Emily Dickinson International Society – Amherst Chapter 28 October 2016

Emily Dickinson International Society – Amherst Chapter

28 October 2016

Facilitated by Lois Kackly

Fascicle 1, Sheet 2

Lois. At the beginning of our approach to the poems, by virtue of the fascicles, starting at the beginning, it really gives us a chance to look at how Dickinson organized them, and, there are a lot of if’s and maybe’s, but if the first fascicle was done early in her career – and Ellie [Eleanor Hegintbotham] goes to great lengths to discuss this – she could have done this much later in her career – but she also might have started early, with some of the early poems.. I thought while we’re doing this, just to add a little dimension to our normal approach of just digging into a poem and sharing what it does to us, that we might, in the back of our minds, since we’re taking the sheets as a whole, also look at some of these ideas. [ Referring to Heginbotham’s book, Dwelling in Possibilities] Starting in the middle and taking it out of context has its problems; nevertheless , this is what I thought would be fun to do, as we look at these fascicle sheets. Starting with the paragraph on page 15. Now, in this chapter, she’s doing a lot with fascicle 21, so just ignore that.

“If one does not select the four, or five, or six poems from a fascicle that suit a thesis (See Scholl, for example [Scholl, Diane Gabrielsen, 1990. Emily Dickinson’s Conversion Narratives: A Study of the Fascicles, Studies in Puritan American Spirituality 1, December: 202 – 24]) – one is more likely to see that patterns exist and that Dickinson has slyly left not only doublings, such as the prose/poetry pair, but also a number of other “tight-rope tricks” as well. For example, at times the poem at the center of a fascicle acts as a sort of style, up toward and away from which the fascicle moves. Dickinson seems to have compiled her poems in the way that her niece and nephews played dominoes, ending one poem with an image that will begin the next. She may end a fascicle with a poem that seems both a culmination of the fascicle and a precursor of the first poem so that, as is true of fascicle 1, the opened book provides the visual trick of leading the reader back to the first poem from that on the back cover. In addition to the mirroring of poems on opposing pages of an opened book, as in the prose/poetry confrontation, Dickinson has chosen to place opposing poems on neighboring leaves that are at once reprises and revisions of earlier poems. She has made poems (or speakers in poems) address each other dialogically. She has spilled lines from certain poems and used them on the next page as titles for adjacent poems. She has used verses separated from previous verses on their new page to bridge proximate poems. She has often privileged clusters of images in each fascicle, giving each what, for want of  a better word, seems it’s own “thumbprint” or maybe “DNA”

Judith. So, are you saying that there’s a kind of an internal structure to the fascicles, or internal structures to the fascicles?

Lois. Well, that’s what we want to see, and it’s strictly opinion. I thought it would be fun, because it’s easy to say, “Is there a theme in this sheet?” But, to get a little more lively about the approach to it, as Ellie suggests here, maybe it’s organized like a set of dominoes, where they kind of fold into each other. Maybe it’s more organized like the center poem the thing, and the poem before it and the poem after it are leading up to it, or leading away, or supporting it. Maybe the other poems sort of hold that one in the middle up. And, maybe it’s none of these things.

Victoria. I’m trying to imagine if she wrote these poems on separate, pieces of paper, then made these little fascicle books, and transcribed them and if she’s kind of got a layout of the poems, and there’s already something about this set of poems that she wants to include them in that one fascicle. But an arrangement – there’s like a visual aspect to it that we don’t see here –

Lois. Exactly

Victoria. – that we don’t see here, that –

Lois. Exactly. That’s the whole point that she’s making about looking at the actual fascicle. But anyway – what are you frowning about?

Greg. I was trying to remember a piece of relevant information about how she does construct visual elements in her work, and it has to do with the word noon. It occurs in the exact middle of seven of her poems. So, she does stuff like that.

Victoria. Which fits the meaning of the word.

Melba. I don’t know this from first hard experience, but I was talking with someone who was studying Latin at the masters level, and he said that the case endings in Latin are so specific that you can more or less arrange the words in the sentence, and the sentence will still cohere, for the mind of the reader even if the adjective that modifies the noun is completely different. So, he was describing this page where someone was being stabbed, and the blood was bursting out of the wound. He said the words were arranged on the page literally so that the word blood was in the center of the line and all of the words about the action were around it to kind of resemble the image. The words formed a picture of the gaping bleeding wound. I thought, boy, I’d like to know enough Latin to get that. So, I thought that was kind of interesting.

Jeff. That reminds me of something that’s maybe a little bit of a diversion, but generally interesting. When you read Milton, as we know Emily did, Milton has a kind of herky-jerky feeling to the verse; It’s not nice, smooth, beautiful, and it has a very Latin feel to it. Word order is disrupted the way you find in Latin. I’ve often felt – with Emily Dickinson – that that’s reflected also. She’s famous, of course, for having words out of order; things are re-arranged and left out. But, I think there’s an affinity, and I think that it does come also from studying the Latin  where, as you’re saying, every word in the Latin sentence has an ending to it that tells you what its function is. So, the freedom to do that – and the classical Latin authors do that, and it makes if very hard to read Latin even if you know it – classical Latin – because you’re constantly having to figure out the puzzle.

Melba. It does make you wonder how much we should read Emily as translation, and hear at least the structure of a second language behind it.

Lois. OK, well, let’s make our way down this little list here. We’ve got the idea of a poem functioning as a style in the middle of a sheet, and her first comment was concerning doubling. I’m afraid we can’t totally get into that without going back and reading the first part of this chapter, which I don’t really want to do. But then she goes on to say that “Dickinson has chosen to place opposing poems on neighboring leaves that are at once reprises and revisions of earlier poems. She has made poems (or speakers in poems) address each other dialogically.” Now. That’s another way we have occasionally done in here. Looking at the poems almost as if thee two poems could be a dialogue between two different people. .”She has spilled lines from certain poems and used them on the next page as titles for adjacent poems. She has used verses separated from previous verses on their new page to bridge proximate poems. She has often privileged clusters of images in each fascicle, giving each what, for want of  a better word, seems it’s own “thumbprint” or maybe ‘DNA’, that network of design that differentiates it from the others.” So, I think that will just add a little color two our reading of these poems.

[The poems on sheet 2 are read in sequence by participants]

Adrianna reads:
The feet of people walking home
With gayer sandals go -
The crocus - till she rises -
The vassal of the snow -
The lips at Hallelujah
Long years of practice bore -
Till bye and bye, these Bargemen
Walked - singing - on the shore

Pearls are the Diver's farthings
Extorted form the sea -
Pinions - the Seraph's wagon -
Pedestrian once - as we -
Night is the morning's canvas -
Larceny - legacy -
Death - but our rapt attention
To immortality.

My figures fail to tell me
How far the village lies -
Whose peasants are the angels -
Whose cantons dot the skies -
My Classics vail their faces -
My faith that Dark adores -
Which from it's solemn abbeys -
Such resurrection pours!
                                           -J7/Fr16/M37, 162
[To hear this poem read aloud, go to https://youtu.be/W2T6acN-_Xg]

Melba reads:
It's all I have to bring today —
This, and my heart beside —
This, and my heart, and all the fields —
And all the meadows wide —
Be sure you count — should I forget
Some one the sum could tell —
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell.
                         - J7/Fr16/M37, 162

[ To hear this poem read aloud, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VdiqIQ4oEI ]

Greg reads
Morns like these - we parted
Noons like these - she rose!
Fluttering first - then firmer
To her fair repose -

Never did she lisp it
And 'twas not for me -
She was mute for transport
I, for agony!

Till the evening nearing
One the shutters drew -
Quick! a sharper rustling!
And this linnet flew!

                    -J27/Fr18/M38

[ To hear this poem read aloud, go to https://youtu.be/w4veitvfzE0 ]

Victoria reads:
So has a Daisy vanished
From the fields today -
So tiptoed many a slipper
To Paradise away -
Oozed so, in crimson bubbles
Day's departing tide -
Blooming - tripping - flowing -
Are ye then with God?
                - J28/Fr19/M39

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

Robert reads:
If those I loved were lost
The Crier's voice w'd tell me -
If those I loved were found
The bells of Ghent w'd ring -
Did those I loved repose
The Daisy would impel me.
Philip - when bewildered

Bore his riddle in!
                -J29/Fr20/M39

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

Victoria. It’s kind of cool to read the poems [inaudible] like that. [general agreement]

Lois. And, to thing that, at a point in time, Dickinson actually chose to present these to us in this way. Alright, there’s so much in each one, it’s hard to stop and start digging, but does anybody have a thought, or see a rhythm or an organizational thread that they’d like to …

Greg. I can see that all except It’s all I have to bring today have to do with the departed – those who have departed.

Lois. Do you feel it’s more a reflection on heaven itself, or does it reflect something of the personality of the departed?

Greg. I think they’re all different. So has a Daisy vanished is tuberculosis. I think The feet of people walking home is a reference to people going to heaven.

Lois. And, she’s using that as a kind of allegory for the familiar sense of –

Greg. There’s a sense of mystery in the first poem, bit in Morns like these we parted it feels more melancholy to me – a feeling of regret.

Lois. Yes, there is a melancholy mood in that one, isn’t here.

Greg. And in It’s all I have to bring today is just like a flower in the middle of all of it.

Judith. But, it’s interesting that in the context of the people who have departed – you wonder if this is too much conjecture but – is this all she can bring to these people who have gone? It puts that poem in a really different context.

Lois. So, in a sense, am I hearing you say that second poem is sort of the focal point of the group – that, this is what I have to bring?

Judith. Could be. That’s what I’m suggesting.

Victoria. This is the style?

Lois. It’s not right in the middle.

Greg. And it occurs to me that it what she’s bringing is her art, then in a way that fits in with the theme of immortality too – here’s what I have to bring. … I’m sure I’m just making stuff up.

Lois. Someone used the word “mystery.” That first poem has a lot of mystery in it. It’s almost as if she’s attempting in this poem to get in control of emotional – you know, when you get all flustered …

Melba. You know, she is heaping up around this a lot of language in something that’s difficult to articulate.

Lois. Yes, it’s like when you lose your keys and you have to admit it. You’re all over the place.

Melba. Yeah.

Lois. And the poem itself is saying “OK, take a deep breath. What is this thing called life? And, what is this thing called death?

Adrianna. It seems to settle down for me when you get to the end of that second stanza, Death - but our rapt attention/ To immortality.

Lois. That’s what death is. It makes us concentrate. If it weren’t for death we wouldn’t concentrate on “What is life?”

Judith. It’s like, you can’t know what freedom is, unless you know what slavery is. Slavery defines freedom.

Victoria. Death as a way into knowing the unknowable. You can’t know what immortality is until you die. You can’t know what that dark mystery is until … I love that line, My faith that Dark adores. That reminded me of when she said “Faith is doubt.”

Judith. She didn’t’ mind living with that doubt.

Greg, Victoria. She loves it.

Victoria. Poem after poem, she’s playing with the unknowable, the uncertainty of it.

Lois. Yeah, if working with that doubt gave you such exquisite work, yeah, I’d love it too. [laughter]

Judith. I also like, in that last stanza, where she identifies those who have gone all as peasants. It’s like death is the great leveler. It’s not royalty, it’s just the peasants are the angels.

Victoria. Heaven is a village; it’s not a big castle in the sky with all this wealth – ostentatious.

Greg. “I went to Heaven/ It was a small town.” [general amusement] There’s her poem to Barrett Browning to where she adores the darkness that she gets

Lois. I think, from what you’re referencing, she credits Browning with her first experience of just exquisite beautiful feeling that came from the sense of sharing – that she shared probably with Browning this sense of awe, and it probably had a huge impact on her decision to do her own writing – that words could deliver that exquisite intimacy between two people without they’re ever having to meet. But, it also gave her a kind of courage to face her own darkness.

Victoria. A model for a woman to do that. I think she must have gotten that from George Elliot, too.

Greg:

I think I was enchanted

When first a somber Girl --

I read that Foreign Lady --

The Dark -- felt beautiful –

Lois. And it was beautiful for the first time; before that there was just darkness – just pain, and estrangement, and questions, and no resolution. And, reading Browning made her feel that that pain, that estrangement, had its own beauty.

Greg. I think that’s similar to what she’s saying in the last stanza of this first poem.

Lois. And, Victoria, I love your image of the little village. She takes it, in the first line of that poem, even  closer – the home within the village. And when you know that’s where you’re going, and it’s really home. The feet of people walking home/ With gayer sandals go, as opposed to a strange place where you don’t know and you’re not walking with such light-heartedness. There’s a happy gait, happy feet. [laughs]

Victoria. There’s a confidence in this poem about – that death is not the end. She just kept asking about that, but this confidence that when I die immortality will be there, and there’s this village, it it’s going to be people like me that are the angels, and all this so-called simple imagery  [crosstalk]

Lois. I guess we could also talk about whether she’s simply describing what she wants to be true, or whether it’s really something that is believed, and I don’t know about you, but I think she’s simply describing what she wants to be true.

Greg. She’s certainly describing the prevailing propounded beliefs of so many people around her – being “willing to die,” being confident of the next life to come, going home to God. People may have doubted it inwardly, but everybody kept singing the same tune.

Victoria. Like the little linnet who was let loose from the cage.

Lois. My Classics … ?

Greg. Oh yeah, Homer and all of them, they don’t have the answer. I can’t get the mystery out of these classic writers – Virgil, Milton, they’re not telling me what’s on the other side.

Lois. My Classics. I love that. Not the classics.

Victoria. But she doesn’t say “My Bible.” That’s what I love. She goes way back.

Jeff. What do you all make of that line Larceny – legacy? How do you read that?

Greg. I don’t know.

Jeff. Does it go with the line before? You could read it maintaining the syntax as Night is the morning's canvas/ -Larceny – IS legacy – or, Night is larceny and legacy, but I just don’t …

Lois. Well, it’s starting with the first line in that verse. You get the sense that the theme of that one verse kind of hangs on images of wealth Pears, extorted – there’s a little reference to wealth,  isn’t there? [general agreement]

Jeff. Larceny and extortion sort of ..

Victoria. I think she’s leaving out the verbs after the first are. Pinions are Death is, Larceny is Legacy. I think she just blows off the verbs. [laughter]

Greg. When I try to get at it I see that the line before it, I see that the morning kind of paints the sky. Then I ask myself, how is that larceny? How is that legacy?

Melba. At the end of the day, sunset’s going to rob you of that canvas, so each day is a legacy to the next night, which becomes the legacy for the next day.

Greg. OK

Jeff. Those first stanzas are all about a preparation for something else which is better.

Jeff. It’s interesting that Legacy is italicized.

Lois. That’s really a cool little verse. You didn’t get anything that wasn’t taken from somewhere else.

Greg. [checking the manuscript book] Neither Larceny nor Legacy are italicized in the manuscript, nor are they underlined. [general surprise]

Victoria. So what’s with Franklin?

Lois. I guess his finger just slipped on the keyboard. [laughter] OK, yeah, good point. What’s she doing here, introducing this theme of cyclical inheritance after the first verse.

Greg. What I see in the first verse is people walking home; they have to pay their dues before they could reach this point, and I don’t see that really in the last two.

Lois. OK, let me just suggest this that just comes to mind. If the first stanza is about accomplishment, where we walk singing on the shore, you have this sense of having it all together, right? “We’re going home – we’re happy feet.” But then she comes in and cuts you off at the knees she says, before you get too impressed with yourself and where you’re going, remember, everything you have meant the death of something else.

Victoria. If the crocus comes up and is predictable – it comes up every spring underneath the snow, that’s a resurrection. You can count on that crocus every spring, and that’s kind of what she comes around to at the end – this resurrection. So, you go through all of this, and that’s what comes at the end.

Jeff. I see those first four stanzas all – you could describe them all in line six, Long years of practice bore. They all involve a process of going through something that achieves in the end a higher goal.

Judith. Oh! Different stanzas!

Jeff. Do you have something different?

Melba. No, we’re just working across a page divide here.

Victoria. So what does that mean, The lips at Hallelujah, just singing the praises of the divine – of awe? You’re just practicing until?

Melba. Yeah.

Greg. Until you’re doing it in heaven. And, I think there’s a total of three stanzas in this poem.

Jeff. I have six stanzas.

Melba. Six in Franklin.

Greg. The way she has it, the way Miller [Cristanne Miller, “Emily Dickinson’s Poems As She Preserved Them,” 2016 The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, London England] has it.

Jeff. So, Franklin has split it up into four-line stanzas.

Victoria. It’s almost a different poem. Visually it changes it, I think.

Jeff. What’s the manuscript look like?

Melba. If you get it as three eight-line stanzas, it makes it easier to read the last eight lines as a pivot away from the first two. [general agreement] Otherwise, I can’t tell why I should pivot on five.

Greg. [consulting the manuscript] It’s definitely eight lines per stanza.

Victoria. Why would Franklin break it up like that?

Jeff. Good question.

Victoria. It’s really very clear.

Jeff. This is starting to be really revelatory after “God” Franklin. [laughter]

Judith. [mock falsetto voice] He’s not perfect either! [laughter]

Greg. I grew up on Johnson.

Lois. Because I like the type. [more laughter]

Melba. But, that phrase, Death - but our rapt attention/To immortality. Makes sense if death is nothing but this transition and you’re facing forward into the next …. You’re the blooming crocus, you’ve gotten to the further shore. And then I’m now seeing the last set of eight lines as the reversal of that, where she’s beginning to say, “No, no, sorry.” There is a not of doubt that creeps in. in the last eight lines that says “I don’t have that vision. My classics don’t quite give me that; they give me something else.

Greg. Yes. Her figures fail to tell her how far it is.

Melba. Right, her classics vail their faces on this topic, I’m assuming, of what comes afterward, and so she’s left with a question.

Victoria. But she’s got faith in that darkness that she adores. She adores the mystery, she adores the whole …

Greg. It’s almost as if she’s saying, “The classics can’t do it. I’m glad they can’t, because that would destroy the mystery.

Melba. Right. Then in the next one she gets very simple. She says, “Alright, what do I know?” and she says, the bee and the grass and the clover. That’s what I know. She kind of goes back to first principals it seems to me, in the next one.

Robert. What are her figures that are failing to tell her?

Melba. I assumed it was that sequence of metaphors that she goes through. That language failing to tell her the pearls. The [inaudible], the pedestrians.

Jeff. I saw that as a scientific reference, perhaps. Mathematical. [general acknowledgement]

Greg. She’s referencing her distance to the cantons.

Jeff. Also, My Classics vail their faces, there’s a classical reference in line 7, Till bye and bye, these Bargemen/ Walked - singing - on the shore. I’m thinking of the bargemen in Hades to get you over the river Styx. [general acknowledgement].

Greg. It’s interesting to me that she refers to the pearls as farthings, because the farthing is the least valuable coin; it’s a miserable little farthing. She uses that in stead of Guinea or something else. – something valuable.

Melba. Weren’t pearl divers very poor, though, in general?

Lois. It could also be a reference to the risk that they take. A lot of them died before they had the sense to come back up. There was a huge risk in that profession, so in that sense, when you compare a pearl to risking their life, then it can become a farthing. … OK so we’re totally confused at the end of the first poem, but then Dickinson says – in the second poem she sort of calms us all down – It’s all I have ..

Judith. It’s a totally different reading of this second poem. I’ve just heard it read at Weddings; I’ve just seen it in such a different context.

Lois. But out of context it can work that way. There’s something very soothing to me about that second poem, if I read it immediately after the first poem.

Victoria. What is “this” then? It’s her poem, I know, that’s what I think. It’s her art.

Lois. Well, if it is a response to the first poem, then in this way it’s a dialogue between the self and the self. I don’t see this as being two different points of view, do you? If it is an answer to being left up in the air by the first poem, then “it” can be a synonym for “me” – or, what is this thing? – this life? Do any of you remember, back in childhood when you were maturing, or really early on having a moment of consciousness, and all of a sudden you realize that you are a separate entity – that there was a discrete thing that was you? – that was not your surroundings? And, the implied question that a child cannot really formulate is, what do I do with this? And in the second poem she’s sort of answering it for herself. I can’t know how far it is to heaven; I can’t know the value of life or the value of death.

Greg. It sounds like you were a more introspective and thoughtful child than I ever was. [laughter]

Melba. Yeah, I usually had that sense when I’d done something awful, or stepped on a nail .. [laughter]

Judith. It’s sort of a mystical moment. I understand what you’re saying – when you suddenly realize that you are an independent entity, and what’s your connection to something larger than yourself; it’s not what you thought it was. I remember that.

Lois. And, a child’s not equipped to answer it.

Victoria. [crosstalk] had was the structured church, and it just didn’t answer it. …. This sounds like a child’s voice. I hear in the poem a much younger voice. Innocent.

Lois. It doesn’t have to be a child, just innocent. What do you have to say for yourself, Emily. “It's all I have to bring today”

Judith. Or maybe she’s just tired of the question [laughter]. We need a little comic relief here.

Robert. This poem resonates to me with To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee. [general agreement]. She’s bringing her heart, the meadows wide …

Melba. Yeah, and she’s even kind of fending off more analysis, because she says Be sure you count. It’s like, OK, you want to count, go ahead; I’m trying to get to this experience.

Judith. And also, besides innocence, her heart just dwells in the natural world. That’s what she has to offer – to point that out.

Lois. To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee seems to me more sophisticated and a more judicious use of language. She’s expressing very similar sentiment in that little four line – aphorism, really is all it is – to this poem, and  I was eager to look and see, assuming that this one was written in her early years, because To make a prairie is one of the poems we have transcribed by others. We don’t even have a manuscript. Don’t have a date, don’t have her hand-writing. This is one that Mable Loomis Todd transcribed, probably from a letter. Either Polly or Martha Ackman told me that one time Jay Leyda scoured the country and wrote to people who had the most remote connection to Dickinson to get them to give him poems that somebody sent them that they didn’t have. I’m not saying it is, but it’s entirely possible that this was one of those. It’s all funs and mystery, but anyway I’m glad you brought that up because it’ a much more sophisticated rendering of this thought.

Judith. One thought I had was, when she talks in that first poem of My faith that Dark adores, she doesn’t declare that her faith is all darkness. So, it seems to me that this poem is another aspect of her faith – the second one. It’s what she knows; it’s what she sees; it’s what inspires her in the world around her.

Lois. OK. Now to me, that third poem is kind of jarring. Does anybody else feel that way after reading It's all I have to bring today? To say Morns like these - we parted              to me is a very abrupt shift in tone. Does anybody else feel that, or do you see a connection?

Greg. Well, I definitely agree …. The poem is departing from its predecessor.

Jeff. Well, if you read it as a love poem, it would fit the [inaudible] – if you read them both as love poems.

Lois Oh! If you read all I have to bring as a love poem?

Jeff. Yes.                              It is read at weddings. I had the honor once of being the solemnizer at a wedding and I read that and everybody thought it was wonderful. And certainly no one came up to me afterward with a cocktail and said “I want to challenge you on that.” [laughter]

Judith. It’s written on birthday cards a lot, too.

Adrianna. I was going to say it sounded as if she actually died. She says It's all I have to bring today and in the other they’re struggling to get to the other side, the pinions before the wagons. I just wonder if she could be saying this is what I’m bringing.

Lois. So, she’s at the pearly gates and St. Peter says, what gives you the right to be here Emily. It's all I have to bring today.

Victoria. I’m bringing my heart, and the meadows, and the bees… to heaven. I’m taking them with me.

Lois. So, what do you call that shift – it’s like she does within a poem. She lets it fall into the next poem. Then the next poem sets you up for the next poem, but only if you read it with a completely different slant, right? [general algreement] So that’s kind of fun; she’ll have the last line of a verse – and I don’t think that’s unique to Dickinson – she’ll have the last line of one verse works with those four lines but it also is the beginning of the next four lines.

Victoria. Is that called enjambment?

Greg. Yes, I think that’s right.

Victoria. So, you’d use that within a poem, but would you use that from poem to poem?

Jeff. That’s what’s suggested.

Greg. That’s what we’re doing. [general agreement]

Lois. Yeah, that’s what Ellie’s suggesting that you can do.

Greg. Now that’s working in the tuberculosis poem.

Several. Why do you call that the tuberculosis poem?

Greg. George Mamunes wrote So has a Daisy Vanished: Emily Dickinson and Tuberculosis, a whole book.

Lois. She had TB?

Greg. Well, she said she did in a letter. “When I was a baby my father used to take me to the mill for my health. I was then in consumption!” They used to think that breathing in the flour dust would scour the lungs. [general amazement] And, blooming, tripping, flowing is the bubbles – it’s the blood that you spit up  -

Melba. And the flush – the flush on the skin.

Greg. The flush on the skin was known as the hectic. That’s in A wounded Deer leaps highest. … The cheek is always redder/ Just where the hectic stings And, the Daisy has vanished, that’s one of her school friends, or girlfriends, or someone in her family. Someone has vanished.

Victoria. So first the friend in the other poem it’s a little linnet that flew away [the last line of the poem before], and now she’s become a Daisy, another metaphor for a lost friend. But it’s like this had already happened before because, as she starts the poem So has a Daisy vanished; It’s like there’s this whole story about this friend and what happened to her, and then she’s just starting there.

Melba. It’s also a trope of nineteenth-century literature that someone is dying and then there’ll be a rush of wind against the shutters and then someone will go to the window to close the shutters and that will be the soul leaving the body at the close of the day.

Lois. So are you suggesting, Victoria, that Morns like these is a backstory?

Victoria. Could be. It starts S0.

Lois. Or, in today’s parlance, “She is so vanished.” [laughter]

Judith. Oh. Don’t do that, Lois. [continued laughter]

…………………………

Lois. Let me just read you the note on If those I loved were lost. Cris says, “The Hero of Sir Henry Taylor’s 1834 dramatic romance “Philip Van Artevelde,” a book owned by both Dickinson and her brother, died in Ghent while puzzling over the fact and mode of his dying.

Greg. Yeah, that’s very interesting.

Lois. She’s suggesting that that’s a reference to that popular book that they were all reading.

Robert. Philip was a rebel who was captured, then dragged off and crushed. That was the form of death.

Greg. I like that explanation better than Philip the disciple, which you also hear sometimes. He’s the one who said “Show us the Father.” Van Artevelde goes with Ghent.

Robert. Thomas Johnson explains that Philip was a man of Ghent who led a successful rebellion against his overloard the Count of Flanders, but in a later battle the rebels were defeated and Philip ingloriously crushed to death in a ditch outside Ghent. In a play on this subject, a copy of which was in Dickinson’s household,  Philip’s last words, as he was being borne toward the town to be crushed were, “What have I done? Why such a death? Why thus?”

Victoria. Oh! So that’s the riddle; that’s the question.

Lois. So, OK, as we wind up here, does anyone want to comment on how this poem fits with the others or not? It’s tempting in that question, Are ye then with God? It’s very tempting to see the last poem as an attempt to answer, but a failed attempt at that, right?

Melba. Or possibly a choice to just rest with the question. [inaudible] defined by the unanswerability of the question.

Lois. But before she gets to that she says If those I loved were lost/ The Crier's voice w'd tell me.

Melba. And if they were found, The bells of Ghent w'd ring, and neither’s happening.

Greg. Lost here, perhaps, means “not saved.” … pretty hard to read it any other way.

Melba. I think the lines Did those I loved repose/ The Daisy would impel me – that’s when I hear Dickinson moving into that subjunctive mood again. “Even if I knew that those I loved were safely tucked in heaven, this fact of death, this oozing, crimson, bubbling death, would impel me to keep asking these questions.

Victoria. The way Philip did at the end of his life.

Melba. Right. At least, that’s what I’m getting out of it.