Banish Air from Air —

Banish Air from Air —
Divide Light if you dare —
They'll meet
While Cubes in a Drop
Or Pellets of Shape
Fit
Films cannot annul
Odors return whole
Force Flame
And with a Blonde push
Over your impotence
Flits Steam.

    -Fr963, J854, sheet 22, 1865

Cubes in a drop? This phrase led me down some scientific rabbit holes. Dickinson was writing during a period of considerable interest in crystallography. The cube is an especially recognizable crystalline form, associated with substances such as salt. The image is scientifically plausible (as a cube of salt can form from its dissolved state in water) and it's a beautiful idea; rigidly defined shapes that "fit" inside something fluid.

That word "fit" sitting on its own line in this poem is great. It doesn't quite "fit" the 3-3-2 rhythmic structure of the poem. It belongs rhythmically to the fifth line if you are going to stay with the trimeter, yet belongs on the sixth line if you want to keep the rhyme with "Meet." The effect of this clever trick is to put extra emphasis on the word aurally when you read the poem, as well as visually when you look at it. Certain words in Dickinson get elevated into entire wide-ranging concepts in Dickinson's poetry and "fit" is one of them. (See F686 for one such example.) 

Another word in this poem that stands out for me is "push," which connects the idea of the poem with another one we looked at recently, Fr960, which was also about a stasis boiling over, 

That Calm is but a Wall
Of unattempted Gauze
An instant's Push demolishes

When you connect these two poems together you begin to see how the poem at hand has an emotional basis as well as a scientific one. "Push/ over your impotence." You can't control the forces, scientifically nor emotionally. You can't banish the air any more than you can love. You can't divide light any more than you can divide the heart. And how about that word "Blonde" describing the push? Who's the Blonde?

Well, I'm going to shut up now and give the floor over to Ira Fader. I found Ira's wonderful commentary on this poem while researching it and subsequently reached out to him for permission to reprint it here. He graciously agreed. He mentioned in his response that he was a fan of The Prowling Bee and we are now a fan of his. It's a fit. Check out his excellent blog, The Wow of Poetry. 

Here's Ira on F963:

Dickinson had more than a passing interest in the science of her time. It has been noted that more than 270 of her poems touch on scientific themes relating to physics, astronomy, chemistry, geology, botany, physiology, medicine, mathematics, and technology. She was taught the natural sciences as a student at the Amherst Academy and again during her year at the rigorous Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mt. Holyoke College) whose founder, Mary Lyon, was not only a pioneer in women’s education but also a trained chemist who required students to learn the new science of laboratory experimentation. Dickinson mentioned her interest in science class in letters to her childhood friend Abiah Root and her brother Austin.

Additionally, she lived in a home filled with books, including books such as “Elementary Geology” by geologist and Amherst College president (and family friend) Edward Hitchcock, “Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry” by French mathematician A. M. Legendre, and “The Stars and the Earth, Or Thoughts upon Space, Time, and Eternity” by Felix Eberty, an amateur German astronomer whose works none other than a young Albert Einstein later read and enjoyed. (The Dickinson family library has been archived and digitized by Harvard University, and you can access and read these 3 books in their entirety, if you are so inclined.)

Whether Dickinson pored over these volumes, I don’t know. But I do know that she read the Romantic poets preceding her, and they explored - and deplored - how the emerging 19th century sciences were “unweaving the rainbow” and banishing nature’s unfathomable mysteries.

In “The Prelude” William Wordsworth believed that “Science appears but, what in truth she is,/ Not as our glory and our absolute boast, But as a [substitute], and a prop/ To our infirmity.” Science, he said, was a “false secondary power, by which,/ In weakness, we create distinctions, then/ Deem that our puny boundaries are things/ Which we perceive, and not which we have made.” John Keats wrote in his lengthy poem “Lamia” that science “will clip an Angel’s wings,/ Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,/ Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—/ Unweave a rainbow." In Sonnet — To Science, a young Edward Allan Poe directly challenged Science by asking why it must prey upon the poet’s heart, “you Vulture whose wings are dull realities.” In his dramatic fashion, he accused Science of dragging the mythic deities from their places in the sky, the woods, and the waters, and tearing from him “the summer dream beneath the tamarind tree.” (Poe’s formidable intelligence soon got the better of him, and he became greatly interested in astronomy and physics.)

But Dickinson was unlike her worried poetical predecessors. Just as imagination for Dickinson was a boundless and invisible realm, so too were the new sciences exploring the world that lies beyond our ordinary senses: atoms, electromagnetism, the germ theory of disease, evolution, thermodynamics. As William Blake (whose poetry was in the Dickinson family library) said, “What is now proved was only once imagined.” Dickinson knew that science would never “empty the haunted air” and subdue the sublime. Consider this poem, written by Dickinson in 1865:

A science - so the Savans say, [“savants”]
"Comparative Anatomy" -
By which a single bone -
Is made a secret to unfold
Of some rare tenant of the mold -
Else perished in the stone -

So to the eye prospective led,
This meekest flower of the mead
Opon a winter's day,
Stands representative in gold
Of Rose and Lily, manifold,
And countless Butterfly!

Dickinson here shows no fear of the emerging science of paleontology which can look into the deep past and unfold secrets about an ancient bone and its prior “tenant.” Her own eye is “prospective led” and sees how the meekest golden flower in a wintry meadow foretells the beauty of the next season. Thus, what is “perished in the stone” is balanced by the Rose, Lily, and Butterfly, which are “manifold,” “countless.”

Awe is unquantifiable.

Dickinson came of age in a period of fiery religious revivalism across New England. The Calvinist theology of Amherst was stricter than the emerging Unitarian Christianity firmly rooted in faraway Boston and Cambridge. In the early 19th century, Calvinist faith and science were not inherently incompatible arenas of thought. Three hundred years earlier, John Calvin himself held that science and reason were gifts from God to man and that “in despising the gifts, we insult the Giver.” The observance and study of nature would reveal God’s presence in the world. Science, it was said, was a Minister of God.

By the 1860’s, however, profound disputes between scientists, intellectuals, and theologians were playing out in the pages of New England periodicals like the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s (both still in print!) that Dickinson read in her own home. The 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of the Species” alone heralded a new crisis of faith. The pace of new scientific reasoning and discovery could not be tamed or modulated by theology or suppressed by church fiat, and this was the talk of the knowledgeable classes.

Quietly at home, Dickinson struggled not with the scientists but with the ministers. Consider this poem, dated to c. 1865:

The Chemical conviction
That Nought be lost
Enable in Disaster
My fractured Trust—

The Faces of the Atoms
If I shall see
How more the Finished Creatures
Departed me!

Dickinson here is certainly not offering a Christian view of what awaits us after death. “The world,” she said in an early letter, “holds a predominant place in my affections. I do not feel that I could give up all for Christ, were I called to die.” She struggled fiercely with faith and doubt in so many poems, and in this one she tells of a “fractured Trust” over what awaits after “Disaster,” which in this context sounds like Death. The religious convictions of her family, her church, and her era provided no balm. What “enables” her is, instead, a “chemical conviction.” Nothing in the universe is lost, according to the science of Dickinson’s day (and ours). The matter and energy in the universe are, in effect, deathless. It is Science, not Faith, that enables her in Disaster.

What a beautiful atomic vision the poem’s second stanza offers! If the speaker could see the “Faces of the Atoms” of which she is made, all the more would she know these “finished creatures” that depart from her. Since they are “finished” with being Emily, these particles - which cannot be lost because nought will be lost - will return instead to the cosmos. We are stardust, Dickinson is saying, anticipating Joni Mitchell by a full century. [note from Prowling Bee: a nice serendipity here as we mentioned this song in the previous post.]

Year after year, as family and friends dutifully “converted” to Calvinist Christianity, Dickinson refused. As a young student, she famously declined to stand when the imposing headmistress at Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, Mary Lyon, asked the students to rise if they believed in Christ or hoped to believe. Dickinson remained a “no-hoper.” And so she remained for the rest of her life, eventually declining to even attend church on Sundays. In an 1862 letter, Dickinson tartly remarked of her family: "They are religious -except me - and address an Eclipse, every morning - whom they call their father.” And elsewhere she slyly noted, “We dignify faith when we can cross oceans with it - though most prefer ships.”

In so many ways, Dickinson was truly different from her people, place, and time, and she knew it. (“What makes a few of us so different from others? It’s a question I often ask myself,” she said as a teenager in a letter to her brother.) I cannot conceive of the inner strength and courage she needed - and possessed - to survive as a brilliant, self-aware, and uncompromising woman in an era of stifling religiosity and patriarchy. Unconventional, idiosyncratic, peculiar in thinking — all at a time with no tolerance for divergence from the proper social graces and religious obeisance. She was, as Adrienne Rich said, “Vesuvius at home.” A quiet volcano in the heart of Amherst.

It comes as no surprise that she was comfortable with scientific principles and theories and found poetry there.

On to the poem.

Below is Dickinson’s handwritten poem. Good luck reading it. It is fitting and ironic that the first barrier in gaining access to her world is her handwriting.

“Banish Air from Air” was written in 1864 or 1865 during Dickinson’s most fecund period of poetry writing. She did not choose it for one of her “fascicles,” the hand-crafted booklets that, unbeknownst to even her own family members, she carefully created and organized for years. (In all, Dickinson quietly bound 814 poems into 40 fascicles that were not discovered until after her death.)

Likewise, her posthumous editors did not select “Banish Air from Air” in the 1890’s when three volumes of her work were published in quick succession and, to everyone’s astonishment, met with instant public interest and acclaim. Banish Air from Air remained unknown until its inclusion in “Bolts of Melody,” a 1945 volume of “new” Dickinson poems. By this time she was recognized as “one of the great poets of the world,” as the scholar Mark Van Doren noted in his preface.

So, we’ve had almost 80 years to figure it out. Here it is again:

Banish Air from Air —
Divide Light if you dare —
They’ll meet
While Cubes in a Drop
Or Pellets of Shape
Fit
Films cannot annul
Odors return whole
Force Flame
And with a Blonde push
Over your impotence
Flits Steam.

We cannot control the natural world that envelops us, I think she is telling us. We are powerless - impotent - to rearrange the fundaments of reality. The narrative voice in the poem seems to laugh as she goads us to try.

Those first two lines: “Banish Air from Air —/ Divide Light if you dare —”. I hear a gentle laugh in the voice as she dares us to “banish air from air.” It is a lovely impossibility. Didn’t you know that nature abhors a vacuum? Then she dares us to divide the light. Since there’s nothing out of the ordinary about dividing a ray of light — after all, that is the ordinary work of prisms and rainbows — perhaps Dickinson’s second challenge is to separate light from air, and that is another paradoxical notion.

Your experiment will fail, she tells us in line 3, because “they’ll meet” anyway. Air and light will meet, as they must, because that is how Nature works. We humans cannot separate what Nature does not wish to separate.

The next three lines are mystifying: air and light will meet “While Cubes in a Drop/ Or Pellets of Shape/Fit”. The phrase “cubes in a drop” creates an odd mental image of a geometrical box inside a falling water drop. Cubes, like the straight lines and angles of which they are made, are mathematical abstractions. When they are present in the real world, they must have been made by human hands or by the technologies that are extensions of our hands. (“Cube” is a word that Dickinson used only twice in writing. See note 1, at the bottom of this post.)

Drops of water are the opposite. They are real in nature, ephemeral, and shape-shifting. Cubes and drops belong to different, seemingly irreconcilable realms of human existence. And although 19th century scientists were indeed looking at the action of splashing water (I own a book containing an 1894 lecture poetically entitled “The Splash of A Drop and Related Phenomena”), no one was cubing the drop.

Dickinson also imagines “pellets of shape.” Pellets such as beads or globules do not come in abstract mathematical shapes like triangles or squares.

What are these absurd phenomena she has imagined, and what might they mean?

Science cannot force a pellet into a fixed shape any more than it can put a cube inside a drop. And yet, in the mind of this poem, these impossible geometries somehow “fit.” That single word on its own line in the middle of the poem draws attention to itself. “Fit” fits, both for form and sense.

I cannot find another instance in which Dickinson placed a single word on a poetic line. I can find plenty of two-worders (“to you,” “so absolute,” “yours, Fly”) but none as short as one word, much less a three-letter, one-syllable word.

Suffice to say, even if a one-word line is not one-of-a-kind, Dickinson did not employ it often, and in doing so here she achieves a powerful (and modern) effect: “fit” functions, visually and substantively, as the fulcrum for the entire poem.

In the poem thus far, we have been told, I think, that with our sciences and measurements we mere humans cannot banish, divide, or otherwise control the properties of our unified universe. And the unimaginable exists as part of this unity, even though we haven’t yet imagined it. Remember William Blake: “What is now proved was only once imagined.”

Then the poem pivots to its message of our impotence. A film is a membrane or a veil that covers or separates or obscures, but here it is ineffective for any such purpose. It will not divide the light. And odors cannot be banished from the air. The unity of things cannot be undone, the rainbow cannot be unwoven.

The line “Force Flame” is a conundrum. Which is the noun, which the verb? Perhaps both are nouns, acting together to feed their natural energy into the final volcanic image where, like “Blonde” lava hissing and steaming down the landscape, the overpowering fire and heat in these final images “push/ over your impotence” as a reminder of our limitations and insignificance in the natural order.

All of this is sheer speculation about Dickinson’s intended meaning. What else is new? She will keep us all unwrapping her mystery gifts for centuries. If a proper Dickinson scholar has looked closely at this poem, I wish I knew about it. More meaning can be extracted, perhaps, by reading this poem in relation to others in which Dickinson addressed the same ideas or themes or used the same words.

But for the time being, I am content to stop here in wrestling with this poem. Truth is, I really am not sure I know what it means. But Dickinson has long prepared me to accept uncertainty in reading her unique work and to exercise creativity, even more than research, in trying to understand her.

    -Ira Fader

Notes

In searching the Emily Dickinson Archive for the word “cube” in her poems and letters, there are only two instances: in the poem I am discussing and in a letter she wrote in 1880 to a family friend. As in many of her letters, she switches from prose to poetry when she advises her friend, “We shall find the cube of a rainbow -/ of that - there is no doubt -/ But the Arc of a Lover's conjecture/ Eludes the finding out -” Solving the science of a rainbow is easier, she is saying, than solving the mysteries of romance. How lucky to have been on Dickinson’s mailing list. Can you imagine opening your mail and finding correspondence as remarkable as this?

In addition to the Archive, I used the following resources, all of which make for great reading if you really want more.

White, Fred D., Sweet Skepticism of the Heart: Science in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson (1992)

R.W. Franklin, “The Emily Dickinson Fascicles,” Studies in Bibliography, Vol. 36 (1983), https://www.jstor.org/stable/40371771

Loeffelholz, Mary, What is a fascicle? Reading Emily Dickinson's manuscript books. Harvard Library Bulletin 10 (1), Spring 1999: 23-42

Gaull, Marilyn, Vol. 21, No. 1 (WINTER 1990), University of Chicago Press. 

Kohler, Michelle The Apparatus of the Dark: Emily Dickinson and the Epistemology of Metaphor. Nineteenth-Century Literature. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2012.67.1.58 (2012).

https://www.amherst.edu/news/archives/classroom/node/439610

https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/24/resources/6412

A Light exists in Spring

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period –
When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.

It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.

Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay –

A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.

   

        -Fr962, J812, sheet 22, 1865

There is a painterly quality in the Emily Dickinson poems that focus on light, just as there is a poetic quality in the paintings of Vermeer.

Poetry takes the picture deep into the ineffable. The poem before this one in the Franklin order, for instance, focuses on the quality of the iodine color of light reflecting off of a waterfall, the last bit of color to leave us before darkness takes over. Poetry goes beyond the merely visual into the interior state, becoming, in a sense, the light made manifest. Think of her famous poem that begins,

There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –

That poem could be seen as a prequel, almost the antithesis, of this one. The two are complementary. We have moved on from winter light and are now in spring’s. The light isn’t oppressive anymore, but rather is waiting on the lawn to show us the "furthest Tree/ Upon the furthest slope."

Still though, something is wanting, because eventually the light “passes and we stay.” Nothing gold can stay and before the poem is over the light is already slanting again, shadows holding their breath.

Let’s look at the particulars.

A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.

In Spring "A Color stands abroad/ on Solitary Fields.” The generic quality of this line is a bit like a minimalist painting, "A Color" on a the "Solitary Fields" of canvas. Solitary Fields (note the singular plural) is the corollary to the line from the poem about winter's slant of light, which shows us “internal difference,/ Where the Meanings, are –” The solitude, like the internal difference, is illuminated. 

“That science cannot overtake” has its counterpart in the "certain slant of light poem" too, in the line, “None may teach it – Any –” This is a feeling, and feeling is a priori.  Feeling blooms from the Solitary Field. It’s a relief, to me, that “feeling” is beyond science and cannot be taught. AI ain’t got nothing, in the end, on the effect of spring light. Here is Dickinson attempting, and somehow succeeding, once again, to express the inexpressible, to evoke the sublime. “It almost speaks to you.”

It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.

The light leads the poet out of the comfort of home and onto the lawn. It points toward life, toward the “furthest Tree” on the “furthest Slope you know.” The tree, the emblem of life itself, is on the edge of sight’s circumference. It is, for a moment, lit up for the watcher from the window, bathed in a holy aura.

It almost speaks to you. If it was speaking, what would it say? Perhaps simply, “Go.” But go where? The poem turns here. The horizon is always changing...

Then as Horizons step

You step toward the horizon and the horizon itself steps toward winter, toward death, always eluding you.

Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound

A report has a couple of different possible meanings here, the first being information on a finding. There can be no "formula" ultimately, no "sound" to this report, which is always moving onward and therefore indefinite. The image here is of one who is suddenly so far away that you can see them speaking, but can no longer hear them. This is what a "spring noon" is like, in retrospect.

The other meaning of "report" is a gunshot. The starting gun of spring is going off, but the race is already too far away to hear. 

A quality of loss
Affecting our Content

We can never be fully content because we are always aware of the temporal. This reminds me of Keats' lines, "Ay, in the very temple of Delight/ Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine." 

Finally we  come to the clincher in this poem, an idea that adds something new to the table:

As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.

When I hear “Trade had suddenly encroached/ upon a Sacrament” I'm reminded of Jesus losing his temper in the temple and driving the money lenders out. “Trade” stands for any economic exchange though. The idea here is that Spring is like the quality of sacred Mercy that is freely given regardless of what we may deserve, but the rest of the year is more akin to “Trade,” to expectations of a return for services rendered. It’s all business come harvest season.

In Fr948, a poem written around the same time as this one, we get the lines,

Spring is the Period
Express from God—

It's a beautiful way to think of Spring, as a reminder of mercy. The mercy, alas, always passes, “affecting our content.” 

The seasons then are a mirror, a reminder, of our journey from innocence to experience. The garden of Eden returns every spring and every autumn we are thrown out again. Every fall we fall. But of course the inverse is true too: in spring we are sprung. The prequel is also the sequel.

        -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

We are stardust, we are golden

We are billion-year-old carbon

And we've got to get ourselves

Back to the garden

When One has given up One's life

When One has given up One's life
The parting with the rest
Feels easy, as when Day lets go
Entirely the West

The Peaks, that lingered last
Remain in Her regret
As scarcely as the Iodine
Upon the Cataract.


    -Fr961, J853, sheet 21, 1865


What does it mean to give up One’s life?  It doesn’t mean to die, because there is still the “parting with the rest” to do. We can only speculate what it meant for Emily, but I read it as something like acceptance of death. 

The first line has a hint of the tragic in it, of giving up, but the rest of the poem has a sense of “easy” and of freedom from “regret.” 

This poem reads like a meditation on aging.  Cataracts, after all, tend to form on the eyes of the elderly, and life has already had its “Peaks.” In this sense, the poem is the flip side of Dylan Thomas’s poem, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night." Thomas wrote this famous villanelle to his ailing father, urging him to "Rage, Rage against the dying of the light," but I wonder how his father might have felt about this. “Let me go in peace, son! Bring me that poem by Emily Dickinson.” 

The really interesting thing about this poem for me is the way “Cataract” appears to have a double meaning. Iodine was a popular cure for cataracts in the 1800s. The metaphor fits the poem beautifully because a cataract slowly clouds over the eyes. 

It is a slow “parting with the rest,” with sight itself. Once you accept death, then you accept all that comes with it, the loss of sight, loss of hearing, hair, friends, etc. This is easier said than done, but once done things get easier.

But a "Cataract" is also a waterfall, and this reading makes a lot of sense too, especially as it follows the metaphor of the mountain peaks in the West. The “iodine” then would be the color of the last bit of light on the waterfall coming down from the peaks. It’s the final color of light showing on the rush of the great roaring waterfall. Dickinson has used Iodine to describe the end of a sunset before, see Fr875.

Iodine

At first I was trying to decide which of these two possible meanings of "Cataract" Dickinson meant, but since they are both so apt I've come to suspect that she may well have had both ideas in mind.

Life is a series of awesome, but difficult peaks, as violent and tremendous as a waterfall. There is peace in letting go of all of that, and in letting go of regrets too.

    -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

The Heart has narrow Banks

The Heart has narrow Banks
It measures like the Sea
In mighty—unremitting Bass
And Blue Monotony

Till Hurricane bisect
And as itself discerns
Its insufficient Area
The Heart convulsive learns

That Calm is but a Wall
Of unattempted Gauze
An instant's Push demolishes
A Questioning—dissolves.


    -F960, J928, sheet 21, 1865


To be this deep into the oeuvre of Emily Dickinson and still be discovering great poems one after another is such a gift. They “measure like the sea," but somehow never become in the slightest monotonous.

This one is powerful, in part because of its amazing imagery and sound.

Let’s start with that image. We picture a mighty sea with a tiny shoreline on either side, "narrow banks." The sea is so large and blue that it becomes monotonous to the eye. But here comes a hurricane to “bisect” the sea, to cut the blue in two. This causes water to push out over the wall of calm air and onto the narrow banks, which demolishes...what? "A Questioning." What do we imagine this Questioning looks like? The Questioning, which is the same thing that presumably caused the hurricane in the first place, is demolished, and then dissolves back into monotonous blue. 

Now let’s listen to the sounds, which follow the image. Great poets tend to write onomatopoeically and Dickinson is especially adept at this. The poem at hand is a master class in sound carrying sense. Note how many words here carry their own meaning in their sound. "Banks" has the hard K ending which forms in this poem the sense of a hard stop, a bank, at the end of a fluid line. (Think how different it would be if she had written “shores” instead of "Banks" here). "Sea" has an open vowel ending at the end of the line, like an endless expanse. "Bass" carries within it a bass sound. (You can hear this if you say "Bass" in your lowest Bass register). There is a sense of cutting in the “sect” of "Bisect." There is a lot of area in the vowels surrounding the r in "Area." The word “Convulsive” sounds like something convulsing. The z sound of "Gauze" has a softness like the fabric of gauze. "Calm" is one of the calmest of words, the way it softly ends in “alm.” "Push" sounds like air being pushed. "Dissolves," to my ear, sounds like sound breaking down. The English language is more onomatopoeic than we realize and Dickinson takes full  advantage of it.

Not just words, but entire lines and stanzas can have an onomatopoeic effect. Look at what Dickinson does, for instance, with the B and the M in the first stanza,

The Heart has narrow Banks
It Measures like the Sea
In Mighty—unreMitting Bass
And Blue Monotony.

The hum of the M surfaces again and again, weaving in out of the percussive B sounds of billowing waves.

Another bit of sound-play is the way those beating B sounds in the first stanza gives way to the calm endings of “Gauze” and “Dissolve” in the second stanza. The hurricane of sound has decidedly died down.

The meaning of the poem is bolstered by the image and the sounds. This one is fairly easy to follow, but it leaves us with a disruptive hurricane of “Questioning.” The question of the heart, perhaps, is one that is being asked of another; a heart extending itself. The answer to this question may profoundly shake up the calm of the heart, create a hurricane which will break it in half. But perhaps an answer is unnecessary for a disruption. The Question itself upsets the mighty blue expanse of the heart. Now that the sea has been disrupted and spilled over there is no more shore to retreat to. There is only chaos of feeling and then eventually a settling down which dissolves the question itself. 

You return back to the mighty blue monotony. The poem is a loop.

I notice upon returning back to the first line that it’s a declarative statement, “The heart has narrow banks" It's an odd way to start the poem. It would make more sense as a second line, something like, "The heart is like a mighty sea/ encased by narrow banks." But by starting with this line it puts an emphasis on the banks themselves. The heart, we are told, has narrow banks. But so what? We come to find out they are not a safe space. The hurricane caused by the push of need crashes down on them.

Another question in the poem is raised with the phrase, "sufficient area." 

as itself discerns
Its insufficient Area
The Heart

This begs a question. What is insufficient Area for a heart? The heart has to discern this for itself, and does it by learning that "calm is just wall...an instant's push demolishes."  

The heart 

...convulsive learns

That Calm is but a Wall
Of unattempted Gauze
An instant's Push demolishes
A Questioning—dissolves.

    

      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Hurricane Emily, an extraordinarily powerful 

early-season tropical cyclone in 2005 

P.S. One other exquisite bit of of sound-craft in this poem is the way the first stanza is tied to the second stanza through the T-H-R-N-B-K sound clusters of the first and fifth lines. I don't know what to make of it, but it's awesome.

P.P.S. The phrase "A Questioning" functions in this poem as a sliding modifier. It can slide backward to qualify that which comes before it, or forward to "dissolves." 

Apology for Her

Apology for Her
Be rendered by the Bee —
Herself, without a Parliament
Apology for Me.


     -F959, J852, 1865

The poem enacts the very problem it raises: an apology is offered, but we can’t quite determine who has given it, or whether it is even necessary. 

My take on the poem was inspired by a comment from Moon on the poem preceding this one, F958, which featured a quote by Dickinson: 'To "thank" you - shames my thought!'

If thanking someone can shame one's thought, then so, perhaps, can apologizing.

Apology for Her
Be rendered by the Bee —

The Bee will render her own apology. This implies to me that the Bee needs no apology. The Bee pollinates and the Bee stings. That’s just what the Bee does. 

And likewise the Bee's apology (or lack of one) will suffice for an apology from the poet.

 Herself, without a Parliament

Apology for me.

The poem offers an apology while questioning the grounds on which one might be required. Perhaps it was originally sent with a flower, an offering of beauty, for which the Bee, especially, need not apologize. 

     -/)dam Wade I)eGraff

P.S. I made a fortuitous discovery while doing a Google search for "parliament bee." 

There is a famous allegorical poem called The Parliament of the Bees. This must be what Dickinson is alluding to in her poem. 

From Britannica.com: "John Day was an Elizabethan dramatist whose verse allegory The Parliament of Bees was published posthumously in 1641 and probably written near the end of his life. This exquisite masque, which is actually a series of pastoral eclogues, is about “the doings, the births, the wars, the wooings” of bees. The bees hold a parliament under Prorex, the “Master Bee,” and grievances are presented against the bumblebee, the wasp, the drone, and other insects whom the author uses to represent various human types. The satirical allegory ends with a royal progress of the fairy king Oberon, who dispenses justice among the bees."

An excerpt from Day's poem that is perhaps relevant to Dickinson's:  

"Go go idle drone,

Thou enviest bees with stings

Because thine is gone.

This Bee sucks honey from the bloomes of sin:

Bee't nere so ranke or foule, he crams it in.

Most of the timber that his state repairs

He hew's out o'the bones of foundred players :

They feed on Poets braines, he eats their breath.

Die. Most strange conception !—life begot in Death."

          

P.P.S. I would love to hear your reading of this poem.

An Emily Dickinson Halloween mystery

I stumbled across this fantastic halloween mystery from 20 years ago in the Lawrence Journal-World. Below is the transcript. Italics mine. I also added some comments in brackets.

'Workers dig up Dickinson family mystery

For Emily Dickinson, death was never too far from the imagination. The topic fueled her writing, making for some of the most memorable lyrics in American poetry.

Now, death is posing a bit of a puzzle for the caretakers of her homestead.

[death is posing a bit of a puzzle? That's almost a Dickinson line.]

While making improvements to the grounds of the Emily Dickinson Museum on Halloween, workers unearthed the gravestone of one of the poet’s relatives.

[On Halloween? And not just any relative's gravestone was found, but Susan's father's.]

But exactly what Gen. Thomas Gilbert’s headstone was doing under 18 inches of dirt in Dickinson’s front yard has some experts stumped – especially knowing that his remains are buried in a nearby cemetery with a more ornate grave marker.

“What do you do with a used gravestone?” asked Jane Wald, the museum’s executive director. “It might have been used as a step or used to cover a hole in the ground. We don’t know exactly why it was placed there.”

["It might have been used as a step"? Metaphor alert.]

To be sure, more is known about Gilbert than the simple marble slab that bears his name and date of death. An innkeeper, merchant, lawmaker and member of the Massachusetts militia who lived in Greenfield, Gilbert had seven children and outlived his wife. But when he died a pauper in 1841, his youngest daughter, Susan, moved to Amherst to live with an older sister.

[If you love Emily, you eventually grow to love Susan too. Sue was, by all reports, a wonder. She was lauded by people like Emerson and Frances Hodgson Burnett. Samuel Bowles called her the best hostess and talker on the East Coast. So who was her father? We have quite a bit of information here. He kept an inn. He was a merchant. (Wonder what he sold?) He helped make laws. He was a general of a militia. Sounds like quite a guy. And yet, he died a pauper. Why? We get a possible clue later in the article.]

That’s where she met Dickinson, when both girls were 14. Their lifelong friendship deepened in 1856, when Emily’s brother, Austin, married Susan.

To entice the newlyweds into staying in Amherst, Austin and Emily’s father built them a house next to the Dickinson homestead.

Susan, who long endured taunts and barbs from Amherst residents who considered her father to be a drunk because he owned a tavern, may have wanted to put her detractors in place by moving her father’s grave from Greenfield to Amherst.

[What does it mean he was considered to be a drunk because one owned a tavern? Was it seen as disgraceful to own a tavern? Where does this info come from? Did the reporter take this formulation from one of Susan's letters? Was this Susan's way of exonerating her father? Was she in denial about the alcoholism?]

Jane Wald, executive director of the Emily Dickinson Museum 

When Gilbert and his wife were reburied close to the Dickinson homestead in West Cemetery, their plot was adorned with a new marker. The gravestone dug up earlier this week was likely the original stone from Gilbert’s Greenfield grave, Wald suspects.

[Was it common to dig up remains and move them to a new location? I assume this is done to have the beloved body closer to one? It seems like an awful lot of work, not to mention the cost of a new plot and gravestone. Susan must've really loved her father.]

“In that regard, it makes sense for this grave marker to be found around here,” she said.

The marker was found by workers digging a trench to improve water drainage. When their excavation equipment hit slabs of stone, they started digging by hand.

Chunks of marble – some with letters or numbers carved in them – started surfacing. By the time they were done, 15 pieces were unearthed and arranged like an oversized jigsaw puzzle. A few gaps in the slab remain, but the marker clearly reads “Gen. Tho. Gilbert. Died Dec. 23, 1841.” The number 48, his age when he died, rests at the bottom.

[Susan was 11 when her father died, a tender age to lose a father.]

Wald guesses the gravestone went underground as one piece, but shattered under pressure of time and landscaping equipment that’s been rolling over the homestead grounds during the past few years.

Emily Dickinson, who wrote most of her hundreds of poems about nature, love, life and death in her second-floor bedroom, died in 1886. The last surviving member of the Dickinson family was Austin and Susan’s daughter, Martha, who sold the homestead in 1916.

It was purchased in 1965 by Amherst College and opened by the school as a museum in 2003.

Other maintenance and repair work has unearthed pieces of ceramics, a mouth harp, coins and a brick gutter.

[a mouth harp!]

“There’s always a great deal of potential for archaeological finds at a site like this,” Wald said.'

[Thus ends the article. It's a Halloween mystery, in which the ghost of the father beloved by the woman beloved by Emily Dickinson emerges from puzzle pieces of a tombstone buried, like a body, for some unknown reason, in Emily's yard.]

   -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Absent Place — an April Day —

Absent Place — an April Day —
Daffodils a-blow
Homesick curiosity
To the Souls that snow —

Drift may block within it
Deeper than without —
Daffodil delight but
Him it duplicate —


     -F958, J927, sheet 21, 1865

This poem throws you into a seasonal confusion from the first line. If you read just that line by itself it seems to say that an April Day is an absent place. In other words, it is an April Day devoid of the feeling of spring. But then you read the rest of the poem and the syntax unravels itself until you realize that there is a snow-drift outside. It is not an absent spring, but winter time and April itself is "Absent." This confusion is in keeping with the poem. What does outside weather matter when the weather inside is inclement? It's all an "Absent Place" to souls that snow.

The last two lines of the poem are tricky.

Daffodil delight but
Him it duplicate —

David Preest reads these lines as, "to the man with a snowdrift on his mind in addition to the snow-drift outside, the daffodils, when they come, are a double delight." But the lack of a comma (or dash) after "delight" leads me to read this differently.  "Daffodil delight but (only) him (that) it duplicate." In other words, just as the snow-drift without is duplicated within, the daffodil must be duplicated within as well for it to be delightful. 

This takes us back to the confusion of the first line. Even if we are in April, the daffodils will not delight if the snow-drift within buries them under. Inner weather supersedes outer weather. 

In Preest's reading these last two lines are about the coming relief of spring, but the sense I get from this poem is more of an Absent Place within that is worsened by being misaligned with spring. The self out of alignment with the season is a common theme in Dickinson. (See F686 for one such example.)

This begs the question as to why there is a snow-drift within. An "Absent Place" suggests someone who is absent. Who is absent? This question leads to another possible reading of the final lines. The Him doesn't refer to the subject, but to the object of the poem. The daffodils duplicate Him. It is "Him" that is absent. 

Daffodil delight but
Him it duplicate —

Who the absent "Him" might be for Dickinson is a question which resounds through many a Dickinson poem. But for us it means, at core, a loss of connection.

***

One striking thing about this poem is that “snow-drift” can be read as a compound word split between two stanzas, as if the snow of the first stanza has drifted across the absent space between the stanzas into the drift of the second stanza. 

To the Souls that snow —

Drift may block within it

The way this enters into my mind as I read it is, "To the Souls that snow, snow-drift may block within it." The sense is that April daffodils are blocked for souls that snow. 

     -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

When the Astronomer stops seeking

When the Astronomer stops seeking
For his Pleiad's Face—
When the lone British Lady
Forsakes the Arctic Race

When to his Covenant Needle
The Sailor doubting turns—
It will be amply early
To ask what treason means.
           

   

     -F957, J851, sheet 20, 1865

The poem is like the assurance a mother gives to her child. The child says "Mommy, will you always love me?" The mother says, "I'll love you until pigs fly and the cow jumps over the moon.” Or think of the lyrics to the great Brian Wilson song, God Only Knows,

I may not always love you 

But long as there are stars above you 

You never need to doubt it 

I'll make you so sure about it

It’s an old trope, but Dickinson takes it to the next level. She gives three examples of impossibilities that will happen before she'll turn traitor, each with far-reaching implications. The first extends all the way into space,

When the Astronomer stops seeking
For his Pleiad's Face—

In F803 we looked at a poem with a similar idea:  

My Secret as secure
As Herschel's private interest
Or Mercury's affair—

***

The astronomer: 

Friedrich Herschel by Lemuel Abbot, 1785

Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel lived from 1738 – 1822. A small sample of his accomplishments: He published his discoveries as three catalogues: Catalogue of One Thousand New Nebulae and Clusters of Stars, Catalogue of a Second Thousand New Nebulae and Clusters of Stars and, finally, Catalogue of 500 New Nebulae. While making his observations Herschel made note of a new object in the constellation of Gemini. He called the new planet the "Georgian star" after King George III. In France, where reference to the British king was to be avoided if possible, the planet was known as "Herschel.” Eventually the planet was given the name of Uranus and because of it, Herschel became famous. Herschel also pioneered astronomical and spectrophotometry using prisms and temperature measuring equipment to measure the wavelength distribution of stellar spectra through which he discovered infrared radiation.  He discovered Titania and Oberon (moons of Uranus), Enceladus and Mimas (moons of Saturn) and the fact that Martian polar caps vary seasonally. Herschel was sure that he had found ample evidence of life on the Moon and compared it to the English countryside. Herschel went so far as to speculate that the interior of the Sun was populated. But Herschel had other notable “private interests.” His father was a court oboist and he followed suit, mastering the oboe and then violin and harpsichord. He composed numerous musical works, including 24 symphonies and many concertos. In 1766 Herschel became organist of the Octagon Chapel a fashionable chapel in a well-known spa in Bath. Herschel's epitaph is: Coelorum perrupit claustra (He broke through the barriers of the heavens).

Friedrich Herschel had a son, John Herschel, 1782 - 1871, who was even more accomplished than his father. It is most likely John Herschel that Dickinson is thinking of here.

John Herschel 

by Alfred Chalon

Sir John Herschel, like his father, was an English polymath; a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, botanist and experimental photographer who invented the blueprint. He originated the use of the Julian day system in astronomy, named seven moons of Saturn and four moons of Uranus, the seventh planet, discovered by his father. He made many contributions to the science of photography. John Herschel also translated the Iliad of Homer. He was friends with Tennyson, Dickens, Darwin, Faraday and many other luminaries of his day.

You could say he elevated astronomy to the level of art and it is in keeping that Dickinson has him searching for the Pleiad’s Face. In these first two lines you see the man of science peering into the mysterious realm of love and mythology, a teleological bridge between man and the heavens. 

John Herschel, 1867

portrait by Julia Margaret Cameron

***

The Pleiades refer to a constellation. The word "Pleiad" derives from the ancient Greek word plein (to sail'), because of the star cluster's importance in opening the sailing season in the Mediterranean Sea. 

photo by Trevor Howard

The Pleiades are the seven divine daughters of the Goddess Pleiō. No one knows which came first, the word for sailing, Plein, or the name of the Goddess, Pleiō, but somehow the two merged to become the Pleiades and the season of navigation began with their heliacal rising in the heavens.

Pleiades by Elihu Vedder, 1885

The Pleiades were companions of Artemis, a virgin Goddess over whom Aphrodite had no power, protector of children, especially girls, and animal cubs. Together they were nursemaids and teachers of the infant Dionysus. 

Enter the bad guy, Orion, who pursued the Pleiades, until Zeus saved them by turning them into doves, and then catasterizing them into stars. In the Odyssey, Odysseus sees Orion hunting in the underworld with a bronze club, slaying animals, which gives you a sense of his character. It’s also worth noting that he was known as the most handsome of the earth-born, so basically a good looking lady-killer. 

Meanwhile Orion was also turned into a constellation by Zeus, destined to always chase, in place, the Pleiades through the night sky. It’s a constant reminder in the sky to all young lady-killers. This is what happens, boys!

Like Orion, the astronomer is destined to always pursue the lost sister across the sky. 

***

Which of the seven Pleiades in particular is the singular "face" the astronomer looking for? It must be Merope.

The loss of one of the sisters, Merope, reflects an astronomical event wherein one of the stars in the Pleiades star cluster disappears from view by the naked eye. Merope was said to be the faintest of the stars, the "lost Pleiad", because she was the only one of the Pleiades to have married a mortal. 

Her sisters had relations with gods and bore them sons, but Merope married the mortal, Sisyphus, and lived on the island Chios. If Sisyphus represents mortal man, what does that say about us? Check out his resume: Sisyphus was the founder and first king of Corinth. While king, Sisyphus was supposed to make Ancient Corinth a travel hub and a leader in navigation, but instead he infuriated Zeus by killing all guests to his palace in violation of the xenia. (Xenia is the ancient law of hospitality to strangers, and the root of term xenophobia.) Likewise, Sisyphus and his brother Salmoneus were known to hate each other, and Sisyphus consulted the Oracle of Delphi on just how to kill Salmoneus without incurring any of severe consequences for himself. From Homer onward, Sisyphus was famed as the craftiest of men. He seduced Salmoneus's daughter Tyro, which eventually led Tyro to slay their children when she discovered that Sisyphus was planning on using them to eventually dethrone her father. Eek.

Sisyphus also is said to have betrayed one of Zeus's secrets by revealing the whereabouts of the Asopid Aegina to her father, the river god Asopus, in return for creating an Eternal spring to flow on the Corinthian acropolis. Zeus therefore ordered Thanatos to chain Sisyphus in Tartarus. But Sisyphus sensed him coming, and seized the opportunity to trap Thanatos himself in chains instead. This caused an uproar because once Thanatos was bound by the strong chains, then no one could die on Earth. Consequently, sacrifices could not be made to the gods and consequently those that were old and sick suffered. The gods finally threatened to make life so miserable for Sisyphus that he would wish he were dead, so then he had no choice but to release Thanatos.

Before dying himself, Sisyphus instructed Merope not to perform the customary funeral rites for him. When he reached the underworld, he complained to Hades that his wife was neglecting him, and obtained permission to return to the upper world in order to reproach her. Crafty! 

Once back in Corinth, Sisyphus did not return to the underworld and lived until he died of old age. In a later tradition, reported by Eustathius, Hermes forcibly carried him back down. (Kicking and screaming I'd imagine).

Eventually, as we all know, he was damned to endlessly push a rock back up to the top of a hill, a fate, according to Camus, not so unlike that of mankind's. 

So the astronomer is, like Sisyphus in his torment, searching for "his Pleiad's face."

***

Let’s look at the next example:

When the lone British Lady
Forsakes the Arctic Race

The lone British Lady: Lady Jane Franklin (née Griffin, 1791 – 1875) was a British explorer and the second wife of the English explorer Sir John Franklin. During her husband's period as Lieutenant-Governor of Tasmania (then known as Van Diemen's Land), she became known for her philanthropic work and her travels throughout south-eastern Australia. After John Franklin's disappearance in search of the Northwest Passage, she sponsored several expeditions to determine his fate.

The  “Race” that Jane won’t forsake, then, is not the one to find the Northwest Passage first, but the one to save her husband who was lost in that pursuit. 

Lady Jane and Sir John Franklin

A bit more on this fascinating character. As a young woman, Jane was attracted to a London physician and scientist, Peter Mark Roget, best known for publishing Roget's Thesaurus. She once said he was the only man who made her swoon, but nothing ever came of the relationship. 

On 5 November 1828 Jane married the explorer John Franklin. Not long after John Franklin was appointed governor of Tasmania, an island off the coast of Australia, where, in 1842, Lady Jane commissioned a classical temple, and named it Ancanthe, Ancient Greek for "blooming valley." She intended the building to serve as a museum for Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, and left 400 acres in trust to ensure the continuance of what she hoped would become the focus of the colony's cultural aspirations. A century of apathy followed, with the museum used as an apple shed among other functions, but in 1949 it was made the home of The Art Society of Tasmania, who rescued the building. It is now known as the Lady Franklin Gallery. This early investment into Tasmanian art has erupted as of late into one the best art scenes in the world. "Blooming valley" indeed. Dark Mofo is an annual mid-winter arts and culture festival held by the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania. Launched in 2013 Dark Mofo events take place at night and celebrate the darkness of the southern winter solstice, featuring many musical acts, large scale light installations and a winter feast. I met some people recently who live in Tasmania and they told me Dark Mofo was not to be missed.

Then things went awry in Tasmania for the Franklins. Wikipedia has it that in August a Sir John Yardley-Wilmot arrived in Tasmania announcing that he was the new appointed governor of Tasmania. Apparently, John Montagu, who had served as colonial secretary to John Franklin, but had been dismissed for his antagonism and insubordination towards Sir John, had returned to Britain with stories publicized in the British newspapers about their bad leadership. Montagu also accused John Franklin of being ruled by his wife, a claim that was believed by the Undersecretary of State for the Colonies James Stephen and Lord Stanley, who then ordered a recall of Sir Franklin.

This meant that Lady Franklin and Sir John had to leave their home quite hastily and sell many of their possessions and return to England. They would arrive in Britain the following year, and the Franklins set about to restore their tarnished reputation. This was done, of course, by Lady Franklin, who was crafty as Sisyphus. Lady Franklin authored a book under the name of her husband defending his actions titled "Narrative of Some Passages in the History of Van Diemen's Land," which was a best seller and not only helped redeem Sir Franklin's reputation, but also brought in a fortune. Shortly after their arrival Sir John had applied to being in charge of leading a polar expedition in search of the Northwest passage. He won the commission and left in 1845, but, alas, never returned. Lady Franklin traveled to Out Stack in the Shetland Islands of Scotland, the northernmost of the British isles, to get as close as she could to her missing husband. She sponsored seven (!!!) expeditions to find her husband. Her efforts made the expeditions' fate one of the biggest stories of the decade. Ultimately, in 1859, Francis McClintock found evidence that Sir John had died twelve years previously, in 1847. Prior accounts had suggested that, in the end, the expedition had turned to cannibalism to survive, but Lady Franklin refused to believe these stories. Finally, in 1874, she joined forces with Allen Young to purchase and fit out the former steam gunboat HMS Pandora to undertake another expedition to the region around Prince of Wales Island. The expedition left London in June 1875 and returned in December, unsuccessful, as ice prevented her from passing west of the Franklin Strait. Lady Franklin died in the interim, on 18 July 1875. Many "Old Arctics" engaged in the Franklin searches were at her funeral. 

This woman had staying power! You see what Dickinson was getting at.

***

That will do for the second example. How about the third,

When to his Covenant Needle
The Sailor doubting turns—

Note that the motif of sailing behind the first two examples comes to an apotheosis here, where Dickinson takes it into the metaphysical realm. The longing of the astronomer and the loyalty of the lone Lady has fallen into doubt. In doubt the sailor turns to the Covenant Needle of the compass. The Covenant referred to here, I believe, would be the Christian Covenant, the sacred binding promise from God to forgive sin through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The sailor, lost, doubting himself and his circumstances, turns to follow the Covenant Needle toward True North.

***

When all of these things happen? Then...

It will be amply early
To ask what treason means.

Look at all Dickinson accomplishes with that odd construction of "It will be amply early/ to ask..." 

First of all you get the funny sound of “amply early.” That sound adds to the slightly comical tone of the poem.

You also get a Dickinsonian paradox. If the betrayal never arrives, then the idea of "amply early” is ridiculous. What does "early" matter in the course of “never”?

But the paradox points toward something telling. "Amply early" might subtly imply that it's never too early to ask what treason means. Forget eternity, or even tomorrow, the betrayal may have already happened and you’re a little late on the uptake. You should've started, like, yesterday: "amply early." If you take the poem this way, it isn't about faithfulness at all, but about gullibility. This idea may be echoed in the seed planted in the sailor's "doubt" in the first half of this stanza. As per usual, Dickinson allows room for both a positive and negative charge in the poem. 

In all three examples a kind of despair points the way toward the beloved. And this is the startling Truth that Dickinson is pointing to: treason, in the face of heartache, is a non-issue.

  -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Notes:

1. We are indebted to Wikipedia and all of its busy bees for the many facts included in this essay. 

2. To add to the interesting etymology of Pleiades in "Plein" and "Pleio," we also have a more poetic possibility: “flock of doves.” The Greek word pleiades has been connected with peleiai, meaning “doves," which of course is what the sisters were turned into before they became stars.

3. The Greek poet Hesiod mentions the Pleiades several times in Works and Days. Here is a bit of advice from Hesiod:

And if longing seizes you for sailing the stormy seas,
when the Pleiades flee mighty Orion
and plunge into the misty deep
and all the gusty winds are raging,
then do not keep your ship on the wine-dark sea
but, as I bid you, remember to work the land.

— Works and Days 618–623

The poet Sappho mentions the Pleiades in one of her poems:

The moon has gone
The Pleiades gone
In dead of night
Time passes on
I lie alone

The poet Lord Tennyson, who was friends with the astronomer John Herschel as well as Lady Jane, mentions the Pleiades in his poem "Locksley Hall" from 1842. This poem is one Emily would have surely read. :

Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising through the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.

4. Are the Pleiades humanities oldest story? From  a Museum of Science article, "What do the Tuareg Berber people of north Africa, the Kiowa people of the North American Great Plains, the Wirangu people of southern Australia, the Ban Raji people of western Nepal, and the ancient Greeks of, well, Greece, have in common? A legend about a cluster of stars being seven young women. There are several other cultural groups whose legends refer to this being seven people or seven young men, but the idea of it being specifically seven young women is one that appears over and over again in different peoples from around the globe that had absolutely no contact with each other in antiquity. When specific mythologies seem to be shared across very widely distributed groups, one possible explanation is that the myth behind it all is a very old one."