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.]
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