EDIS, Amherst Chapter, Poetry Conversation 1 August 2017

EDIS, Amherst Chapter, Poetry Conversation

1 August 2017

Facilitated by Lois Kackley

Fascicle 4 Sheet 1

Source: Cristanne Miller, Emily Dickinson’s Poems as She Arranged Them, Cambridge, Massachusetts  London, England Harvard University Press, 2016

Water, is taught by thirst.
Land—by the Oceans passed.
Transport—by throe—
Peace—by its battles told—
Love, by Memorial Mold—
Birds, by the Snow.
                        J133/Fr93/M61

Have you got a Brook in your little heart,
Where bashful flowers blow,
And blushing birds go down to drink,
And shadows tremble so—

And nobody knows, so still it flows,
That any brook is there,
And yet your little draught of life
Is daily drunken there—

Why, look out for the little brook in March,
When the rivers overflow,
And the snows come hurrying from the fills,
And the bridges often go—

And later, in August it may be—
When the meadows parching lie,
Beware, lest this little brook of life,
Some burning noon go dry!
                        -J9136/Fr94M61

Lois. Does anyone see a theme among the poems on this sheet?

Greg. Three of them have to do with flowers.

Lois. A lot of flowers in this one, aren’t there?

Victoria. Four of them have a kind of a feeling of personification. The flowers take on different characters.

Lois. She’s drawing on an assumption of shared experience in doing that, isn’t she?

Greg. What do you mean, “shared experience?”

Lois. Well, for instance, to say “Have you got a Brook in your little heart,” she’s assuming that the reader has a kind of sentimental, or a very pleasant connotation with “brook.” Right?

Greg. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Lois. What do you feel when you watch a brook?

Judith. Delight.

Polly. A liveliness as well, because a brook, typically, is flowing.

Lois. Right, there’s a lot of energy there, but it’s a soft energy. It’s not an overwhelming energy. If she said, “Have you got a hurricane in your little heart?’ [laughter] that would [crosstalk].

Greg. Water is life.

Lois. Yeah, that’s a terrific connotation.

Adrianna. I was thinking of baptism, too. Water is used for that. She calls it your draught of life.

Lois. So, in a poem like Water, is taught by thirst, she’s really – the assumption is stronger with water than thirst, isn’t it? Or is it? She’s saying “If you know thirst, you know water, isn’t she?

Polly. She’s saying you know it by understanding its opposite.

Lois. Exactly.

Greg. Or experiencing its loss or lack. [general agreement]

Melba. And it’s even a stronger claim. It’s taught. You cannot know water until you know thirst.

Lois. But the real message there is that you cannot know the significance water, right? Or am I reading too much …

Melba. No, no, you’re right.

Lois. Again, water here is a metonym for a broad meaning.

Robert. I was just thinking of Franklin 284, The Zeroes taught us Phosphorous, the second stanza Of Opposite — to equal ought. [general concurrence]

Lois. This is one of the fun things about starting with these early poems. We see these themes that she’s picking up on early. That poem, Water, is taught by thirst, is almost an index of poems to come [laughs]. She grouped them in this little poem, but as she goes and gets more experience she takes every one of those lines into an expansion into other poems. … I was thinking of The Emily Dickinson Handbook. Martha Nell [Smith] has an interesting piece in the beginning about the manuscripts, and she points out that in the early manuscript books, there aren’t really a lot of variants. It wasn’t until the ninth or tenth fascicle that she started using unusual line breaks, she started putting in a lot more variants. In the early poems that we’re reading now, she tends more toward tetrameters. Then, around the ninth or tenth fascicle she starts mixing in a lot more pentameter and even trimeter

Victoria. A lot of “b” sounds, like a bubbling brook.

Melba. Which would indicate that she’s just enjoying the sounds – she enjoys just putting the words together.

Judith. I remember Thomas Wentworth Higginson said that he never really understood the poems until he heard Mabel read them aloud. She was such a good reader that her recognized what they were doing. [crosstalk]

Victoria. If you hear someone read the poems well, it does make a difference. I imagine Mabel had a lovely voice.

Judith. It’s intriguing that Emily apparently intended that. She may have thought of seeing it as an aural production.

Greg. She referred to her poetry often as “singing.”

Polly. I’m struck by how much of life she understands in this poem. The little brook in her heart being a resource, but then, watch out in March, or in August, you could really be up a creek. [laughter] I just like that “look out!” She’s got the warning signs out. And she ends with a contrast with the first two stanzas. It strikes me how simple and natural the imagery is, and as usual she gives just so much meaning to it.

Lois. I think I was about 29 when I first read this, and I remember thinking, “Hm. Do I have a little brook in my heart?” [laughter]

Greg. Does a leaky pipe count? [laughter]

Jeff. She repeats the word “little” in all four stanzas.

Lois. The ruefulness is one of the more lasting elements in this poem for me. There’s a lot of sugar in this to help the medicine go down.

Jeff. “A smile so small as mine might be/ Precisely their necessity.

Polly. What is the moral? Does everybody have one?

Lois. Good point! Let’s see if we can give some street names to these metaphors. Do you think she’s talking about a universal experience here?

Polly. That’s what I thought when I first read it, but maybe she doesn’t mean that. Maybe she means people who are more attuned to life.

Lois. A reason to get up in the morning is one way I would define it. Do you have a reason to get up every morning? Then, to elaborate on it, what would be some bashful flowers? Little private pleasures, right?

Polly. I would think, if I continue with the metaphor of creativity, most really creative people believe that, if you look too directly at the idea you extinguish it. You have to approach it a little bit at a slant. She sees these bashful flowers that she longs to encounter, but if too much real life gets in the way, then …

Lois. They won’t be able to bloom …. And blushing birds go down to drink, that’s all in the same vein, right?

Polly. Yes.

Lois. And shadows tremble so. How would you interpret that?

Victoria. I think flickering light, as you would actually see it if you were sitting by the brook and the light was flickering through the foliage. In some sense that creative light. Sometimes that shadow – perhaps she would have perceived it as something that would move. Shadows would come in and out of that creative light that she was experiencing.

Lois. What about the rest of us? Could it be little episodes of self-doubt?

Melba. Maybe, but this was coming at time in her life when the poetry is really beginning to flow out, and maybe I’, wondering if she feels she needs some privacy and concealment. She’s ambivalent about letting too many people in.

Lois. Okay, so putting it on a more universal plane we could say that even someone who’s not a poet could have private ambitions that she’s not willing to share. And nobody knows, so still it flows,/ That any brook is there,/ And yet your little draught of life/ Is daily drunken there—  It almost puts the emphasis on the thing that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning than the “wanna.” She’s – in an odd way – I like Polly’s suggestion of coming at things indirectly.

Polly. The elusiveness of that inspiration, and how precious it is – how it can overflow, it can also go dry.

Lois. Can anybody relate to the idea of private inspiration that nobody knows about?

Greg. I went to a workshop a long, long time ago – a stress management workshop, and I’d been doing a lot of Zen meditation at the time. The instructor taught us how to create a “sanctuary,” a strictly mental place, where you might imagine a garden, and when you’re stressed out you can actually go there, depending on how well you can actually do it. It reminds me of that.

Lois. So, I think implied with that is that it’s something we have to work on. It’s not something that happens naturally. Would you say that?

Polly. I wouldn’t. I would say that, for the creative person, the important thing is recognizing that it’s there and honoring its love. That’s what I would think, anyway.

Greg. I think of the line “It was given to me by the Gods.”

Lois. I think to me, the thing that’s magical about this poem is her insistence of secrecy about this brook.

Melba. There is a protective impulse, because when you get to stanza four she’s not saying that it’s not saying that it will go dry in August, she’s saying that it may go dry. Beware, so tend it carefully. And, I assume that the tending it is sort of keeping it in the shadows, out of sight.

Greg.

Inheritance, it is, to us--

Beyond the Art to Earn--

Beyond the trait to take away

By Robber, since the Gain

Is gotten not of fingers--

And inner than the Bone--

Hid golden, for the whole of Days, [Of all the sounds dispatched abroad]

Or,

Of Chambers as the Cedars

Impregnable of eye [I dwell in Possibility]

You can’t see it. You can’t get at it.

Lois. So, that’s a good poem for noticing the contrast she’s posing between things abroad and the inner than the bone.

Greg. Yes, she says about the music in the trees, it’s permitted Gods, and Me.

Lois. But, I think as readers of Dickinson we can find a lot of reinforcement for very private experience, and also very public experience, and maybe in the post-Freudian era that’s not so hard – but I just find a real fascination with the intensity with which she expresses these two different realms as being so very distinct, and also reinforces the reader, if that reader has a suspicion that there are private experiences that simply cannot be shared. Dickinson I think, as a poet, is attempting to reinforce the awareness of that phenomenon, rather than the more public attitude of “Just don’t sit there, do something.”

Victoria. Or, in our contemporary culture, if you don’t share a lot of your inner private life, you’re up tight or neurotic in some way. You’ve got issues. [laughter] There’s something ironic. She’s writing a poem to tell you about the privateness, but she’s not telling what it is specifically.

Polly. Can we compare it to the first one in the fascicle? That one intrigues me, because it’s almost like, until the thing is fully flowered, until the thing is ripened, OK, I’ll loan it to you, but once it’s in full fruition, then, no, it’s mine.

Lois. So let’s read it.

Perhaps you'd like to buy a flower
But I could never sell.
If you would like to borrow
Until the daffodil

Unties her yellow bonnet
Beneath the village door,
Until the bees, from clover rows
Their hock and sherry draw,

Why, I will lend until just then,
But not an hour more !
                            - J134/Fr92/M61

Lois. Hock, by the way, is a kind of German wine.

Polly. Sometimes she called her poems flowers.

Lois. Well it would be easy to think of it as a poem.

Polly. What I’m trying to figure out is, what is it she’s willing to lend? – prior to the flower blooming, - before the poem is – before you could call it a poem.

Lois. But, how could you borrow a poem? Or, even a flower.

Polly. That’s what I’m asking.

Victoria. Yeah. “Can I borrow your flower?” [laughter] Flowers are something you give away.

Lois. And she did. Of course, there are several records of her dismissiveness towards the people who, you know, came to her door, “asking for her mind,” is that how she put it? She was rather caustic about that, so maybe she wrote this poem to soften …

Polly. Well maybe – perhaps the words themselves are fine, you can have my words, but once I put them together into this beautiful poem, then it’s mine. Then you can’t have it. [laughing] Then, I don’t even know why she would say that.

Lois. Yeah, I know. OK, let’s get with the mood of it and see if we can come up with something. The mood of it is what?

Melba. It seems playful. Cheeky? [laughter] And she’s having fun with the commercial metaphors – sell, borrow, lend. So, if you read her poem, you’re in some ways borrowing an image of the flower from her. She can’t give you the flower itself, she can’t give you the flower that she sees, but you can kind of borrow the impression of a flower for her. - But maybe she doesn’t want that compared to the actual flower. Maybe she doesn’t want you to compare the image to the real thing.

Polly. And, in a sense she’s sort of implying that you can have it when it’s in the bud, but then it’s mine.

Robert. I’m sensing that she gives flowers an autonomy of their own, and they are not hers to sell. She doesn’t sell flowers. They have their own autonomy. They untie their own bonnets. She can’t sell them, but they can be shared.