Purple is – fashionable twice –

Purple is – fashionable twice –
This season of the year,
And when a soul perceives itself
To be an Emperor.

     -Fr896, J980, 1865

My first question is, what season of the year is fashionably purple? Spring? Autumn?

My guess is that it is spring. This poem is saying that purple is naturally fashionable twice, first in the spring, and then again when the soul perceives that it is an Emperor. 

Autumn could make sense too though. There is a tradition of reading the late year as a kind of earned sovereignty. August has a deeper purple: wine-dark harvest tones. 

But “Fashionable” doesn’t sound like autumn to me. Fall tends to carry a sense of august inevitability, not trendiness. “Fashionable” feels lighter, as if the purple is in vogue, not hard-won.

It also makes sense that this season would be spring because it is traditionally associated with rebirth, which aligns with that sudden sense of inner grandeur Dickinson is describing.

When the early purple flowers are blooming the soul suddenly feels grand as “an Emperor."

And maybe Dickinson is also letting us know that this feeling won't last forever. Normally one thinks of the soul as being beyond the the temporary. But here, it is reversed; feeling and soul are inextricably intertwined.

After all, Dickinson doesn’t say the soul is an emperor, only that it feels like one. It perceives itself so.  This feeling is seasonal and fashionable (temporary and subject to change) and self-perceived (possibly illusory).

Maybe the purple feeling of the soul is only temporary, and self-perceived, but it's still awesome. And just like Spring, it's bound to come around again. For a season at least the soul rules. 

     
    -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

My neighbor Quinn O'Sullivan took this video of spring purple in Sunnyside for Prowling Bee. 

The background song "Turned to Dust" is by Bonnie Prince Billy and Ronnie Bowman

Notes

1. David Preest agrees Dickinson must be talking about Spring: 

"'This season of the year’ is presumably spring. When she described the coming of spring in poem 140 Emily wrote that a ‘Tyrian light’ the village fills, ancient Tyre being famous for its purple dye. She also said in the same poem that spring was the season of ‘a purple finger [of the violet] on the slope.’"

2. I found a delightful paper on the subject, a deep dive the different moods and meanings of purple in Dickinson’s poems. 

3. From the above article I learned that Dickinson refers to purple in her poems more than any other color. It’s mentioned in 54 of her poems. That would make a good little book of poems if anyone's got the time and inclination. It would look fantastic too, with photos fitting every poem in all shades of purple.