Of individual Voice —
As One detect on Landings
An Emigrant's address.
A Hint of Ports and Peoples —
And much not understood —
The fairer — for the farness —
And for the foreignhood.
-Fr883, J719, fascicle 39, 1864
One intriguing pattern I’ve noticed in Dickinson’s poems is the reversal of signified and signifier. For instance, in this poem, what is it that is signified? Is it the South Wind or the Emigrant? At first it seems to be the South Wind that’s the subject and the Emigrant, the metaphor. But it’s the other way around. Once you make that turn-around, then you realize it’s the Emigrant that carries “a pathos of individual voice,” not the wind.
So when you get to that line “And much not understood,” the pathos becomes clear.
In the last two lines of the poem the poet shows her affinity for the foreigner:
The fairer — for the farness —
And for the foreignhood.
By tying the F R N sounds of "fairer— for the farness—" to "foreignhood," Dickinson makes it all seem like a natural fit. The next word would have to be "friend."
The fairer — for the farness —
And for the foreignhood.
By tying the F R N sounds of "fairer— for the farness—" to "foreignhood," Dickinson makes it all seem like a natural fit. The next word would have to be "friend."
Also she coins a term here, "foreignhood," which has the advantage of making a solid rhyme in both sound and meaning with "understood."
Here the poet leads us from the pathos of separation toward an attitude of welcome and acceptance, a message as necessary today as it was back then.
-/)dam Wade l)eGraff
I recently discovered this blog and it is fabulous!!! Many congratulations!!! I adore Dickinson and this blog will help me explore her poetry!!
ReplyDeleteThank you!
DeleteCool Adam, I like your take. Here's mine:
ReplyDeleteI think the drift is that a wind from the south has a personality that’s forlorn. It brings to mind Emily’s poem “Ourselves were wed on summer - dear - ,” where she describes her cottage has having North on every side. If we let the South stand for happy warmth, and the North stand for the cold and the blues, then Emily is telling us then when happiness and warmth enter her life, they’re like weirdos from far away, and she actually feels sorry for them being so far from home. I think it’s fair to say this is one of the big themes in Emily’s poetry: the strangeness of happiness.
I especially like how she gives the wind a personality. That strikes me as very Shakespearian.
(One of my favorite lines from a Shakespeare play - because it makes me laugh- is from King John. King John is worried that his nephew Arthur will go for his thrown, so he asks his crony Hubert to blind Arthur with a hot poker. Hubert chickens out and Arthur tries to escape by jumping off a tower, but the tower is too tall. As he is dying, Arthur says “O me! My uncle's spirit is in these stones.”)
The second stanza is a very Dickinsonian twist, and a reiteration of another big theme in her poems: The weirdness of happiness makes it sweeter. Having the south on all sides might be great. But for someone driven to resolve beauty, living in the north makes it easier to focus.
Thank you, Nate, it's great to have this perspective. I was teaching "After great pain a formal feeling comes" today. In the middle of that poem the "formal" goes all wonky, the literal and metrical feet go askew. Then Dickinson brings it back into formal lockstep by the end of the poem, regains her ground. I can see a kind of push pull like that here (and in so much of Dickinson, like the one between between solitude and society.) Here though, I think she is calling the foreign "fair," and pointing out of our comfort zones to try to understand the "much that's not understood." You can read the poem, I suppose, as saying "she only looks good from a distance" kind of thing. But that's not "fair." Meanwhile I'm living in Queens, the most diverse place on earth, and it's a beautiful thing. Tomorrow night at my HS, St. Francis Prep, we have International Night and 26 clubs representing everything from Haitian to Pakistani to Hindu culture will perform. The kids do dances native to those countries. The different clubs all support one another fanatically. It's the "fairest."
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