Nature – the Gentlest Mother is,

Nature – the Gentlest Mother is,
Impatient of no Child –
The feeblest – or the waywardest –
Her Admonition mild –

In Forest – and the Hill –
By Traveller – be heard –
Restraining Rampant Squirrel –
Or too impetuous Bird –

How fair Her Conversation –
A Summer Afternoon –
Her Household – Her Assembly –
And when the Sun go down –

Her Voice among the Aisles
Incite the timid prayer
Of the minutest Cricket –
The most unworthy Flower –

When all the Children sleep –
She turns as long away
As will suffice to light Her lamps –
Then bending from the Sky –

With infinite Affection –
And infiniter Care –
Her Golden finger on Her lip –
Wills Silence – Everywhere –

       -F741, J790, Fascicle 36, 1863

I can imagine this poem in an Emily Dickinson collection for children. It describes an ideal mother, but it does more than just describe. It actually gives us a sense of what it feels like to have an ideal mother. 

We know Emily’s mother wasn’t so ideal. In a later letter to Higginson in 1870, she bluntly said that, "I never had a mother. I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.” 

Not only did Emily find that mother she needed in nature, but here, in describing it so wonderfully, she has made the idea of the perfect mother realized for all future generations to see. You might say that through this poem Emily is mothering mothers, using the mother of all mothers as her prime and perfect example.

Nature – the Gentlest Mother is,
Impatient of no Child –
The feeblest – or the waywardest –
Her Admonition mild –

For starters, mothers and future mothers, try to be impatient of no child. All mothers will know just how difficult of an ideal this is. Being a parent myself I well know what a tall order this is. When it comes to parenting, and life, patience may indeed be the greatest of virtues.

Mother Nature may be patient with all children, even the feeblest and most wayward, but we also note that She will still admonish when need be, albeit mildly. Isn't the mother we all wish for, one who guides us gently, with infinite patience?

In Forest – and the Hill –
By Traveller – be heard –
Restraining Rampant Squirrel –
Or too impetuous Bird –

Rampant squirrels are "restrained" by Mother Nature, and so are impetuous birds and the traveler can hear this in the forest and hills. It would have to be quite a squawking racket for a passing traveler to hear, wouldn't it? Are the rampant squirrel and impetuous birds checked by bigger animals trying, and sometimes succeeding, in eating them? After all, this is part of nature too. This doesn’t really seem like such a mild admonishment, and doesn't fit the loving tone of the poem, but I think Emily is having fun here. Mild admonishment from nature may mean a few errant squirrels and birds are picked off. Nature is working on a different scale.

How fair Her Conversation –
A Summer Afternoon –
Her Household – Her Assembly –
And when the Sun go down –

“How fair Her Conversation.” Okay, now we’ve switched soundscapes, from the squeals and squawks of admonishment, to the beautiful Conversation (capital C) on a summer afternoon, where you can hear, say, if you listen closely, the hare sniffing a carrot, or, louder still, the birds calling their mates across the upper regions of the forests. This is the assembly (the family) in Nature's household, which is a charming way to think of the forest. 

Her Voice among the Aisles
Incite the timid prayer
Of the minutest Cricket –
The most unworthy Flower –

What aisles are there in nature? What is Emily talking about here? The first thing I think of are aisles of trees, but we also have, via association with aisles of pews, entered into a church. We've been in this particular church with Emily before. See F238 for one great example, and F21 for another. 

When the sun goes down, what is it we hear among the aisles of trees? We hear the “timid prayer” of the smallest cricket. It's funny to think of a cricket’s insistent chirp as a prayer. A simple line like this one can tweak the way you hear crickets forevermore. But how about a flower? What sound does the prayer of an “unworthy” flower make in the evening? Here you have to imagine something extra-auditory, a frequency far beyond the norm.

But I suspect there is a little joke involved in the idea of the timid prayer of the most unworthy flower. It is humans that see themselves as unworthy, not flowers. The subtle point I think Dickinson is making here is that there are no unworthy flowers, and, if we could only but see ourselves as flowers we would no longer see ourselves as timid and unworthy.

When all the Children sleep –
She turns as long away
As will suffice to light Her lamps –

The image of Mother Nature turning on her moon and star lamps is adorable. (And ancient too. I remember the lines from Beowulf, “both sun and moon,/ the lamps of light for those living on land,”.)

I can appreciate the line, “as long away as will suffice.” Nature only goes as far as she needs to. But this is another funny moment in the poem, because look how far she goes! All the way out to the moon, and then to the stars beyond them. It’s a very long way away that "suffices" for these lamps to be turned on. Make of that what you will.

Okay, so Mother Nature has turned on the night light, to comfort Her children, and to give them a soft light in case one of them needs to go in the middle of the night. 

Then bending from the Sky –

With infinite Affection –
And infiniter Care –
Her Golden finger on Her lip –
Wills Silence – Everywhere –

What a beautiful thought, that nature has infinite affection for us. Not everyone’s going to buy that idea, I know. Nature can seem quite cruel. (See the bit about animals being eaten above.) But this is a poem directing us, in part, in how to be a good mother, so let’s just focus for now on how sweet nature can be. To begin with we have the sweetness in the nature of sleep.

"Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care, sore labor's bath, Balm of hurt minds, Chief nourisher in life's feast." -William Shakespeare

And then, as if infinite Affection wasn’t enough, we have even infiniter Care. That’s where my reasoning brain shuts off and I get, instead, that feeling of being mothered by the poem itself. It leads me to imagine, and therefore feel, what it means to have infinite Affection and infiniter Care. 

It’s a kind of joke that anything could be infiniter than infinity, but there's also a kind of truth to this joke. Care IS infiniter. As Dickinson says in a letter a few years after this poem was written,

“When infinite Space is beheld
And all Dominion shown
The smallest Human Heart’s extent
Reduces it to none.”

The smallest Human Heart’s extent is greater than infinite dominion. Why? Infinity would be empty without love and care, which, after all, can only take place in small ways in the moment itself. 

Infinite affection and infiniter care. That is the motherly ideal. Is it true that Nature is infinitely affectionate and caring? Well, if Emily, who is one of the toughest skeptics I know of, thinks so, there must be some truth to it. 

In my imagination the "golden finger on Her lip" at the end of this poem is the golden rays of the sun reflecting on the moon in early evening. This magic hour moment Wills silence everywhere. We must obey this Will because, eventually, we must sleep, just as we must die. But this sleep, this death, as it is presented in this poem, this Willed silence, is one thought to be born of infinite affection and infiniter care. Thanks to Emily Dickinson's grace and largesse, this is a sleep I can now enter a bit more peacefully, basking in the infinite Affection and infiniter Care of Nature Herself. This poet has lovingly mothered us through her writing of this very poem.

    -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Super blue moon over a pond in Nevada MO, 

as seen from my mother's house, 8/20/24

notes:

1. The word "Assembly" here is a reflection of the word "Assembly" in the poem proceeding this one. The former poem used Assembly as a descriptor for God. This one uses it as a descriptor for family in the house of Nature. It's fascinating to watch Dickinson turn words over and over as she writes her poems. This poem also shares the word "suffice" with the previous poem. And the poem before that one had the word "sufficient" in it. The word infinite or eternity is in almost every poem in this fascicle thus far. The word "recollect" is in the first two poems of this fascicle. In this way the words becomes like monadic stars, and the poems like constellations. 

2.  I haven't written much about the actual music of Dickinson's language for awhile, but it is worth taking note of that first line, "Nature – the Gentlest Mother is,". First of all, the natural way to write this would be "Nature is gentlest mother." If we look at the possible reasons why Dickinson weirds this line, we can begin to get some insight into her process. Stating the object of the sentence first enables it to take the initial role in the poem. "Nature" sits there and glows all by itself for a moment. Then, by the way the sentence is restructured you get that idea of pure being that the "is" gives you sitting at the end of the line. Nature, the gentlest mother IS. You also get the satisfaction of a slant rhyme when you get to the third line; "mother is" rhymes subtly with "waywardness." Dickinson deploys a rare comma after "is" which is interesting because without the comma the line would dovetail perfectly with the the next line, "Impatient of no Child –," but this choice makes me think she wanted that "is" to be left as pure verb, pure isness. The z sound at the end of the word is soft and comforting as well, like the Nature in this poem. You hear this sound reflected later in the poem too, as the sound of "is" extends into the sound of "aisles."