'Tis Customary as we part

'Tis Customary as we part
A Trinket — to confer —
It helps to stimulate the faith
When Lovers be afar —

'Tis various — as the various taste —
Clematis — journeying far —
Presents me with a single Curl
Of her Electric Hair —
                       Fr628 (1863)  J400


I love this. The amazing two-word image in the last line startles the dry poem into smiling drollery. It has particular charm for the gardener familiar with the wayward habits of the clematis vine.

Dickinson describes the parting of lovers in the academic tone of an anthropologist. In the custom of her land, trinkets are conferred (not 'given' or even 'bestowed') when one takes leave of a lover to "stimulate the faith". Could the giving of a love token to a departing lover be phrased any more clinically?
        The second stanza begins in the same dry and concise vein. The love token is chosen based on personal taste. One person might give, say, a lock of hair; another a slim volume of verse. In the sixth line, however, Dickinson abruptly abandons the general in favor of the specific, signaling that the poem up to this point is mere introduction: a prologue to the essential scene where Clematis presents the poet with a parting gift.

The Electric Curls of the Clematis vine

Anyone even vaguely familiar with clematis vines can visualize the scene immediately. Many clematis varieties are pruned down quite severely each year. New growth can shoot up twenty feet or even more in one season. So yes, the vine might well present her gardener with a lock of her hair before continuing her journey far up the barn or elm tree. While Judith Farr in The Gardens of Emily Dickinson, p.256, includes Thomas H. Johnson's suggestion that this poem "may have been composed to accompany a gift of a clematis blossom for a departing friend", I think this interpretation requires unnecessary torture of the poem. It is the clematis that is traveling; the clematis that presents the token.
        Further, it is not the flower that Clematis gives, but rather the seed-like fruit, the achene, that flattens out into a long, feathery, curling plume. When their beautiful petals fall,  clematis flowers leave behind entrancing puffs of these achenes. They do indeed look as if a mild electric current had tossed them into unruly curls.

The regularity of the meter of this poem along with the precise and neutral diction create the perfect setting for the dynamic image of the clematis' "Electric Hair". Nothing else is alive in the poem. There are customs and trinkets and some abstract faith that benefits from stimulation. There are tastes involved but they are simply summarized as 'various' without benefit of example. Consequently, that electric curl almost sizzles when Dickinson drops it into this static and abstract tableau.

Several hard 'C's help bind the poem together: Customary, confer, Clematis, and Curl. The rhyming is also fairly tight: confer/afar/far/hair, while part and Curl support the 'r' sounds in those slant rhymes.

 I find the poem tightly composed, darling and delightful.

I think I was enchanted

I think I was enchanted
When first a sombre Girl —
I read that Foreign Lady —
The Dark — felt beautiful —

And whether it was noon at night —
Or only Heaven — at Noon —
For very Lunacy of Light
I had not power to tell —

The Bees — became as Butterflies —
The Butterflies — as Swans —
Approached — and spurned the narrow Grass —
And just the meanest Tunes

That Nature murmured to herself
To keep herself in Cheer —
I took for Giants — practising
Titanic Opera —

The Days — to Mighty Metres stept —
The Homeliest — adorned
As if unto a Jubilee
'Twere suddenly confirmed —

I could not have defined the change —
Conversion of the Mind
Like Sanctifying in the Soul —
Is witnessed — not explained —

'Twas a Divine Insanity —
The Danger to be sane
Should I again experience —
'Tis Antidote to turn —

To Tomes of Solid Witchcraft —
Magicians be asleep —
But Magic — hath an element —
Like Deity — to keep —
Fr627 (1863)  J593


This beautiful ode to poetry includes all that makes poems so deeply powerful. In praising the transformative effect of 'that Foreign Lady' – English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (according to better scholars than I) – Dickinson makes plain her own ability to enchant, displace, and transform. For me, and no doubt countless others, "Foreign" could be replaced by "Amherst", for when I first truly dipped into Dickinson's poems, I, too, found that the "Dark – felt beautiful". 
I love that phrase about the Dark. A simple interpretation would be that Brownings' work introduced a tangible beauty into the dark room and that it shed an uncanny light of insight and recognition. But "The Dark"  encompasses more than an unlit room. Dickinson might be meaning the hidden places, even the abyss, that she herself came to frequent in many of her own poems and where she so often threads her way, like Ariadne negotiating the labyrinth to the Minotaur at its heart.

Dickinson begins this poem as if in intimate conversation with the reader. We see the "sombre Girl" first reading from the Foreign Lady in the dark of her room. There would only be the flickering flame of an oil lamp or candle to light the words. Perhaps she was gulping down "Aurora Leigh", a poem-novel whose eponymous heroine struggles, as Virginia Woolf wrote, with "her conflict as an artist and woman, her longing for knowledge and freedom" – as well as with her desire for passion and truth. Such themes and struggles might well have made compelling reading for Dickinson.
Whichever ones they were, the poems shed such a "Lunacy of Light" that it might have been the noontime sun or else some interior sun at midnight; the girl couldn't tell. Mundane reality fell away as she read. What was known and simple became enlarged and glorious. Her mind shifted in the way one can suddenly see two profiles in place of a goblet except that her shift was deep in the mind, deep inside "Where the Meanings are" (Fr320).

Peter Birkhäuser's "Anima"

The poem is full of female power and this theme is introduced in these first two stanzas: Lunacy (as a certain divine madness), the Foreign Lady and sombre Girl, the enchantment, and the moon (so clearly suggested by 'noon at night' – the word 'noon' itself invoking 'moon'), are each traditionally associated with the Feminine. Dickinson later invokes witchcraft, too – and it would have only been 170 years since witches were hanged in Massachussetts. The transformations depicted in the middle of the poem not only do double duty in exemplifying Barrett Brownings' effect and Dickinson's poetic prowess, but remind us of the transformative aspect of the feminine: birth, seed to fruit, the creative and generative Muse. 

In the first of these transformations bees metamorphose first into butterflies and then into swans. The vision has sound effects: the ordinary "Tunes" of nature – bees buzzing, breezes whispering through the grass and shrubs, grasshoppers whirring, birds singing, etc. –  become a grand and giant opera. In the third transformation Dickinson leaves the birds and the bees behind, focusing on the days themselves. No longer creeping along in their petty pace they were now dressed to the nines and stepping grandly in time to the swelling orchestra. A Jubilee might be a big festivity, but the Dickinson Lexicon lists another meaning: the "fiftieth year in the Old Testament calendar, when slaves are granted liberty and debts forgiven [Leviticus 25]". This is transformation indeed.

When Dickinson writes that the result of her 'enchantment' was a "Conversion of the Mind" she may be crediting the Foreign Lady as her poetic progenitor. The change was indefinable and indelible; something like sanctification which is a holy consecration. Dickinson reinforces the sacredness of the conversion by referring to it as 'Divine Insanity', a topic she was examining only a few poems ago in "Much Madness is divinest Sense" (Fr620). It is, the sombre Girl realizes, what is considered sanity that poses the real danger. Should she find herself succumbing to it, however, she has the antidote right at hand:  "Tomes of Solid Witchcraft – that is to say, books of poetry. The poet/magician may be asleep in death, but her magic/poems live on in divine immortality.

Undue Significance a starving man attaches

Undue Significance a starving man attaches
To Food —
Far off — He sighs — and therefore — Hopeless —
And therefore — Good —

Partaken — it relieves — indeed —
But proves us
That Spices fly
In the Receipt — It was the Distance —
Was Savory —
                             F626 (1863)  J439


 I have to admire Emily Dickinson who is an imagist and metaphorist of the very first rank, who knows how to start off a poem with a killer lead, but who can also begin the first stanza of a poem with 'Undue Significance' and the other stanza with 'Partaken'. Her father and brother were both lawyers and I imagine she acquired both an ear for legalese and a sound sense of formal logic. The phrases signal the rather dry, abstract tone of this poem about hunger and desire.
        Dickinson emphasizes the legal diction by reversing the grammatical order of the first line. It wouldn't sound too interesting as "A starving man attaches Undue Significance / To Food".  The "Undue" is trochaic, making the line even more weighty. Dickinson proceeds to include two 'therefore's, a 'proves' and a 'Receipt'.  It is an attempt at drollery, I believe, making the case that anticipation beats fulfillment.
        She wrote two similar poems within a year or two of this one, using quite different diction: In "Heaven'—is what I cannot reach!" (F310), Dickinson develops a series of vivid metaphors to illustrate how heaven is always unattainable. It is an apple hopelessly out of reach, a forbidden property, etc. Robert Browning wrote, and Dickinson might very well have read, "Ah, but a man's reach must extend his grasp, / Or what's a heaven for" ("Andrea del Sarto", publ. 1855). Browning, though, is getting at reaching for an unattainable level of artistic excellence. Dickinson, on the other hand, yearns for the ineffable.
        In 'I had been hungry, all the Years –' (F439), she uses, as she does in the present poem, the analogy of hunger for desire, but she does so with concrete details: crumbs and bread, tables with 'Curious Wine', berries and bushes, roads and windows. She concludes that poem with the aphorism that "Hunger – was a way / Of Persons outside Windows – / The Entering – takes away." Hunger here represents a yearning for completion, for the satisfaction of a gnawing desire; yet the object of that yearning and desire is misplaced. Having access to the Table and the 'Curious Wine', having touched and tasted the feast, having had the 'Plenty', the speaker finds herself feeling 'ill – and odd'; she ultimately realizes that it is not the food that takes away the hunger but the access to food. Once seen clearly, the feast loses its appeal. It does not satisfy.

Emilio Longoni, "Reflections of a Starving Man", 1894

Dickinson is clearly no gourmand. In this poem she portrays herself as no simple gourmet, either. She prefers the longing for the food in all its spicy savour to the tasting. Indeed, having tasted, she loses interest in the foods' flavor altogether. That opening "Undue Significance" is almost like a wagging finger. Satisfying your hunger is a bodily satisfaction and need. But the body is a simple thing, she reminds us, compared to imagination. That's where the real spice is. That's where the real satisfaction can be found.

I don't find that a particularly remarkable insight. Further, I find much of the poem plodding and bare. A starving man is introduced, but he is not a real entity but rather staked out in some culinary desert as an example. The only action word is "fly" and that is what spices theoretically do once we stick a fork in the longed-for food.

Forget! The lady with the Amulet

Forget! The lady with the Amulet
Forget she wore it at her Heart
Because she breathed against
Was Treason twixt?

Deny! Did Rose her Bee —
For Privilege of Play
Or Wile of Butterfly
Or Opportunity — Her Lord away?

The lady with the Amulet — will fade —
The Bee — in Mausoleum laid —
Discard his Bride —
But longer than the little Rill —
That cooled the Forehead of the Hill —
While Other — went the Sea to fill —
And Other — went to turn the Mill —
I'll do thy Will —
                                    F625 (1863)  J438


Much of this poem is ambiguous, but here is what is clear: the poem strives to assure a beloved that the speaker will always be faithful, will always "do thy Will". Most of the ambiguity involves who the speaker is and who the accuser is. Is the speaker accusing a beloved – or denying accusations? I've written and discarded many words of commentary arguing for first the one and then the other.
        But! I am going to take the simplest route because it is simplest and therefore has some traditional claim to credibility. Besides, the fun (if you could call it that) of the poem lies not in the theme of constancy but in the riot of rhyme. For sake of argument, I'll assume the poem is structured to contrast the speaker's constancy with that of a fickle lady and a fickle Rose.

First the explication.
        The speaker adopts a tone of shock and disbelief. The Amulet lady claims to have forgotten the love token at her breast because it had been there against her breath so long she forgot it. Will the next step be some treasonous infidelity against the giver of the amulet? Or has she already committed some treason because the Amulet (and thus its giver) has been so taken for granted?
        The second stanza continues the speaker's show of outrage. Here the Rose has denied her Bee Lord her constancy because she wanted to Play, or she was seduced by some rascal Butterfly, or just because there was some Opportunity while the Lord was out of town (while the Bee's away the Rose will play).
   

Popular in both men''s and women's jewelry in Victorian
times, the mustard seed symbolized religious faith

    Dickinson compresses what might have been two stanzas into one for the third stanza.  In it we find that while the forgetful, possibly treasonous lady will fade and the Bee at last discard his over-playful Bride (who might well be the lady with the Amulet), the speaker will be faithful to her own beloved longer than streams keep running. The last line, "I'll do thy Will" recalls the line from the Lord's Prayer, "Thy will be done", and is such a turn in point of view from third person to second that the entire poem might be re-read as a letter to God. The Amulet might well contain a mustard seed – symbol of faith; the Bee the same life-giving pollinator Dickinson uses for God in earlier poems.

And now the rhyme!
The first line's rhyme of "Forget!" with "Amulet" is just fun. The ticking "t's" also underscore the playful tone – which undermines any sense of real outrage or sarcasm: Forget, amulet, forget, it, Heart, against, Treason, twixt. "Treason twixt" is particularly fun. "Twixt" is just fun to look at, let alone say.
        You can claim the first stanza as all in slant rhyme, although the argument would rest rather tenuously upon the final 't' sound. But in the second stanza there is no arguing against Bee, Play, Butterfly, and away. The first word of the stanza, "Deny" sets this up, and the longest word, "Opportunity", reinforces it.
        The next three lines features fade, laid, and Bride as rhymes, adding to that the long 'a' of 'lady. Dickinson also uses an alliterative 'l' in: lady, Amulet, Mausoleum, and laid. The final five lines end in very simple true rhymes: Rill, Hill, fill, Mill, and Will.

Find what meaning you will in the poem, I found it, in order, maddening, playful, interesting, earnest, and maddening.

What care the Dead, for Chanticleer —

What care the Dead, for Chanticleer —
What care the Dead for Day?
'Tis late your Sunrise vex their face —
And Purple Ribaldry — of Morning

Pour as blank on them
As on the Tier of Wall
The Mason builded, yesterday,
And equally as cool —

What care the Dead for Summer?
The Solstice had no Sun
Could waste the Snow before their Gate —
And knew One Bird a Tune —

Could thrill their Mortised Ear
Of all the Birds that be —
This One — beloved of Mankind
Henceforward cherished be —

What care the Dead for Winter?
Themselves as easy freeze —
June Noon — as January Night —
As soon the South — her Breeze

Of Sycamore — or Cinnamon —
Deposit in a Stone
And put a Stone to keep it Warm —
Give Spices — unto Men —
                                                     F624 (1863)  J592


Dickinson gives no sign of cheer in this bleak poem about death. It is not a cosy rest in a snug coffin or a return to the bosom of earth. Nor is there any indication that departed souls have found a better place. Everything is cold and still, senseless.
  The poem begins with a heavy iambic phrase that will be repeated throughout the poem: "What care the Dead". The accented syllables are so stressed that it is almost an effort to say them, as if invoking the heavy, weighted immobility of the dead. In the first two stanzas Dickinson offers Morning with its rooster herald and its purple sunrise. But it is too late for the dead. Sunrise colors are now as blank to them as the surface of a new wall (perhaps that of a crypt) – and the risen sun is cool as its smooth marble.
  Summer makes its appearance in the next two stanzas but also to no avail. The cold snow of death cannot melted or wasted by even the solstice sun. If only a bird could find a tune that could be heard in the grave it would be forever 'beloved' and 'cherished' by Mankind. Dickinson, whose poetry reveals a deep love of birds, reminds us by these passages of the joys of being alive. There is the sky with all its colors, the warmth of the sun, the "thrill" of birdsong.
  The final two stanzas reflect on the coldness of death. Why should the dead worry about winter when they are as frozen in June as January? Winters' effects are as likely to disturb them as spices from the south, delivered on the wind, are to penetrate their stony tombs beneath their stony markers.

The poem's tone is sad, bitter, and elegiac. I see the poet at graveside or imagining herself at graveside contemplating death. With the Civil War losing tens of thousands of soldiers in the year this poem was written, it's no wonder Dickinson's thoughts would turn to the dead. With this in mind, a second, expanded reading of the poem is possible.

Original and current Purple Hearts with their ribbons

  Dickinson begins by invoking the War. Sunrise colors are a 'Purple Ribaldry – of Morning'. The word play on 'ribbon'  (per Dickinson Lexicon) and 'morning' for 'mourning', along with the color purple, suggests the Purple Heart, a military decoration awarded to the wounded or killed in battle. The award began as the Badge of Military Merit in the Revolutionary War,  became the Medal of Honor in the Civil War, and the Purple Heart after WWI. Its color began as purple and is purple still. Sunrise pours the purple heart of mourning over the dead, vexing them. Too little, perhaps, and much too late. 
  The second stanza continues with memorialization. The stone masons build crypts, monuments and tombs for the dead – all of which are as meaningless or 'blank' as the Purple Ribaldry of Morning. The stone walls have no more warmth for the dead than the impotent sun. 
  The wrongness of these deaths is mirrored in the meter. While the poem is written in regular ballad meter, that last line of the first stanza is extremely irregular. It should be three iambic feet, just like all the rest of the stanzas' closing lines. Instead, Dickinson added "of Morning". The extra syllables and the trailing, unaccented ending (a "feminine" ending in poetry terms) call attention to themselves. We are meant to see the dawn colors as those of mourning – and to read what follows as memorial. That "Tier of Wall" isn't just a new wing off the kitchen. 

  It might be too much to read the One Bird's tune as "Taps," the solo funereal bugle call that originated in the Civil War, but that's what I hear when I read the poem as part of Dickinson's war opus. 
  The final image of the poem conjures a fragrant breeze from the South that is as likely to donate its spices as the dead are to care about winter. Despite being teasingly scented with spice, there is no way the southern wind is going to sweeten the sleep of the Union dead. The imagery and diction here make this a difficult stanza and I'm not confident in my interpretation. Dickinson's use of "Men" certainly makes no distinction between those of the North and those of the South.
  But what care the Dead about these distinctions of North versus South, about valor in battle? Their eternity is a cold blank.


The notion that the dead are senseless, that time has lost meaning, that they are in a blank, cold, quiet place indefinitely if not forever, is found in a few other Dickinson poems. In "As far from pity, as complaint" (F364) Dickinson describes the dead as being "numb to Revelation", as "far from time – as History"; and while the corpse is unresponsive, "Color's Revelations break – and blaze – the Butterflies!"
  Dickinson pens a couple of stanzas on the same theme in "A long – long Sleep – A famous – Sleep" (F463). Here the dead "bask the Centuries away" but never respond to morning, "Nor once look up – for Noon". Perhaps the most famous of these poems is "Safe in their alabaster chambers" (F124) where the dead sleep through eons as "firmanents – row" and "Worlds scoop their Arcs". 

Dickinson in these poems reminds us in an awe-full way to open our eyes and use all our senses while we are still living under the sun. I am reminded of Solomon's wisdom book, Ecclesiastes – a Biblical book Dickinson no doubt studied – particularly Chapter 9. Here, after discussing the finality and equality of death ("All things come alike to all"), Solomon advises his readers to "eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart," and that "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave, whither thou goest." 
This is also the chapter where Solomon instructs us to "Let thy garments be always white". I'd love to look at the Dickinson family bible just to see the notes and underlinings …

Prayer is the little implement

Prayer is the little implement
Through which Men reach
Where Presence — is denied them – 
They fling their Speech

By means of it — in God's Ear —
If then He hear —
This sums the Apparatus
Comprised in Prayer —
                            F623 (1863)  J437


In this short poem Dickinson depicts prayer as the recourse of Men to communicate with a God who remains hidden from them.

The tone is breezily dismissive and ironic; the import sad. What is both incisive and sad about the poem is the word choice. Prayer is no powerful medium; only a "little implement". How can such a paltry device ever crack the heavens – particularly when God has "denied" his presence. Shut out from divine "Presence", Men desperately "fling" their prayers. Dickinson says "Speech" here, not only for the rhyme with "reach" but to make quotidian what might otherwise be considered sacred.
        Flinging speech into God's Ear is done on the chance that He hears it. "If then He hear" can be read, "In case He hears". It is as if we were to unceasingly throw messages in bottles into the sea hoping the intended recipient would receive and read them. To extend the analogy, suppose the intended recipient had purposefully removed himself from anywhere we could find him. We don't even know if the message would be read if the sea cast the bottle up at his feet.

W.Holman Hunt, 1859: Morning Prayer

        The poem doesn't offer much hope that prayers are either heard or acted upon. The "Apparatus" seems inadequate and God's denial of his Presence seems far from encouraging. The cool finality of the last two lines, written as drily as if for an equipment manual, finishes the dismissal of prayer.

This isn't the first Dickinson poem about prayer. Most recently in "Of Course – I prayed – "  (F581), she says that she had indeed prayed but that God cared about as much as if "A Bird – had stamped her foot". But while Dickinson dismisses prayer, she does not dismiss the divine. In "My period had come for Prayer —"  (F525) the poet does her best to find and talk to God but finds instead "Infinitude" and "Creation" – an experience of such awe that she abandons the idea of prayer and instead simply "worshipped".
        In "At least – to pray – is left – is left –" (F377), Dickinson adopts a dismissive and rather flippant tone towards prayer. She is "knocking – everywhere –" and finally wondering why God can cause wars and storms but seems to take no interest in her.

To interrupt His Yellow Plan

To interrupt His Yellow Plan
The Sun does not allow
Caprices of the Atmosphere —
And even when the Snow

Heaves Balls of Specks, like Vicious Boy
Directly in His Eye —
Does not so much as turn His Head
Busy with Majesty —

'Tis His to stimulate the Earth —
And magnetize the Sea —
And bind Astronomy, in place,
Yet Any passing by

Would deem Ourselves — the busier
As the minutest Bee
That rides — emits a Thunder —
A Bomb — to justify —
                             F622 (1863)  J591

Dickinson contrasts humans, by way of bees, with the serene majesty of the sun. She also takes aim, I think, at the saccharine platitudes of Isaac Watts' poem "How Doth the Little Busy Bee", published in 1715, and popular during Dickinson's time (and beyond).

The first two stanzas describe the sun's imperturbability. Like the U.S. Post Office motto, neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor hail – nor any other "Caprices of the Atmosphere" –will interrupt his business. The stately third stanza describes this business as stimulating the earth to be fruitful, magnetizing the Sea (I'm not sure about what this might mean: the basaltic ocean floor is magnetized but that is geologic rather than astronomic), and binding Astronomy – probably meaning binding earth to the sun's progression through the galaxy.
        Those are big jobs! Nonetheless, to any passing extraterrestrial observer it would seem that humans have more to do. We are like the tiniest bees whose efforts to gather nectar involves an inordinate amount of buzzing – a "Thunder", Dickinson calls it, as if such a commotion will 'justify' its constant bustling about.
        The bees' Thunder allows an amazing segue to "Bomb" in the last line. But while bees' thunder indicates their passage among flowerbeds, human's thunder, their bombs, indicates their rush to destroy. And so it was in 1863 while Dickinson was writing this poem. Battles at Vicksburg, Gettsburg, Chickamauga, and Stones River – just to list a few that occurred that year – had nearly 130,000 casualties.

Bombardment of Fort Sumter by Currier & Ives 

        And what could Dickinson possibly mean, ending the poem with the word "justify"? Do we humans, or at least Americans at the time she was writing, believe that battles justify the victors? It's a sad and timely commentary, if so.

Now, as to Watts' poem about the "Little Busy Bee". The first two stanzas praise the bee who is industrious, skilful, and neat. Such attributes "Improve each shining hour". The last two stanzas find the poet wanting to emulate the bee for two reasons: to lead a good life and to stay busy so that the Devil can't make use of his 'idle hands'.
        I imagine Dickinson reading this poem and finding it deeply ironic. Most of her countrymen were exposed to this poem. Many of them spent their childhoods "In books, or work, or healthful play" and later strove to be busy in 'works of labor or of skill'. And yet rather than a society like the humming hive, they found no way out of their deep divisions except by busily building and employing the engines of war.



How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower!

How skilfully she builds her cell!
How neat she spreads the wax!
And labors hard to store it well
With the sweet food she makes.

In works of labor or of skill,
I would be busy too;
For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.

In books, or work, or healthful play,
Let my first years be passed,
That I may give for every day
Some good account at last.
                                     Isaac Watts, 1715