deliver them?

And so, today’s prompt: Write a love poem that reads like no one is intended to read it, and then share it with the world! Preferably via the comments section below. 😉

XXVI: The brain within its groove

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THE BRAIN within its groove
Runs evenly and true;
But let a splinter swerve,
’T were easier for you
To put the water back
When floods have slit the hills,
And scooped a turnpike for themselves,
And blotted out the mills!

Some days I just cannot be a person.

Today was one of those days. I wasted hours–I’m not exaggerating here–sitting in my chair, reading unimportant nonsense on my phone.

I could have been reading one of the many books in my to-read pile. I could have been grading papers. I could have been finishing the poem I started yesterday. or I could have started something else. And when Brenna asked me if I’d had any writing time lately, I answered truthfully, but I was pretty ashamed when I said no.

My brain was not within its groove today.

I’m not sure what causes these days. They happen more often than I’d like to admit. And the poem is right: when these swerves happen, it would be easier to reverse a flood than to get my brain back on track. Every little thing is an inconvenience. I need to take a shower, but I also need to organize papers, but I can’t grade them because I have to readjust point categories, but even if I graded them I have to add categories to Blackboard before I can record them, and I have two loads of clean laundry to fold, and I haven’t done anything worthwhile all day, and I’m useless, and I have phone calls to make, and a thousand other things to do, so I sit in my chair and do none of them.

These days seem impossible: and then one thing changes. We went to visit friends tonight, and played games for over four hours. My brain is back on its track. And even if I don’t have a planned game date the next time my brain swerves, at least I can remember that the poem fails to tell you one thing: yes, it’s hard to get back on track, but it can be done.

Fairy Sails

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THIS is the land the sunset washes,
These are the banks of the Yellow Sea;
Where it rose, or whither it rushes,
These are the western mystery!
Night after night her purple traffic
Strews the landing with opal bales;
Merchantmen poise upon horizons,
Dip, and vanish with fairy sails.

~Emily Dickinson
fairy sails at sunset in the foothills of the Alleghenies

This immediately strikes me as a rare gem of a Dickinson poem. It is thoroughly lovely and in-the-moment, with nary a mention of buzzing flies or someone’s funeral (though I suppose the “western mystery,” the going-down-place of the sun, could be connected to death–but you know what, I’m going to stick with the prettiness this time and not read too much into it).

The phrase “the land the sunset washes” is gorgeously descriptive, and I love how light becomes water in this poem–it “washes” across the landscape. If I’m reading this right, the “Yellow Sea” is also the light in its entirety. This whole poem is one tiny, perfect, jewel-like description of a single moment–but also the eternal recurrence, “night after night,” of sunset.

There is something wonderfully profligate (to use the word in a Dickinson kind of way) about how, despite the very short length of this poem, she strews it lavishly with lush descriptions that are at once immediately evocative and yet at time a bit elusive. “Where,” “whither,” “mystery,” “vanish”–while the sensory details are precise and shimmering, painting a vivid picture, and at the same time the thrust of the poem is toward mystery, the unknown–magic.

One of the things about Dickinson’s poetry that never ceases to delight and astonish me is the way she packs so much meaning into so few words. How is this tiny poem about sunset in all its glorious specificity, and the vast mystery of, well, pretty much everything? How does she do it?? There is magic at work here, clearly.

I love, love, love that she ends the poem with “fairy sails.” The prosaic ships of merchantmen are transformed in the golden light to fae craft that work their own magic, dipping and vanishing.

As I read and re-read the poem, it strikes me that Dickinson is both describing an almost alchemical process, and also performing word-alchemy herself–light to water, water to light. This idea has set roots in my brain, and I’m wondering now–what would happen in my own writing if, the next time I described some elemental force (like air) I described it in terms of a completely different elemental force (like fire). What would happen to my language? How much richer would it grow?

So, here’s a bonus prompt, if you’ve made it this far through my raptures of delight: describe an element using the descriptive language suited to a different element. What happens if you write about earth as if it is water, fire as if it is air?