Apology for Her

Apology for Her
Be rendered by the Bee —
Herself, without a Parliament
Apology for Me.


     -F959, J852, 1865

The poem enacts the very problem it raises: an apology is offered, but we can’t quite determine who has given it, or whether it is even necessary. 

My take on the poem was inspired by a comment from Moon on the poem preceding this one, F958, which featured a quote by Dickinson: 'To "thank" you - shames my thought!'

If thanking someone can shame one's thought, then so, perhaps, can apologizing.

Apology for Her
Be rendered by the Bee —

The Bee will render her own apology. This implies to me that the Bee needs no apology. The Bee pollinates and the Bee stings. That’s just what the Bee does. 

And likewise the Bee's apology (or lack of one) will suffice for an apology from the poet.

 Herself, without a Parliament

Apology for me.

The poem offers an apology while questioning the grounds on which one might be required. Perhaps it was originally sent with a flower, an offering of beauty, for which the Bee, especially, need not apologize. 

     -/)dam Wade I)eGraff

P.S. I made a fortuitous discovery while doing a Google search for "parliament bee." 

There is a famous allegorical poem called The Parliament of the Bees. This must be what Dickinson is alluding to in her poem. 

From Britannica.com: "John Day was an Elizabethan dramatist whose verse allegory The Parliament of Bees was published posthumously in 1641 and probably written near the end of his life. This exquisite masque, which is actually a series of pastoral eclogues, is about “the doings, the births, the wars, the wooings” of bees. The bees hold a parliament under Prorex, the “Master Bee,” and grievances are presented against the bumblebee, the wasp, the drone, and other insects whom the author uses to represent various human types. The satirical allegory ends with a royal progress of the fairy king Oberon, who dispenses justice among the bees."

An excerpt from Day's poem that is perhaps relevant to Dickinson's:  

"Go go idle drone,

Thou enviest bees with stings

Because thine is gone.

This Bee sucks honey from the bloomes of sin:

Bee't nere so ranke or foule, he crams it in.

Most of the timber that his state repairs

He hew's out o'the bones of foundred players :

They feed on Poets braines, he eats their breath.

Die. Most strange conception !—life begot in Death."

          

P.P.S. I would love to hear your reading of this poem.

An Emily Dickinson Halloween mystery

I stumbled across this fantastic halloween mystery from 20 years ago in the Lawrence Journal-World. Below is the transcript. Italics mine. I also added some comments in brackets.

'Workers dig up Dickinson family mystery

For Emily Dickinson, death was never too far from the imagination. The topic fueled her writing, making for some of the most memorable lyrics in American poetry.

Now, death is posing a bit of a puzzle for the caretakers of her homestead.

[death is posing a bit of a puzzle? That's almost a Dickinson line.]

While making improvements to the grounds of the Emily Dickinson Museum on Halloween, workers unearthed the gravestone of one of the poet’s relatives.

[On Halloween? And not just any relative's gravestone was found, but Susan's father's.]

But exactly what Gen. Thomas Gilbert’s headstone was doing under 18 inches of dirt in Dickinson’s front yard has some experts stumped – especially knowing that his remains are buried in a nearby cemetery with a more ornate grave marker.

“What do you do with a used gravestone?” asked Jane Wald, the museum’s executive director. “It might have been used as a step or used to cover a hole in the ground. We don’t know exactly why it was placed there.”

["It might have been used as a step"? Metaphor alert.]

To be sure, more is known about Gilbert than the simple marble slab that bears his name and date of death. An innkeeper, merchant, lawmaker and member of the Massachusetts militia who lived in Greenfield, Gilbert had seven children and outlived his wife. But when he died a pauper in 1841, his youngest daughter, Susan, moved to Amherst to live with an older sister.

[If you love Emily, you eventually grow to love Susan too. Sue was, by all reports, a wonder. She was lauded by people like Emerson and Frances Hodgson Burnett. Samuel Bowles called her the best hostess and talker on the East Coast. So who was her father? We have quite a bit of information here. He kept an inn. He was a merchant. (Wonder what he sold?) He helped make laws. He was a general of a militia. Sounds like quite a guy. And yet, he died a pauper. Why? We get a possible clue later in the article.]

That’s where she met Dickinson, when both girls were 14. Their lifelong friendship deepened in 1856, when Emily’s brother, Austin, married Susan.

To entice the newlyweds into staying in Amherst, Austin and Emily’s father built them a house next to the Dickinson homestead.

Susan, who long endured taunts and barbs from Amherst residents who considered her father to be a drunk because he owned a tavern, may have wanted to put her detractors in place by moving her father’s grave from Greenfield to Amherst.

[What does it mean he was considered to be a drunk because one owned a tavern? Was it seen as disgraceful to own a tavern? Where does this info come from? Did the reporter take this formulation from one of Susan's letters? Was this Susan's way of exonerating her father? Was she in denial about the alcoholism?]

Jane Wald, executive director of the Emily Dickinson Museum 

When Gilbert and his wife were reburied close to the Dickinson homestead in West Cemetery, their plot was adorned with a new marker. The gravestone dug up earlier this week was likely the original stone from Gilbert’s Greenfield grave, Wald suspects.

[Was it common to dig up remains and move them to a new location? I assume this is done to have the beloved body closer to one? It seems like an awful lot of work, not to mention the cost of a new plot and gravestone. Susan must've really loved her father.]

“In that regard, it makes sense for this grave marker to be found around here,” she said.

The marker was found by workers digging a trench to improve water drainage. When their excavation equipment hit slabs of stone, they started digging by hand.

Chunks of marble – some with letters or numbers carved in them – started surfacing. By the time they were done, 15 pieces were unearthed and arranged like an oversized jigsaw puzzle. A few gaps in the slab remain, but the marker clearly reads “Gen. Tho. Gilbert. Died Dec. 23, 1841.” The number 48, his age when he died, rests at the bottom.

[Susan was 11 when her father died, a tender age to lose a father.]

Wald guesses the gravestone went underground as one piece, but shattered under pressure of time and landscaping equipment that’s been rolling over the homestead grounds during the past few years.

Emily Dickinson, who wrote most of her hundreds of poems about nature, love, life and death in her second-floor bedroom, died in 1886. The last surviving member of the Dickinson family was Austin and Susan’s daughter, Martha, who sold the homestead in 1916.

It was purchased in 1965 by Amherst College and opened by the school as a museum in 2003.

Other maintenance and repair work has unearthed pieces of ceramics, a mouth harp, coins and a brick gutter.

[a mouth harp!]

“There’s always a great deal of potential for archaeological finds at a site like this,” Wald said.'

[Thus ends the article. It's a Halloween mystery, in which the ghost of the father beloved by the woman beloved by Emily Dickinson emerges from puzzle pieces of a tombstone buried, like a body, for some unknown reason, in Emily's yard.]

   -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Absent Place — an April Day —

Absent Place — an April Day —
Daffodils a-blow
Homesick curiosity
To the Souls that snow —

Drift may block within it
Deeper than without —
Daffodil delight but
Him it duplicate —


     -F958, J927, 1865

This poem throws you into a seasonal confusion from the first line. If you read just that line by itself it seems to say that an April Day is an absent place. In other words, it is an April Day devoid of the feeling of spring. But then you read the rest of the poem and the syntax unravels itself until you realize that there is a snow-drift outside. It is not an absent spring, but winter time and April itself is "Absent." This confusion is in keeping with the poem. What does outside weather matter when the weather inside is inclement? It's all an "Absent Place" to souls that snow.

The last two lines of the poem are tricky.

Daffodil delight but
Him it duplicate —

David Preest reads these lines as, "to the man with a snowdrift on his mind in addition to the snow-drift outside, the daffodils, when they come, are a double delight." But the lack of a comma (or dash) after "delight" leads me to read this differently.  "Daffodil delight but (only) him (that) it duplicate." In other words, just as the snow-drift without is duplicated within, the daffodil must be duplicated within as well for it to be delightful. 

This takes us back to the confusion of the first line. Even if we are in April, the daffodils will not delight if the snow-drift within buries them under. Inner weather supersedes outer weather. 

In Preest's reading these last two lines are about the coming relief of spring, but the sense I get from this poem is more of an Absent Place within that is worsened by being misaligned with spring. The self out of alignment with the season is a common theme in Dickinson. (See F686 for one such example.)

This begs the question as to why there is a snow-drift within. An "Absent Place" suggests someone who is absent. Who is absent? This question leads to another possible reading of the final lines. The Him doesn't refer to the subject, but to the object of the poem. The daffodils duplicate Him. It is "Him" that is absent. 

Daffodil delight but
Him it duplicate —

Who the absent "Him" might be for Dickinson is a question which resounds through many a Dickinson poem. But for us it means, at core, a loss of connection.

***

One striking thing about this poem is that “snow-drift” can be read as a compound word split between two stanzas, as if the snow of the first stanza has drifted across the absent space between the stanzas into the drift of the second stanza. 

To the Souls that snow —

Drift may block within it

The way this enters into my mind as I read it is, "To the Souls that snow, snow-drift may block within it." The sense is that April daffodils are blocked for souls that snow. 

     -/)dam Wade l)eGraff