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 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.
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.’
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
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
No comments:
Post a Comment