Upon the Hills Today—
With here and there a mighty Bow
Or trailing Courtesy
To Neighbors doubtless of their own
Not quickened to perceive
Minuter landscape as Ourselves
And Boroughs where we live—
-F964, J1105, sheet 22, 1865
This poem plunges you immediately into a mysterious image: shadows on the hills that look like men and women walking.
The mind tries to fill in the possibilities here. What could these shadows be? Clouds? Trees?
The great poet always starts with real things and abstracts from there, almost never the other way around. “No ideas but in things,” said William Carlos Williams. “Not ideas about things, but the thing itself," echoed Wallace Stevens, doubling down.
So let's try to find a tangible answer to the riddle. What are these shadows... of? Dickinson never tells us the answer. It doesn't help that shadows themselves are so shadowy, an ephemeral echo of the real. In this wonderful way this poem allows us to slip into the mystic. These undefined shadows allow a whole host of possible metaphoric meanings into the poem beyond the merely empirical.
But first thing's first. What is the real thing the poem is alluding to? Our first clue is that "they are like men and women." Hmm. How are they like men and women? Second clue, they are on a hill. What is on a hill and looks like the shadows of men and women? Third clue, they are bowing. Aha. Gotta be trees, right?
I think trees must be at the root of this riddle. The silhouettes of trees are bowing in the wind.
Or trailing Courtesy
To Neighbors doubtless of their own
The trees appear to be curtsying. The poet imagines that they are "trailing Courtesy" after neighbors who are passing them by, "Neighbors doubtless of their own."
Now that we've got the riddle, it begins to release its meaning. If the shadows of the trees are like men and women, that means they are not men and women, right? So then, this begs the question, how are they different? The poem will soon let us know.
Not quickened to perceive
Minuter landscape as Ourselves
The trees are operating, from our perspective, in super slow-motion.
An Eastern Hemlock may last 1000 years, which almost seems from our smaller perspective to be eternal. Because they have a longer sense of time, goes the proposition, trees are not able to perceive us. They are not quick enough, "not quickened to perceive." To the old growth we must look like a blur, just as the trees must look like a blur to the earth, and the earth to the stars.
But first thing's first. What is the real thing the poem is alluding to? Our first clue is that "they are like men and women." Hmm. How are they like men and women? Second clue, they are on a hill. What is on a hill and looks like the shadows of men and women? Third clue, they are bowing. Aha. Gotta be trees, right?
I think trees must be at the root of this riddle. The silhouettes of trees are bowing in the wind.
Or trailing Courtesy
To Neighbors doubtless of their own
The trees appear to be curtsying. The poet imagines that they are "trailing Courtesy" after neighbors who are passing them by, "Neighbors doubtless of their own."
Now that we've got the riddle, it begins to release its meaning. If the shadows of the trees are like men and women, that means they are not men and women, right? So then, this begs the question, how are they different? The poem will soon let us know.
Not quickened to perceive
Minuter landscape as Ourselves
The trees are operating, from our perspective, in super slow-motion.
An Eastern Hemlock may last 1000 years, which almost seems from our smaller perspective to be eternal. Because they have a longer sense of time, goes the proposition, trees are not able to perceive us. They are not quick enough, "not quickened to perceive." To the old growth we must look like a blur, just as the trees must look like a blur to the earth, and the earth to the stars.
This is why our "landscape" is "minuter" than the trees, because we are smaller in time.
Perhaps the "Neighbors" that the trees are "trailing Courtesy" to are the flowers then. The flowers are slower moving than we are, but still faster than the trees. The flowers pass by and the trees give them a Mighty slo-mo bow as they go.
Dickinson gets across an amazing idea here. As humans we may be able to perceive quicker than a tree can, but the rub is that what we are perceiving is "minuter," more trivial. This is a humble understanding of limits, and at the same time, through the power of poetic imagination, Dickinson aligns with the eternal-leaning time of the shadowy trees. The trees carry "Bulletins from Immortality." So do poems.
Not quickened to perceive
Minuter landscape as Ourselves
And Boroughs where we live—The trees aren't even quick enough to perceive the boroughs where we live. Even our culture is just a blip in the lifetime of a tree. In a 1000 years whole civilizations may come and go.
What does a tree know?
-/)dam Wade l)eGraff
tree looking up at stars in wonder
P.S. This post is dedicated to David DeGraff in whose great shadow I walk. Happy birthday, Dad. I could sense your spirit as I wrote this, almost as if we wrote it together.
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