Well, a slew of fairly minor activities kept me away from this for a week. And I was only part way through my accounts of Day Two. That doesn't bode well. I think I will have to reformat my approach, something I had already anticipated. Let me finish Day Two and see what happens next.
#36 "Snow Flakes"
This might be the only one of her poems formatted like this. I wonder if she considered this a title? Could it be the only titled Dickinson poem? She loves for natural things to wear "slippers". The daintiness of this brings to mind something that's been preoccupying my mind as I read Dickinson. There is a cloying side to her work. Sometimes this is apparent when she falls into cliche, but at other times it seems to spring from some genuinely prudish (or is it girlish?) part of herself. I'll have to think about this more. I am curious to see whether this evolves into something, whether it's something she leaves behind, or whether it simply lives alongside (and possibly even informs) the fiercely imaginative, independent side of her writing.
#37 "Before the ice is in the pools--"
This is a poem that I find exciting because she really works the DELAY: the subject doesn't appear until line 7 and I didn't even realize that "Wonder upon wonder" was the subject at first because it sounds like an exclamation of surprise, like "My goodness" or "Will wonders never cease". But of course Wonder must be what will arrive to her (also this is an odd use of preposition after arrive, but may merely be a common 19th century usage--anyone know?). Is she speaking about "Wonder" as an abstract idea or is the wonder a specific one, some event that will happen or "arrive" before winter? The sense of time is very strange in this poem, because the vantage point looks forward and back at once: by locating us in winter, she forces us to look back with the word "before", and yet she is describing something that "will arrive", something that forces us to look forward. I hear echoes of looking forward to something ahead in "What is only walking/Just a bridge away".
Just as we've been gratified by a subject at the end of the second stanza, she throws us off the scent again with "What we touch the hems of/On a summer's day--". All these relative pronouns pop up in stanzas three and four: two "whats" and a "that which"! Do these refer to Wonder? Is wonder what we touch the hems of on a summer's day? I certainly like that image. However the second half of this poem seems broken off from the first half, adrift. This probably has to do with my total bafflement over the last two lines, which I need help with.
It seems like there's something that "we" (she cozies up to the reader again!) experience in stanza 3, though perhaps only peripherally, because it's just a bridge away and we can only touch the hem of it (something we are subject to? Like a peasant touching or kissing the hem of a royal robe? Or something we desire that is slipping away, like a lover only catching the hem of a dress?). Then we get "That which sings so--speaks so--When there's no one here--" At first I thought this was a denial of the power of subjective experience, i.e. these things in the world still have a voice whether or not we are here to experience them. But as I re-examine, the split between "sing" and "speak" seems to indicate that the human presence, the presence of a receptive mind, makes these things sing--something loftier than speaking for Dickinson I imagine. This line "when there's no one here" reminds me of a wonderful Philip Larkin quote about some of his own poetry. He said: "I am always thrilled by the thought of what places look like when I am not there." Imagination not observation is the power of the poet.
I don't know what to do with the last two lines of this poem because I can't even make sense of the grammar at end "answer me to wear?" And how does this relate to the rest of this poem? I like a lot of this poem, but the end is killing me.
#38 "By such and such an offering"
I like her mocking generalizations... it doesn't add up to much. I bet you would be hard pressed to find someone else (except perhaps Dickens) to write "To Mr. So and So" in a 19th century poem.
#39 "It did not surprise me--"
There are some good things happening in this poem, even if I'm not sure the poem's overall effect is strong. First of all that is a good first line, especially when the decisiveness of the first line is followed up by the faltering second line "So I said--or thought--" (we get the revising voice, clarifying, specifying). Then we get what did not surprise her: the inevitability of the fledgling leaving the nest to search for something greater, "broader forests" and "gayer boughs". And then she writes the deeply ironic and darkly funny: "Breathe in Ear more modern/God's old fashioned vows--". Suddenly the bird takes on human qualities, a technique she uses to prepare us for transferring her ideas about the bird back onto herself: "This was but a Birdling--/What and if it be/One within my bosom/Had departed me?" This question comes across as less absurd because she has already humanized the bird. But knowing the little I do know about Dickinson, that she never moved out of her family home, that (this needs to be fact checked) she only took one trip in her life outside of the immediate area around Amherst (to Washington D.C.), the personal irony is knocking hard in this poem. Dickinson is not surprised to see the bird (a she) leave the nest in search of something greater. There is an understated mockery of the idealism of the bird in lines 7 & 8. Changing location does not change the "old fashioned" self that you present to the world. Dickinson herself will live out the opposite: a life of staid location in which she speaks in a modern, unique voice.
#40 "When I count the seeds"
Another poem in which she uses subordination to delay--to underwhelming effect for me.
#41 "I robbed the Woods--"
I love the strangeness of this line--this poem is charming but never goes anywhere significant. It shows her strength at re-framing an action (picking plants) with metaphor.
#42 "A Day! Help ! Help! Another Day!"
I know how you feel, Emily! This is Dickinson at her funniest. I love her when she's funny.
#43 "Could live--did live--"
The power of verbs and verb tenses at the beginning of this poem is remarkable. Verb tense seems to have so much power in many of Dickinson's poems. I don't know exactly why I say that... maybe it's not true. I will investigate tense more. I certainly know that she writes stanzas (not in this poem) that end in past passive participles that seem like past tense verbs until you keep reading into the next stanza. Temporal shifts overwhelm her poems at times. When I have read more, I will try to write something more thought out on this.
#44 "If she had been the Mistletoe"
Another weirdly quaint sounding one that might have sexual undertones?
#45 "There's something quieter than sleep"
Okay... this is the first funeral poem. There will be many iterations of this theme. Here she is actually in the room with a dead body (though knowing Dickinson that "inner room" could doubly allude to the inner self). But the dead boy here is "IT"! She does not see the body as the former person--it is a thing. There is something chilling in her phrase "idle hand"--it shows the strangeness of her perception because it implies that the hand could be something other than idle. I do love the mourning in the middle of the poem, not for the dead, but for her own lack of understanding: "It has a simple gravity I do not understand!" What a great phrase: "simple gravity": the seriousness of death doubles with the dead weight of the corpse. Also the phrase "simple gravity" suggests the contradictory nature of death: it is common and natural yet painfully unique to those who love the dead. The fact that Dickinson writes this indicates that she does, in fact, understand. I almost wonder if this is a poem in which she is trying to capture her younger self experiencing death--the speaker seems to believe in fairies. Of course her older, sophisticated voice is laid over this naive, confused, child's experience. No child would say "prone to periphrasis"... and this is the phrase that gets to the heart of the style of this poem--it is at once frankly descriptive and yet manages to avoid invoking its subject until the second line of the last stanza when the word "dead" shows up. And this in not an old dead person, but perhaps another child or young person "Early dead". But she cannot bear to speak of death and so has to resort to metaphor. Metaphor might be a form of avoidance or euphemism in this poem, but it emanates from an innate sensibility: she is "prone to periphrasis".
#46 "I keep my pledge"
Ah the Bobolink--it will show up a lot. It's a blackbird that is only found in North (and parts of South) America. It is all black but has a white or creamy nape that sometimes extends to its back feathers. The bobolink also shows up in Pale Fire...
#47 "Heart! We will forget him!"
The direct address of the heart...
#48 "Once more, my now bewildered Dove"
I find this cloying for example. "Courage! My brave Columba!" makes me sort of want to strike her.
#49 "I never lost as much but twice"
She is faithful to her dichotomies. She already created the Burglar/Banker split in poem #22 though it was Burglar/Broker there. Once she finds a pairing suitable, she is comfortable using it over and over again. Like early Yeats, she creates her own world of symbols through (over)use.
#50 "I haven't told my garden yet"
Again a poem which avoids invoking death--almost superstitiously, as if uttering the idea would bring death upon her. This poem is precious to be sure, but somehow I find it endearing here, where I found it annoying in #48. Perhaps because I believe that this woman would go out into her garden and talk to it, and I like me a little bit of crazy!
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Staying afloat...
I have stayed on top of reading my 25 poems a day (today I am up to #100). I just haven't had time to post my thoughts and notes on here... I will catch up with that tomorrow... promise.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Day Two, Part One--June 14th (26-35)
So I'm wondering if this format is useful. Basically I'm writing down my thoughts off the top of my head--occasionally I will look up a word or a type of bird or flower, but I am NOT doing any Dickinson research yet and I am not reading other people's commentaries on these poems. I think that there's something appealing about first reactions to poems, and certainly one reason for doing this was that I have read SO FEW of her poems (at least proportionally). I think that I will need to take some days off in here, because I already feel that I can't sustain this pace of reading AND writing notes all summer. Perhaps I should make Saturdays my Dickinson Sabbath.
#26 "It's all I have to bring today"
An accumulation of sound and image drives this poem.
#27 "Morns like these--we parted"
Another female bird companion for Dickinson! They often seem like "bosom companions" to use a horrifying 19th century-ism. I would say they almost seem to be lovers, but I don't think it's quite so strong. It seems to be easy for her to identify and almost become the animals and plants around her. It also seems that, symmetrically, she is quick to endow these birds and plants with human qualities. I guess I'm wondering if she really does see the human in the non-human or if it's a very concerted poetic act of hers; how much work does she have to do to make these transformations? Does that make sense? The linnet, by the way, is a bird in the finch family. Of course the linnet is more famous for flapping around on Yeats' "Lake Isle of Innisfree".
#28 "So has a Daisy vanished"
"Oozed"--my my my!
#29 "If those I loved were lost"
I wonder who Philip is--I'll have to find out.
#30 "Adrift! A little boat adrift!"
Oh god. Here go the angels exalting things: religious maudlin. On a separate note, this is a poem of split perspective. Already contradiction and paradox are emerging as heavy preoccupations of hers. This isn't a particularly fine example, so more on that later. I do love the first line of this poem. I also like that she is not afraid of guttural Nordic language like ooze and gurgle.
#31 "Summer for thee, grant I may be"
Nothing really to say.
#32 "When Roses cease to bloom, Sir"
Another short, skipping lyric. Not very interesting to me.
#33 "If recollecting were forgetting"
I always like the playful side of Dickinson. This is a better example of the paradoxical ideas that she is setting up in some poems. She loves playing opposites off of one another. However this poem is more a stylish use of opposites than a real examination of the power of contradiction.
#34 "Garlands for Queens, may be--"
Whatever. Leave that one in the recycling bin, Emily.
#35 "Nobody knows this little Rose--"
She does seem to be concerned already (look at #28) with the ease with which death takes place. It is ordinary. Thus far she has kept it at a distance from the human body though and transposed death onto flowers. Of course the flowers have been her sisters and she claimed to be a rose, so we know that she IS talking about dying, even about her own death possibly, but she hasn't yet directly addressed her own mortality. Death still takes place outside of her own body and mind so far.
#26 "It's all I have to bring today"
An accumulation of sound and image drives this poem.
#27 "Morns like these--we parted"
Another female bird companion for Dickinson! They often seem like "bosom companions" to use a horrifying 19th century-ism. I would say they almost seem to be lovers, but I don't think it's quite so strong. It seems to be easy for her to identify and almost become the animals and plants around her. It also seems that, symmetrically, she is quick to endow these birds and plants with human qualities. I guess I'm wondering if she really does see the human in the non-human or if it's a very concerted poetic act of hers; how much work does she have to do to make these transformations? Does that make sense? The linnet, by the way, is a bird in the finch family. Of course the linnet is more famous for flapping around on Yeats' "Lake Isle of Innisfree".
#28 "So has a Daisy vanished"
"Oozed"--my my my!
#29 "If those I loved were lost"
I wonder who Philip is--I'll have to find out.
#30 "Adrift! A little boat adrift!"
Oh god. Here go the angels exalting things: religious maudlin. On a separate note, this is a poem of split perspective. Already contradiction and paradox are emerging as heavy preoccupations of hers. This isn't a particularly fine example, so more on that later. I do love the first line of this poem. I also like that she is not afraid of guttural Nordic language like ooze and gurgle.
#31 "Summer for thee, grant I may be"
Nothing really to say.
#32 "When Roses cease to bloom, Sir"
Another short, skipping lyric. Not very interesting to me.
#33 "If recollecting were forgetting"
I always like the playful side of Dickinson. This is a better example of the paradoxical ideas that she is setting up in some poems. She loves playing opposites off of one another. However this poem is more a stylish use of opposites than a real examination of the power of contradiction.
#34 "Garlands for Queens, may be--"
Whatever. Leave that one in the recycling bin, Emily.
#35 "Nobody knows this little Rose--"
She does seem to be concerned already (look at #28) with the ease with which death takes place. It is ordinary. Thus far she has kept it at a distance from the human body though and transposed death onto flowers. Of course the flowers have been her sisters and she claimed to be a rose, so we know that she IS talking about dying, even about her own death possibly, but she hasn't yet directly addressed her own mortality. Death still takes place outside of her own body and mind so far.
Day One--June 13th (15-25)
Sorry to be posting the second half of day one a day late! This is exhausting. I probably can't comment on every poem and yet that seems like part of the point of the project, no? Really I read about 40 poems yesterday, so I only have 10 more to read today. Anyway. Here are some of the notes I took on the remaining poems 15-25 from yesterday... then I will start in on 26-50 in my next post. My friend Adam asked if I could post the poems along with the notes. I don't really have the time to type them all up, but I will give the first line of the poem. You should be able to find them via index in your own collections or online. I also
#15 "The Guest is gold and crimson"
I have little to say. Color, of course, is a vivid part of her world view. A lapwing is apparently just another term for the subfamily of birds that include plovers and dotterels, which are all medium to small wading birds. So the Lark's pure territory is the sky while the Lapwing's is the ocean shore.
#16 "I would distil a cup"
Nothing to say here.
#17 "Baffled for just a day or two--"
Where's the subject of the first stanza? I assume it's supposed to be an inferred "I" and she's not using an imperative with "Encounter". This is just the beginning of the grammatical pitfalls... It's strange that she starts with all of these past passive participles and yet they don't modify any word in the poem. It makes me think of those mood qualifiers for responses on Huffington post... Are these emotions coming from her? Is she imagining them in the "unexpected Maid" (which I take to be a bird). Am I really offbase here? You see, with this project, I am not reading these poems as carefully as I might, so these thoughts are going to be full of misreadings. Some of the poems really call me back and force me to struggle through them. This isn't one of those poems. Pass.
#18 "The Gentian weaves her fringes--"
All the plants and animals are female in these early Dickinson poems. She seems preoccupied with the idea of sisterhood as a form of communion with these animals and flowers.
#19 "A sepal, petal, and a thorn"
She speaks as the flower: "And I'm a Rose!" What a funny last line--very childish! Communion allows for personal transformation?
#20 "Distrustful of the Gentian"
I am going to have to come back and editorialize here. There's something happening that interests me in this poem, but maybe by the time I make sense of it, I will simply realize that I am confused and that it's not a very worthwhile poem after all.
#21 "We lose--because we win--"
Epigrammatic. She clearly understands how gambling works.
#22 "All these my banners be."
This poem is all over the place. She interrupts the action of gardening for these epigrammatic lines "the Burglar... cheat." Interesting that the word chancel (which seems to be an architectural term for part of the church) comes from the French word for lattice. She is growing flowers, so I wonder if she means it more in that sense of the word? I am confused by "all the plain/Today." She does more conspiratorial talk in this poem "You and I the secret/Of the Crocus know--"
#23 "I had a guinea golden--"
Unlike #22, this one is very clearly structured. Dickinson is fond of making lists and instructing by example; here the lists are longer: 8 line stanzas. In a way the basic structure of this poem is very much a model for Bishop's "One Art", isn't it? The speaker loses things, first a clearly material thing--a coin; second an animal, a wild one, something that cannot be properly "owned" or possessed, but something which we can nevertheless conceive of the speaker (especially Dickinson) thinking of as hers; finally a star, something far too distant or massive to be either owned or lost. I think of the keys, houses, and finally continents in "One Art". Of course Bishop's poem has a stronger and more personal finish and is a MUCH better poem. The ending of Dickinson's poem and its strange moralistic tone is a bit baffling to me. What are other good poems about losing things?
#24 "There is a morn by men unseen--"
This seems to fit into the series of mysterious sisterhood poems she is so keen on in many of these 1858 poems. This feels like a poem of initiation, one that alludes to the spring as an ancient cult mystery. It makes me want to look back at plays like Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and Euripides' The Bacchae.
#25 "She slept beneath a tree--"
What do you think the she is? It's not a person. The first few times I read this poem I imagined that she was a cardinal who, startled, takes flight at the end of the poem. But the sleeping beneath a tree convinces me that it's a flower. The suddenness at the end ("And see!") certainly reminds me of the ending of poem #19, which is about a rose. But why would a flower respond to a foot: "She recognized the foot...". [Okay-- aggravated by the mystery of this I briefly looked online and one confused reader had asked the same question and the sole response on that site was that it was a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. I like that idea. Two other sites seemed to indicate (with no accounting for why) that the poem was about a tulip. How it comes across obviously as a tulip is beyond me. I will have to research this further.]
#15 "The Guest is gold and crimson"
I have little to say. Color, of course, is a vivid part of her world view. A lapwing is apparently just another term for the subfamily of birds that include plovers and dotterels, which are all medium to small wading birds. So the Lark's pure territory is the sky while the Lapwing's is the ocean shore.
#16 "I would distil a cup"
Nothing to say here.
#17 "Baffled for just a day or two--"
Where's the subject of the first stanza? I assume it's supposed to be an inferred "I" and she's not using an imperative with "Encounter". This is just the beginning of the grammatical pitfalls... It's strange that she starts with all of these past passive participles and yet they don't modify any word in the poem. It makes me think of those mood qualifiers for responses on Huffington post... Are these emotions coming from her? Is she imagining them in the "unexpected Maid" (which I take to be a bird). Am I really offbase here? You see, with this project, I am not reading these poems as carefully as I might, so these thoughts are going to be full of misreadings. Some of the poems really call me back and force me to struggle through them. This isn't one of those poems. Pass.
#18 "The Gentian weaves her fringes--"
All the plants and animals are female in these early Dickinson poems. She seems preoccupied with the idea of sisterhood as a form of communion with these animals and flowers.
#19 "A sepal, petal, and a thorn"
She speaks as the flower: "And I'm a Rose!" What a funny last line--very childish! Communion allows for personal transformation?
#20 "Distrustful of the Gentian"
I am going to have to come back and editorialize here. There's something happening that interests me in this poem, but maybe by the time I make sense of it, I will simply realize that I am confused and that it's not a very worthwhile poem after all.
#21 "We lose--because we win--"
Epigrammatic. She clearly understands how gambling works.
#22 "All these my banners be."
This poem is all over the place. She interrupts the action of gardening for these epigrammatic lines "the Burglar... cheat." Interesting that the word chancel (which seems to be an architectural term for part of the church) comes from the French word for lattice. She is growing flowers, so I wonder if she means it more in that sense of the word? I am confused by "all the plain/Today." She does more conspiratorial talk in this poem "You and I the secret/Of the Crocus know--"
#23 "I had a guinea golden--"
Unlike #22, this one is very clearly structured. Dickinson is fond of making lists and instructing by example; here the lists are longer: 8 line stanzas. In a way the basic structure of this poem is very much a model for Bishop's "One Art", isn't it? The speaker loses things, first a clearly material thing--a coin; second an animal, a wild one, something that cannot be properly "owned" or possessed, but something which we can nevertheless conceive of the speaker (especially Dickinson) thinking of as hers; finally a star, something far too distant or massive to be either owned or lost. I think of the keys, houses, and finally continents in "One Art". Of course Bishop's poem has a stronger and more personal finish and is a MUCH better poem. The ending of Dickinson's poem and its strange moralistic tone is a bit baffling to me. What are other good poems about losing things?
#24 "There is a morn by men unseen--"
This seems to fit into the series of mysterious sisterhood poems she is so keen on in many of these 1858 poems. This feels like a poem of initiation, one that alludes to the spring as an ancient cult mystery. It makes me want to look back at plays like Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and Euripides' The Bacchae.
#25 "She slept beneath a tree--"
What do you think the she is? It's not a person. The first few times I read this poem I imagined that she was a cardinal who, startled, takes flight at the end of the poem. But the sleeping beneath a tree convinces me that it's a flower. The suddenness at the end ("And see!") certainly reminds me of the ending of poem #19, which is about a rose. But why would a flower respond to a foot: "She recognized the foot...". [Okay-- aggravated by the mystery of this I briefly looked online and one confused reader had asked the same question and the sole response on that site was that it was a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. I like that idea. Two other sites seemed to indicate (with no accounting for why) that the poem was about a tulip. How it comes across obviously as a tulip is beyond me. I will have to research this further.]
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Day One--June 13th (1-14)
Started by reading the first 20 poems in Thomas H. Johnson's edition of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. I only know a little bit of Dickinson and have encountered snippets here and there about her, especially since I went to Amherst College. Having just returned from my 10 year reunion, I've decided to spend some time getting more familiar with her. After all I walked past her house to get to class every day sophomore year when I lived in Marsh House.
Thoughts:
#1 "Awake ye muses nine, sing me a strain divine"
Well there are some Dickinson-like signs in here... "The worm doth woo the mortal" and "Thou are a human solo, a being cold, and lone". Poor thing wrote this during Valentine's week in 1850. I remember reading a heartbreaking letter from her to her brother Austin when she was at Mount Holyoke in which she describes watching all the other girls open Valentines and how she has none to open. I believe she even talks about wishing that a certain friend of Austin's would have sent her one. Glad I'm not that age any more.
#2 "There is another sky"
Creeeeeeeeeeeeeepy. Emily wants her brother to do her? This is a pretty naughty poem, no? And the bee has arrived! "I hear the bright bee hum".
#3 "Sic transit gloria mundi"
I'm bored.
#4 "On this wondrous sea"
ETERNITY!--I will try to keep an eye out for the first appearances of some of the big images, objects, animals, ideas that show up in her poems.
#5 "I have a Bird in spring"
"the spring decoys"--I like using decoy as a verb. [6/14 ed. Is she using it as a verb? Maybe it's the direct object of sings? I think I read it as a verb because it's a above "the summer nears".]
#6 "Frequently the woods are pink"
I like this poem. I've liked it for a long time. And I don't think it's even that great a poem, but it has a great jaunty rhythm and I love the hills undressing. This is the first place I hear that revising voice pop up: "And the Earth--they tell me--". I wonder if she isn't a little pissed off that she has to get her scientific information that way: "they tell me". But it doesn't really matter what the facts are, because for her the year is a "Wonderful Rotation!" There's the exclamatory enthusiasm that I love in a Dickinson poem. How can I not feel love toward someone who cheers about the fact that the Earth spins!
#7 "The feet of people walking home"
This is one of those list poems and it feels a bit scattered to me.
#8 "There is a word/Which bears a sword"
Somehow I'm rarely convinced by her soldier & war metaphors (I'll have to keep an eye out for good ones). I'm thinking forward to "Success is counted sweetest." There the idea of the dying soldier is interesting, but there's always something storybookish to her descriptions of armies and soldiers. No?
#9 "Through the lane it lay--through bramble"
Huh? I'm not moved to spend more time.
#10 "My wheel is in the dark!"
I love you, you little freakshow! Well maybe this isn't a great poem, but that's the first real weirdo first line of Dickinson's poetry I've come across. I don't know why it strikes me as so odd. This poem seems weirdly bifurcated to me. We get that conspiratorial "At you and I" at the end of the poem. I do think Dickinson--for a poet who is so strange and hidden in so many ways--is very good at getting me to ally myself with her. I'll have to think about why that is...
#11 "I never told the buried gold"
Again, not that interested.
#12 "The morns are meeker than they were"
Totally boring except for the last two line which I like for no good reason.
#13 "Sleep is supposed to be"
This is a poem that I really like the first three quarters of. The last stanza is not as satisfying to me as I'd like. What do I want this poem to do? Hmmm. I like it's contrary voice and the suggestion in the beginning that there might be another view of the world than the sane one. The voice seems critical of "supposed". I guess I feel this poem leading to some greater consideration of the sane/normative view of the world, but in the end she seems simply to make a not so clever distinction between morning and dawn.
#14 "One sister have I in our house"
I like the beginning of this one a lot. "There's only one recorded,/But both belong to me." I'm starting to think about what's hidden and NOT known in a Dickinson poem. I think in some of her more mysterious or vague poems, there are ideas known only to her that leave us grasping at ideas a bit or scratching our heads. But also she writes quite a bit about privacy and secrets and she lets us in on those secrets or rather ALMOST lets us in. This is part of (as I was thinking about earlier) how she gets me to ally myself with her. Moments in her poems remind me of the feeling I would get staying up late at night in the dark talking to a friend when quite young. But the WHOLE poem is never like that--the whole of her poems seem to have a much grander, Sybil-like cryptic quality to them as if they are pronouncements that we have to sort through and interpret, possibly to our detriment. I like this mix of intimacy with pronouncement, but it can be disorienting, because she can switch from one to the other very easily.
Thoughts:
#1 "Awake ye muses nine, sing me a strain divine"
Well there are some Dickinson-like signs in here... "The worm doth woo the mortal" and "Thou are a human solo, a being cold, and lone". Poor thing wrote this during Valentine's week in 1850. I remember reading a heartbreaking letter from her to her brother Austin when she was at Mount Holyoke in which she describes watching all the other girls open Valentines and how she has none to open. I believe she even talks about wishing that a certain friend of Austin's would have sent her one. Glad I'm not that age any more.
#2 "There is another sky"
Creeeeeeeeeeeeeepy. Emily wants her brother to do her? This is a pretty naughty poem, no? And the bee has arrived! "I hear the bright bee hum".
#3 "Sic transit gloria mundi"
I'm bored.
#4 "On this wondrous sea"
ETERNITY!--I will try to keep an eye out for the first appearances of some of the big images, objects, animals, ideas that show up in her poems.
#5 "I have a Bird in spring"
"the spring decoys"--I like using decoy as a verb. [6/14 ed. Is she using it as a verb? Maybe it's the direct object of sings? I think I read it as a verb because it's a above "the summer nears".]
#6 "Frequently the woods are pink"
I like this poem. I've liked it for a long time. And I don't think it's even that great a poem, but it has a great jaunty rhythm and I love the hills undressing. This is the first place I hear that revising voice pop up: "And the Earth--they tell me--". I wonder if she isn't a little pissed off that she has to get her scientific information that way: "they tell me". But it doesn't really matter what the facts are, because for her the year is a "Wonderful Rotation!" There's the exclamatory enthusiasm that I love in a Dickinson poem. How can I not feel love toward someone who cheers about the fact that the Earth spins!
#7 "The feet of people walking home"
This is one of those list poems and it feels a bit scattered to me.
#8 "There is a word/Which bears a sword"
Somehow I'm rarely convinced by her soldier & war metaphors (I'll have to keep an eye out for good ones). I'm thinking forward to "Success is counted sweetest." There the idea of the dying soldier is interesting, but there's always something storybookish to her descriptions of armies and soldiers. No?
#9 "Through the lane it lay--through bramble"
Huh? I'm not moved to spend more time.
#10 "My wheel is in the dark!"
I love you, you little freakshow! Well maybe this isn't a great poem, but that's the first real weirdo first line of Dickinson's poetry I've come across. I don't know why it strikes me as so odd. This poem seems weirdly bifurcated to me. We get that conspiratorial "At you and I" at the end of the poem. I do think Dickinson--for a poet who is so strange and hidden in so many ways--is very good at getting me to ally myself with her. I'll have to think about why that is...
#11 "I never told the buried gold"
Again, not that interested.
#12 "The morns are meeker than they were"
Totally boring except for the last two line which I like for no good reason.
#13 "Sleep is supposed to be"
This is a poem that I really like the first three quarters of. The last stanza is not as satisfying to me as I'd like. What do I want this poem to do? Hmmm. I like it's contrary voice and the suggestion in the beginning that there might be another view of the world than the sane one. The voice seems critical of "supposed". I guess I feel this poem leading to some greater consideration of the sane/normative view of the world, but in the end she seems simply to make a not so clever distinction between morning and dawn.
#14 "One sister have I in our house"
I like the beginning of this one a lot. "There's only one recorded,/But both belong to me." I'm starting to think about what's hidden and NOT known in a Dickinson poem. I think in some of her more mysterious or vague poems, there are ideas known only to her that leave us grasping at ideas a bit or scratching our heads. But also she writes quite a bit about privacy and secrets and she lets us in on those secrets or rather ALMOST lets us in. This is part of (as I was thinking about earlier) how she gets me to ally myself with her. Moments in her poems remind me of the feeling I would get staying up late at night in the dark talking to a friend when quite young. But the WHOLE poem is never like that--the whole of her poems seem to have a much grander, Sybil-like cryptic quality to them as if they are pronouncements that we have to sort through and interpret, possibly to our detriment. I like this mix of intimacy with pronouncement, but it can be disorienting, because she can switch from one to the other very easily.
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