EDIS Amherst Chapter August 2016

Emily Dickinson International Society, Amherst Chapter  Poetry Conversation

Topic: Fascicle 1, Sheet 1

Facilitated by Lois Kackley

27 August 2016

“Whatever else Dickinson intended in leaving at least 40 hand-bound books for our ‘delight,’ “ says Eleanor Higginbotham’s Introduction to, Reading The Fascicles of Emily Dickinson, “they are ..the most important clue for reading the poems..

-Eleanor Heginbotham, Dwelling in Possibilities: Reading the Fascicles of Emily Dickinson, 2003, Ohio State University Press

Lois. [ Referring to Heginbotham’s book] I thought it was good enough to launch us on our little enterprise.

Jeff. Are you planning on going through the fascicles in order?

Lois. Yes. As far as the way Dickinson preserved them. Of all of Dickinson’s poems, almost half were in fascicles.

Greg. Yeah. 810 poems.

Lois. Close to half were unbound, or loose. Loose poems can be anything that was retrieved from a recipient, that wasn’t bound. It could have been a candy wrapper in somebody’s drawer, or may have had a poem in the body of a letter. When Jay Leyda wrote his book, he did a tremendous amount of reaching out to a gazillion people who might have one, and he found a lot of them that way, according to Polly. So, the poems at the end of the book [Chris Miller, Emily Dickinson’s Poems as she Preserved Them, 2006, the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) are from a variety of sources, unlike the fascicles and the unbound sheets.

Judith. Were the fascicles found in the dresser drawer? Or the Trunk?

Greg. There’s conflicting information about where the poems were found. The story about them being found in the bottom dresser drawer is apocryphal/

Jane. Yes, that’s what we used to tell visitors. We told so many lies. [laughter]

Greg. Vinnie said she found them in a locked box. Martha said the were found in “boxes and drawers, and Maggie Maher said that some of them were stored in her – Maggie’s – trunk for safe keeping. The unbound sheets were found – and I don’t know what they mean by this – but they were found in such a way as to make it look like she organized them as a fascicle, so they’re called sets.

Victoria. So she grouped them together in a certain order.

Greg. Yes, but I don’t know how.

Victoria. How long did she do the fascicles?

Greg. 1858 to 1865.

Lois. OK, as I wrote in my email, the first three poems were separated by Franklin, but they were not separated by Johnson. [displays photocopy of the manuscript; see https://acdc.amherst.edu/view/asc:15595]. Here, it shows why one person would think it was three different poems and another person would think it was the same poem.

Victoria. With just a stanza break it could have appeared [inaudible]

Greg. In most of the fascicles she draws a horizontal line between poems – and she did not between these three. For that reason alone Franklin thought they were separate poems, starting from number 21 in Franklin. Johnson thought they were all one poem, and that’s what I think, too.

Lois. We can get into this when we talk about it, but one of the fascinating things abut this little group that we start with is – if you look at the way she wrote it, obviate parade is set off. She brought it in almost as if to give a title for what’s underneath it. It’s anybody’s guess why she did that. She put a big ol’ fat period there, too.

Victoria. Another signal.

Lois. Yeah, another signal that, if you want to make this into one poem, go ahead, but take two or three deep breaths before you do. So, it’s just kind of fun. I just wanted to say before we get going, Emily Dickinson’s gift for populated loneliness gave her the freedom to explore what Suzanne Juhasz called “The undiscovered continent” of her mind, and to assess the thread between inner nature and outer nature, or if you will, the link between .– the “aged bee” and the earth that some tell of. So, looking at this first poem, let’s read them separately, keeping in mind that anybody’s free to group them if they want to.

Robert reads.

The Gentian weaves her fringes—

The Maple's loom is red—

My departing blossoms

Obviate parade.

                        Fr21/J18/M33
[ [ To hear this poem read aloud, go to https://youtu.be/ENQIfRCppvE ] ]

Lois. What do you make of the significance that she gives to that little term?

Robert. What was coming up for me was, translating My departing blossoms as her poetry. They obviate parade because they’re not seen.

Lois. They don’t need to be seen. To obviate is to render something unnecessary, or less important.

Jane. But it assumes that there’s quite a wind. You would have to have to have that parade of leaves blowing. Interesting that she doesn’t mention that – any kind of wind.

Harrison. Is there anything special about the gentian?

Greg. A beautiful purple.

Victoria. It grows late. That’s a fringed gentian, which is very hard to find these days. It blooms in the fall, and it’s a sun-loving flower. In those days the fields were more open and we have these forests now so it’s pretty hard on the habitat/

Judith. I love her little poem, though – “I had a little gentian/ It tried to be a rose.” It’s a wonderful poem for anyone working with kids and late bloomers.

Adriana. William Cullen Bryant wrote a poem – I don’t remember the whole poem – but I know he wrote one called The Pink Gentian. I didn’t have a chance to look it up, but I don’t know why this particular flower was chosen by her.

Harrison. She mentions Bryant in another poem.

Adriana. Oh, does she?

Greg. “Besides the Autumn poets sing/ A few prosaic days” … “Gone—Mr. Bryant's "Golden Rod"—/ And Mr. Thomson's ‘sheaves.’ “

Victoria. The fringes are so pretty. They’re delicate little … if you see a gentian now, it’s blue, but it’s a bottle gentian and it’s curved shaped without that fringe that she’s talking about – but that close observation – she was such a naturalist.

Lois. Well, one of the things that I think she gained from her separateness was the freedom that gave her mind free range and it often landed on some of these little details that the rest of us tend to overlook. Well, what is she talking about here? What’s going on? What’s the point of these four lines, or do we need to get into the larger poem to figure that out? Is there something discrete about these four lines?

Harrison. Are her blossoms the same as the gentian, or is she saying that my blossoms are different from the gentian’s blossom because they obviate parade.

Victoria. I think the way Robert read it, with the emphasis on My, it seems like they’re separate; her departing blossoms are different.

Jeff. Yes, that’s the impression I get. The Maple's loom is red – that’s in contrast to her blossoms.

Lois. But we’re in fall, right?

Greg. You’ve got this beautiful blue gentian, the bright red maples – who needs a parade? Departing is an interesting word to use with anything but people who have passed away. We talk of “our dear departed.”

Jeff. Yes. From a 27-year old, talking about my departing blossoms – not that we necessarily take her as the subject of the poem –

Greg. “So has a Daisy vanished/ From the fields today.”

Lois. Yeah. I’m just now thinking about what you said. Is she talking about the summer flowers as My Blossoms – that the color of the fall and the flowers like the gentian obviate the need to grieve over summer. The maple is so red and the gentian is so blue .. is the what you’re thinking?

Jeff. This poem reminds me really of Franklin 319 – Of Bronze and Blaze.

Lois. Yeah, well, I just wanted to throw that out there. “I’m not going to be depressed about summer being over; I’ve got the red maple and I’ve got the blue gentian, and what they represent of fall.

Greg. I’ll suggest that the maple and the gentian are the parade, and that, because her blossoms have departed – if these are departed friends, that’s what obviates parade.

Harrison. It rained on her parade. [laughter]

Judith. I just think of the poem This is a Blossom of the Brain. I wondered if it was poems that she had sent to other people. Departing poems.

Robert. After, she wouldn’t see them.

Judith. She wouldn’t see them.

Lois. Well, let’s move on to the next poem, and see if the larger poem – if this is an introduction to the larger body of the poem.

Greg. In the second poem, someone has departed

Lois. Well, it’s a tricky poem. Who would like to read this poem?

Jane reads.

A brief, but patient illness—

An hour to prepare,

And one below this morning

Is where the angels are—

It was a short procession,

The Bobolink was there—

An aged Bee addressed us—

And then we knelt in prayer—

We trust that she was willing—

We ask that we may be.

Summer—Sister—Seraph!

Let us go with thee!

                        Fr22/J18/M33
[ To hear this poem read aloud, go to https://youtu.be/ENQIfRCppvE ]

Lois. There’s a little syntactical trickery here.

Greg. Where?

Lois. Like a lot of them. To me, this section of the poem is a love song pretending to be a dirge.

Jane. It doesn’t express the sorrow as deeply as some of her other poems.

Lois. Or a celebration – pretending to be a funeral, because, until we take in the whole poem, there’s all this language of bereavement, isn’t there, or a hint of bereavement? It was a brief illness, and we only had an hour to prepare for he leaving. Then we’re in this short procession. We’ve got the bobolink, who is the chorister [laughs].

Victoria. Well, she doesn’t really get to she, to the person herself until further down in the poem. I feel that there’s a distance from the actual person who died. She had a brief illness – my patient friend – or anything like that – it feels kind of distant.

Lois. Well, because there’s no subject. It starts right out. A brief, but patient illness—, I mean, it’s all suggestive. I’s a patient illness. There’s no “patient,” but we’re tricked into the images of illness and death words that are not saying what they normally would indicate.

Victoria. A patient illness – that’s just a play on the word patient.

Greg. “Patient illness” is just brilliant.

Victoria. It’s not an enduring illness.

Greg. There used to be a casket company that I would pass on a train out of Boston. They displayed a big sign which people objected to and they eventually took down. It read, “Drive Carefully. We can wait.” Death is patient like that. Tuberculosis is patient like that. “I’m going to get you. I can wait.”

Harrison. The illness is patient. It can take it’s time, and the patient is patient. The patient endures the illness.

Greg. What you and Lois are reacting to, and I think I agree, is the tone of the poem compared to the subject. If it’s a funeral …

Lois. Is it a funeral? Who thinks this is a funeral?

Harrison. I tend to think it’s a funeral for summer. It’s very characteristic, after Indian summer, of it ending just like that. Summer was with us, next thing it’s gone.

Greg. Who’s “below?”

Jeff. I think it could just as well be a wedding.

Lois. What?

Jeff. I mean if you want to look on this sardonically. [laughter].

Victoria. What if Summer means that it was someone who was in the summertime of their life, and they were struck

Greg. How can you interpret And one below this morning/ Is where the angels are any other way than somebody being dead and buried?

Victoria. Yeah. Yeah. Taken in the summertime of her life. It must be someone close to her, because she calls her “sister. Not in blood, but ..”

Judith. It doesn’t sound like it was somebody close to her.

Victoria. To call someone a sister?

Judith. Yeah, but it doesn’t have the sorrow of somebody close to her dying. I figured it was someone she didn’t know well. She just was observing. But, she does say We trust that she was willing, and that’s a question that was a big question at that time. Are you willing to die? When Ben Newton died she wrote, “was he willing to die?” Had they professed their faith … were they willing to go? So, that grounds it for me.

Harrison. And, we hope that we may be, when our time comes. [general agreement]. I’m, still clinging to summer.

Lois. Anthropomorphizing summer. If you do that, you can entertain thoughts of summer whether or not summer is willing to leave. We don’t want to feel like it’s willing to leave us because that’s where our angels are.

Harrison. We also want to feel that it was willing to leave, because that was in indication of grace.

Lois. When she says We ask that we may be, it’s like she’s trying to be willing to move into fall – to let summer go.

Harrison. And, summer comes and goes every year, and we should accept the fact that summer will return again, and go away, and come back.

Lois. We don’t always realize how profound an affect the seasons have on us unless a tragedy or something takes away your ability to experience any real joy, and then, when a new season comes it’s like an assault on your senses because your senses are all broken down. I think Dickinson experienced that intensity that the rest of us don’t.

[The recording device shut off accidentally at this point - alas!]