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.
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