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06 May 2012

I've known a Heaven, like a Tent –


I've known a Heaven, like a Tent – 
To wrap its shining Yards – 
Pluck up its stakes, and disappear – 
Without the sound of Boards
Or Rip of Nail – Or Carpenter – 
But just the miles of Stare – 
That signalize a Show's Retreat – 
In North America – 

No Trace – no Figment of the Thing
That dazzled, Yesterday,
No Ring – no Marvel – 
Men, and Feats – 
Dissolved as utterly – 
As Bird's far Navigation
Discloses just a Hue – 
A plash of Oars, a Gaiety – 
Then swallowed up, of View.
                                                            F257 (1861)  243

Some people, and I suspect Emily Dickinson is one of them, can find a little bit of heaven in a sunset, a soiree, a garden, or a dusty path through a meadow. In this poem she compares the lush ephemerality of these brief heavens to a circus. Amherst would no doubt have seen a few traveling circuses and the shows would have been great attractions. The circus would arrive with a parade: beautifully outfitted prancing horses, carriages pulling caged lions and tigers, acrobats marching and twirling, and elephants plodding along with their tenders. The tents would go up overnight and then the magic would begin – only to be taken down and removed a day or two later when the circus moved on.
Everyone watches as the circus leaves town
            The poet’s heaven came and went like that except that it was more silent. There was no sound of hammers or all the hustle and bustle of packing up and leaving. Instead, the Heaven wrapped “its shining Yards,” plucked itself up by the stakes, and disappeared. It left “No Trace – no Figment” of what was so dazzling the day before. The acrobats and feats of courage and skill were gone.
            The poet likens the absence of the divine circus to “miles of Stare” – a landscape you might stare across for miles without seeing the hoped-for thing. The phrase implies longing and wondering, “stare” being more intense than “gaze.” This stare might characterize the children staring after the circus train and carriages disappearing from sight – its “Retreat.” The children might have the same sense of awe and loss as the poet searching the horizon for the lost heaven.
            In the second stanza Dickinson frames the absence as the last glimpse of bird in flight as it is “swallowed up” in the distance. She characterizes this as a dissolving: the bird is first visible and then begins to fade against the clouds and sky as it flies away. Finally it is just a hint of color, a slight indication of movement. She describes this as the “plash of Oars” as if the bird were rowing through the sky. She will use similar imagery in 1862 in the familiar poem, “A Bird, came down the Walk.” In this poem the narrator feeds the bird a crumb and then -
… he unrolled his feathers,
And rowed him softer Home – 

Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plashless, as they swim.  

The last fleeting sense of the bird before it dissolves from view is “a Gaiety.” I picture the flowing, bounding flight of a song sparrow – gay as can be! Once the bird is gone, all that remains is the “View.”
            Dickinson’s treatment of absence as “miles of Stare” and of as a swallowing “View” is slightly disturbing. It is as if our eyes are looking into some vastness that is not empty as it appears but somehow full of potential presence. We see something marvelous or delightful. It disappears without a sound but the air has changed; something still lingers from the circus disappearing in the horizon, the birds fading against the sky. A space has been made that is now empty, much as the empty corner still contains something of the easy chair that once sat so comfortably there. 

16 comments:

  1. I've just stumbled upon your blog and I absolutely love it.

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  2. This is a beautiful reading of one of my favourite Dickinson poems. Might I ask what prompted you to start on this journey of blogging all the poems and where you are in this process? I would also be interested in communicating offline should you wish to do so.

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    1. Thank you -- it's one of my favorite's, too. A contact form is on the bottom left of this page -- messages go directly to my email. You are welcome to contact!

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  3. I think she is saying it is time for another Jesus show! I second that emotion.

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  4. Thank you - yours are the interpretations that make the most sense as I navigate a year of one E.D. poem a day.

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  5. Wow, I loved so much your interpretation. I absolutely love reading ED but I have to say that I also love reading you!!

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    1. Thank you! I just love this poem. It never tires.

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  6. I enjoyed this poem this morning with my morning coffee. I Googled an analysis of the poem to understand it better, and yours was the first and pretty much only lay person-level analysis. Really excellent, and thank you so much for doing this. The more understanding I appreciation we have for the fabulous MissD. The better!

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    1. What a wonderful poem to start the day with. Thank you for the kind words.

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  7. The “Heaven like a Tent” might have been a circus, but my money is on a 19th century tent revival, a big, frequent deal in fervently Christian western Massachusetts. Here’s Habegger’s comment on the effect of revivals on teenage ED:

    “In 1846, [15-year-old] Emily confided to a friend that as a younger girl she briefly and mistakenly believed she had found salvation. “I can say that I never enjoyed such perfect peace and happiness,” she wrote, “ as the short time in which I felt I had found my savior.” Looking back, she felt that those “few short moments …... I would not now exchange for a thousand worlds like this. It was then my greatest pleasure to commune alone with the great God & to feel that he would listen to my prayers.” Little is known about this false conversion other than that Emily’s prayers soon ceased to be a spontaneous pleasure and she began avoiding the small prayer circle she had joined. …….. “

    “This brief taste of perfect joy, peace, and communion with God had divided results. It established an absolute scale by which to measure all later experience, in that way confirming the child’s exalted expectations. But it also made her wary of all solicitations to surrender and of her own quick responsiveness. In 1845 there was a powerful revival in her church that affected many young people and resulted in forty-six confessions of faith that year. This time she stayed away from the daily meetings, fearing she “was so easily excited that I might again be deceived.”

    Habegger, Alfred. My Wars Are Laid Away in Books (p. 196)

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  8. "It's good to keep changing your mind. It shows you're thinking. I'll only stop changing my mind when I'm dead. And maybe not even then." John Marsden

    Which is another way of saying ED’s niece, Martha Dickinson Bianci, published a biography of her aunt in 1924 that has four quotes about circuses and Emily, and I just found it:

    “Always, when a circus was to pass her window in the first grey dawn on its hooded way from town to town, she sat up all night to watch for it, thrilled by its wild vagrancy, its pathos, its utter sophistication: hungry for sensation, starving for a world she later shunned, with a vague dread of its haunting power over her.”

    “Friday I tasted life. It was a vast morsel. A circus passed the house - still I feel the red in my mind though the drums are out.”

    “Vinnie says there is a tree in Mr. Sweetser's woods that shivers. I am afraid it is cold. II am going to make it a little coat. I must make several, because it is tall as the barn, and put them on as the circus men stand on each other's shoulders .... There is to be a "show" next week, and little Maggie's bed is to be moved to the door so she can see the tents.”

    “There was a circus, too, and I watched it [going] away at half-past three that morning. They said "hoy, hoy" to their horses.”

    Given the evidence, your honor, I’d like to change my vote from revival to circus.

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    1. The Bianci exerpt is a great addition here. Thank you.

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  9. A new day dawned. ‘I've known a Heaven, like a Tent’ became much more than a circus, a revival, or heaven’s tent:

    I've known a Heaven, like a Tent –
    To wrap its shining Yards –
    Pluck up its stakes, and disappear –
    Without the sound of Boards
    Or Rip of Nail – Or Carpenter –
    But just the miles of Stare –
    That signalize a Show's Retreat –

    You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
    As if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir.
    Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
    As I foretold you, were all spirits and
    Are melted into air, into thin air.
    And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
    The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
    The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
    Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
    And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
    Leave not a rack behind.

    No Trace – no Figment of the Thing
    That dazzled, Yesterday,
    No Ring – no Marvel –
    Men, and Feats –
    Dissolved as utterly –
    As Bird's far Navigation
    Discloses just a Hue –

    We are such stuff
    As dreams are made on, and our little life
    Is rounded with a sleep.

    A plash of Oars, a Gaiety –
    Then swallowed up, of View.

    The rest is silence.

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  10. My preceding comment (above), plagiarized from Shakespeare (Prospero to Ferdinand, Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1; Hamlet to Horatio, Act 5, Scene 2), omits one mysterious line from ED’s ‘I've known a Heaven, like a Tent’, the last line of Stanza 1: “In North America –”.

    Without that line, ED’s poem could be a simple circus poem or even a lost-love poem, but North America has no monopoly on circuses or love.

    Without that line ED’s poem might imply universal nihilism, the belief that the world has no real existence (OED); with that line the poem intentionally pins itself to one specific geographical location, atypical of ED.

    It would also be extremely atypical for ED to make a poetic political statement, but can we ignore the American Civil War, which began April 1861, a war Lincoln presciently characterized, “I should like to know,” he said, “if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, and making exceptions to it, where will it stop?” (5th Lincoln-Douglas debate, 1858).

    Could this poem’s first three lines be ED’s preview of one possible outcome of the Civil War?

    “I've known a Heaven, like a Tent –
    To wrap its shining Yards –
    Pluck up its stakes, and disappear –”

    (With thanks to my prescient poet wife, Louise.)

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