EDIS Amherst Chapter 01April2016

Emily Dickinson International Society, Amherst Chapter  Poetry Conversation

Facilitated by Lois Kackley

1 April 2016

Robert reads.

Spring is the Period
Express from God.
Among the other seasons
Himself abide,

But during March and April
None stir abroad
Without a cordial interview
With God.
                    - J844/Fr948/M442

[ To hear this poem read aloud, go to https://youtu.be/P18vQxVdIu0 ]

Lois. The most poignant aspect of this poem, even though it’s somewhat simple, and we’ve talked about just about every spring poem thus far, is that she just tosses off that word none, as if everybody would agree. None stir abroad – no one. She just tosses that off. It’s easy to take for granted, and yet when spring does begin to hit, what we call spring fever is indeed a personal kind of experience, isn’t it? Doesn’t it feel really private – your own personal response to the warmth and the fragrances. And Dickinson includes us all and yet she tosses in this other universal, at least in terms of this poem, and that’s one thing we might want to chew on a little bit – whether or not that personal response to the sights, smells, and temperatures of spring that feel so personal – Dickinson inserts the idea that this is an interview with God which I found extremely tantalizing because in a way it takes away from the idea that our response to spring is a personal experience and injects the idea that that experience itself is an interview with God.

Ben. It’s very interesting. My personal take on it was that it never occurred to me that the pronoun none referred to people. I actually read it, as frequently happens in Emily’s stuff, she’s talking about the flowers, the natural personalities that she understands are populating the world, especially in spring – and especially when she says stir abroad. That’s what I thought was stirring, all the living things that are emerging in the spring., and in the process interviewing with God because that’s the whole connection there.

Ellen. I saw it as people too, but I can see it both ways. Spring is such an amazing season. It comes right from God.

[An exchange occurs on the meaning of abide]

Greg. I don’t see a discrepancy in having an experience that’s personal and that’s also universal.

Lois. Yes, but it feels so personal. When I walk out in the morning an see the new flowers it feels too private almost to comprehend. Yet everyone has it.

Robert. A Light exists in Spring/ Not present on the Year/ At any other period/ When March is scarcely here. The feeling from A Light exists in Spring is present in this poem, too, I think.

Lois. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s very true.

Greg. And you have to remember, also, the Transcendentalist notion of communing with the divine through nature was a common way of thinking back then. The last two lines really suggest that notion, I think.

Ellen. I like the contrast in abide and abroad. [general agreement] I think everyone can experience God in some way. They can’t avoid that cordial personal interview with God through the flowers. Is that how you ….?

Lois. Yes, and the choice of words there is a little bit shocking, too, because if you go to “meet your maker” – if your interview with God is a synonym for death, you wouldn’t say it was cordial – depending on how you see death. I guess I’m reading this in opposition to a death interview with God.

Ellen. It’s a life interview, because it’s stirring.

Lois. Yes, and cordial being the opposite of

Ellen. … the Horseman going …

Lois. Yes, in Because I could not stop for Death

Robert. Cordial. I was just looking at transport of cordiality in A narrow Fellow in the Grass, in that sense of cordiality being a communication with nature. Here I see that cordial interview being that deep connection with nature – equating with God.

Lois. It’s a kind of an austere word, isn’t it? When you think of this poem, or her other poem, A little madness in the spring/ Is healthy even for the King, the madness of the excitement, the inner stirring is much more exuberant. This cordial interview is almost austere by comparison.

Greg. Subdued.

Ben. There’s kind of an understated welcoming – a quiet way of welcoming. Hospitable.

Lois. It’s a very poetic experience of spring, isn’t it? Because I wouldn’t necessarily equate the experience of spring with meeting up with God the way she’s presented it in this poem

Ellen. There’s something almost Victorian about this poem.

Lois. Well, it is. That’s a good point. The calling on people, with no phones, email, or television, and the habit of calling on people – the whole culture of cordiality in this day and age had permeated interpersonal relationships in a way that we have lost completely.

Ellen. So, your referencing the meeting of people in parlors, etc.

Lois. Yes, and you're mentioning of he Victorian aspect of it is really spot-on as the British say. The next poem is Franklin 193.

Greg reads.

Speech"—is a prank of Parliament

"Tears"—is a trick of the nerve—

But the Heart with the heaviest freight on—

Doesn't—always—move—
                          - J688/Fr193/M700

[ To hear this poem read aloud, go to https://youtu.be/mLG38xRwXhc ]

Garrison Keillior read this a couple of years ago when he came to town. It’s one of the ones that he chose to read. …. It sounds playful in the beginning. That last line goes the other way – he heard truth of the pain that she sees around her.

Ellen. Why are tears a trick?

Lois. Why is speech a prank?

Ellen. You could say that politicians are full of it, in that kind of a way.

Greg. Tears – I’m reminded of something that I read about Beethoven. He would improvise at the piano in the salons of Vienna and move people to tears. He would spring up and berate them for it, calling them fools and saying “The tears belong in the music, not on your faces!” … Trick of the Nerve.

Lois. This is a good story, but I’m not quite sure – what did he mean? If the tears are in the music, what would be nefarious about a tearful response?

Robert. I would take it as meaning that the tears are a kind of leaking out of emotion, and it doesn’t allow that emotion to go more deeply.

Ben. Is there any more to that story? It sounds like it needs some kind of context.

Greg. It’s just something I read in a biography, and it’s always stuck with me.

Ellen . There’s a little bit of negativity in those first two lines, and that surprises me. Most people wouldn’t call somebody’s crying a trick.

Lois. To me it means that, I may be with people, or in a circumstance where I don’t want anyone to know that I am emotionally touched. You know, if one of us started weeping in here over a poem, this is a pretty congenial crowd and we wouldn’t necessarily see anything censorious about it. But, if you’re in a situation where people are not so understanding and you cry, you would feel as though you had been tricked, by your own anatomy, right?

Greg. Yes, and haven’t you ever burst into tears and felt foolish about it?

Lois, I think what she’s saying here is that it’s involuntary. [general assent]

Ellen. Well, the first verse is a Prank, so how is that different. A prank is intentional.

Ben. I think that she’s just trying to say that the normal functions we associate with Parliament and crying – even though these are as serious as we normally take them to be, she’s trying to put them in a state of triviality compared to the weight of the heart. I don’t’ think she’s trying to make a big deal of the prank and the trick so mush as putting these accepted normative functions into a new context because she wants to emphasize the heaviness, the importance and weight of the heart.

Lois. I think your point is well taken. The first two lines are more of a way of creating a context, and contrasting what we may commonly think of, as opposed to this condition of overwhelming emotional work.

Ben. I don’t think she’s writing a poem about speech or tears. I think it’s about heart.

Robert. I’m experiencing it as an epigram more or less - the Heart with the heaviest freight on/ Doesn't always move is for me independent in itself. The first two lines don’t add anything to the epigram. So, for me, the first two lines aren’t working.

Greg. Well, I like what Ben was saying, that they add contrast, they set you up in a contrary mood that makes those last lines more unexpected and impactful. It’s a common technique in sonnets, and they take fourteen lines to do it, and she’s done it in four.

Ben. [laughing] That’s her trick.

Lois. It’s also a way of saying that speech is no guarantee that anything is said. Just because someone is talking doesn’t meant they’re saying anything.

Ben. And just because there are tears doesn’t mean you necessarily know what the depth of meaning is there. So, she’s saying that those things are up for grabs in terms of how important they are, but this we don’t.

Ellen. Speech goes on and tears flow, but this is different.

Ben. This would closely dovetail with that quote from Beethoven I think.

Ellen. Could someone just explain the Prank of Parliament?

Lois. It could be anything, it’s just her choice of words. She could have said “Speech is what you hear when you walk into a coffee shop.”

Greg. She wanted two letters p in the line.

Lois. It doesn’t mean that she thinks that all tears are meaningless. It doesn’t mean that speech is worthless. It just means that you can look at both of those things in comparison to the most inner turmoil and regard them as frivolous when compared to becoming utterly unmovable – paralyzed by a burden.

Greg. You know how sometimes in movies there’ll be a happy scene and you know something bad is about to happen? We’re being set up here.

Lois. But what is she doing here? What is it that’s not moving?

Ben. Well, in relation to the previous lines, speech and tears, I took it as move as meaning expression. The heaviest heart doesn’t always speak and doesn’t always cry.

Greg. That’s the most profound of sorrows.

Lois. So am I being hyperbolic in saying that in some burdens the sufferer is immovable, or paralyzed? [general consensus that Lois is not being hyperbolic at all]

Greg. In other poems she writes of volcanic forces that are not perceptible on the features.

Ben. I feel like this poem should be embroidered, framed, and hung on every psychologist’s wall. It makes you aware that sometimes whatever is going on in another person’s inner psyche is not going to be expressed.

Robert. A powerful expression of despair.

Ben. Could be .. weight is not necessarily despair … in fact, listening to some Beethoven music it might be something very deep – love or appreciation or understanding. Talk is cheap you might say. [laughter] She could have said that, too. [laughter]

Lois. I think it’s kind of fascinating that she says doesn’t always move, as if to say sometimes it might. She’s not uttering an absolute, right? I guess that’s something that keeps bringing me back again and again to Dickinson is her braveness. Undertaking a subject looking almost for its most subtle element rather than expressing a recognizable pleasure, like Keats, Wordsworth – they just make us glad to be alive, but we can see so easily what they’re saying.

Lois. The next poem is Franklin 1011

Ben reads.

Not to discover weakness is
The Artifice of strength —
Impregnability inheres
As much through Consciousness

Of faith of others in itself
As Pyramidal Nerve
Behind the most unconscious clock
What skillful Pointers move —

                               - J1054/Fr1011/M461

[ To hear this pem read aloud, go to https://youtu.be/dDot64Su1e4 ]

Greg. Whenever anyone expresses doubt that Emily Dickinson can be difficult, this is a good one to trot out. [laughter]

Ben. The one thing about it that I can connect to, because I’m a retired biology professor and I used to teach anatomy and physiology, is her use of the term Pyramidal Nerve. That refers – and I don’t know if it was even known in her time, let alone that she would know it, but it’s an anatomical part of the spinal cord – the pyramidal tract. It carries motor signals from the brain. I don’t know if that’s what she’s referring to.

Lois. There’s a good chance.

Greg. She studied the sciences in school and her poems are often sprinkled with scientific terminology. I looked up pyramidal and found that it’s also used in botany, for the structure of something like a thorn.

Ellen. There’s something reversed, or flipped in the first stanza. [agreement]

Robert. The Pyramidal Nerve would be controlling the voluntary movements?

Ben. Apparently.

[Lengthy discussion of medical and scientific history omitted.]

Lois. Well, let’s just go as far as the first stanza – it’s easy to get tripped up on – it’s a liminal – a line that stands alone, but also can be read as an introductory phrase to the first line of the second stanza. Not to discover weakness is the artifice of strength, period. Are we clear on that, that far? [general agreement]

Greg. Impregnability inheres as much through Consciousness of faith of others in itself as Pyramidal Nerve. That’s how I read it.

Lois. She’s expecting us to do more than one thing at a time. Not that one cancels out the other, but that you see it as both. …. Impregnability adheres as much through consciousness as it does through the discovery of weakness. [or not discovering weakness]

Jeff. I dwell in Possibility/ …. Impregnable of eye. The suggestion there is that impregnability comes from this openness that she’s talking about in that poem. She’s saying that impregnability comes from consciousness, not something that’s more defensive.

Greg. In another poem she writes.

Arrows enamored of his Heart —
Forgot to rankle there
And Venoms he mistook for Balms
Disdained to rankle there —

This person – there are certain things that he’s not even going to notice. Not discover weakness. I’m not even going to see that. It’s literally beneath notice.

Jeff. That’s what those first two lines seem to be saying. Artifice is a very double-edged word, isn’t it? It can mean artificial and it can be positive. Art is artifice, right?

Ben. But the word has come to mean insincere, ungenuine, but she would have been closer in time to its earlier meaning as just “something made.”

Lois. What’s the topic of this poem?

Greg. Sources of strength.

Jeff. How about self-awareness? She’s talking more about behind the pointers on the clock.

Robert. What’s the first line there … Of faith of others in itself… What’s “itself?”

Greg. I read it as itself ties back to strength.

Lois. So if the topic is strength ….

[ A discussion follows on whether the weakness in the poem is weakness within oneself or in others.]

Greg. Sources of strength that will not deign to discover weakness. Here’s another poem that I think is saying the same thing, Number 707.

Size circumscribes — it has no room
For petty furniture —
The Giant tolerates no Gnat
For Ease of Gianture —

Repudiates it, all the more —
Because intrinsic size
Ignores the possibility
Of Calumnies — or Flies
                    -J641/Fr707/M344

[To hear this poem read aloud, go to https://youtu.be/LNLkHciduf0 
See also "Emily Dickinson as a Second Language: Demystifying the Poetry," by 
Greg Mattingly, page 34 ]

Lois. So you think the poems are saying essentially the same thing. The crucial difference between the way I’m reading it and the way you’re reading it is that you’re reading it as the weakness is in somebody else. I’m reading it as saying, “If you, Lois, can’t discover weakness then your strength is just artificial

Greg. Holy crow. I never saw that.

Ben. I would think a priori that that’s what she’d be addressing, because she’s very concerned with the internal processes that are going on.

Jeff. Yes, it seems right to me.

Lois. What about you Robert?

Robert. Well, I like it in the firs stanza. I’m trying to connect it to the second stanza, because as you spoke, and [inaudible] persuaded, I was thinking that this is in a relational poem, one person to another, but I like your take on it.

Loisl. Which begs the question – in the reading that I’m giving to these first two lines suggests that the word impregnability is another word for strength. [general agreement]

Ben. Presumably, but I’ve always wondered why she chose that word for strength.

Lois. I know. It is an odd choice.

Ben. All these multi-syllabic words just thrown in there to make you think, I guess.

Ellen. Strength like a fortress – you can’t go through it.

Lois. You know, in our world, impregnability is a kind of obtuse barrier, right? But in Dickinson’s world, she could have meant that to signify a quality in someone who cannot be torn down, regardless of the forces aimed at her.

Greg. Well, in the poem that Jeff cited earlier, I dwell in Possibility, she speaks of Chambers as the Cedars/ Impregnable of Eye, which means you can’t see in there. In another poem she begins Best Things dwell out of Sight/ The Pearl — the Just — Our Thought, so this is a very good impregnability she’s got

Lois. Yes, and you know, we frequently will say. “Does anyone really know somebody else?” Aren’t we all impregnable, in that sense?

Ellen. Can you join the last two lines? How do you?

Lois. Well, that’s where we get the Dickinson curve [laughter], because we’ve gotten comfortable with this concept of strength as being someone who is able to recognize their own weakness, and that consciousness itself is a kind of impregnability. But then if we read As much through Consciousness/ Of faith of others in itself, we’re told that this is not such a discreet entity after all. It is influenced by the faith of others.

Greg. I’m thinking of Napoleon. Relating his earlier experiences he once said, “I noticed that when I spoke, men listened.” That helped him realize that he was a leader, that he saw other people reacting to him that way.

Jeff. If a third of Republican voters want me I’ve got to be right. [laughter] That is sort of the implication.

Lois. But, if you look at it from the standpoint of a child – a child is a totally dependent emerging human – a child has to have the faith of others - right? in order to develop into a truly strong person.

Jeff. My old trick with her is to combine the first two lines with the last two, and it works.

Not to discover weakness is
The Artifice of strength —

Behind the most unconscious clock
What skillful Pointers move —

That can stand by itself, and everything between …

Robert. I kind of like that poem better