Tag: winter

November left

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The night was wide, and furnished scant
With but a single star,
That often as a cloud it met
Blew out itself for fear.

The wind pursued the little bush,
And drove away the leaves
November left; then clambered up
And fretted in the eaves.

No squirrel went abroad;
A dog’s belated feet
Like intermittent plush were heard
Adown the empty street.

To feel if blinds be fast,
And closer to the fire
Her little rocking-chair to draw,
And shiver for the poor,

The housewife’s gentle task.
“How pleasanter,” said she
Unto the sofa opposite,
“The sleet than May—no thee!”

~Emily Dickinson
Image via Pexels.com

This is a perfect poem for the start of December, in so many ways. Dickinson begins with the image of a vast night whose darkness is interrupted only by a lone star–and that star is frequently obscured by scudding clouds. With the personification of the star as fearfully extinguishing itself, the poet captures the very human sense of apprehension many of us feel as we approach the darkest day of the year.

November in this poem is like a small, disgruntled creature–it leaves, but then doesn’t, climbing up into the eaves to linger and fret. Just as there is but a lone star in the sky, there is a single living creature out on this dark, cold night–a dog, returning home late, padding almost silently along. Does plush make a sound? The speaker says it does–but it must be a sound that is all but silent. With the wind blowing, how could anyone hear that plush?

In the last two stanzas, the speaker brings us inside a home, where a houswife’s duties are to make sure the blinds are fastened against the night and weather, and to “shiver for the poor.” In the final stanza, the woman addresses “the sofa opposite”–presumably there is someone there? Her spouse? A child? A friend? Maybe a cat or dog?? She remarks that the inclement weather is more pleasant than May. It’s an interesting comment–on one hand, it’s unexpected. Of course May is more pleasant. But for the housewife, May likely means all manner of chores, while the sleet affords her the opportunity to sit, cozy by the fire.

The last line, however–or rather, the last two words–are perplexing. The housewife says that the sleet is more pleasant than May, and then adds, “no thee!” She’s addressing the sofa opposite, and if there’s someone on it, what do we make of this remark? Is she saying, “No, you are more pleasant than May,” or is she saying that sleet is more pleasant than May because there is now “no thee”? She could either be complimenting or issuing a Dickinson-style burn. I really can’t tell which one. What do you think?

Gentian

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GOD made a little gentian;
It tired to be a rose
And failed, and all the summer laughed.
But just before the snows
There came a purple creature 5
That ravished all the hill;
And summer hid her forehead,
And mockery was still.
The frosts were her condition;
The Tyrian would not come 10
Until the North evoked it.
“Creator! shall I bloom?”

Image via Pexels.com

Emily Dickinson apparently really liked gentians. I have only just learned of them this week. That’s about all I’ve got for today, because life has gotten zooey and I do not have time to contemplate gentians at the moment. Here’s hoping you’ve got a little more wiggle room!

Pneumonia weather

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XXVIII
I know a place where summer strives
With such a practised frost,
She each year leads her daisies back,
Recording briefly, “Lost.”


But when the south wind stirs the pools
And struggles in the lanes,
Her heart misgives her for her vow,
And she pours soft refrains


Into the lap of adamant,
And spices, and the dew,
That stiffens quietly to quartz,
Upon her amber shoe.

~Emily Dickinson

When I was a child, my mother called this “pneumonia weather.” The skies are clear blue, the sunlight warm–and yet there’s a lingering chill behind the glimmer, a reminder that winter hasn’t yet loosed its fingers completely. There will be days in the high seventies, even in the eighties. And there will be mornings when we wake to hard frost.

Only the hardiest blossoms survive this weather. Spring teases them from tight buds to tempt fate. Spring and autumn balance each other on either side of the wheel of the year in a way that summer and winter cannot. Summer and winter are opposites, but spring and autumn are nearly-identical twins. One is redheaded, one has locks of fern-green and forsythia–but they are like the same person seen coming and going.

In the Shenandoah Valley in winter, we exclaim over unseasonably warm days. We grumble about cold summer rains. But the wild swings in spring and autumn do not surprise us. There are a thousand seasons in each one–microseasons, shifting from one to the next as the sun arcs the sky. The daisies won’t arrive till full summer, but the snowy drifts of bloom lacing the apple branches take their chances. They are gamblers all. Maybe they will swell to fruit this summer. Or maybe they are only the ghosts of possibility, beads of quartz frost on amber shoes.

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.

“It passes, and we stay”

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LXXXV


A light exists in spring
Not present on the year
At any other period.
When March is scarcely here


A color stands abroad
On solitary hills
That silence cannot overtake,
But human nature feels.


It waits upon the lawn;
It shows the furthest tree
Upon the furthest slope we know;
It almost speaks to me.


Then, as horizons step,
Or noons report away,
Without the formula of sound,
It passes, and we stay:


A quality of loss
Affecting our content,
As trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a sacrament.

~Emily Dickinson

A quality of loss is affecting my content today as, after a sunny, breezy early spring day yesterday, I woke to sleet that quickly turned to snow. The afternoon light is wintry now, the snow changed again to rain. But I can take refuge in this poem, and dream of warmer, sunnier days.

A dare:

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DARE you see a soul at the white heat?
Then crouch within the door.
Red is the fire’s common tint;
But when the vivid ore


Has sated flame’s conditions,
Its quivering substance plays
Without a color but the light
Of unanointed blaze.


Least village boasts its blacksmith,
Whose anvil’s even din
Stands symbol for the finer forge
That soundless tugs within,


Refining these impatient ores
With hammer and with blaze,
Until the designated light
Repudiate the forge.

~Emily Dickinson

In the thin darkness before dawn, temperatures plummeted to low single digits here in the north of the South. Before sunrise I bundled up and went outside to break the crust of ice from the chickens’ water. The coming sunrise was a yolk-colored watercolor wash along the horizon, brightening against the lightening sky, and the thin fingernail moon hung high, framed by piercing stars. The cold was so violent it burned, the air sere and searing.

I chose this poem for today simply because it seemed pleasant to think about anything white-hot on a day like today. As I read and reread it, I am first reminded of John Donne’s “Batter my heart, three person’d God” from his Holy Sonnets. Both Donne and Dickinson invoke a creator who makes through violent change, through extreme trial, by pushing the raw material to its limits. The difference is that while Donne begs God to bludgeon him into shape, Dickinson envisions the end of the process as the newly-refined material repudiating the forge.

Here’s where Dickinson gets supremely Dickinsonian. “Repudiate” is a fascinating choice here, with a couple of possible meanings: “to refuse to accept,” or “to reject as untrue or unjust.” Refusing to accept the creator/circumstances of creation is one thing; rejecting them as untrue or unjust is another. They are similar, but there is a significant shade of difference.

As I continue mulling over this poem, the second thing that strikes me is that the current extreme cold is an opposite yet similar metaphor–opposite in temperature, but similar in function. Heat refines in one way, cold in another. I think of how allergists tell people to either wash linens in hot water or seal them in plastic and put them in the freezer to kill dust mites. Heat and cold can both burn. We talk about long-lingering food in freezers as being “freezer-burned.” I think of this line from the poem “Angus McGregor,” by B. D. Pancake: “The hills at thirty below have teeth.” On my drive home this evening, I heard on the news that eight people in the midwest have died from the cold this week. The forge is metaphorical. The forge is real.

It is telling that Dickinson begins the poem with a dare: “Dare you see a soul at the white heat?” Can you handle bearing witness to the process of creation?

the shadow of a flame

“Deadly sweet”

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LXIII


TALK with prudence to a beggar
Of “Potosi” and the mines!
Reverently to the hungry
Of your viands and your wines!


Cautious, hint to any captive
You have passed enfranchised feet!
Anecdotes of air in dungeons
Have sometimes proved deadly sweet!

~Emily Dickinson

This is another Dickinson poem that feels sharply prescient. In the age of social media’s many brags, humble and otherwise, we’re periodically reminded by scary stories of stalkers and trolls that we share at our own risk. But we also share at the risk of others. Coming off the holiday season, I am reminded of all the people for whom the holidays are hard, and how much harder our constant oversharing must make the experience. I think of the trendily matte Christmas cards with their professional photographs of smiling families in color-coordinated outfits and wonder what the effect is on people without families, or people whose families make the holidays a torment rather than a joy.

Today the polar vortex blasts in, carving a swath through the continent and plunging the American South to sub-Arctic temperatures. People joke about the cold, shudder in a pleasant mixture of dread and anticipation (freezing outside but warm inside–sweaters, hot chocolate, fireplaces). How many people don’t have anything good to anticipate? How often do we long for cold (it will kill the viruses!), snow (it’s so pretty!), winter storms (a day off from work/school!) without imagining what pain that pleasure will bring for some?

Dickinson uses Potosí, a massive and once highly-productive silver mine run by the Spanish in what is now Bolivia, as an example of vast riches. The mine’s history is also one of exploitation and slavery, and I wonder how much she knew about this. The miners were as much prisoners as the captives she mentions at the end of the poem.

In the thin cold days of winter, this poem is a reminder to think outside ourselves, beyond our own experiences, and consider the impact of our messages on others.

“Sometimes almost more”

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THIS was in the white of the year,
That was in the green,
Drifts were as difficult then to think
As daisies now to be seen.
Looking back is best that is left,
Or if it be before,
Retrospection is prospect’s half,
Sometimes almost more.

~Emily Dickinson

This morning I woke to a dusting of snow across the yard and driveway. The snow is gone now, but more hangs in the pale, heavy cloud blanket that rings my sky.

Winter is a time for introspection, and for retrospection. I like the notion that “retrospection is prospect’s half”–the looking-backward and the looking-forward dovetail, inform each other. In order to look ahead with any clarity of vision, it’s good to know where you’ve been. In order to look back with any optimism, it’s good to know you are headed somewhere.

I also like how Dickinson says that retrospection is “sometimes almost more” than prospect. “Sometimes almost” is the same thing, really, as “not ever,” but it sounds so different. There’s a suggestion here that retrospection could almost tip the balance, could weight the scales so ponderously that maybe, just maybe, it could almost change the equation.

The white-lead clouds brood overhead, heavy with unfallen snow.