"How doth the busy bee,"
"Dum vivimus vivamus,"
I stay mine enemy!
Oh "veni, vidi, vici!"
Oh caput cap-a-pie!
And oh "memento mori"
When I am far from thee!
Hurrah for Peter Parley!
Hurrah for Daniel Boone!
Three cheers, sir, for the gentleman
Who first observed the moon!
Peter, put up the sunshine;
Patti, arrange the stars;
Tell Luna, tea is waiting,
And call your brother Mars!
Put down the apple, Adam,
And come away with me,
So shalt thou have a pippin
From off my father's tree!
I climb the "Hill of Science,"
I "view the landscape o'er;"
Such transcendental prospect,
I ne'er beheld before!
Unto the Legislature
My country bids me go;
I'll take my india rubbers,
In case the wind should blow!
During my education,
It was announced to me
That gravitation, stumbling,
Fell from an apple tree!
The earth upon an axis
Was once supposed to turn,
By way of a gymnastic
In honor of the sun!
It was the brave Columbus,
A'sailing o'er the tide,
Who notified the nations
Of where I would reside!
Mortality is fatal—
Gentility is fine,
Rascality, heroic,
Insolvency, sublime!
Our Fathers being weary,
Laid down on Bunker Hill;
And tho' full many a morning,
Yet they are sleeping still,—
The trumpet, sir, shall wake them,
In dreams I see them rise,
Each with a solemn musket
A marching to the skies!
A coward will remain, Sir,
Until the fight is done;
But an immortal hero
Will take his hat, and run!
Good bye, Sir, I am going;
My country calleth me;
Allow me, Sir, at parting,
To wipe my weeping e'e.
In token of our friendship
Accept this "Bonnie Doon,"
And when the hand that plucked it
Hath passed beyond the moon,
The memory of my ashes
Will consolation be;
Then, farewell, Tuscarora,
And farewell, Sir, to thee!
J2, Fr2 (1852)
This is another valentine, this one to William Howland, a law student in her father's office and a tutor at Amherst college. It was published anonymously in the Springfield Republican, submitted by Howland, but Emily discovered it and had it removed.
The poem revels in turning upside down the book learning of school. She begins with 'Sic transit gloria mundi" -- "Thus passes the glory of the world," but jumps immediately to "Dum vivamus vivamus"--"Let us live while we live," presenting a playful dichotomy in how we are taught to live our lives. Perhaps her own opinion is best expressed in the second line: "How doth the busy bee." From what I've read of her later work, she is very concerned with what the busy bee does--and as we saw in poem 1, what he does with the flower!
She is the Pied Piper, calling Adam to put down that tainted apple from Eve and go along with her to have a pippin from her own father's orchard--presumably an apple without the fatal strings. She also draws some counter-intuitive conclusions from the book learning: in the 11th stanza she says "mortality is fatal / Gentility is fine"--which seem a pair of truisms. But then she follows up with "Rascality, heroic / Insolvency, sublime" which seem paradoxical until you consider that the great heroes of Greek myth and even Western history often are rascals, that the saints are indeed insolvent.
The deeper paradox comes in stanza 14 where she says "A coward will remain, Sir, / Until the fight is done; / But an immortal hero / Will take his hat and run." Is she poking fun, here, at the masculine concern with reputation--that it is braver to risk scorn that a bullet?
She writes here in iambic trimeter and makes little use of the slant rhymes that pepper her later work. It's a fun poem, but I'm still anxious to move on.
- Susan Kornfeld
