EDIS Amherst Chapter 25 June 2016

Emily Dickinson International Society, Amherst Chapter  Poetry Conversation

Facilitated by Lois Kackley

25 June 2016

Jeff reads.

A Dew sufficed itself --

And satisfied a Leaf

And felt "how vast a destiny" --

"How trivial is Life!"

The Sun went out to work --

The Day went out to play

And not again that Dew be seen

By Physiognomy

Whether by Day Abducted

Or emptied by the Sun

Into the Sea in passing

Eternally unknown

Attested to this Day

That awful Tragedy

By Transport's instability

And Doom's celerity.
                 - J1437/Fr1372/M519

[ To hear this poem read aloud, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40bNXsP-RcM ]

Lois. Well, the first thing that I notice in this poem is something we’ve spent quite a bit of time with when we were looking at Cristanne’s [Miller] A Poet’s Grammar, the shocking attribution of emotion in one of the smallest visible aspects of nature, a drop of dew. To attribute such extraordinary emotion to such a finite point of nature – with the naked eye you couldn’t get much smaller than a dew. And the contrast in that minute element with the broad and deep emotion conveyed is part of her genius. The poem I read on Robert Burns, where he talks as if he is –“Sing on, sweet thrush, upon the leafless bough” – even in this, as we were talking about, it’s not so unusual for a poet to see her fate in an aspect of nature … but Dickinson goes several steps further when she attribute the extraordinary emotions to an element of nature that is not even sentient. Any thoughts on that as a technique in this poem before we get into other aspects of it?

Harrison. She insists on taking the smallest element and treating it as an individual, not just one of many identical ones. “I wish I were a Hay.” [ from The Grass so little has to do].

Victoria. In that poem she elevates the dew to the realm of pearls that are so fine that a duchess wouldn’t be ashamed of wearing them. So there’s an elevation of this microscopic H2O to something magnified to something royal, important.

Harrison. She associates that royal elevation with the afterlife. “Wait til the majesty of death.” Sometimes something low in position becomes something important.

Jeff. It also starts out the poem with a wonderful sense of playfulness. Attributing to a dew this pretentiousness and self-satisfaction. A Dew sufficed itself. This silly little drop of water with all this grand …

Greg. Wow. I took it really seriosly.

Jeff. Oh, you did?

Greg. Yeah. [laughs nervously]

Lois. In what way?

Greg. “how vast a destiny" - "How trivial is Life!" The universe in microcosm. It’s real. Wow, that’s a different take on it.

Lois. Well, I don’t think it’s either/or, I think it’s both/and.

Greg. I hate it when people say that. [laughter]

Lois. Well, it’s both playful and profound is what I mean.

Victoria, Yeah, yeah.

Greg. Yeah, but is the dew being self-satisfied and vain? Is that what she really put in here?

Lois. Yeah, however -

Harrison. It’s also accurate.

Lois. Accurate, but when you say self-satisfied we – and I think Human beings have for a very long time – interpreted that as an improper condition to be in. To be self-satisfied is to elicit censure from your fellows, right?

Victoria. Oh, because it’s not Christian humility?

Lois. Yeah, yeah, but the very act of taking a dew and conveying this quality almost demands that you question your moral judgement if you will, of self-satisfaction.

Victoria. And your human place in the universe? If a dew is worth as much as a human, if she elevates this little drop, we’re all little drops.

Lois. Yes precisely. Not to jump ahead but that was my takeaway from this whole poem. Planet Earth is my leaf, and I’m a dew.

Harrison. It reminds me of the poem about the aurora borealis [Of Bronze and Blaze the North tonight - J290/Fr319], “I take vaster attitudes and strut upon my stem.” A connection between herself and the northern lights “infects my simple spirit with taints of majesty.”

Lois. Exactly, and you know, for us, it’s not a big pill to swallow. But, in her day, this is likely one of her very subversive poems, of the demand for self-abnegation and humility from the Christian church.

Greg. This poem?

Lois. I mean, by virtue of the fact that she’s almost making it impossible, if you read the poem and smile at the idea of a dew being self-satisfied – she makes you smile, rather than censure No one would censure a dew for being proud, right? You can’t do it. [laughs] So that whole quality of smiling at pride is perhaps one of Dickinson’s underlying efforts in this poem.

Jeff. I just thought it was meant to be humorous, start to finish.

Lois. Well we would today, Jeff. I think we would today.

Greg. I see that now. I didn’t see that.

Jeff. Now, Attested to this Day/ That awful Tragedy – that’s tongue in cheek.

Victoria. I keep thinking of the water cycle, you know? Except, I think we need some clouds and storms at the end.

Jeff. That’s in the third stanza, Or emptied by the Sun/ Into the Sea.

Victoria. But that awful Tragedy of the Dew evaporating in the heat of the sun [laughs],

Harrison. Is the tragedy being Eternally unknown? What is …

Lois Eternally unknown … Well, back up. We haven’t really looked at anything else. Before we go on, though. How does the Dew know that it has satisfied this leaf?

Victoria. Great alliteration there - sufficed itself --/ And satisfied, Leaf, felt, nice!

Lois. To say that it satisfied a leaf there has to be an observer.

Robert. So, she’s the detailed observer of nature. I go out and see the dew in my strawberry patch every morning and think, well, that’s going to satisfy the leaf, because it’s not raining much. The dew is going to get sucked in by the leaf, so I’m appreciating Emily Dickinson the nature observer there. I think some of the philosophizing does have something to do with what happens to the dew – does it get absorbed by the leaf? Does it get evaporated by the sun? Or is it both?

Lois. But, in any case, it as an observable entity is gone. All gone.

Jeff. But I think the Dew is very proud of having satisfied the leaf. That’s’ how I read it.

Lois. Yeah, but the Dew cannot know that it satisfied the leaf. The dew can’t know if the leaf might still be hungry, or want another dew, right? The perspective, right in the second line, is that of the observer. There’s a speaker in this poem, and the speaker has to observe that it satisfied the leaf. When she says A Dew sufficed itself/ And satisfied a Leaf …

Harrison. And felt. She’s attributing feelings of self-consciousness.

Lois. Exactly.

Jeff. Yeah, and "How trivial is Life!" is the Dew’s comment on that silly little leaf, because, “My destiny is vast, as a dew drop.” And, it’s this trivial little thing I do for this trivial little leaf. It’s just bursting with false pride.

Lois. With irony? Well, she’s also borrowing from her observation of how we are, is she not?  Which is kind of fun if you hold that thought as you read the poem. She all along is commenting on human behavior. Who hasn’t had some kind of big success at something and thought their destiny vast – not everyone, for sure. Nevertheless it’s an observable human behavior. So then we get away from the leaf, right? And even the exalted emotion of the dew in the first stanza. Then the observer steps back and looks at the world at play, right?

Jeff. Well, that’s the poet now speaking in the second stanza. It’s not the dew any longer.

Lois. The observer.

Jeff. Yeah, because the dew is done.

Harrison. She’s juxtaposing the act of the Dew to enable the leaf – a little action – to a much grander cycle of nature. Like in The blonde assassin passes on/ The Sun proceeds unmoved [ from Apparently with no surprise, J1624/Fr1668] That’s the big picture. The little picture is that the flower gets beheaded.

Lois. That’s a great comparison.

Greg. That really is. So, the dew is a microcosm of all destiny captured in the last lines. We go from the little dew drop, through the cycles of nature as Harrison says, to the unknown. It seems to have a very profound base to me, even though it’s funny, the Dew imagining that it has a vaster destiny, but in a way, it does.

Lois. Exactly. To itself it does, and you know, maybe the speaker is taking on the role of God. The speaker is Dickinson as God, perhaps, because God would take note of the Dew and also, as you’ve so beautifully described, the grander scheme.

Harrison. “His eye is on the sparrow.”

Lois. Yes.

Jedd. Nothing would be Eternally unknown to God, though. That’s the mystery – what happens after we die. Things are over. It’s unknown.

Lois. And she did put a period there. That’s interesting.

Jeff. Lois, I very much appreciate, and I hope you’ll continue doing this, a Cris Miller reference. [Emily Dickinson’s Poems as She Preserved Them, by Cristanne Miller]. That encouraged me to go and look at my brand new shiny Cris Miller, because it’s so accessible now, to see these variants, and the last two lines of this poem go like this. In Transport’s exegesis/ And Hopes necrology.

Lois. Attested to this Day/ That awful Tragedy/ In Transport’s exegesis/ And Hopes necrology.

Greg. What’s necrology, the study of death?

Harrison. Yeah. The records of death. It’s a legal kind of term she’s using here. She’s attesting to something. She’s going against the anonymity of the dew by attesting to its presence. And in one moment she says Transport and Doom. Those are two [inaudible] subjects in her poems. In one she has “The Transport of the Aim.” Transport’s an intense emotion that you get when you have a sudden insight or something.

Jeff. And transport – I’ve read that in both the sense that you’re saying, but all so the sense of transport as the sun vaporizes water, which is what we’ve been talking about – the hydrologic cycle. That’s a kind of transport also, a kind of physical – transporting – moving.

Victoria. It’s awesome, once you get the idea of it. This whole thing, this system that’s set up for us.

Lois. For some reason I keep thinking of that poem where she ends up saying “Soto, explore thyself!” To me, that’s so self-revelatory, in that exploring herself was part of the reason for some of the themes that we see recurring. And I keep asking, what is there in this poem that might divulge some of what she’s saying of self-awareness. Do we learn anything about ourself in this poem? Or, can we say if Dickinson is learning anything about herself as she writes this poem?

Jeff. It certainly contains that thought, Soto, examine thyself. That first stanza’s all about that, I think. The two words there, A Dew sufficed itself/ And satisfied a Leaf, the two words are synonyms, basically. “I’m enough, and I did enough for the leaf. I’m such an ego that, whatever that leaf needed, I satisfied that leaf, I took care of it.”

Harrison. That sounds orgasmic. “Are you satisfied?” [laughter]

Lois. [laughing] That’s right. It’s like, “Mission accomplished!”

Robert. I wonder if you could read this poem as an ironical statement of the pathetic fallacy, looking at dew and then leaping to the deep philosophical lessons that you get from observing dew, and doing it all tongue-in-cheek. “Please don’t try to leap to deep philosophical conclusions from observations of nature.]

Harrison. Reductio ad absurdum.

Lois. Right, except that there’s so much there! It is a joke, if you want to take it just as a joke, but it also touches on some of the most difficult assignments that we have as humans looking at the big picture as opposed to our tiny little tyrannies.

Harrison. I agree, it’s a very serious poem. It’s fun, but it’s serious.

Greg. She uses this short meter and alliteration to capture this very playful tone, which seems to contrast, in a way at least, with the subject matter. That’s kind of a signature of hers, too.

Robert. The poem resonated with me with A spider sewed at night. There’s the word Physiognomy, but also the philosophizing from minute observation.

Lois. She put A Dew sufficed first on this unbound sheet, before she added The Spider as an Artist, and Winter is good. I often wonder if some of these thoughts that are conveyed poetically are the result of an intention that she brought with her in that observation, or if, in observing it, she feels confronted by what she sees of human experience in these close-up looks at things that are all around her.

Victoria. I bet it works both ways. Sometimes it works one way and she has it inside of her and it’s captured in that one incident, or the other way around. She’d see the dew and she’d see the whole world in it – all the tragedy – that dew drying up and losing all the color and the sparkle of it.

Lois. And observing her own response to that, saying, why do I see a tragedy here? … when nobody else does [laughs]. So, it’s fun to play with.

Victoria. I wonder if that kind of expression was so common in her as she was relating to her brother, her sister, and they would say, “Oh, that’s just Emily.” And maybe that’s why they were dismissive of her writing life. It was probably a blessing that she had Sue and she had Mable who didn’t do that. Because, they had that in them, too. They didn’t have the genius, but they could connect to that in her.

Harrison. Helen Hunt Jackson

Victoria. Oh, yes, right, of course, yeah.

Lois. The next poem to me is just pure music.

Robert. The second stanza’s not in Franklin, why is that?

Lois. That is interesting. All I know is, it appeared in four stanzas on the unbound sheet. Now, Franklin may have had some kind of information that caused him to leave it out. [There are three manuscripts, two fair copies and one semifinal packet copy. (Johnson variorum)]

Greg. Is it the third stanza that’s missing?

Robert. The second stanza is missing in 1104.

Lois. If you will all indulge me, I’m going to read this poem.

The Cricket sang
And set the sun
And Workmen finished, one by one
Their seam the Day upon.

The Bee had perished from the Scene
And distant as an Order done
And doubtful as report upon
The Multitudes of Noon -

The low Grass loaded with the Dew,
The Twilight stood as Strangers do
With Hat in Hand, polite and new,
To stay as if, or go -

A vastness, as a neighbor, came -
A wisdom without face or name -
A peace, as hemispheres at home
And so the night became -
                        - J1104/Fr1104/M493

[Hear Lois read this poem at https://youtu.be/7vo_3yj4m9I]

I don’t know what you could say about it that she hasn’t said. Now, in this poem, the elements of nature are not imbued with self-reflection. The speaker remains in tact throughout this poem as far as I have observed. Now of course the playfulness of the cricket setting the sun, if we get analytical, is probably part of the magic. But the cricket, the bee, the grass – she chooses the three elements to describe the sunset, but she doesn’t remain at sunset. It’s not just a pure observation of a sunset. There’s a movement involved, isn’t there, a progression.

Jeff. Transport. Yes.

Lois. There’s that word again.

Jeff. I’ve always loved that image, The twilight leaned as strangers do/ With hat in hand, polite and new,/ To stay as if, or go. It’s just delightful. This poem is so calming. There’s no sense of any kind of conflict in it – any kind of absurdity or BS. It just builds to this vastness and wisdom and peace.

Lois. Yet, she pulls on our collective emotion and our collective observation of workmen and as you say, strangers with hat in hand. Now there she treats humility with real reverence.

Jeff. Yes! That’s right! Yeah. These are people without any pretention.

Lois. The Bee had perished, but there’s nothing sad.

Victoria. It was just time for the bee to go. [laughter] The day is done. God’s orders are over for today.

Harrison. And the last line is, the night became, not the night began or anything.

Jeff. It loves that word, because, it operates on more than one level. It became night is conventional; it turns into something. But it’s almost as if it’s an archaic way of saying to become. It be-came. It’s almost an Anglo-Saxon way of saying “to have come.” It just feels that way, I don’t know if it really …

Lois. Well, she plays with the element of time here, and paints this picture of when you’re enjoying the sunset and all of a sudden you find you’re in the dark. It’s like, “Oh, when did it get dark?”

Harrison. “How it set I know not.”

Jeff. It’s got the abruptness of that wonderful poem, This quiet Dust. It’s just going on about life until that very last line, and then there’s an abruptness, “And cease, like these.”

Lois. Exactly, and you can’t make that sunset last any longer, no matter how much you’re loving it.

Victoria. I don’t get that feeling from that last line – that abruptness. With the word became, it seems to me that it’s like the lovely letting out of the last breath of day, and the night became, and the day melts into the night. I think she might have put a period there if she wanted to. I don’t get A vastness, as a neighbor, came.

Harrison. She’s embracing the normality of this vastness that comes with darkness. It’s as familiar as a neighbor.

Victoria. Oh, I see – familiar, and unthreatening, as the dark descends.

Jeff. And it also stands in contrast to the strangers, which is kind of interesting. The Twilight stood as Strangers do. You know, a stranger stands in your house with hat in hand, but the vastness brings it back to this more restful … unthreatening … familiar….

Lois. Well I’m glad you said that about the vastness, because I was thinking that this was a purely Dickinson experience that a neighbor, or any human being, would be so vast. That’s part of why she became more reclusive, because she felt the vastness in every person. I like your reading of it.

Victoria. You mean like the complexity of each person? My interaction with each person would be overwhelming.

Lois. Yes, overwhelming. Because her perception is so much more sensitive. I mean, we all need each other, so we sort of condition ourselves, right? to interact on a pretty surface level. But Dickinson refused to do that, but the flip side of that was that she was forever picking up on vibes that were bigger.

Victoria. But, your interpretation I don’t think really fits here.

Lois. It may not. That’s why I say I’m glad to hear Harrison’s reading, but I just wanted to share that because that’s how I’ve always, always heard this. Like this vastness, like every human being to me

Greg. Well, listen to this other usage of it in the poem, The Mountains stood in Haze - / The Valleys stopped below; it’s a similar description. The last verse is

So soft upon the Scene

The Act of evening fell

We felt how neighborly a Thing

Was the Invisible.

Lois. That’s a great comparison. [general agreement]

Harrison. What’s the number of that one?

Greg. 1225 [Franklin]

Victoria. You know, this is a time when there weren’t street lights, and people didn’t have all of this ambient light, so you could really observe the whole process of each day ending on a summer day, and that light, especially at the end of the day when the crickets were singing, would be a real gift. It’s always really hard for me to imagine, myself, when I try to project back in time to what it was like here with no street lights , and the quietness! You’d here a little bit of clip-clopping along the dirt roads. You wouldn’t hear engines, or cars. You might have heard the cow mooing in the barn and things like that, but it was so much quieter.

Harrison. [sings lines from “Love’s Old Sweet Song] Just a song at twilight, when the lights are low/ And the flickering shadows softly come and go.

Lois. Who wrote that?

Harrison. It’s an old standard folk song.

Lovely. Well, I don’t hear it now, but as a child, when we would visit aunts and uncles on the farm, you’d go to bed with the windows open, and even then, because we always lived in the city, going to the country - there were street lights, but they were way off, and to go to sleep listening to the crickets – it’s just a different experience altogether.

Victoria. Didn’t Woody Allen make a comment somewhere that he didn’t like going to the country because the crickets were so noisy they drove him crazy? [laughter]

[interlude]

Jeff. She’s describing a momentary feeling, but I’m sure everyone has had it, a summer’s evening, when you get that sense of vastness, and [inaudible], and peace. It’s just in the air – and it goes quickly. But, it’s one of those human experiences where it would be really hard to explain what it is about that moment that grips us so much. It’s like those mysterious moments in music – they’re just as deep in you as anything can get. In that case it’s sounds. What’s doing that?

Victoria. Ancient, ancient stuff there I think, embedded in our DNA. Our deepest human response.

Robert. I was experiencing this poem as something that would work with my three-year-old granddaughter. The sense that the crickets sang, and the crickets are setting the sun, and the workmen are sewing up the day. It’s a kind of reversal of causation, where the crickets are putting things to bed and the workmen are putting things to bed.

Greg. What are hemispheres at home gran’pa? [general hilarity]

Robert. [As to a child] Really, I’m so glad you asked that question. In your home you experience the whole world. The hemispheres, the whole world, comes into your home.

Greg. Thank You!

Lois. That’s a nice reading.

Greg. Yes, I really didn’t get that, so … I thought of another poem where the neighbor is  more like what you [Lois] were describing - What mystery pervades a well! The rest of that first verse is

That water lives so far —

A neighbor from another world

Residing in a jar

That’s more like the way you were first reading it, isn’t it? It’s more mysterious. That’s a different kind of a neighbor.

Harrison. The water cycle.