Yet sanctifies the Mind—
With fair association—
Afar upon the Wind
A Bird to overhear
Delight without a Cause—
Arrestless as invisible—
A matter of the Skies.
-Fr873, J774, 1864
The first stanza is relatively easy to follow, especially if you lay it out in prose:
The sound of a faraway bird, borne by the wind, has a lonesome glee to it, and this is a beautiful metaphor (“fair association”) for our own situation and sanctifies the mind.
It is a lonesome Glee—
Yet sanctifies the Mind—
With fair association—
Afar upon the Wind
A Bird to overhear
In the next line we are presented with delight. Whether this delight belongs to the bird or the listener is ambiguous.
Delight without a Cause—
What is this delight without cause? Is the bird singing only for itself? What is the reason for it to cause delight? It is like the Rhodora that Emerson speaks of that grows where no one can see it.
The Rhodora
In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals fallen in the pool
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask; I never knew;
But in my simple ignorance suppose
The self-same power that brought me there, brought you.
This poem came out in a collected in 1847 and most assuredly Dickinson read it. Both of them ponder delight without a cause. Emerson puts it, "Then beauty is its own excuse for being."
But Dickinson’s version gives pause. The faraway song of the bird heard through the wind is seemingly unattainable, being far away, overhead, an invisible matter “of the skies.”
Arrestless as invisible—
A matter of the Skies.
“Arrestless” is both comforting and troubling. The beauty of nature’s song doesn't stop, is arrestless, and transcends our life-time, but the word hints at our own restlessness, our inability to rest easily.
I am also reminded of Keats’ "Ode to a Nightingale” here, a poem that Dickinson would have known well.
Here is a stanza of that great poem:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Emily's poem, too, has a forlorn sense of the impossible love, but it is looking, and listening, skyward, where the mind becomes sanctified, recognizing what it means to be grounded, but at the same time offering a way to ascend, through the beauty of the poem, into those same skies, in lonesome glee, a delight without cause.
In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals fallen in the pool
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask; I never knew;
But in my simple ignorance suppose
The self-same power that brought me there, brought you.
This poem came out in a collected in 1847 and most assuredly Dickinson read it. Both of them ponder delight without a cause. Emerson puts it, "Then beauty is its own excuse for being."
But Dickinson’s version gives pause. The faraway song of the bird heard through the wind is seemingly unattainable, being far away, overhead, an invisible matter “of the skies.”
Arrestless as invisible—
A matter of the Skies.
“Arrestless” is both comforting and troubling. The beauty of nature’s song doesn't stop, is arrestless, and transcends our life-time, but the word hints at our own restlessness, our inability to rest easily.
I am also reminded of Keats’ "Ode to a Nightingale” here, a poem that Dickinson would have known well.
Here is a stanza of that great poem:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Emily's poem, too, has a forlorn sense of the impossible love, but it is looking, and listening, skyward, where the mind becomes sanctified, recognizing what it means to be grounded, but at the same time offering a way to ascend, through the beauty of the poem, into those same skies, in lonesome glee, a delight without cause.
-/)dam Wade DeGraff
Svetlana Melik-Nubarova, Birds, 2019
PS. That phrase "lonesome glee" reminds me of the phrase "anonymous delight" in Fr784. There's this idea that delight is anonymous and has an inherent loneliness to it which seems to run through Dickinson.
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