Soil of Flint, if steady tilled—

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


-Fr862, J681, Fascicle 38, 1864


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

"seed of palm fructified in sand"

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

On the Bleakness of my Lot

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

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

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