Emily Dickinson Museum Poetry Discussion Group February 2018

Emily Dickinson Museum Poetry Discussion Group February 16,  2018

Facilitated by Karen Sanchez-Eppler

Karen. From a letter to Elizabeth Holland. “My flowers are near and foreign, and I have but to cross the floor to strand in the spice isles.” So that notion of geographic movement; and that caring – I love that caring. My flowers are near and foreign – that they can be both of those things at the same time is a kind of conjunction that is something that I think her poetry seeks to do in general, and it certainly is one of the things that happens with what I’m thinking of as conservatory poetry.

 [Shows a picture of Dickinson’s conservatory reconstruction] 

So there’s a picture of the conservatory going up. … and then the process of building this tiny room – tiny and mighty room. Well before the conservatory, there is clearly a connection between Emily Dickinson and flowers and poetry. In some ways deeply conventional, that the itinerant portrait painter who came to paint the Dickinson children and gave them props to hold; gave Emily a book with some flowers … and these are probably more than generic props, because Lavinia is holding – I don’t know, books and flowers – normal girl things – you could just say “I’m painting your portrait, here, hold this,” right? Though a little bit odd to have her hold both of them. But, Lavinia is holding a piece of paper with a drawing of a cat on it. So, if you know anything about Lavinia, Lavinia, certainly into her adulthood, was deeply fond of cats, and we should also take this time to say “Happy Birthday” to Lavinia. So, that’s a personalizing gesture that Bullard did when he painted them, saying, “Well, what would you like to hold, girls?” That would get Lavinia and the cat in there. So, I think, Emily, and the book, and the flowers. And this is a page from Wildflowers Drawn and Colored from Nature with poems by Lydia Sigourney, 1859, which was a gift that Edward Dickinson gave to Emily. So, she grew up with that connection, and, the first book that she made is her herbarium. …. Harvard University has put the whole herbarium up on line, and it’s free, and you can just go through. Page 20, and I think it’s 44, are the two gentians. The first poem that I picked for today is a gentian poem. On the first page of the first book of poetry that she made [Dickinson’s hand-made “fascicles”] is a poem about a gentian. There are four lines on the sheet, then there’s a blank, then there’s a bunch of lines, then there’s another blank, then there are three lines. So, when this poem was first published, in Thomas Johnson’s edition and other editions of the poems as well, all of the words on this sheet were one poem. One of the changes that Ralph Franklin made was, when he looked at this sheet he said that it is true that most of the time on her fascicles Emily Dickinson draws a line between one poem and the next, and that’s why Johnson decided that these are not separate poems, but she left quite large spaces between them, and this is her first book and she’s just developing her practice and his decision was that she had not yet developed the practice of drawing those lines, and that we should think of these as three separate poems. So, for one thing, it’s just a really fascinating thing about our relationship to Dickinson’s poetry that it’s because the vast majority of her poems were published after her death, with no input from her about how what they should be, how dependent we are on editorial decisions, and how difficult it is to make the decisions, and what it is you should do. So, one of the things that’s just so awesome about these materials all being available, is that you can now yourself, easily, from a computer anywhere, at no cost, look at the manuscripts yourself. …

The Gentian weaves her fringes —

The Maple's loom is red —

My departing blossoms

Obviate parade.

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!

In the name of the Bee —

And of the Butterfly —

And of the Breeze — Amen!
                       - J18/Fr21/M33

So those could be three poems, but they also work, fairly beautifully as one poem. I wanted to mark how there’s this lovely connectedness to her attention to the natural world, and her sense of what it is that she’s doing as a poet. Maybe just that first little stanza, since that’s the part you have

The Gentian weaves her fringes —

The Maple's loom is red —

My departing blossoms

Obviate parade.

Since that’s the first poem that Dickinson decided to put in the first effort to collect her poems into a little book – to basically self-publish, pull things together in that way. What are the first things that strike you about this poem?

Greg. Well, she would occasionally refer to girls, young women, as flowers. I’ve read this as the departing blossom is the one below where the angels are. The second piece describes a funeral procession and then there’s the blessing at the end. So, I read it as one poem – but they also stand alone, which is interesting. Maybe that’s why she put the big spaces between them.

Karen. So that it could be …

Greg. Yeah.

Karen. So, you can read them together as a funeral for a young woman. I think you can also read them as a funeral for summer, maybe – summer, sister, seraph – One of the things that happens with the coming of red maple trees is that mark – and that is a true thing of gentians, that it is one of the last fall flowers.

Everett. I read the departing blossoms as her poems, and that it was instructive about how she felt about her poetry, that she didn’t publish them during her lifetime, that she didn’t leave instructions about how they’d be treated after her death, and they could have just as easily have been burnt. I think it’s very consistent with her philosophy throughout her life.

Victoria. It reminds me of when later on she wrote “God made a little Gentian/ It tried to be a rose. It’s that same kind of not being showy-offy, but at the end, that beauty after all the summer flowers have gone, after all the other poets have shouted their words, there’s Dickinson, the beautiful, beautiful – she doesn’t shout.

Unknown. It’s just this modest little flower.

Victoria. She writes enough about the gentian. There are several poems, and so I think there must have been a lot more gentians than there are now in this area, because they’re hard to find, especially the fringed gentian, which is the one she wrote to the most, with the little delicate edges on it. A lot of the land had been cleared.

Unknown. The kind of land that they like. So, as we’ve become more forested, we have become less gentianed.

Victoria. Yes.

Unknown. Also, I love the weaving and the loom, because that’s one more way of conjuring the women that you’re talking about. But, there’s also such a long tradition of – we still say that, don’t we, “text” and “textile.” There’s such a sense of the relationship – “spinning of tales,” of fabric production and literary production. I think especially as a way of thinking of women as writers – Lydia Sigourney – who has that book? At the beginning she has a bunch of poems as a writer being a spinner and a weaver – an available set of vocabularies for being a writer – that she shares with the gentian.

Greg. We weave a story, don’t we?

Karen. We weave a story, we weave a tale.

Jule. It’s interesting. I’d never made that connection, nor heard that connection.

Greg. Spin a yarn.

Karen. Spin a yarn. Indeed. That’s even better. Let me give you another poem, also gentians. And this is going with Victoria’s sense of the poem’s gentian’s staying with her. So, this is a late poem, 1877, past her most prolific period.

……

The Gentian has a parched Corolla —

Like azure dried

'Tis Nature's buoyant juices

Beatified —

Without a vaunt or sheen

As casual as Rain

And as benign —

When most is part — it comes —

Nor isolate it seems

Its Bond its Friend —

To fill its Fringed career

And aid an aged Year

Abundant end —

Its lot — were it forgot —

This Truth endear —

Fidelity is gain

Creation o'er —

                        -J1424/Fr1458/M609

What’s the feel of that poem? What’s the emotional tenor – the color of that poem?

Julie. I find it melancholy. The idea of  parched and dry, Without a vaunt or sheen –mellow and melancholy.

Elizabeth. To me, interspersed with – there is a sense of melancholy – but I also detect a sense of play with the idea that the gentian has a parched corolla, because the corolla isn’t only the petals of the flower but the corolla is the flower around the saint’s heads, and in the gentian, Juices becomes beatified. So there’s just this hint of irreverence in this poem – and reverence, for nature, that I found to shift the tone a little for me. ….

Karen. Yeah, and that gets us back to In the name of the Bee —/ And of the Butterfly —/ And of the Breeze — Amen! Which is both such an iconoclastic thing to say, and yet also so true of the trinity, right? The father, the sun, and the holy ghost – transformation – place of butterflies. ….

Greg. Does the last line mean “creation is over,” or does it mean “all over creation?”

Karen. Well, isn’t that dual possibility exactly what everyone is saying – the loss and the abundant fullness, the loss and the wholeness. Which it is is a matter of inflection, right? It’s both, and it’s how you decide to say it – which it is – which is how we live in the world with grace or not, right? – whether you see it – whether you see the loss – so in the beginning, Nature’s buoyant juices/ Beatified, But they’ve been parched; by the time you talk about buoyant juices they’re already parched. Can you see the buoyant juices still there?

Melba. One of the things that appeals to me about this poem is the intense concentration that she can bring to this final moment, to this one flower – she has the significance of the whole summer past. It’s not only beatified, it’s sort of clarified, condensed – this final moment of appreciating the gentian.     

Karen. So, moving us away from the herbarium and gentians to the conservatory, which where I promised. This is at the end of fascicle 8.

As if some little Arctic flower

Upon the polar hem—

Went wandering down the Latitudes

Until it puzzled came

To continents of summer—

To firmaments of sun—

To strange, bright crowds of flowers—

And birds, of foreign tongue!

I say, As if this little flower

To Eden, wandered in—

What then? Why nothing,

Only, your inference therefrom!

                                    -J180/Fr177/M103

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

One way this is a conservatory poem is that As if. That’s the syntax of the imagination. That’s the opening up for a space of play and fantasy. What if? As if! Let’s imagine together. But it’s also true that the thing that she’s imagining is something that is literally available to her through the conservatory – a way in which she can have summer and winter – a way she can have arctic flowers. But in that, you have strangeness being present in this snowy wintry place.

Victoria. In Marta McDowell’s book she writes about this poem. She uses this poem, and she talks about all of the seed catalogs, the Bliss catalog. Emily and Vinnie could have been sitting looking at it, and it would have brought all these plants into their imagination, and some seeds they could have bought and brought to the conservatory – brought all those plants from foreign places to them, through this catalog.

Judith. I love it that inference is italicized. Does that mean that she did something different when she wrote it?

Greg. It usually means that she underlined it.

Elizabeth. [examining the manuscript online] It looks like she underlined it.

Judith. What if Emily is the Arctic flower?

Greg. That’s your inference. [laughter]