Split the Lark — and you'll find the Music —

Split the Lark — and you'll find the Music —
Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled —
Scantilly dealt to the Summer Morning
Saved for your Ear when Lutes be old.

Loose the Flood — you shall find it patent —
Gush after Gush, reserved for you —
Scarlet Experiment! Sceptic Thomas!
Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?

       -F905, J861, Sheet 8, 1865

I was first made aware of this poem when I watched the episode of the Apple TV series "Dickinson" called “Split the Lark.” In this episode this poem is sung on an opera stage by Sue. 

This made me take a deeper look at the poem and I have since come to view it as one of her best.

Let's start at the beginning, with the word "Split." First of all the word is onomatopoeic, so you feel the violence in its sound. 

Then the trochaic rhythmic structure of the poem causes that word to be emphasized. (Trochaic rhythm is the opposite of the more common poetic rhythm, iambic meter. Iambic meter goes: ta DA ta DA ta DA. Trochaic meter goes: TA da TA da TA da TA da.) Because this poem begins on the beat, the word “Split” comes down on us like an axe.  The effect is to give extra venom to an underlying anger.  It's almost as if this word, and therefore this poem, is being spit out, like a metal shriek. SPLIT the Lark!

This move gets carried through the rest of the poem too, especially in the second stanza with the emphasis on the first words of the 5th and 8th line, “Loose” and “Now.” It’s a masterful use of the trochee.

Another brilliant thing about this poem is the way the letters of the word “Split the Lark” continue through the poem, almost as if the phrase itself is being split apart: S L and R sounds, especially, are scattered through the poem. I’ve seen Dickinson do this kind of thing before, using a single consonant cluster of a key word or phrase to inform the sound of the rest of a poem, but this is next level. 

Also worth taking note of here is the use of the second person, "you." This is somewhat rare for a Dickinson poem. According to Google, “There is no single, publicly verified count of exactly how many of Emily Dickinson’s nearly 1,800 poems use the second person." I can think of a few. “I’m nobody, who are you?” comes to mind. In that poem though the "you" feels general. In this one it feels pointed at someone specific. This naturally makes us want to know who, in Dickinson’s wild and complicated private life, was the recipient of this poem? I’m not going to speculate too much here (see end notes), but I will share something which relates to this poem and further deepens the mystery. The second of Dickinson's so-called "Master letters" (L233) begins:

“Master, If you saw a bullet hit a Bird—and he told you he was'nt shot you might weep at his courtesy, but you would certainly doubt his word. One drop more from the gash that stains your Daisy's bosom—then could you believe? Thomas's faith in Anatomy was stronger than his faith in faith. God made me—(Sir) Master—I didn't be—myself. I dont know how it was done.”

(Gosh, I just re-read that letter six or seven times in a row and it got more strange with every pass. The line “Thomas’s faith in Anatomy was stronger than his faith in faith” stopped me in my tracks. It’s so wry!)

We’ve covered the first word, "Split," so now let’s contend with the rest of the first line. 

Split the Lark — and you'll find the Music —

There is a long poetic history of the lark. Many of the poets Dickinson knew and loved, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Milton, Bronte, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Emily's favorite) all used the lark in their poetry as a symbol of poetry itself.

What does it mean that if you split open the lark you'll find music? 

Much of Dickinson’s poetry, especially in her prolific period from which this poem comes, is born from the pain of loss. It is elegy. She calls it the “White sustenance Despair” and hers is a “Soul at White Heat." (Elegy is, perhaps, at the very heart of poetry. See Elizabeth Bishop’s "One Art," for a prime example, where loss and poetry are posited as "One Art.")

This first line carries anger and sadness in its blood, what Federico Garcia Lorca called duende. It's the sound of heartbreak, like the voice of Merry Clayton on The Rolling Stones' Gimme Shelter when she belts out, “Rape, murder!”

The second line of the poem is equally astonishing,

Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled —

I showed this poem to my HS senior English class and I asked them what they thought these bulbs were. I was given many possible answers. It must have something to do with music, because it follows directly from "you will find the music" in the previous line. But bulbs could refer to the bulbous organs found inside the split bird, "in Silver rolled," encased in the silver feathers of the bird. It could be bulbs of blood. It could be the bulb of the bird's throat as it expands over and over to chirp. It could refer to the bulb of the clapper of a silver bell. There is a dense synaesthesia of music and image in these bulbs. The song itself, we are to understand, has a silver sound. 

Dave Cappleman captions this photo “The sweet silver song of the lark.”

Because of the next line of the poem we might also see the bulbs as flower bulbs, seeds that are:

Scantily dealt to the Summer Morning

The notes of the bird song are like seeds which are scantily dealt. This music, this poetry, is rare.

It's difficult to make the turn between the first two lines of the first stanza and next two, but I think it is key to understanding the poem. The dense syntax of this poem goes something like this. Split the lark and you'll find music. You'll find it alright! gushing out, bulb after bulb, a profuse outpouring of agony. But the next two lines tell us that a song bird doesn't normally gush. It deals its song scantily. You catch a little here and there, if you are lucky, on Summer mornings. The "reserved" song, the rareness, is what preserves it, what saves it for the long run, so that it be...

Saved for your Ear when Lutes be old.

If you can be patient, and just accept the little snatches of song, of love, when they come, then it will last you your whole life, but if your doubt, or your jealousy, causes you to be impatient, or greedy, because you couldn’t wait for the music, you will kill the bird. 

"When Lutes be old" could be the two lovers, or Lutes, growing old together. That's how I take it. But it could also mean something like old-fashioned instruments (and ideas) as opposed to music that stays as fresh as the song of a lark.

The gist is that by not having faith and killing the bird you are getting all of its music at once, in this pained outpouring, instead of having it dealt out to you slowly over the long run. It won't last.

After a much needed breath of a stanza break the next gush of blood-song spurts up.

Loose the Flood — you shall find it patent —

Flood is a poignant word here. It rhymes with blood, a word which is not mentioned, but is at the center of this poem’s scarlet imagery. It's a flood of blood gushing out of the split-open bird. But it's also a flood of emotions, a flood to drown in. The word "patent," used in this way, is antiquated. Here it means something like "proof."

Gush after Gush, reserved for you —

This line does the same thing "Bulb after Bulb" did, which is to create a rhythmic surge. Gush gushes.

“Reserved for you” has an interesting double meaning here. It means, on one hand, all of this is for one chosen person. It’s not a general love, but a specific one. But “Reserved” can also mean to hold back. Both meanings play out here. It's reserved for you, and you can have it all now, painfully, or you can have it spread over the years, reserved.

Scarlet Experiment! Sceptic Thomas!

Experiment is an odd word to use in the context of this poem. If this song is about lack of faith killing a song bird, then how does experiment fit in? How is the lover experimenting? Is this poem about infidelity perhaps? However it plays out in the psychological drama at which it hints, “experiment” takes the poem into the realm of science, like the idea that you have to prove the existence of God, or music, through some kind of tangible evidence. If you look at the two previous poems in the sheet this poem was originally written on (the previous two poems on this blog), you’ll see the words “prove” and “doubt.” The poems on this one sheet can all be read in dynamic relationship to one another.

Dickinson adds a whole new idea here with that word “experiment.” When you try to analyze something (like a poem!) you can kill its music. It's like the irony of killing and dissecting a frog to find out how it lives. It reminds me of one of my favorite Kafka aphorisms, The Top, in which a philosopher wants to understand how a top spins, so he picks it up, which stops it from spinning, thus upsetting the kids, who then chase him away. 

Dickinson could have written “doubting Thomas” here and it would have scanned just fine in the trochaic rhythm, but by using the word "Skeptic" she doubles up on that SK sound.The double SK sound in this line gives a harshness to the already vitriolic poem. You hear this sound subtly in the first line "Split the larK," and in "Scantily" in the third line, which prepares you for this. It's part of the scathing sound underlying the poem. This is intensified by those two exclamation points.

(The word Skeptic is spelled in this poem with a C. This is confusing because we naturally read this as a different word at first, sceptic as in sceptic tank. I assume though that in Dickinson's day it was just common to spell it with a C and the word should be "Skeptic.")

Thomas, for those of you who don't know the Gospels, is the one who had to touch Jesus' wounds to believe He was real. This reference gives the bird, and thus the "I" of this poem, a Christ-like quality. This poem can be imagined to be spoken by Christ himself. 

It’s dazzling, and dizzying, how much is going on in this poem.

We finally end with the plaintive line,

Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?

All the disbelieving skeptics, all the scientists, all the jealous lovers, indeed, all of us, are hereby admonished. The Love of the poet, of nature, of music, is True. Be patient, it will be scantily dealt to you, saved for you when you get old. If you rush to prove it is true you will kill it. But hey, the poem sardonically reminds us, at least in killing it, you will have your proof!

     -/)dam Wade l)eGraff
 

 

Notes: 

1. David Preest, amongst others, has made the argument that the recipient of this poem was Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Dickinson referred to Higginson in a letter as her Preceptor, which is another term for Master. Also the reference to "skeptic Thomas" in the second stanza may be a sly reference to Higginson's first name, Thomas. I’d personally love to believe it was Higginson instead of Charles Wadsworth, who some believe to be "Master," just because I like Higginson better as a person. I’m also fine with "(Sir) Master" being Emily's sister-in-law Sue. (Johnny Cash's song "A boy named Sue" suddenly comes to mind). Anyway! This poem could be for anyone who sometimes doubts love, which is to say, I suppose, if we are honest, all of us.

2. There is much more to say about the play of consonance and rhyme in this poem, which is mind-boggingly well-composed. One small example I love is the way the sound of "Lutes" in the first stanza sets up "Loose" in the second.