Fairer through Fading — as the Day

Fairer through Fading — as the Day
Into the Darkness dips away —
Half Her Complexion of the Sun —
Hindering — Haunting — Perishing —

Rallies Her Glow, like a dying Friend —
Teasing with glittering Amend —
Only to aggravate the Dark
Through an expiring — perfect — look —


    -Fr868,  J938, 1864

The music in this poem sucks you in like a siren song. You can’t stop listening. First there are those strong double Fs that begin the poem, and those Ds coming in with FaDing and Day, echoed in the next line with Darkness and Dip. "D" sounds are like deep dark percussion in Dickinson, the equivalent to bass notes in a piece of music. (I think of Robert Frost here too, "The woods are lovely, dark and deep.")

Then there’s the assonance, that strong ay sound in fair and fade and day in the first line merging, finally, into “away” in the second. The ay of "away" fades away off into the ether. Awaayyyy. 

The quadruple Hs in the second couplet, Half, Her, Hindering and Haunting, create an airy push, so that surprising P at the end of the line, “Perishing,” really pops out at you.

There is no knowing where the music is going with Dickinson because the tenor of the thought is leading the way. Somehow though it is always perfect. For example, look at “look” at the end of the poem. There is no set up for the word. It doesn’t rhyme with anything else in the poem. It defies expectation, but is just right.

Suffice to say that there is "fair" music in spades here, a sublime connection between the musicality of this poem and its content.

Let's look at that content:

Fairer through Fading

This is an oxymoron of sorts. How can something become more beautiful when it is becoming less seen? Its impending absence makes the presence more powerful.

— as the Day
Into the Darkness dips away —

The sunset, when day is fading, is the most beautiful part of it. Dickinson doesn’t go there in this poem, but this is also true of the end of the year. Autumn is the most colorful of seasons. Like a day, and a year, a life ends at its most beautiful point, fairer through fading.

Half Her Complexion of the Sun —
Hindering — Haunting — Perishing —

At twilight, half the day’s complexion is sun, and half dark. 

Hindering —  To hinder is to hamper progress. The day, the life, wants to stay, so it's hindering night. 

Haunting —  We are haunted by the lingering finality of life.

 — Perishing —  Look at how that stark word is set aside like that between dashes, followed by a break between stanzas, like a pregnant pause. What comes during the Perishing? 

The next stanza rallies!

Rallies Her Glow, like a dying Friend —

The subject is still Day. Day is rallying her “glow,” like a dying friend. I remember hearing my grandmother make a hilarious joke on her 90th birthday. I wasn’t expecting it and it seemed to sum up all of her spirit and wit and verve. She was like dying Friend rallying her glow. It was all the more poignant for being so late in the day, so late in the year, so late in the life.

Teasing with glittering Amend —

What is there for the day to amend? Is the day making up for all that noonday sinning with its brilliant “glittering” display of a sunset? Is Emily hinting that it is in atoning that our colors become most rich in tone?

Only to aggravate the Dark
Through an expiring — perfect — look —

This glittering is in defiance to the Dark. It’s flipping off the void. What does it mean to “aggravate the Dark"? It’s almost like some kind of battle of good and evil. Living life to the nth, to the last, is our final battle cry. Aggravate the dark and leave this “light” in a glittering golden display of rebellion,

Through an expiring — perfect — look —

That’s a sunset for you. Or an Autumn trove of trees in New England. Or Emily herself. The end of the poem is the poem's, the poet's, final perfect look, straight at us.

It’s not one that could be predicted. There is no set up rhyme for it, yet it’s perfect.

Glittering.


       -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

My daughter Lucia in the glitter of a sunset

Stay tuned. In the next poem Dickinson continues her meditation on perfection.

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind –

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind –
As if my Brain had split –
I tried to match it – Seam by Seam –
But could not make them fit.

The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before –
But Sequence raveled out of Sound
Like Balls – upon a Floor.

    -Fr867, J937, 1864

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind –
As if my Brain had split –

That word split is often used with visceral force by Emily Dickinson, as in the start of the the amazing poem of hers which begins, “Split the lark - and you’ll find the music-” Violence can be felt in the very sound of the word: SPLIT. Splat.

The meaning of the word is rich too. There is a doubleness to "split." Something breaks, but in breaking it also gains in possibility. (Read the post on Fr849 for a deeper discussion on the word).

Cleave is another interesting word because it has a doubleness too. Cleave is a contranym, meaning it can denote two opposite things at once. It can mean coming together as well as coming apart. In this case it seems to be the latter, a cleaving apart, but maybe that third line, “I tried to match it,” hints at the other meaning, two parts cleaving back together.

What could have split Emily’s mind? Loyalty to two opposing ideals? There is all of that push and pull between herself and marriage, or herself and religion, or (you fill in the blank.) There is the possibility that something badly wounded Emily, someone close to her, which fractured her mind. To feel betrayed by love might do it.

I tried to match it Seam by Seam.

A few poems back, in Fr860,  we had the phrase “Rime by Rime,” which was a pun of rhyme by rhyme, a sly reference to poetry. I think this is a further echo of the same idea. Seam by Seam is the brain trying to match itself at the seams, but it is also, perhaps, a stitching together in poetry. To sew together verses even as you are dealing with a torn-apart and tattered mind seems to be at the heart of this poem. And there’s the other echo here, which is the pun on "seem." 

“Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not 'seems.'” says Hamlet, as his mind is splitting apart.

Following the word “Seams” is another rich word that is often found in Dickinson’s poems: “fit.”

But could not make them fit.

Words in Dickinson function like planets around a sun. You can’t quite get to the sun, but the definitions and connotations orbiting around it create a solar system. "Fit" is one of those words. See Fr686 for a good example of the complexities of the word “Fit.”

But of course “fit” here goes in two different directions too. The content of the poem is about not fitting, but everything in the form fits perfectly. Just look how perfectly in this poem “fit” rhymes here with “split”!

The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before –

It is a mind divided. But what is the divide? The poem doesn’t answer that question. Perhaps the divide is between want and need? Or between reason and love? Or (you fill in the blank).

But Sequence raveled out of Sound

Not only do the thoughts not fit together, but they are, somehow, out of sequence.

The word “Sound” here has a few possibilities. Sound as in noise, as in, the thoughts went out beyond sound and into silence, out into no thought.

But Sound can also mean measurement, like sounding the depths of the water. The sequence goes out beyond measure.

Sound can also mean sense, as in, a sound mind. The mind is going out of the realm of reason. There is no more sequence because reason is gone.

Ravel is yet another contranym of sorts. Ravel seems like it would mean the opposite of unravel, and sometimes it does, but usually it means the same as unravel, as I believe it does here.

But again, like we saw with cleaving apart to cleaving together, and in not fitting being fitting, there is a raveling together here in the form of the poem itself. The brain may be unwinding like a ball of yarn, but there is a winding up the yarn too, you might say, in the tight form and perfect end-rhymes of the poem.

Like Balls – upon a Floor.

These balls must refer to balls of yarn, or thread, being used to try to seam the thoughts together. The startling image here is of a woman attempting to sew, but her mind being so out of sorts that she drops the balls off her lap, just lets them go, where they unroll themselves on the floor. Note that ball is plural here, as if several threads have been dropped. Ball made plural also makes you think of a juggler having dropped all of the balls at once.

There is a letting go of the balls of thought here. The poem, with its contranyms, “cleave,” and “ravel,” is itself a contranym. It can be read as pointing toward a loss or a gain, depending on how you look at it. You can read the poem, in the frame of its poetry, as call to drop the balls and just watch them roll. 

And yet, paradoxically, even as the mind is, for better or worse, coming apart, marvelously, the poem comes together.

      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

This Dust, and its Feature—

This Dust, and its Feature—
Accredited—Today—
Will in a second Future—
Cease to identify—

This Mind, and its measure—
A too minute Area
For its enlarged inspection's
Comparison—appear—

This World, and its species
A too concluded show
For its absorbed Attention's
Remotest scrutiny—


       -Fr866, J936, Fascicle 39, 1864

I first met Katy Lederer back in the early 90s when we were both at Berkeley and studying under poets like Thom Gunn, Lyn Hejinian and Robert Hass. Katy was one of the first poets to really draw my attention to Emily Dickinson's work. I remember listening to her talk about Dickinson's precise linguistic clarity in the realm of very abstract subjects like faith and eternity in amazement. "How does she do that?"  I still think about that conversation often. 

I've been an admirer of Katy's poetry and writing ever since and I'm very grateful she agreed to write a post for Prowling Bee. Her essay gives us a valuable new way to think about Dickinson's work that extends from the Latinate past toward the language of the future. 

***

We are living in the era of the rise of what are known as the “large language models,” or LLMs. In this context, one might think of Dickinson’s poems, and this poem in particular, as a miniature language model. Though known as one of the foundational lyricists of the American tradition, Dickinson was also a technician; her hymnlike verses can be analyzed as spiritual machines.

In 2017, a group of eight technical researchers published a seminal paper in the field of deep learning titled “Attention Is All You Need.” In the paper, they introduced the transformer, a piece of technical architecture that made the modern incarnation of artificial intelligence possible. The etymology of the word “attention,” which appears in line 11 of Fr866, is worth considering here: from the Latin tendere, it means to reach for, to stretch or extend. Language itself is a tool for such extension; the M-dash, in the
Dickinsonian context, a kind of reaching for, or stretching toward, a phrase.

Latinate words are notably spatial, constructed as they often are of directional affixes and roots. As with “Attention,” the word “Accredited,” in line two of the poem, from the Latin credere, also implies a kind of reaching or extension, in this case of credit outward (ac-). “This Dust, and its Feature—” writes Dickinson in the first of the poem’s three stanzas,

Accredited—Today—
Will in a second Future—
Cease to identify—

The “Dust” in this case might be dust on a piece of furniture, or dust motes floating in the sunlight, or possibly even the dust – composed of sloughed off skin cells or grime – layered on a woman’s skin. One thinks of the expression “dust to dust.” “Dust” in this instance implies mortality, the ephemeral flesh; that which is “Accredited” – as in extended credence, a kind of credit – in the moment, but which will, in due time, “cease to identify,” to exist. What was once a “Future” inexorably transforms into a present; what was expansively alive will become dead. The credit – of life, love, time – will no longer be extended.

In the second stanza of the poem, Dickinson takes us from “This Dust” to “This Mind” – from the material flesh to the seat of cognition and awareness:

This Mind, and its measure—
A too minute Area
For its enlarged inspection’s
Comparison—appear

Here, once again, the poem becomes spatial – literally an “area,” and a measurable one at that. This area is “too minute,” too small to accommodate the “enlarged inspection’s/ Comparison.” As with “Attention” and “Accredited,” the word “inspection” is Latinate, from the root specere, which means to look, a looking into or inside (the prefix in-). Whereas “This Dust, and its Feature” were accredited, extended outward into the material body and into time, “This Mind, and its measure” try to extend inward; but, alas, its “Area” is “too minute,” not big enough. The divine mystery – of consciousness and its desire to in-spect, or look into, itself – cannot find adequate accommodation in the “measure” of the “Mind.” To return to the analogy with LLMs introduced at the beginning of this commentary, the “measure” of the material mind doesn’t scale, its processing power is inadequate to the task of full spiritual self-awareness.

In the third and final stanza of the poem, Dickinson pans out from the interior inspections of the Mind to the expansive vista of “This World” and “its species.” Here, one might imagine a kind of pastoral scene, of animals and plants – also material, a permutation of this “Dust” – grazing and gamboling along the countryside. Who or what made “This World,” full as it is of material, kinetic life? As with so many of Dickinson’s poems, a sense of divine mystery pervades. The poem functions as both a prayer and paean – a Platonic love poem addressed to a Creator. This Creator, unnamed here, is the locus of a remote, “absorbed Attention” that wishes to “scrutinize,” to inspect “This World.” But alas, “This World” is “too concluded,” too disappointingly finite.

Dickinson’s poetics are preternaturally algorithmic. One might describe her poems as linguistic equations, studded as they are by the quantitative dash. But there is a tragedy inherent in Dickinson’s intentionally composed poems – they seem to promise a summation, a kind of balance or totality, and yet there is always an unsettling remainder, an inability to tally the metaphysical reality. The flesh, including the mind and its cognition, is simply not equipped to make sense of the material context in which it finds itself, no matter how strenuously it extends itself outward or attends. Attention in this case – even that of a writer as sensitive and attuned to the subtleties of language as Dickinson – is simply not enough, or possibly too much.

      -Katy Lederer

        "In the temper and the tantrum, in the well-kept arboretum

        I am waiting, like an animal,

        For poetry."   

        from "That Everything's Inevitable" by Katy Lederer

Expectation — is Contentment —

Expectation — is Contentment —
Gain — Satiety —
But Satiety — Conviction
Of Necessity

Of an Austere trait in Pleasure —
Good, without alarm
Is a too established Fortune —
Danger — deepens Sum —


    -Fr865, J807, Fascicle 38, 1864

For some reason when I first read this I heard Julie Andrews as Maria Von Trapp, or maybe Mary Poppins, sing-saying it. “Children, repeat after me, "Expectation — is Contentment —…”

Come to think of it, there is something Governess-like in Emily Dickinson.

This one is tough syntactically from the very first line:

Expectation — is Contentment —

Is contentment the subject or object here?

Does this line mean that (our) Expectation is (to eventually have) Contentment?

Or does it mean that expectation itself, that is to say, anticipation, is where one finds true contentment?

Which of these two different ideas is meant by Dickinson? It seems like she must mean one or the other, right? But Dickinson does this kind of syntactically slippery thing all of the time, so we suspect she means both. This poem works either way that you interpret the line and both play into its meaning. 

In the two ways to read this line, we actually have one entire idea, which is this: 

We have the expectation that if we have what we want, then we will become content (first meaning). But anticipation is, ironically, where one may find true contentment (second meaning).

In the way that I processed the poem, the second meaning didn't kick in until I’d read it all the way through once. It’s like a coda, but one that you have to go back to the beginning of the poem to get. 

OK, let's work through the rest of the poem.

Expectation — is Contentment —
Gain — Satiety —

We have an expectation of contentment, and that if we gain we will be satisfied.

But Satiety — Conviction
Of Necessity

But satiety (feeling full) brings a conviction of a Necessity. Conviction and Necessity are both strong words. Necessity. Of what? 

Satiety brings a...

Conviction
Of Necessity

Of an Austere trait in Pleasure —

What does having an austere trait in our pleasure mean? Austerity means something like "restraint of luxuries", so I think an austere trait would be showing constraint.

The next lines comprise an aphorism:

Good, without alarm
Is a too established Fortune —

If there is no alarm in our good, then it’s too “established." Don't allow yourself to get too comfortable, the good Governess is reminding us. You mustn't rest too easily in your feeling of satisfaction, in your happiness. Stay alert to pain.  

Then she looks at the idea from a slightly different angle,

Danger — deepens Sum —

This is the third or fourth wisdom bomb she’s dropped on us in this poem. Danger deepens Sum. This could mean a couple things as far as I can figure it. One is that when we gain, the risk of loss makes our wholeness (sum) more meaningful. It “deepens” it.

Another possibility is that when we are are on the other side of gain, in expectation, the risk we take for that gain deepens it.

That all brings us back around to that first line again. Now that we’ve worked our way through the poem, the first line begins to take on its second meaning. Now we can see that because satiety is suspect, expectation (anticipation) is where true contentment lies.

The argument that Dickinson is making here is difficult for us to get because it's ironic. (I heard Elon Musk say in an interview recently that "fate is the ultimate irony maximizer." Hmm.) It’s not in gain that we find satisfaction, but in expectation. And if we, perchance, find ourselves in gain, well then, it is best to maintain a sense of austerity, which is to say, moderation.

This is the last poem of Fascicle 38. Emily perhaps wrote this poem to remind herself of what is “Necessary,"  but I'm convinced this is aimed for an audience who still needs to learn these lessons. I believe she wrote it for us, the Governess's charges. She’s helping us to understand the wisdom of valuing our desire over the satisfaction of desire, and once we have achieved our desire, the necessity of austerity. We are to keep in mind that danger “deepens the Sum.” 

    -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

A Plated Life — diversified

A Plated Life — diversified
With Gold and Silver Pain
To prove the presence of the Ore
In Particles — 'tis when

A Value struggle — it exist —

A Power — will proclaim
Although Annihilation pile
Whole Chaoses on Him —

   -Fr864, J806, Fascicle 48, 1864


For this poem we reached out to the great poet and musician Chris Stroffolino. Chris has written about Dickinson beautifully elsewhere so I asked him to write for Prowling Bee and he kindly said yes. (Fun fact: I referenced the band Silver Jews in the commentary for Fr 860, which I posted a couple of weeks ago, and it so happens that Chris played keyboard and trumpet on their album American Water, one of the best of the '90s.)

Perhaps this short poem screams “Pain” on a level deeper than any exegesis could provide. On one level, it is Dickinson at her most formal, as it scans perfectly to the tune of “Amazing Grace,” yet the “off rhymes” (pain and when/ proclaim and him), and the enjambed sentence, or at least clause, between stanzas, and the use of dashes, in the 5th an 6th line especially:

In Particles — 'tis when
A Value struggle — it exist —
A Power — will proclaim

exhibit a grammatical stumbling like marbles on the floor,, largely due to the phrase “it exist.” Although the “argument of the poem,” suggests the necessary value of decoration (which reminds me of a John Ashbery line about “metal that will rust if not painted”), the decoration does not cover or hide the pain, but rather reveals (and perhaps amplifies) it. Is the pain in a value struggle with the power? Or may the pain be said to proclaim the power? Adam DeGraff argues that ‘ the silver and gold pain might be alchemically transmuted poetry, ‘proving’ the ore.” He reminds me that “ore doesn't rust. Ore is strength against chaoses. (or rather it already IS rust. Most ore is already iron oxide, meaning it's already rusted in its natural state, just in solid rock form.)”

If this poem sings the necessity of diversification, does the ore become       “the one?” Certainly, this poem, with its artful alternations of singular and plurals is concerned with the relationship between the many and the one. Nonetheless, although there is a celebration of this power, the poem seems to be more interested in evoking the annihilation that piles “whole chaoses,” which get the last words, and spell check reminds me that chaos is not supposed to be spoken in the plural.

Given that the poem mentions gold and silver, as well as a value struggle, it is perhaps tempting to consider a mercantile dimension to this poem, of how “pain” may have a currency, a power, in lyric effusions, and I am curious what others have to say about that.


                    -Chris Stroffolino

This Bauble was preferred of Bees –

This Bauble was preferred of Bees –
By Butterflies admired
At Heavenly – Hopeless Distances –
Was justified of Bird –

Did Noon – enamel – in Herself
Was Summer to a Score
Who only knew of Universe –
It had created Her.


    -Fr863, J805, fascicle 38, 1864

.
I would guess that this poem was given to a friend accompanied by a flower. This was a signature gesture from Emily. The “This” would have pointed to a specific flower, probably some beauty from Emily’s garden, but it would have been understood by the recipient to be about recipient herself. 

Without the original referent, though, the “This” points to any flower, and then, finally, to any recipient.

A bauble is a showy, often cheap, trinket. So from the get-go Dickinson is making a statement about value. What may seem like just a worthless bauble is preferred by bees. Butterflies admire it too. (Do butterflies admire flowers? Maybe butterflies admire flowers because, unlike them, they are rooted to the ground?) 

We already have a solid idea here. The beauty in ourselves that we may judge as shallow is necessary and beloved by nature itself. But Dickinson takes the idea deeper as the poem continues.

At Heavenly – Hopeless Distances –
Was justified of Bird –

Now the flower, or the recipient, is seen to be like heaven, hopelessly far away, and therefore justifies the very reach of the wings of the bird. If one wishes to reach this recipient, this bauble that is so much more than just a bauble, then one must grow wings. It justifies the flight itself. What does it mean to grow wings metaphorically? One might say that this poem itself is the bird, and the heightened language, the song, of this poem, is the bird in flight. It has reached its flower, you.

(We may ask ourselves here, what sort of wings will get us across the hopeless distances to the heaven of the beloved?)

Did Noon – enamel – in Herself

The density of this line is staggering. Dickinson thinks of noon, in the intensity and heat of the sun, as maturity itself. Dew is for the young.* Confronting “the man of noon” as she calls it, is where the flower becomes a gem-like flame. (Enamel refers back to bauble, so we might be led to think we were talking about a gem here if we weren't told that this is something “preferred by bees,” which makes it clearly a flower.)

This enameled in noon image comes from an astute observation by Dickinson. On a literal level, a flower becoming enameled as the sun gets hotter is a way of saying it becomes glossy. Glossy petals, such as buttercups, appear more glossy in full, direct sunlight. The visual effect is a result of the specialized structure of the flower petals. From the internet: "Glossy flowers have flat, smooth epidermal cells that act like a mirror, bouncing light in a narrow, specular band."

On a figurative level though, this enameling is symbolic of the recipient taking the heat, the pain, and, in light of it, shining back. This flower in noon is enameled "in Herself."

Was Summer to a Score

Summer to a score could have a few meanings. On the literal level, a flower might have a score of summers. And a buttercup, to use our earlier example (and my guess as to the original flower that was with this note) can live up to 20 years, or a score of summers. But also the syntax could read here that the flower was summer to a score of others, bees and butterflies and birds. Therefore it is understood that the recipient, too, has a score of summers to live, and is, in turn, summer to score of others. The reader, in other words, is all the sweetness of life for as long as She summers. One other meaning that I can't help but read here is score as in score of music. She is like summer itself set to a score of music.

All of this does the recipient represent, and yet all the flower/reader can ultimately know about the universe itself is that She is somehow alive in it, alive and attracting bees and butterflies, alive and justifying wings, alive and becoming hard and beautiful in the noon heat of the sun.

Who only knew of Universe –
It had created Her.

We are left to wonder in the mystery, in the isness of it all. This reminds me of Whitman’s lines in Song of Myself:

Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams,

Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,
I and this mystery here we stand.

       -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

buttercup enameled in the sun, 

summer to a score

*a passage from an 1852 letter from Emily to Sue:

"You have seen flowers at morning, satisfied with the dew, and those same sweet flowers at noon with their heads bowed in anguish before the mighty sun; think you those thirsty blossoms will now need ought but –dew? No, they will cry for sunlight, and pine for the burning noon, tho’ it scorches them, scathes them; they have got through with peace, they know that the man of noon, is mightier than the morning and their life is henceforth to him. Oh, Susie, it is dangerous, and it is all too dear, these simple trusting spirits, and the spirits mightier, which we cannot resist! It does so rend me, Susie, the thought of it when it comes, that I tremble lest at sometime I, too, am yielded up." 

Thank you to the anonymous reader that pointed this passage out to us in the comments to Fr857.

Soil of Flint, if steady tilled—

Soil of Flint, if steady tilled—
Will refund by Hand—
Seed of Palm, by Libyan Sun
Fructified in Sand—


-Fr862, J681, Fascicle 38, 1864


We can add this poem to the imagined Emily Dickinson Book of Epigrams.

A prose translation of this poem would go something like this, “Rock that is steadily tilled will bear crops. Likewise, a seed, even in sand, will bear fruit.”

These platitudes may be wise ones, but in prose they sound trite. Dickinson, however, does several things, with extreme concision, to raise the poem to an entirely different level.

First, there is the juxtaposition of two similar, but opposite, ideas. Both the eater (the farmer) and the thing eaten (the seed) labor toward the same end. Put another way, the object of our desire (represented here by food) is as tenacious as the desire itself (represented in the act of tilling). This is a powerful thought.  The fruit longs to grow as much as we long for it to grow. This thought may be expanded into matters of the heart: what we want wants us back.

Second, the sheer music of the poem. One useful way to read Dickinson is to attend closely to every consonant and vowel as you speak them aloud, then notice how they recur and echo across the lines. The poem opens with an s sound; listen to how it threads its way through the poem. Do the same with the l, f, and d sounds and you start to get a sense of the sonic intricacy at play. Then consider the vowel system, the clustered i sounds in flint, tilled, and will prepare the ear for the broader a sounds of hand and sand. There is pleasure in the subtler echoes as well, such as the u sound in refund in the second line answered by the u in fructified in the fourth. Fructified is, in itself, a luxurious word to pronounce. Dickinson binds her idea together with exquisitely stitched sound.

Third, word choice. “Refund,” for instance, is a strange and striking word to use. A refund typically follows a return, yet here the earth takes the “fund” of labor invested in it and gives it back, enriched. The word brings the poem into the realm of economics. We are talking about a gift economy here, but one that takes hard steady work. 

The idea of the earth “handing” you this refund is funny as a personification too. "Will refund by hand." It’s as though stalks were arms from which corn is passed directly into your grasp.

The word palm in the third line deepens this effect. While it refers literally to the seed of a palm tree, the surrounding language of hands encourages a pun. After the idea of being “handed” a refund, the fruit seems to rise from the seed and offer itself to you, resting in the palm.

Finally, there’s the exoticism of the second example. A palm seed growing in Libya, a place Dickinson never visited, introduces an element of Otherness. The flint belongs to home soil while the sand lies on the far side of the world. The foreign setting makes the image feel charged, as if the seed planted in sand were the seed of a lover. The poem grows and expands outward, from the familiar to the distant, while remaining contained.


      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

"seed of palm fructified in sand"

P.S. A kind reader pointed out in the comments that in the fascicle there is more to this poem, a whole stanza more. The confusion is because just the second stanza was given to Sue, so the poem, like many of Emily Dickinson's poems, survives in two forms.  The first stanza as it appears in the fascicle is:

On the Bleakness of my Lot

Bloom I strove to raise –
Late – my Garden of a Rock
Yielded Grape – and Maise –

It's nice to know that Dickinson was able to get blooms on her bleak garden of a rock. This is promising! I take these blooms, here represented as grape and maise, to be the poems themselves.

"bring tea for the tillerman/ steak for the sun"

They say that “Time assuages” —

They say that “Time assuages” —
Time never did assuage —
An actual suffering strengthens
As Sinews do, with Age —

Time is a Test of Trouble —
But not a Remedy —
If such it prove, it prove too
There was no Malady —


     -Fr861, J686, Fascicle 38, 1864

I reached out to one of my favorite poets, Jennifer Moxley, to ask if she would like to respond to poem 861 on Prowling Bee. The following is the insightful and moving essay Jennifer sent me in reply:

The poem is not making an argument; it is asserting a verity. Against self-care axioms such as “time heals all wounds” and similar dictums we twenty-first centurions have swollen and then sanded into facile measures meant to smooth over the hard bits of life, as if to make it sweet despite daily tweets meted out by the death cult currently in power, Dickinson posits, as is her wont, a wholly contrarian view. With a bossy certainty that brooks no argument, she lets us have it: if your suffering lessens with time, then it wasn’t real in the first place. The juggernaut “they” who say “time assuages” are lying.

Dickinson equates abstract mental “suffering” to concrete bodily “sinews.” Sinews are the stuff that binds muscle to bone, the fibrous connective tissue we call tendons. The most cursory of research proves her simile medically unsound (sinews slacken with age), but no matter. It is poetically pleasing, which is what counts here.

Or perhaps she’s using the word “sinews” in the sense of “strength, energy, force” (OED), which was not uncommon in her time? If such is the case, she would not only be comparing one abstraction to another (suffering to strength) but also making a fascinating argument against senescence. I love the slipperiness of this proposition.

In the second stanza “suffering” is synonymized to “Trouble.”Not like “car trouble,” but more like what Gordan Gano meant by “trouble” when he sang “I’ve got girl trouble up the ass,” or Pound meant in “Cantico del Sole”: a “disturbance of mind or feelings; worry, vexation; affliction; grief; perplexity; distress” (OED). Time will “test” trouble, that is, time will determine whether or not it’s genuine.

Dickinson’s poem assuages my worry that I am ill because I cannot heal from the death of my mother. Recently I awoke in the night with my mother’s body in mine and became all cramped with thoughts of her extreme solitude when facing death. I was three thousand miles away. Her hand was empty of my hand, her ear of my voice. “What is wrong with me,” I thought, “that such a pain can still prick with such freshness.” My mother died thirty-five years ago. “Nothing is wrong with you,” the poem becalms, “your suffering over the death of your mother is genuine.” Time does not turn suffering sweet, but poems can.

“I grieve that grief can teach me nothing,” Emerson wrote after he realized that the death of his precious little son Waldo had left him fundamentally unchanged, “neither better nor worse.” Is his view at odds with Dickinson’s? “[S]ome thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar,” he continues in his essay “Experience.” Emerson regrets that suffering is not educative, nor does it “carry [us] one step into real Nature.” Which says nothing of whether or not suffering is a genuine malady, only that it cannot be alleviated by any argument about its value as a vehicle of growth. In this reading Emerson is in concert with Dickinson in protesting any pandering to our pain. True suffering cannot be assuaged, nor does it contort or better us through its lessons.

How do I fold the wisdom of these awesome forebears into my long-held conviction that the poet’s visionary birth is precipitated through a painful confrontation with finitude? Orpheus suffers the death of Euridice. Whitman the death of the she-bird at the New Jersey shore. In the wake of these experiences they become true poets. These stories recount metamorphoses, but are they also tales of education? Is the poet better or worse for such experiences? Better not to put a value on awful change, Emerson says, lest it become a formula. Whereas when Dickinson writes, “actual suffering strengthens,” perhaps she means both that with time suffering grows in intensity, but also that it can make us more powerful. At least as poets.   

      —Jennifer Moxley