20 August 2011

If she had been the Mistletoe

If she had been the Mistletoe
And I had been the Rose —
How gay upon your table
My velvet life to close!
Since I am of the Druid —
And she is of the dew —
I'll deck Tradition's buttonhole —
And send the Rose to you.
                                                                - F 60 (1859)

This was sent as a note to Samuel Bowles, a beloved (some say very beloved) friend. It sounds like a Christmas letter with the mistletoe reference and the idea of decking someone’s buttonhole; a rose may well have accompanied the note. She says as much in the last line.
            The poet begins by identifying herself as "Mistletoe" and imagining she might have traded places with the Rose. She clearly takes pride in her druidic mistletoe-ness, however. The mistletoe lives on and feeds off the oak, whereas the lovely cultivated Rose depends on dew and other water that must be supplied. While dew is lovely it is ephemeral; beautiful woodland oaks, on the other hand, are heavy and enduring. They would  be prominent among the sacred groves, or nemetons, of the druids. In his Natural History, which Dickinson would have read, Pliny describes the oak and mistletoe rite:
The druids – that is what they call their magicians – hold nothing more sacred than the mistletoe and a tree on which it is growing.... Mistletoe is rare and when found it is gathered with great ceremony, and particularly on the sixth day of the moon....Hailing the moon in a native word that means 'healing all things,' they prepare a ritual sacrifice and banquet beneath a tree and bring up two white bulls, whose horns are bound for the first time on this occasion. A priest arrayed in white vestments climbs the tree and, with a golden sickle, cuts down the mistletoe, which is caught in a white cloak. Then finally they kill the victims, praying to a god to render his gift propitious to those on whom he has bestowed it. They believe that mistletoe given in drink will impart fertility to any animal that is barren and that it is an antidote to all poisons.
          When the poet says she is a Druid, she isn’t saying that she is a pagan or magician, but rather identifying with their practice of worshipping outdoors, of studying the  mysteries, of being withdrawn from gay society life. She is also saying that had she been a rose and come to Bowles, rather than staying at her sacred groves at Amherst, it would have killed her, or at least the essential part of her. No, better for her to send the rose.
       There may be another message in this poem. Bowles and Dickinson's sister-in-law, the vivacious Sue, had an ongoing flirtation. Sue fits the Rose description pretty well. "I couldn't be like her," Dickinson is implying. "I'm more wild and woodland than velvet and table. But for Christmas, I'll "send the Rose to you." And that would be her nod to the Samuel Bowles-Sue Dickinson flirtation.
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4 comments:

  1. UnknownJune 2, 2016 at 5:42 AM

    All well said. I would only add a few minor observations to yours. The first is that this poem was the very first manuscript known to have been given by Dickinson to "Mr. Bowles" (Samuel Bowles, the editor-in-chief of the Springfield Republican newspaper), a man who clearly had an arresting and powerful influence on Dickinson. In that manuscript the poet underlined the word "she" (Line 1) which immediately calls attention to the identity-play going on in the poem. "She" was not emphasized in any way in the poem Dickinson copied into Fascicle 2. I would also note that the word "Druid" does not appear anywhere else in the Dickinson oeuvre. The only reference to anything related to "Druid" occurs in a letter that she wrote to her neighbor Mrs. Henry Hills around 1883 (Letter 849). The letter inquired about a recipe for a sacred and unforgettable Cake that Mrs. Hills baked and sent over to the Dickinson household. The poet associated this miracle of sweetness to "a remembrance of nectar" and "Druidic odors" that brought back reverential memories of the Cake and its maker. --Stephen Eric Berry, Ann Arbor.

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    1. Susan KornfeldJune 2, 2016 at 8:07 AM

      Thank you for this additional insight. It's strange, now that I think about it, that Dickinson only used 'druid' only the two times. It seems so apt for her and her work.

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    2. AnonymousFebruary 19, 2024 at 10:54 PM

      In F 895 we have "Druidic Difference."

      Delete
  2. Larry BMay 9, 2022 at 2:37 PM

    ED first met Stephen Bowles when he visited Amherst in June 1858; In late 1858. Bowles, accompanied by his wife Mary, made another visit to Amherst. (Habegger 2002. My Wars Are Laid Away in Books, p.429). Franklin regards this poem as the earliest manuscript ED sent to Bowles, dating it early 1859; Habegger dates it September or October 1859” (Miller 2016. ED's Poems p744).

    “September 6, 1859, the Bowleses’ eleventh anniversary, was probably the occasion for Emily’s gift of a [rose] and this poem. Wife Mary is the rose, and friend Emily the mistletoe—weird, more Druid than Christian, and emphatically not “of the dew”. Boldly imagining what it would be like to trade places with the wife, [ED] makes doubly clear how offbeat she is” (Habegger 2002).

    Long a Shakespeare fan, ED must have intended the double entendre of lines 3-4, which she cleverly disguises by saying “How gay upon your table / My velvet life to close!” instead of using the word “die”, a common Elizabethan euphemism for orgasm; for example, in Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick tells Beatrice “I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap, and be buried in thy eyes; and moreover I will go with thee to thy uncle's.”

    In any case, this is a dramatically cheeky poem to send a married man with two children and another on the way, especially after meeting him only twice. ED must have been out of her infatuated mind.

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