The Robin for the Crumb

The Robin for the Crumb
Returns no syllable
But long records the Lady's name
In Silver Chronicle.

   

    -Fr810, J864, early 1864


This is such a perfectly Emily Dickinson poem. It can be boiled down to a pretty simple idea, that a little goes a long way, but Dickinson relays this idea through a richly evocative aphorism. The robin doesn’t say a word in thanks for a crumb, just sings his Lady’s name in silver chronicle.

The form of the poem expresses its content. First of all, like the song of its subject, it sounds beautiful. This poem, itself, could be considered a silver chronicle.

Start with the structure. There is a deliberate 6 - 6 - 8 - 6 iambic structure, a pattern which Dickinson most often uses for aphorisms. The idea of the structure is to give extra weight to that third line, as if it were the punchline of a joke. In this case it is especially appropriate because the longest line in the stanza " long records the Lady’s name.”

Within that iambic metrical structure Dickinson syncopates the rhythm by adding two rhyming dactyls, “syllable” and “chronicle,” which gives the poem an extra song-song lilt. 

 

The bird may not need to use syllables, but they are all Emily’s got to work with here. The word "syllable" is a metonym for poetry itself. English verse, after all, is made up of the arrangement of syllables. (Another poem written by Dickinson in 1864, Fr798, makes a similar argument, we can only “conjugate…while nature…creates and federates…without syllable.”)

The consonant soundscape of the poem is masterful. She weaves together RN, CR and SL sound clusters which satisfyingly culminates in the sound of the last line, “iN SiLver CRoNiCle.”

In the very feel of the musical language Dickinson gets across the idea that even the littlest offering to the poor will result in music. It’s as if the whole of nature becomes filled with music, all coming from that one little crumb.

The synaesthetic use of the visual word "silver" to describe auditory birdsong is also part of the poem's beauty. (This comparison is not unique to this poem. Dickinson also uses it in Fr902, ”Split the Lark — and you'll find the Music —Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled —”)

I notice that the bird isn’t necessarily singing in gratitude. The robin is just singing, and because one has given it a crumb, and nourished it, it gets to keep singing. That continued song becomes the “chronicle” of generosity. it’s not a transactional tit for tat.  This is a subtle point. You give because the bird is hungry. The bird sings because it is fed.

The lovely idea of a “Lady’s name” being told by “no syllable” is worth stopping to wonder about too. Nature’s music is able to tell the name of the benefactor without saying a word!


  -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Notes:

1. This poem was sent in a letter to Dickinson’s aunt Lucretia Bullard, probably as a thank you note. The aunt had given a gift to Emily, I would guess, and Emily, the Robin, sings this poem in response.

2. The “Robin and Crumb” theme is a common one for Dickinson. Here are a few more, Fr210, Fr195, Fr359 and Fr501. And here's one more Robin poem with a sentiment that fits well with the poem at hand.

If I can stop one Heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain
If I can ease one Life the Aching,
Or cool one Pain,
Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

3. I mentioned above that Dickinson typically uses a 6-6-8-6 stanza form for aphorisms. I don’t know if this is an innovation of hers, or a common aphoristic form? Here another good one for the sake of comparison.

The Pedigree of Honey (6)
Does not concern the Bee — (6)
A Clover, any time, to him (8)
Is Aristocracy — (6)

4. There were several “interpretations” of this poem up on The Emily Dickinson Museum’s FaceBook page. Here are two I liked. 

Gastropher1 wrote, “Please and thank you are but platitudes. Being is the greatest appreciation.” Perspicacious! 

 Starrynightrob wrote, “Who among us cannot spare at least a crumb for those less fortunate? Our good deed will echo through time like a musical report, when before the world was silent. The recipient may seem to take the bounty and run but their posterity assures their gratitude. Emily wrote another poem about a choir of birds and ends that one in song, too:

Twas the Winged Beggar —.
Afterward I learned
To her Benefactor
Making Gratitude

Good to have had them lost

Good to have had them lost
For news that they be saved!
The nearer they departed Us
The nearer they, restored,

Shall stand to Our Right Hand—
Most precious— are the Dead—
Next precious, those that rose to go
Then thought of Us, and stayed—


    -Fr809, J901, early 1864


You can read this poem in a very straight-forward religious way, which the poem invites you to do with its use of the term “saved” and the biblical allusion to standing at God’s “Right Hand.”

If you are a believer, which most of the people in Dickinson’s circle were, then this poem might be helpful in bringing comfort to you after a loved one has died. The person isn’t lost, they are saved in heaven! The nearer they were to us when we died means the nearer they will be to us in heaven where they will stand with us at God’s right hand. 

But then the final two lines complicate this idea. Why call out as “next precious” those that choose to stay behind? What does it mean to choose to stay behind because of the "thought of Us?" Huh? What does this have to do with standing at the right hand of God after death? This is a left turn that throws everything else in the poem into question. Suddenly we wonder if we are talking about actual death here, or, something else, like, perhaps, the loss of a relationship. After all, to choose to stay sounds like something a lover, or friend, would do, not a dying person. 

If the loss is referring, then, to the loss of a lover, everything else in the poem takes on a new meaning. Being “saved!” and at “Our Right Hand,” for instance, now has a more sly and wry meaning.

If this is a poem written to a lover, then the one that “chooses” to stay at the end is the unassuming hero of this story.

The “most precious” are those gone from us not because they were the most loving, but because their absence is total. They are beyond failure, or even forgetting. In contrast, the living, even those who choose to stay, exist in an unstable world. Their love is still being tested. Their presence is valuable, but still unfolding.

Those who “rose to go / Then thought of Us, and stayed” are precious in a different way. Dickinson is drawing our attention to a deliberate choice. They had the freedom to leave, but chose to remain for our sake. That act of self-sacrifice makes all the difference. By calling them “next precious,” Dickinson’s not diminishing them, but giving them a different kind of reverence.

By ranking the “dead” and the stayers, Dickinson helps us to confront the complexity of love. Do we most value those who are gone? Or do we cherish most those who could have left and didn’t?

Perhaps Dickinson is subtly critiquing us. We tend to overvalue what we’ve lost and undervalue what we still have. So maybe she’s saying to look closely at those who stayed? They are not forgotten, they are “next precious.” Don’t wait until they’re gone to make them most.

     -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

P.S. It's noteworthy how often Dickinson subverts religious language to talk about the interpersonal. We mark that in Emily's earliest love letters to Sue, when they were 19 year old school friends, she often conflated religious and romantic language. I tend to read the poem at hand as part of a tradition of love poems to Sue that continued a decades-long conversation. Using religious language, complicated by the fact that Sue was a professed believer and Dickinson wasn't, ultimately underscores the nature of their human relationship by comparison.

P.P.S. One more thought. Might this poem be a warning to its recipient? "If the precious one I love leaves me, I'm going to love the "next precious" one I'm with. Probably not, but the suggestion is there with that word "next." 

The lovely flowers embarrass me,

The lovely flowers embarrass me,
They make me regret I am not a Bee -

     -Fr808, late spring 1864

This poem was sent as the opening lines of a thank you card for a gift of wisteria from Emily’s aunt Lucretia Bullard. The entire letter runs thusly,

The lovely flowers embarrass me,

They make me regret I am not a Bee -
Was it my blame or Nature's?
Thank you, dear Aunt, for the thoughtfulness, I shall slowly forget -
The beautiful Plant would entice me, did I obey myself, but the Doctor is rigid.
Will you believe me grateful, who have no Argument?

Truly,
Emily.

The thing about Emily’s letters is that they were full of poetry and it’s often hard to tell where the prose stops and the verse begins. This letter is a good example. Can the “poem” really be separated from the letter? I’m not so sure. Franklin decided to do it here, probably because he was charmed by this couplet. But there are dozens of other metrical “couplets” in letters that he did NOT include, and you can see many brilliant examples of these in a terrific book I discovered in my school library, “New Poems of Emily Dickinson.”

One short “poem” (extracted from a letter) I remember reading in that book is, “Emerson’s intimacy with his ‘Bee’ only immortalized him.” Dickinson is referring to Emerson’s great poem “The Humble-Bee,” but the sentiment in that one liner is similar to this couplet. Emerson becomes immortalized because he captures in that poem “intimacy” with the bee. Dickinson wishes to me be more intimate, but because she is human, and, especially because of the circumstances under which this poem was written, she cannot. This is a condition she finds embarrassing. 

Dickinson wrote this letter when she was in Cambridge undergoing treatment for her eyes, which is why she says about the gift of the wisteria: “The beautiful Plant would entice me, did I obey myself, but the Doctor is rigid.” (See end note.) She is embarrassed to be so removed from nature, and wishes she could be enticed by the wisteria to go out. She would “slowly forget” what flowers were like, cooped up inside, if it were not for her Aunt’s thoughtfulness.

When I was searching online for information on this couplet, I came across a post on The Emily Dickinson Museum's FaceBook page which asked for interpretations of it. There were some pretty interesting ones, but one recurring idea that I found can be seen in this comment by Jennifer Berne, “My interpretation: Emily is embarrassed when thinking about flowers because she relates to and desires to take on the creatively active "male role" of the bee who pollinates the flower, rather than relating to the "female role" of the flower in being passively pollinated. I think it is a poem about gender-identity discomfort.”

Seeing as this was a thank you note to Dickinson’s aunt, I would doubt that Dickinson was thinking of "gender-identity discomfort” here. This is a good example of why extracting a poem from a letter might be problematic? 

The main thing I take from the couplet, and the letter, though, is that Dickinson can’t fully attend to either the flowers, nor to her aunt, as she wishes she could.

I like that last line of the letter, “Would you believe me grateful, who have no argument?” In the context of the letter I think she might be saying here, “I’m grateful, if you can believe it, for the doctor’s rigidity, and I have no good argument against his orders.” She also might mean, "Would you still think I'm grateful for your invite, even though I've got no good argument against my doctor for coming to see you?" I'm not totally sure. But the reason I like the line is that, taken by itself, it could mean other things, including the idea that we would live in gratitude if we only didn't argue so much against doing so. 

   -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Note:

From Thomas Johnson: "This note ED wrote probably in 1864, when she was in Cambridge undergoing treatment for her eyes. It acknowledges thoughtful attentions from her Aunt Lucretia. The above was written after receiving flowers, said to be wistaria; it was therefore presumably written in May. Evidently an invitation to call was declined. Mrs. Asa Bullard was Edward Dickinson's eldest sister, and the Bullards resided in Cambridge, at 24 Center Street."

Away from Home are some and I —

Away from Home are some and I —
An Emigrant to be
In a Metropolis of Homes
Is easy, possibly —

The Habit of a Foreign Sky
We — difficult — acquire
As Children, who remain in Face
The more their Feet retire.


    -Fr807, J821, early 1864


I wonder if the dash at the end of the first line is meant to be a thought trailing off. The way this first stanza reads to me is a kind of mimesis of thought, jumping from one to another quickly, without showing all of the work. The first line cuts off and the thought is overrun by the next one, which is that for some people it might possibly be easy to be an immigrant. But then the next thought comes in quickly on the heels of that “possibly.” Yes, the poet says, it may be possible that it's easy, but probably not, because foreign skies must be as difficult to get used to as it is to get used to children leaving home. 

Though the poem is in strict meter, and obviously worked out, the first stanza feels casual and in the moment, as if the poet were talking to herself, a bit confused. In other words, the elided lines and irregular punctuation is difficult to follow, which gives us a sense of the displacement felt by the narrator, who is trying to make sense of something new. (Dickinson makes a similar mimetic move in the poem, "I sometimes drop it,  for a quick-") 

The line also has a similarly bewildering effect on the reader, who is suddenly a bit lost him/herself and displaced by a grammar that doesn’t seem to quite coalesce.

Away from Home are some and I —

You have that “I" just hanging there. Is that "I" the object of the line or the subject of the next? Normally the object of a sentence is "me" not "I," but the next line seems to begin a new subject. This kind of lexical hall of mirrors gives us vertigo. We are made a little unsure by the syntax. But this sets up the point of the poem,  which is displacement. What does it mean, to some, to feel homeless? 

Dickinson says it might be easy, "possibly."  But she has a nice home, doesn't she? In other words, she wouldn't know. Or maybe she's saying she too feels homeless, in a way, and is wryly admitting that while this feeling might possibly be easy for some, it is not to her. Is she at home or not? That indeterminate "I" hanging at the end of the first line could be read both ways. I get the sense, though, that she is at home and considering those who are not. 

The second stanza is in a different voice, more wise and coherent, answering the first stanza with a proverb.

The Habit of a Foreign Sky
We — difficult — acquire

That word “Habit” can carry a couple possible meanings. The most likely one is the sense of habit as an acquired way of doing things. A foreign sky has different habits, a different way of doing things. 

Prince knows how hard it is to get used to snow in April. 

But, perhaps Dickinson was also playing with the idea of a nun’s dress when she speaks of acquiring the Habit of a foreign sky. A nun's Habit is not easy to acquire either. Dickinson, you might say, with her famous home-made white dress with pockets sewn in, did acquire one, of sorts. We put on the clothes of a spiritual adept when we attempt to go outside of our comfort zone.

It’s the final lines of this poem that I find so affecting.

As Children, who remain in Face
The more their Feet retire.

I think this means that the more your children’s feet retire away, the more you will see their face before you. I have a couple of teenage daughters, so this line gets me, knowing how deeply I will miss their faces when they are no longer living at home. Lucky Mr. Dickinson, I suppose. 

That is what the opposite end of the spectrum, homesickness, feels like too, though, like your childhood home has retired from you, but you still see its face in front of you. This image gets at both sides of the heartache.

This poem becomes even more affecting when we know that its author never left her home for long. For some reason Dickinson did not leave her childhood home behind, and, we can see in retrospect, that perhaps that was for the best. It allowed her to write poems in the financial comfort of her father’s home with few demands on her time. She never wanted for any material comfort, but a poem like this goes a ways to show that her heart was often bereft.

Thomas Johnson helpfully notes that “the poem may have been inspired in a moment of longing for home, shortly after Emily arrived in Cambridge, a district of Boston, in late April 1864 for eye treatment.’

One can't help but read Dickinson's poems biographically, because her story is so unusual in its way, but maybe doing so minimalizes the serious import of the poem, which is, after all, including in its scope immigrants with a much more serious problem than a reception in Cambridge.

This poem comes, in the Franklin order, soon after poem Fr805, which is an admonition to those who do not welcome in the immigrant,

These Strangers, in a foreign World,
Protection asked of me—
Befriend them, lest Yourself in Heaven
Be found a Refugee—

Perhaps this slightly earlier poem was also written in Cambridge in response to a chilly reception. Who  knows? At any rate the two poems seem in keeping with each other in that the earlier one is addressed to the comfortable one at home, and this latter, to the distressed one away from home.

This is a poem that leaves us with the haunting question of what it means to have no home.


         -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Luigi Ono, "Abandoned," 1875

from Eclectic Light collection of homeless paintings from the 19th c.

Partake as doth the Bee,

Partake as doth the Bee,
Abstemiously.
The Rose is an Estate—
In Sicily.


     -Fr994, J806, sheet 29, early 1864


This poem is coming from a different angle than “don’t forget to stop and smell the roses.” It seems to be saying, rather, don’t overindulge in smelling the roses.

I once read that the 12th century Islamic mystic Rumi’s poems sometimes contradicted each other because they were given to specific people for specific purposes. For instance, one person might need to learn to indulge more and another, to indulge less. This poem is for the latter audience. I learned from David Preest that, “Emily’s cousin, Perez Dickinson Cowan, recorded in his diary for 26 April 1864 that he had received from Emily a very fine bouquet together with this commandment-poem.” So this poem was specifically given to a young man, which makes it more…pointed.

But Richard Sewall comments that Emily could sometimes be wary of excess of the good, herself, for example stating in poem Fr312 that, ‘the least push of Joy/breaks up my feet/and I tip – drunken.’ So this poem is in keeping, whether written as a reminder for herself, or for her cousin Perez.

Let’s look at the poem. The first line, if we did not have that word “Abstemiously” following it, would read to me very differently. Bees do sometimes take a little from here and a little from there, abstemiously, but sometimes they seem to be careening luxuriously in one flower for a long time, drunk on pollen. So I would likely read the line as saying to partake deeply. But “abstemiously” changes this dramatically, as it means to partake in a way that shows restraint. I assume Dickinson means, to partake delicately and methodically, without destroying the flower.

Seeing the rose as an estate in Sicily opens up a whole new dimension to the flower. The fragrance of the rose opens us to something as luxurious and exotic as can be imagined. So on one hand the rose is like an estate in Sicily, and we should partake, but on the other hand, we should only visit such a grand estate now and then, like on a vacation. Dickinson raises the rose to swoony heights, but even as she does so, she warns us to take our swooning in measure. It's like telling us how incredibly amazing chocolate is and then telling us to not eat too much.

But I love this idea. It’s like imagining yourself in a Swiss Chalet with each bite of that chocolate, or a vineyard in France with each sip of chardonnay. I'm left with the idea of making each indulgence really count, and, in fact, making it count so much that we need not overindulge.

Next time I’m tempted to overindulge in the fragrance of a rose (which I confess happens often,) I’ll think of this poem and, instead, will just try to inhale deeply. 

         -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

 

P.S. I’m reminded of Sarah Silverman’s advice to Make It A Treat (M.I.A.T.)

These Strangers, in a foreign World,

These Strangers, in a foreign World,
Protection asked of me—
Befriend them, lest Yourself in Heaven
Be found a Refugee—


      -Fr805, J1096, early 1864


This is a rare straight-forward poem from Dickinson, and one that speaks to our moment now as well as any. One can imagine this poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, or written on a sign held by any one of the millions of protesters last week at one of the "No King" rallies.

The poem recalls Matthew 25: 41-46: "Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: For I was hungry, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee hungry, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me."

Is this poem meant, as it seems, to be a proverb for the general public, or is there something more personal in its use of the pronoun "me?" Thinking about the issues of her time, I wonder if slavery is on Dickinson's mind here. Her “preceptor” and friend, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was a famous and outspoken abolitionist. There is a really great book about Dickinson’s friendship with Higginson called “White Heat” by Brenda Wineapple, that gives a lot of context for all of this, and also serves as terrific character study of Higginson, who was quite the guy. Dickinson never wrote directly about the issue of slavery, for whatever reason, but there are many oblique references to it, and perhaps this poem is one of them.

If the “me” is not just a generalized “me,” but, in fact, the author, then we could ask, what protection might have been asked of Dickinson? Here I think of that passage in Whitman’s Song of Myself,

“The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,
And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him,
And brought water and fill’d a tub for his sweated body and bruis’d feet,
And gave him a room that enter’d from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes,
And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;
He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass’d north,
I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean’d in the corner.”

On the whole I tend to favor Dickinson’s poems over Whitman’s, but here I find Whitman’s testimony much more moving and inspiring for its specificity than Dickinson’s. Whitman is bravely putting himself out there and doing, through his poem, what Dickinson only suggests in hers. 

So, perhaps Dickinson is chastising herself here for not doing more?

The turn around in this poem is well-put. You will eventually become the stranger that you turn away. It’s a truth well worth reflecting on, then and now.

      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Ample make this Bed—

Ample make this Bed—
Make this Bed with Awe—
In it wait till Judgment break
Excellent and Fair.

Be its Mattress straight—
Be its Pillow round—
Let no Sunrise’ yellow noise
Interrupt this Ground—


     -Fr804, J829, early 1864


Dickinson gave a rare title to an early version of this poem, “Country Burial.” You can imagine why she removed this title though, and it is an object lesson in the problem with titles in the first place. They can over-determine a reading. If this poem is only about a burial, it is far less powerful. By removing the title, the bed in this poem becomes suggestive of a marriage bed. You may also read "bed" as a place of birth, too, like, for instance, a garden bed, where seeds gestate below the surface and no sun can “interrupt.” Minus the title, the bed takes on the fullness of life; birth, marriage and death.

The result is that the poem becomes very resonant. The poem itself, just like the bed, is "ample," and like the pillow, is “round." The poem is making its own bed. The folding in of birth, marriage and death in the metaphor of the bed all seems to be happening under the surface of the “yellow noise,” residing in the netherspaces of the subconscious.

You can see what I mean if you look at the scene of Kevin Kline reading this poem to Meryl Streep in the film Sophie’s Choice. Here the poem is used for romantic purposes, and it rings with aura. This wouldn’t have worked if the title, "A Country Burial" had stuck.

 
Though even if the poem did carry the title, and functioned as mere elegy, it would still be powerful. Dickinson presents death not with fear, but with tranquility and a hint of hope. Death is imbued with amplitude and awe, with the promise of excellence and fairness, and finally, is presented as a place where you can rest uninterrupted.

But as a love poem, I think this poem is even more powerful. It speaks to the moment, right now, through the incantatory spell of this poem; let us make our bed ample and full of awe. And let’s close the curtains so we can sleep in.

Ample make this Bed—
Make this Bed with Awe—

Already, in the opening sound of the first word of this poem, there is a feeling of ampleness. Aaaaample. (Whitman also uses this word to excellent effect in “A Farm Picture,” which begins, “THROUGH the ample open door of the peaceful country barn”) Not only does the poem start with that open vowel feel, but it’s also in trochaic meter, instead of the more usual iambic, which means it begins with an emphasized syllable. In other words, this openness is emphasized. There’s a big difference between “Make this bed ample” and “Ample make this bed.”

The repetition of “make” in the second line is part of what gives this poem its incantatory power. And "make" is an interesting imperative too. Is it a command? A suggestion? A plea? A prayer? All of it. And then finally you get to that “Awe” which also carries the open vowel sense of amplitude and falls on an emphatic beat. Because the line ends on the half beat there is an extra ringing out of the sound of that "awe." These are subtle effects, but they really do make a difference in the feeling of the words, which carry the meaning of the poem.

In it wait till Judgment break
Excellent and Fair.

The word “break” is doing some heavy lifting here. Judgment breaks excellent and fair? You can take that a few ways. You can see a dozen different ways that Dickinson uses the word break in the Dickinson lexicon, and more than a few of them work for this poem. One meaning of break is change, or conversion. Judgment will bring a changeover into excellence and fairness. That’s the first and most obvious reading of break here, but that word “break” is hard to read without thinking of something being disrupted, and in that sense the "excellence and fair" are implied to be broken by judgment. Fair has a double meaning here too. In the first reading it means “just,” referring to Judgment, but in the second it carries, I think, its more archaic meaning of “beauty." So is the Judgment excellent and fair, or is it interrupting the excellent and fair? 

The main feeling I get is that Judgment will eventually break the ampleness and peace of the marriage/death bed, which, though perhaps is as it should be ("excellent and fair") is still, like the “yellow noise,” a disruption nonetheless.

Be its Mattress straight—
Be its Pillow round—

The incantatory sense of trochaic repetition continues in these lines. "Make this...make this...Be its...Be its.." Spells are cast in trochees. Think of the witches in Macbeth. This poem puts a spell on you.

I’m taken with just how much Dickinson is able to suggest with the dialectic between straight and round here. The straight can be read as a symbol of the masculine, associated with rigid structure, logic and the law (Judgment) while the round has a more feminine quality, connected to comfort, softness, the womb, the moon, the inner world. This brings in a sense of sacred balance to the grave-bed (or marriage-bed.)

“Straight” implies linearity, time that moves forward, from life to death to judgment. “Round” implies eternity. The bed, then, becomes a space where linear time and cyclical time meet, where the body dies, but something else (soul? memory? love?) may continue or return.

A straight mattress could symbolize the formality of death, the thing we can't escape. A round pillow suggests comfort, perhaps an openness to what comes after death, or in the case of the marriage bed, to love and trust.

By pairing just two shapes, “straight” and “round”, Dickinson encodes a whole universe of opposites: life/death, male/female, body/soul, finite/infinite, law/grace.

Let no Sunrise’ yellow noise

Interrupt this Ground— 

“Yellow noise” combines the visual and auditory, creating a kind of synesthesia, where color sounds, and sound glows.

The phrase “yellow noise” is unnatural because we expect “yellow light,” not “yellow noise.” That jolt forces attention and opens the image to multiple meanings. It turns the sunrise from something life-giving into something invasive, almost violent in its disruption. Usually sunrise symbolizes hope and resurrection, but Dickinson flips that. The line dramatizes a desire to protect stillness from the clamor of life.

“Sunrise’ yellow noise" is an entire world intruding; morning, light, sound, time, life. Dickinson takes something ordinary, like sunrise, and makes it strange and unsettling, but in so doing, she defends the quiet, the hidden, the profound, even against something as radiant as morning.

      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Notes:

1. In his blog, Frank Hudson gets underneath the Aubade quality of this poem, which is helpful. Frank writes, "An aubade is a poem where two lovers wish for the morning to never arrive. Since it is, in fact, arriving, they will deny it, wishing for their night together to remain forever. By using this traditional poetic trope, Dickinson has thrown a rich ambiguity into her 34 words. Although Christian religious belief has its variations, the traditional judgement day is the day of eternal salvation and the universe’s perfection. “Ample make this Bed” compares the morning of divine perfection to the morning that separates the lovers in an aubade. Is this a statement that the sensuousness of human love can be judged greater than eternal salvation? Or is it a puritan statement that any such love will face its final end and judgement? Could it even be both, balanced on a knife’s edge?"

2. A further breakdown of trochaic structure of this poem here.

Nature and God—I neither knew

Nature and God—I neither knew
Yet Both so well knew me
They startled, like Executors
Of My identity.

Yet Neither told—that I could learn—
My Secret as secure
As Herschel's private interest
Or Mercury's affair—


-Fr803, J835, early 1864


Nature and God—I neither knew

What a start to the poem, to skip right past the question of "belief" and to admit that you know nothing of Nature and God. It reminds of what the oracle of Delphi said about Socrates: he was the wisest man in the land for knowing he knew nothing.
.
And yet!

Yet Both so well knew me

Both Nature and God so well know Emily. The person is formed from and by nature, and from something more, too, perhaps, God. But who or what is God? That is up to you to not know.

They startled, like Executors
Of My identity.

Executors has a hint of "execution." It is a startling word. In the undercutting connotation of the word "executors,"we see, perhaps, a bit of Dickinson’s rebellious independence flare up.

But, there is also this startling idea; our identity is executed not by our will, as we think, but by Nature and God. "identity" we notice, is not capitalized as per usual.

Yet Neither told—that I could learn—

Nevertheless, neither Nature nor God have told anyone Emily's true secret identity. At least not that she has "learned" of. Because, of course, they can't. It's beyond words, and therefore beyond learned knowledge. Our superhero's secret identity is safe. 

My Secret as secure
As Herschel's private interest

Her identity is beyond knowing, because it's of Nature and God, which are themselves beyond knowing.

Not knowing is a kind of negative capability that allows unconditional beauty to exist. We saw this idea expressed beautifully in a poem a few back in the Franklin order,

“The definition of Beauty is
that definition is none.”

Herschel’s private interest is …what? Well, he’s famous for being the man that discovered Uranus, but he had many other private interests. He was not only a very accomplished astronomer, but also a talented composer. (See the fourth end note) Herschel’s private interest, though, for the sake of this poem, is likely meant to be the planets and stars. The word "private" is intriguing. It most likely means that Herschel's interest is private because it can't be known, even to Herschel, but perhaps there are other possibilities (See the third end note.)

Or Mercury's affair—

Mercury’s affairs, too, point toward the planetary. Mercury has the added resonance of the word mercurial, like quicksilver. God and Nature, and Emily Dickinson by extension, are mercurial like quicksilver too. But Mercury has another meaning. He is the messenger of the gods, and a guide to the souls in the underworld. That was his "affair." This poem, too, is a message sent by a guide.

In these final lines Dickinson is saying that her (your) identity is as unknowable and vast as the galaxy. 

One startling thing in this poem is, perhaps, the word "startles." Why is Dickinson startled by being so well known by Nature and God? For one, it's a mind-blowing thought. We can’t know, but are known. That's both disconcerting and comforting at once. Our identity may not be in our own hands, but what does it matter if we are as large and unknowable as the cosmos? 

     -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

The Astronomer (Herschel) by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1867

Notes:

1. In a strange and wonderful coincidence, I saw the above photo of Herschel at the Morgan Library last week. I went to the Morgan, on appointment, to see and hold in my hand (!!!) an Emily Dickinson poem, and not just any poem, but one she had given to Sue. When my friend Tyler Burba and I got to the library though something had gone wrong with the library's cooling system, so we had to wait. Meanwhile we explored the exhibits. One of them was a great show on Jane Austen and the other was photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron. There were several pictures of Herschel, who was a friend of hers. At that time I'd never heard of Herschel before. But I was immediately struck by the photos. So imagine my surprise when I started researching this poem. 

2. Keats and Whitman were both taken by Herschel's discovery too. 

Whitman writes in Song of Myself, “The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies." I've always loved this line, but didn't know until researching this Dickinson poem that Whitman was referring to Herschel here as both astronomer and composer! 

John Keats alludes to Herschel's discovery of Uranus in his 1816 sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer": 

"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken."

3. Was the "Uranus/ your anus" joke already a thing back in the 1800s? It must’ve been, right? If so, is Dickinson being ribald by calling it Herschel's "private interest?" Probably not, but I wouldn't quite put it past her either.


4. Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel 1738 – 1822

Herschel published catalogues of astronomical objects.
Herschel 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 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)
and 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.
He did not refrain from theorizing that the other planets were populated,
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)

The spry Arms of the Wind

The spry Arms of the Wind
If I could crawl between
I have an errand imminent
To an adjoining Zone—

I should not care to stop
My Process is not long
The Wind could wait without the Gate
Or stroll the Town among.

To ascertain the House
And is the soul at Home
And hold the Wick of mine to it
To light, and then return—

    -Fr802, J1103, back of envelope, early 1864


I first read this poem in a book given to me by a HS student as a gift. It’s called “Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems” and is comprised of reproductions of poems Dickinson wrote down on envelopes and other scraps of paper lying around the house.* It is one of the best gifts I’ve ever been given. I remember first reading the poem at hand on the back of an envelope in that book and feeling stunned by it. I’ll try to say why.

The spry Arms of the Wind
If I could crawl between

In these opening lines I picture Emily herself crawling through the wild winds of time blowing this way and that. I picture a precocious girl running through the legs of giants who are trying to catch her, but who somehow manages to keep her flame lit in all that candle-snuffing wind. The light of the flame is this poem itself.

I have an errand imminent
To an adjoining Zone—

The poet is on an errand to deliver something to one in an adjoining Zone. The adjoining Zone, you might say, is the very one that the reader is in.**  

I should not care to stop

Dickinson is relentless in getting this imminent message across to the reader's zone. It’s possible that this message had a single recipient originally, and I usually think of Sue, since we know she so often was the poem's intended audience. Sue lived in the adjoining house (zone), but to deliver a poem across to her, past prying eyes, and most especially, past Austin’s, must have felt like a game. (Cue theme music to Mission Impossible.) 

But, of course, Dickinson could also mean she is on an errand to visit ANY reader. Part of Dickinson’s genius is that though her poems often were meant for one specific reader, they were also, somehow, meant for any ideal reader. The ideal reader, at this point, now includes me and you. And that's one of the things that wowed me when I first read the poem on the back of that envelope: the very poem I was reading had to get through the spry arms of the wind to get to me, a century and a half later, which is quite a feat, especially for a poet who refused to publish her poetry.***

Dickinson did “not care to stop” trying to get her message across to Sue, and, then, finally, to us. If you think about it, the poems are still working to get that light across. Dickinson still hasn't stopped. She still cares to keep going.

My Process is not long

What does this mean? Well, for one, it probably didn't take that long to write this poem, nor does it take long to read and receive its light. But one gets a sense here, somehow, of her meaning something more; a whole life project, that is relative to eternity still a very short process. Life is very short, but in poetry the light may persist on and on.

The Wind could wait without the Gate
Or stroll the Town among.

If Emily is talking to Sue here, this Wind that could “wait without the Gate/ Or stroll the Town among” might well be Austin. Go paint the town red, Austin! Wait outside of the "gate." Hint hint, wink wink. ****

But if she’s talking to us, then Dickinson is using her skill as a poet to set aside any distractions or barriers between us. She’s gatekeeping. Those who she is sending to “town,” which includes the general population, will likely never see the light of this poem. One thinks here of the famous poem, “The soul selects her own society/ then shuts the door.”

To ascertain the House
And is the soul at Home

To ascertain the House, for me, takes this poem out the personal realm (of Sue and co) and into that of an unknown reader. Whose house is this message going to? The poet is still trying to ascertain whose house it is. The poem, in other words, is trying to find you. And once it does, the question she has for us is, “And is the soul at Home?”

Hello?

Well, if the soul is home, and Emily’s candle has found you, she's going to share her light with you.

And hold the Wick of mine to it
To light, and then return—

This is a very romantic, and even sexy, image if it is written to Sue, or some other lover. But its also quite powerful to think of this poem as Emily lighting us up with a poem about...lighting us up. She holds her essence, the gem-like flame of her poetry, up to our essence, and ignites us. Then, almost as if she was never there, a professed nobody, she returns back to her own Zone.

And we are left holding the flame.

What a poem.

    -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Candle Flame by Shan Sheehan

* Here's a New Yorker review of The Envelope poems. I disagree with the author of the review, since he doesn't believe there are any masterpieces among these scraps. Is the poem at hand not a masterpiece? It is, in my appreciation. Somehow, it seems to me, most of Dickinson's poems could be justified as masterpieces.

**Zones are an intriguing part of Dickinson’s poetic lexicon. A recent poem, Fr794, for instance, speaks of "ethereal Zones.” Think of zones in terms of Dickinson's fixation on circumference. There is a circumference around a burning candle, a zone of light. 

*** Indeed, publishers could be seen as “spry arms” attempting to block the message from getting to the reader. Normally you would think a publisher would aid a poet, but in Dickinson's case, she saw it the other way around. (See Publishing is the auction of the mind of man.)

**** And Austin did "go to town," where he met the married, but free-loving, Mabel Loomis Todd, who became Sue's nemesis, and later, ironically, Dickinson's biggest champion. It's possible we have Todd to thank for the fact that we have Dickinson's poems at all. Fate is funny.

Notes: This poem is a corollary to Fr322, which is a very deep dive into what that candle means. It's something the angels have labored diligently to light. 

As Sleigh Bells seem in summer

As Sleigh Bells seem in summer
Or Bees, at Christmas show —
So fairy — so fictitious
The individuals do
Repealed from observation —
A Party that we knew —
More distant in an instant
Than Dawn in Timbuctoo.


     Fr801, J981, 1864

Before we move onto the lexical level of this poem, let’s linger inside its lavish music. 

The sound of the opening line has an immortal aura. It reminds me of one of those fragments of Sappho, where the whole poem is alive in one perfect line. 

Let’s zoom in to the interweave of the consonance. The Z sound of “As” repeats in the Z sound of “Bells” and then buzzes again in “Bees” in the following line. The Z sound slides into the S sound of “Sleigh,” which is quickly followed by the little tongue-trip of “L, then hits a “B” sound which bounces us back to the “L” again, which leads us into another Z/S combo, “Bells” and “seem,” and then we get a repeat of S once again with “summer.” With the word “seem” the “M” sound comes into the poem, which is doubled down upon in “summer.” 

Finally the line ends, rhythmically, on a half beat, on the drop into “er,” which sets us up to expect an iambic up beat, but instead we get another down beat of “Or,” in the next line, a break beat, if you will. The two descending beats in a row give us a strong up beat on the word “Bees.” 

That’s a lot of work these consonants are doing to our tongues. You have an abundance of sibilance with that Z>S>Z>S>S combo, you’ve got the bop of a “B” (setting up the B of “Bee” in the second line), and then finally, running underneath of all of this, is the double hum of those mmm sounds. You have a sliding feeling of smooth snake, an ssss feeling, but also an mmm feeling, with something under the surface bubbling up. It hummable and it pops. It’s sinuous and a little sexy. This is the soundscape Dickinson begins with and all of these sonic structures will be picked up in the subsequent lines of this poem.

This audible line presents two things we love: summer and sleigh bells, and proceeds, somehow, to smash them together into one perfect season. Summer AND sleighbells! But alas, we know it’s impossible. For some reason, having to do with the way the seasons work, the two do not belong together.

(This begs a question. Besides the fact that they are for sleds on winter snow, why don’t sleighbells sound right in the summer?)

The sounds of the poem perfectly blend together, but its object and subject are out of season with one another. There’s a disconnect between sound and sense here.

Snow in summer is unsettling. But this idea gets even more strange and disturbing in the next stanza because now we have bees in winter.

The idea of being out of season with someone is one Dickinson has explored before, notably in Fr686. It’s an odd thought. What does it mean to not be of your time?

Brian Wilson, of the Beach Boys, wrote a song about it, “I just wasn't made for these times.” I bring Wilson up because he died today and therefore he's on my mind. But it seems appropriate since we are looking at the musicality of Dickinson's language.  Poetry is song, and though we love words, it is the sounds we love first. The music of both Dickinson and Wilson will ripple into our lives for a long time to come.

I just wasn't made for these times. Brian Wilson. 

Getting back to the poem. In the next line we see that these kinds of seasonal anomalies are described as "Fairy" and "Fictitious." These words have a winking sound, and a subversive meaning. Both words could be seen as a portal into a perfect season. Maybe you can’t have certain things in the real world, but you can still have them in fiction, and you can have them in the realm of fairy magic too, which is the realm of our imaginations.

They are fun words to say together, and for me tip off a kind of acceptance. “So fairy, so fictitious." You almost want to shimmy back and forth as you say it. It doesn't sound completely heart-broken.

The officious latinate sound of the word "fictitious" sets us up for a very different tone in the next few lines,

The individuals do
Repealed from observation —

The words in this poem go from anglo-saxon in the first few lines to latinate in these, and then back again. The late “latin” influence on the poem is ALSO out of sync, out of time, with its opening Anglo-saxon era. Is this meant to be a disconnect too? 

Another reason that occurs to me that these lines are suddenly latinate is that Latin underlies the language of the law: repeal,party, observation.

If a party is getting “repealed,” then my guess is it is Sue. And her husband, Emily’s brother, Austin, a lawyer by the way, is the one taking her away.

Latin has entered the picture, but then it leaves again, taking along with it the beloved, and we are back with the plaintive anglo-saxon of “Dawn” followed by a word that isn't even English, “Timbuctoo.” It’s as if language is finally going all the way back to its very roots, or at least trying to.

The poem carries the idea of heartbreak in it, but the language is fun: “Distant in an instant,” “So fairy, so fictitious,” “Dawn of Timbuctoo,” "Sleighbells seem in summer."

One would think that fun would be repealed along with the beloved, but the delight in the language belies any heartbreak. You believe heartbreak may be imminent, but you also suspect that at some level the lover is, like the bees, still inside the summer of the poet. Or perhaps, at least, those sleighbells can be heard in the poet’s winter.


    -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Currier and Ives, 1853

I never saw a Moor

I never saw a Moor
I never saw the Sea –
Yet know I how the Heather looks
And what a Billow be –

I never spoke with God
Nor visited in Heaven –
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the Checks were given –


    -F800, J1052, early 1864


This poem is mad sneaky. It’s a poem about simple faith that is anything but. 

Let’s start with the comparison. In the first stanza the poet says that though she's never seen a moor or the sea, she knows how heather looks and what a billow is. But how could she know this? It would have to be through the testimony of others, like, for instance, through a description in a novel (moors show up prominently in Wuthering Heights, one of Dickinson’s favorites) or perhaps from a painting. But heaven, which these are compared to in the second stanza, is a different kind of experience. It is beyond any first-person description. It's speculative and subjective. No one knows what heaven looks like. So there is a strange logical disconnect between the first and second stanza.

Let’s look closer at moors and billows for moment. These are rich poetic images. A moor is a wild and untamed region. A billow connotes a chaotic, and even tempestuous rolling of the sea. Together they seem to point toward a mysterious and romantic sense of the sublime. These are earthly symbols of the vast and unknowable, just like God and Heaven are for the spiritual world in the second stanza. Dickinson is drawing a parallel between the natural and the spiritual. It's a comparison, and where there's a comparison there's always a contrast, isn't there? She’s up to something.

First of all, the knowledge of moors and billows is secondhand. It’s “hearsay.” These are things one could easily imagine, but it’s just that, imagination. That’s already a little ironic. Because if the speaker is so sure about those, it’s not really inner certainty, but imagination. There’s a whiff of artifice here.

Here’s where the shift gets bold though. After describing the earthly things she hasn't seen, but sort of knows through description, she jumps to the spiritual: "I never spoke with God / Nor visited in Heaven—"

That’s much more drastic than “I never saw a moor.” And here's the kicker. She follows that with, "Yet certain am I of the spot.”

But wait, she just said she never spoke with God, so where is the certainty coming from? And is heaven really a "spot?" How so? Can it, like a billowing moor, be described?

What if Dickinson is not making a straight declaration of faith, but instead mirroring the form of such declarations in order to question them?

She builds a simple analogy: Just as I know a moor I’ve never seen, I know the heaven I’ve never visited. But this analogy collapses under pressure, because imagining a landscape based on descriptions is not the same as having certainty about metaphysical truth.

So when she says, "Yet certain am I of the spot," it starts to feel overconfident to the point of being satirical. This might be Dickinson's quiet way of saying, “Look how easily we convince ourselves we’re sure of the unseen. Just a few metaphors, a confident tone, and it feels like faith.”

And then there’s that line: “I never spoke with God” This may be the most subversive line in the poem. She doesn’t say “I haven’t heard from God,” she says: “I never spoke with God” That’s active and sounds like a choice. A quiet refusal. A recognition that she hasn’t even attempted direct communion, and yet she’s still “certain.” That undercuts her own claim. It hints at doubt, or at least self-awareness about the constructed nature of belief.

Dickinson seems to be presenting certainty, while at the same time showing us the flimsiness of its scaffolding. It reminds me of the poem a few back in the Franklin order, F797, which begins, “The Definition of Beauty is/ That Definition is none—” That’s another example where Dickinson asserts a logical claim that undoes itself. The definition is that there is no definition. Here too she lures us in with a simple analogy, makes a show of confidence, and then slips in just enough unease (a never-spoken to God, hearsay) to make us wonder, is this faith, or just the shadow of faith made by language?

The tension between belief and suspicion is what makes the poem so deceptively simple and strange.

Let’s end by looking at those given “checks” in the last line. In Christanne Miller’s notes on this poem it states that “the word 'checks' was used colloquially to mean railroad tickets; one gave one’s checks to the conductor.”

With this reading, the poem becomes even more elusive. Dickinson begins with things she hasn’t seen (moor, sea), compares them to things she’s only heard about, heaven, God, and ends with the metaphor of train travel (a la “This train is bound for Glory”) that makes the unknowable seem orderly and ticketed.

But the phrase “as if” is crucial I think. She’s saying, “I know I’m imagining this. I know the ‘ticket’ isn’t real. But the feeling? The feeling is real.”

It’s a confession of belief through metaphor, and a confession that metaphor is the only thing we have.

But for all of the metaphorical construction, I believe the idea of "the feeling being real" is also essential here, especially if you factor in the wildness of moor and billow. Dickinson may be questioning the machinery of belief, the metaphors, but we can't forget that the feeling is still real.

Dickinson doesn’t just interrogate and mock belief, she also professes it. The poem lives in that in-between space where certainty may be built on metaphors (moor, billow, checks) but the inner sensation of faith remains authentic. So when she says, “Yet certain am I of the spot,” she may be showing us the scaffolding of that certainty, but she’s not denying the emotional reality of it. That’s what makes the poem resonate. It doesn't land in sarcasm or skepticism. It hovers in tension.

Moors and billows, after all, don’t represent certainty so much as they represent a feeling of the sublime, a kind of emotional knowing that defies logic. They're the opposite of a “check," no receipt for travel, no structure, just mood.

That contrast might be the real engine of the poem, and of poetry itself. On one hand you have feeling and on the other, faith through metaphor. A poem may depend on both.

Dickinson is showing us that faith isn’t rational, but rather derives from a kind of felt resonance with the world’s mystery, the echo of something wild and vast, like moors and billows, inside the self.

      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Wuthering Heights, by Robert McGinnis, 1965

All I may, if small,

All I may, if small,
Do it not display
Larger for the Totalness —
’Tis Economy

To bestow a World
And withhold a Star —
Utmost, is Munificence —
Less, tho’ larger, poor.


      -Fr799, J819, sheet 13, early 1864


This was a difficult poem to understand. I read it, blinked, shook my head, and tried again. And again and again. It’s like one of those autostereograms, where you look at a 2 dimensional page, and if you stare long enough, and squint just right, a 3 dimensional object pops out. Most of Dickinson’s poems have some degree of this quality, but some, like this one, take bit more work. 

So I went back and stared longer. Eventually, a cogent reading emerged, like a 3D star, from the page. Once I got it, it seemed obvious. Here is my take, line by line.

All I may, if small

All I have to give, even though it is small…

Do it not display
Larger for the Totalness —

Doesn’t it appear larger for being so total?

’Tis Economy
To bestow a World
And withhold a Star —

It may be economical to give a whole world and keep a star for yourself,

Utmost, is Munificence —

but giving your utmost, everything, is where true munificence (generosity) is.

Less, tho’ larger, poor.

Giving anything less, even if it is actually more than what I have to give, is still poor.

It is better to give everything you have, even if it is small, than to give a lot, but hold back the truly important thing. 

***

I chafe a bit at biographical readings of Dickinson's poems, just because I think they can detract from a poem’s resonance in our own lives, but sometimes they can be helpful. This is, perhaps, the case here. We know this poem was given to Sue, so let’s start there.

This poem reads to me like Fr687,

I asked no other thing —
No other — was denied —
I offered Being — for it —
The Mighty Merchant smiled —

Brazil? He twirled a Button —
Without a glance my way —
“But — Madam — is there nothing else
That We can show — Today”?

In this earlier poem, Emily is offered Brazil but, though an entire country, it isn’t the one thing she really wants, which is all of Sue. Emily offers her whole being, but Sue is holding back the one thing Emily really wants, which is, we assume, her whole being in return. In that poem Emily is saying, I wanted the world, but you just offered Brazil. In this one, the stakes are even larger -you may have given me the whole world, but you kept the star for yourself.  

What I have, it says, may be small, but doesn’t it appear larger for being so total? Meanwhile, you, who have so much to give, are keeping the true thing, the star, for yourself. Both poems seem to say, you are being economical, like a merchant, and bartering, but it's all or nothing I want.

I believe this poem is chiding Sue for holding back. Fr687 does this with a cheeky humor, but this one is more to the point -is not my small gift of my whole Being larger for being total than your large gift is for being partial? 

One wonders if receiving poems like this made Sue retreat even further. And yet, don't we all wish for a love this total? Well, we know Sue was there for Emily at the end, and even made her funeral shroud for her, so perhaps Emily got her star after all.

   -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

The Lovers, by Marc Chagall, 1915

Note: This poem, like many of Dickinson's, can be read in more ways than one. For instance, there is a logically viable reading of the poem I found online which has nearly the opposite meaning from the way that I take it. This other reading extols the wisdom of holding something back when you give. It says that to give a world, but to hold back a small part, a star, is the “utmost, is munificence,” and suggests that true generosity is not in giving recklessly, but rather, giving wisely. The entire poem can be parsed in support of this reading, and it’s compelling. It's a terrific reading, and wise, but I don't think that is what Dickinson is saying here. I believe she is saying the opposite. She’s not praising being economical, but, instead, criticizing it. Love with your whole heart she is telling us.

The Veins of other Flowers

The Veins of other Flowers
The Scarlet Flowers are
Till Nature leisure has for Terms
As "Branch," and "Jugular."

We pass, and she abides.
We conjugate Her Skill
While She creates and federates
Without a syllable.


     -Fr798, J811, sheet 21, 1865


This was a tough poem to “get.”

The first stanza makes a very wonky Yoda-like sentence. “The veins of other Flowers the Scarlet Flowers are, 'till Nature leisure has for Terms as “Branch” and “Jugular.”

Let’s start by trying to put that in a more regular sentence form. “The scarlet flowers are like the veins of other flowers, until Nature has leisure for terms such as "branch" and "jugular."

Why would scarlet flowers be like veins of "other Flowers"? Here’s my best guess for what’s going on here. I think "other Flowers" is referring to humans. Dickinson is saying that if we set terms aside, then human veins, such as the jugular, can be likened to branches of scarlet flowers, and, inversely, branches of scarlet flowers can be seen as jugular veins. If we get beyond "terms," then we can more easily see that humans are like flowers, and flowers, human.

Since Dickinson often sent riddle-like poems along with flowers from her garden as gifts to friends (see Fr726 for a brilliant example of this), it made me wonder what flowers might have possibly accompanied this riddle of a poem. I did some research and I found out that Cardinal Flowers could well have been growing in Dickinson's garden. They fit the criteria; they're scarlet and shaped like a branch, look like jugular veins and are the color of blood.

Cardinal flowers, or a stand of jugular veins? 

The next stanza adds a new dimension to this idea. It starts with a pithy and memorable line:

We pass, and she abides.

This line ends, pointedly, with a period, not a dash. In fact this is a rare Dickinson poem in which there are no dashes. 

Dickinson loved this word “abides.” (See Fr654, “Beauty…abides.”) It’s a common theme of Dickinson's poetry, and poetry in general; nature’s permanence versus our impermanence. The idea that nature continues on long after we are gone is a comforting thought.

It’s ironic, though, that we humans, who are just passing through, attempt to control nature through language, through terms and conjugations:

We conjugate Her Skill

I love this line, because conjugating is what we do to verbs. Nature is in flow, in flux, is always "verbing," and to try to conjugate this "Skill" is almost laughable.

While She creates and federates
Without a syllable.

We attempt to make ourselves permanent by giving names to things, and perhaps, even, by writing poems.

Maybe Dickinson is poking a bit of fun at herself here. Syllables are the very building blocks of poetry, but Nature creates and federates (governs) without any need of that.

This poem dovetails beautifully with the last one in the Franklin order, Fr797, which begins with the lines, “The Definition of Beauty is/ That Definition is none—” When we go beyond terms and definitions, it isn’t so difficult to see anew, to see, for instance, the way humans flower and flowers are human, the stuff of life coursing through the veins of both.

     -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Michaelangelo's David exhibits a very prominent jugular vein

The Definition of Beauty is

The Definition of Beauty is
That Definition is none—
Of Heaven, easing Analysis,
Since Heaven and He are one.


   -Fr797, J988, Sheet 61, late 1865

This is a short poem, but there is so much one can say about it.

The first two lines are saying something more than just “beauty cannot be defined.” It’s saying that the definition of beauty is lack of definition. To define anything is to attempt to pin it down, which destroys its true beauty. There’s an irony here, because we appear to be attempting to define this poem, but we'll look later at the ways the poem itself defies any definition.

Can you stay open, like a child, to the beauty in the moment without needing to define it? If you can, that's heaven. But this is radical and perhaps it goes against our very nature. I've thought a lot about why we have the incessant need to think and define. Our brains constantly secrete thought. I'm sure this has something to do, evolutionarily, with survival in the wild. If we are always thinking, always worrying, we have a better chance of staying alive in the wilderness. But at what point does this get in the way of our well being? 

I’ve only ever felt this kind of heavenly beauty in certain rare moments when all thought shuts down and I enter into a trance-like state of sensory bliss. It’s very difficult to describe this state precisely because it's a kind of shutting down of description and one must define to describe. 

But before we head into the mystical, which is where I think Dickinson is going, let's look at this poem philosophically. By removing the definition for what counts as beautiful, we find that everything has the potential to be beautiful. Not because everything is beautiful, necessarily, but because nothing is ruled out by definition. If there’s no fixed standard, then beauty arises in relation, not essence. It’s about how you experience, not what you experience.

So a cracked sidewalk, a withered leaf, a moment of grief, all could be beautiful if you aren't working with a checklist. It’s an anti-aesthetic aesthetic.  

But now I want to try to dig even deeper than the philosophical and enter into the realm of the metaphysical. Bear with me here because I'm trying to get down to something ineffable, and therefore my words are wildly insufficient. 

There seems to be me to be a state of pure being, a place in which true beauty exists simply because of absolute ISNESS.

Defined beauty implies a kind of conditionality: this could be beautiful if… But what Dickinson is reaching for, I believe, is unconditional beauty, beauty as a state of pure presence prior to the judgment implicit in thought.

Let’s slow down and sit inside that. 

If definitions disappear, then beauty doesn’t just become possible in all things, all things become beautiful. Not because we choose to see them that way, but because there’s nothing in the way of their being what they are.

This is what Eastern philosophy might call suchness (Tathātā), or the Christian mystics might call the “cloud of unknowing.” In that space, you don’t see beauty, you are in beauty. You are beauty.

Let’s look at the way the form of this poem echoes its content.

The Definition of Beauty is

That Definition is none—

This formal structure of an equation collapses in on itself. What looks like it’s going to deliver clarity ends up producing a kind of absence. Dickinson’s making a definition that erases itself, which is what the poem is about, subverting definition. She uses the grammar of certainty to create uncertainty, and that reflects her subject.

She does something similar with the dash, which functions here as both a closing of the line and an opening to the next line. It creates a gap where meaning both breaks down and spills forward. This echoes how beauty itself works, something that resists closure.

Dickinson also uses ambiguity in this poem to further this idea. In the lines "Of Heaven, easing Analysis, / Since Heaven and He are one,’ the syntax is ambiguous. "Of Heaven" can modify "Beauty" (Beauty is of Heaven), or it could introduce a new clause, (easing analysis is of Heaven.) Same with “easing Analysis.” Is Heaven easing analysis? Or is the absence of definition what eases analysis? It’s structurally unclear, which underlines the point of the poem. Just as Heaven (and beauty) defy straightforward analysis, these lines defy analysis. They resist parsing the same way their subject resists dissection.

The reader is forced to experience the lines rather than decode them. It's like a divine leak, a trick I'm not sure even Shakespeare could've pulled off so well.

What’s so radical in Dickinson's poem here is that she starts with a linguistic paradox. “The definition of Beauty is / That Definition is none—” But that paradox opens into something beyond thought. The poem performs a shift, from the idea of beauty, to the failure of defining it, to the refusal of analysis, to the merging of Heaven and God, to the unspoken reality behind all appearances.

It’s as if she leads you to the edge of thought, and just as you reach for understanding, lets you fall gently into Presence.

      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Giovanni Bellini's "St. Francis in the desert." The most beautiful painting in the world?

Notes:


1. The opening structure of this poem is used again in Fr988, but "beauty" is replaced with "melody,"

The Definition of Melody – is
That Definition is none –


2. Check Fr654 out for a deeper dive into Fr797, a poem that says much the same thing, but maybe even more beautifully. It's a favorite.

 
Beauty — be not caused — It Is –
Chase it, and it ceases –
Chase it not, and it abides –

Overtake the Creases

In the Meadow — when the Wind
Runs his fingers thro' it –
Deity will see to it
That You never do it –

The Wind begun to knead the Grass –

The Wind begun to knead the Grass –
As Women do a Dough –
He flung a Hand full at the Plain –
A Hand full at the Sky –
The Leaves unhooked
themselves from Trees –
And started all abroad –
The Dust did scoop itself like Hands –
And throw away the Road –
The Wagons quickened on the Street –
The Thunders gossiped low –
The Lightning showed a Yellow Head –
And then a livid Toe –
The Birds put up the Bars to Nests –
The Cattle flung to Barns –
Then came one drop of Giant Rain –
And then, as if the Hands
That held the Dams – had parted hold –
The Waters Wrecked the Sky –
But overlooked my Father's House –
Just Quartering a Tree –


             -Fr796, J824, 1864


There is a later version of this poem in which the storm becomes even fiercer. Here it is.


The Wind begun to rock the Grass
With threatening Tunes and low-
He threw a Menace at the Earth-
A Menace at the Sky.

The Leaves unhooked themselves from Trees-
And started all abroad
The Dust did scoop itself like Hands
And threw away the Road.

The Wagons quickened on the Streets
The Thunder hurried slow-
The Lightning showed a Yellow Beak
And then a livid Claw.

The Birds put up the Bars to Nests-
The Cattle fled to Barns-
There came one drop of Giant Rain
And then as if the Hands

That held the Dams had parted hold
The Waters Wrecked the Sky,
But overlooked my Father's House-
Just quartering a Tree

I see why in the later poem Dickinson got rid of the image of the wind kneading the grass like women knead dough since it’s not a very menacing image and doesn’t really fit with a storm. But I love the idea of the wind kneading the grass and hate to see it go. Sometimes good lines have to go in service to the poem. The new opening lines are pretty good too though. The wind “rocking” the grass with “threatening Tunes” has an anachronistic sense of a heavy metal guitar God.

I also like “The Cattle flung to the barn” in the first poem better than “fled to the barn" in the second. But “fled” carries with it a sense of fear, which, like the double use of the word "menace" adds terror to the poem. Word choices matter.

I love the addition of the Yellow Beak and Livid Claw image to describe lightning. Imagining lightning as a humongous chicken claw is tremendous.

The entire poem, in both versions, is a bravura display of Dickinson’s creative powers. You might even say it is a storm of creativity. The world becomes personified; leaves unhooking themselves from trees, dust scooping itself like Hands, thunder Hurrying “slow,” birds putting up bars on their nests, hands letting dams go, a drop of Giant Rain. It’s both charming and terrifying at once.

If nothing else, this poem gives us new ways of seeing the world. I will likely think of those chicken claws next time I see lightning, and think of the idea of hurrying slow next time I hear thunder. It’s marvelous. But, beyond its fantastical quality, what is this poem saying? At the end of the poem you have a sense of safety amid the storm in “my Father’s House.” Father’s House could be referring to her actual family home, which fits for Dickinson, since she stayed in the safety and comfort of her father's house her whole life. But “My Father’s House” can also be read as a biblical allusion. (John 14:2: “In my Father’s house are many mansions…”)

So what does it mean, then, that the storm “overlooked” the house? A lot depends on this word “overlooked.” Overlooked can mean “ignored" or "bypassed" which is how we generally take it today, or it can mean “looked over,” or "surveyed," which was a more common usage in Dickinson’s day. The difference between the two is huge in terms of the meaning of this poem.

If we take the first meaning, that the storm bypassed the house, it suggests that even in the midst of overwhelming forces, there may be moments of mercy, or meaning, beyond comprehension. The storm is not governed solely by "chance,” but pointedly “overlooked my Father’s House.” That implies something more deliberate than accidental. Even though the storm quarters a tree nearby, the house is spared.
Dickinson is at least entertaining the idea that there is more than randomness in the universe and that some forces may act with purpose, even if inscrutable, and that moments of survival or sparing might not be purely chance.

BUT, if we take “overlooked” to mean “surveyed,” then the storm passed by not because of divine protection, but because of the house’s strength. This shifts the emphasis from grace (the storm chose to spare the house) to preparedness (the house withstood the storm through its own merit).

So which is it? Is there an external force deciding who is spared, or is it an internal resilience? Either way, perhaps Dickinson's deeper point here is that even under threat from overwhelming forces, something grounded, whether physically, emotionally, or spiritually, might hold.

     -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

chicken claw lightning