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.

EDIS, Amherst Chapter, Poetry Conversation

4 August 2017

Facilitated by Lois Kackley

Fascicle 3 Sheet 4

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

Sleep is supposed to be
By souls of sanity
The shutting of the eye.

Sleep is the station grand
Down which, on either hand
The hosts of witness stand!

Morn is supposed to be
By people of degree
The breaking of the Day.

Morning has not occurred!

That shall Aurora be—
East of Eternity—
One with the banner gay—
One in the red array—
That is the break of Day!

                        - Fr35/J13/M59

Lois. Essentially, she’s calling attention to the fact that even her father’s convention-bound language would limit life itself – by souls of sanity – even that is figurative language, because, to talk about “shut-eye” as sleep is figurative, and yet it’s limiting. In contrast to that, in the second stanza, “Sleep is the station grand/ Down wh’, on either hand/ The hosts of witness stand,” she’s kind of putting that in the category of myth-making, is she not? Anybody have any thoughts or arguments about that line of thinking?

Greg. The dead were said to be “sleeping in Christ.” It sounds that biblical note. The reason this isn’t the real morning is that the real morning is the resurrection.

Lois. Well, yeah. I started doing a little research on the Puritans, because, in the language that Greg is pointing out here, she’s aligning herself with the spiritual aspects of myth and language and poetry, if we read between the lines. So there’s not the wholesale rejection of the spiritual aspect of her Puritan heritage, right? Only with the deadening of language that comes about when you use figurative language to cut off imagination .

Greg. She uses that language for its power. It’s not doctrinal at all.

Lois. Right, it’s not doctrinal, but nevertheless she’s aligning herself with life as adventure that I suppose was inherited by the Puritans before all the dogma became so repressive. When she talks back to her father, if I  use that phrase, she’s not saying that she’s totally rejecting the tradition, only its repressive elements that come down and get hold of people and stop their thinking, stop their imagination, their wonder, the free-flow of ideas. And then again, in the third stanza, Morn is supposed to be/ By people of degree/ The breaking of the Day. Scan it, that’s just “Morning is just the break of Day.” And then the poet answers. I don’t think it’s fully developed. I don’t think her imagery is fully developed; but I do see the back-and-forth between what the acceptable language is and what the language is among those who align with symbolism and myth-making and possibility-exploring. Morning has not occurred! Morning has not even yet gotten here!

Victoria. I think that word – she uses it twice – suppose, is kind of important here, because, later on you get a lot of definition poems [such as Hope is the thing with feathers], where she proclaims it, and this is a very early poem. When she uses the word suppose, there’s a qualifying …

Lois. Well it’s not her voice.

Polly. She’s quoting people around her their attitude. It reminds me of Shakespeare, in a way, because who else addresses sleep in literature?

Victoria. I was thinking of Shakespeare too. What’s that line? Sleep [crosstalk].

Greg. I agree, the word suppose expresses a kind of light-hearted skepticism. There are a couple of other poems lime that, like Where bells no more affright the morn, that ends with Not Father’s bells nor factories/ Could scare us any more. So she’s done that more than once in per poems.

Victoria. She writes about that in another letter, where – this is in the context of her conservatory – where she went down early to tend to her flowers, but Father doesn’t like that. He’d rather I was reading the Bible, or doing something more valuable.

Lois. It doesn’t say in the notes, but I thought this poem was a response to his statement about preferring “real life.”

Melba. “We don't have many jokes, though, now, it is pretty much all sobriety; and we do not have much poetry, father having made up his mind that it's pretty much all real life. Father's real life and mine sometimes come into collision, but as yet remain unhurt.”

Judith. When I read it, I actually thought that second stanza was about dreams.

Melba. I got a very hallucinatory quality out of that, and it immediately called to mind that kind of sleep where there’s just this parade of images just constantly in your head, and it’s very fantastic.

Lois. I think that’s wonderful, because that’s exactly what she’d doing in that poem. So, she pulled out of you the phantasmagorical.

Victoria. That’s not sanity; it makes you feel the insanity.

Melba. Yes, or at least the release from a constrained sanity and convention. And then maybe you could say it’s the minds eye that’s active then. The physical eye might be shut, but it’s the mind’s eye that’s sort of wandering in this land of images.

Lois. It’s not what you’re supposed to have going on in your head.

Melba. No, no, no.

Lois. The contrast between Sleep is supposed to be and Morn is supposed to be and the proclamation, Morning has not occurred – Folks! [laughter]. The task that I think Dickinson took on in this little poem is to distinguish between the mechanistic, convention-bound thinking, and the symbolic – Possibilities – Exploring mind. She’s distinguishing between two modes of thinking here, and I think her Father’s attitude about so-called “real life” – and he’s the one who set up the juxtaposition, in a way. I’m not saying he was cruel or anything, but he’s the one that created this contrast between the symbolic mind, and the conventional, life-deadening mind.

Judith. Also, it wasn’t just her father, it was the time, it was the culture. It was limiting to individuality and free thought,

Lois. Yes, absolutely. And isn’t it true today? You meet some people who get glassy-eyed if you bring up a poem in a conversation, and can’t imagine sitting in a room for an hour and a half talking about poetry.

Melba. I swear, in a tour yesterday I started on an eight-line poem and they’re like zzzzzzzzz. [laughter]. It was not a good day.

Judith. This poem is 1858, and it’s just when she’s moving into this period of productivity – it’s kind of extraordinary that in some ways we can see her transitioning by the declarations that she’s making here.

Lois. That’s what’s so fun about reading them in this order.

Melba. She’s just getting her vocabulary together.

Polly. Yeah, or rationalizing, justifying, articulating why she’s moving in the direction she’s moving.

Melba. Is it possible that there are two compatible readings of this poem?

Lois. Oh, yeah. Probably more than two.

Melba. The witnesses are standing by for the resurrection, but maybe morning has not occurred for me. Maybe my morning is just about to happen – In language. I mean, I’m wondering if it’s double voice, and that’s why it’s directed to someone like her father, because that’s one meaning that she knows he’d be comfortable with.

Lois. I think that’s entirely possible.

Melba. But maybe I misunderstood something. When you started you said a sort of a dedication to Edward from his affectionate daughter.

Lois. Let’s look at that again. This is an editor’s note. “Copy sent to Susan, with the ironic dedication, ‘To my father, who’s untiring dedication in my behalf – I am indebted for my morning – hours – viz 3, AM to 12, PM. These grateful lines are inscribed by his aff daughter’ (L198). ED writes in another letter that her father typically ‘rapped on my door to wake me’“ (L175).

Victoria. A copy of this poem in the letter to Sur – it almost sounds as if she wrote the poem, and then sent the letter to Sue – “here’s the poem I wrote about Father, and this is the way I would dedicate it if I were to show it to him.”

Greg. It’s kind of tongue-in-cheek isn’t it?

Lois, Victoria. Yeah! It’s very tongue-in-cheek.

Victoria. If we look at this poem in the context of the fascicle, maybe we could get a clue as to what kind of morning it is.

Lois. I think Greg is right in pointing out that when she talked about Aurora, and east of eternity, she’s eliciting the religious connotations to eternity. I can’t give you an exact reference, but Aurora was spoken of traditionally, in Puritan terms as referencing the break of heaven.

Greg. The morning Goddess, right? She’s the Goddess of Dawn?

Lois. Yeah. And her enthusiasm – she italicizes “that,” which usually means that in the manuscript she underlined it. That is the break of day.

Victoria. Why is that emphasis?

Lois. Because she’s contrasting what the world calls the breaking of the day, and the logical day, the symbolic day. You know, to her, morning could be when she’s happy with a poem.

Polly. I’m thinking of it as a birthing image. The birth of the day is at dawn, and she is birthing her poem, and that’s when the breaking of the day is for her.

Lois. Yeah, yeah. I think something along those lines.

Melba. The Latin root for Aurora means to shine, so it has the connotation of a light that’s different from the actual light from the sun. So, I think one connotation here is that there’s a kind of light that has nothing to do with the eye being open or shut – that there’s some kind of internal light – usually knowledge – that comes into view. One last thought – it seems to have the quality of a hymn.

Sleep is supposed to be
By souls of sanity
The shutting of the eye.

Morning has not occurred!

Sleep is the station grand
Down which, on either hand
The hosts of witness stand!

Morning has not occurred!

Morn is supposed to be
By people of degree
The breaking of the Day.

Morning has not occurred! [general approval]

Lois. Because, she does isolate that line … Alright, shall we move on?

Mary reads.

Whether my bark went down at sea --

Whether she met with gales --

Whether to isles enchanted

She bent her docile sails --

By what mystic mooring

She is held today --

This is the errand of the eye

Out upon the Bay.
                  - J52/Fr33/M59

[ To hear this poem read aloud, go to https://youtu.be/Dez9iTq4dzw ]

Lois. So, what is that symbolic mind saying in this poem?

Polly. It’s not a journey, right? in that first stanza? It doesn’t matter what journey has happened. It’s mystic journey.

Adrianna. It’s like accepting what life sends your way, because you could be met with gales, you could go to an enchanted isle – and so you anticipate, await whatever happens, accepting what occurs.

Polly. Well, any one of these things could have happened – gales, the mystic mooring – that’s what I’m looking at – whatever’s there.

Lois. Yes, I think it’s as Adrianna said; if this is a commentary on life, it’s all up for question, it’s all up in the air. We don’t know. I may be buried by the storms of life.

Greg. What’s interesting to e is that this whole first stanza is in the past tense. [general agreement]. Then she goes into the present tense in the next stanza … but not the future

[crosstalk]

Victoria. All of those things may have happened to me, but here I am today

Lois. It’s the soul and the body, isn’t it? It’s the spirit speaking. I don’t know – it’s posing a question is it not? Whether, whether, whether? [crosstalk]

Polly. There are all these choices and she doesn’t know which is the right one.

Judith. The word “errand” is interesting, isn’t it? when you think of soul and body – the errand of the eye.

Lois. Yes, everything leads up to that, doesn’t it?

Greg. It’s nice alliteration.

Judith. But also I’d like to know about “errand” if there was a deeper meaning back then. It’s kind of a daily routine thing…

Greg. No, the Puritans called their entrance into the New World as an “errand into the wilderness.” It wasn’t just running an errand, l/vicike an errand boy. It’s a big deal.

Lois. It’s interesting that you talk about the change of tense, though. It’s like when people talk about out-of-body experiences, where they look down on their body on the surgical table or something, they look back into the past and into the future. It’s almost like she’s trying to look at everything from every perspective –the uses of the changing tenses I’m just saying…..There are lots of possibilities in life. My job is to figure it out. Some of it may be out of my control, like gales at sea. Some of it may be within my control, as in docile sails.

Victoria. The sea is always a big symbol for her, of the unknown.

Emily Dickinson Reading Circle 12 May 2017

Emily Dickinson Reading Circle

12 May 2017

Facilitated by Christopher Benfey

Chris. I think we should do spinach first, and then we can have the applesauce. So, I suggest we talk about two things. First, about riddles and definitions, since the only big insight I think I’ve ever had about Emily Dickinson is about the riddle poems and the definition poems – the relation between them.

Margaret. Oh come on Chris. There’s your “Emily Dickinson and the Problem of Others,” where you had some insights as well…

Chris. Oh yeah, but that was so long ago. I was a different person – somebody with two middle initials! … Then, I thought we might gossip a little, about the movie, the exhibition at the Morgan Library, etc. There are a lot of opinions in the air, all of a sudden about certain modes of Dickinson mythology, and this seems to be a good moment to air some of those things. You’ll find I have sort of wishy-washy opinions, and you’ll have strong, passionate positions, and I’ll annoy you by taking – kind of – the long view, or being annoying in my evasiveness’.

   I think these two things – the scholarly issues, what I want to say about the riddles and definitions correspond to one widely held version of Dickinson, and all of these issues - THE RENTING OF THE BEDROOM!!! [general hilarity] are attached to another. I think there are at least two versions of Dickinson, and they’ve been with us from the time the poems were first published – from the 1890’s. One is a very restrained Dickinson, a New England nun, the Dickinson of renunciation. “Renunciation is a piercing virtue,” the Dickinson who didn’t, didn’t, didn’t; didn’t marry, didn’t publish, didn’t do anything, didn’t leave her door. And that Dickinson wrote rhymed verse and metered verse and in many ways conventional New England women’s verse, and that’s the Dickinson I best [inaudible] the “cooked” Dickinson,” using the anthropological distinction between “raw” and “cooked. Already in the 1890’s there was the making of a different Dickinson, You saw it in the English reviewers who said “She doesn’t even know how to rhyme! She thinks alcohol rhymes with pearl. What is the matter with her.” And that’s when Alice James says it’s reassuring that the British get things so wrong. [laughter] And, they think of Dickinson as[inaudible] with Thomas Wentworth Higginson. And for Alice James and others Dickinson is transgressive, and wild, and American. She doesn’t rhyme, and she doesn’t know that “it’s” isn’t how you do the possessive [laughing] even after a year at Mount Holyoke. She doesn’t know how to spell. She spells “upon” “opon.” What are those dashes for? They’re wild! Crazy! And that was the Dickinson that Sue was warning Mabel that Dickinson was seen on the lap of a man, or something. These witch-women in the Homestead, What are they going to do now? Now, the raw Dickinson and the Cooked Dickinson: The cooked Dickinson was, through the 20s, was contrasted with Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman is – “tear the doors off their jams, and Dickinson is sort of prim white dress. Meekness, cooked, and Whitman is wild. And, there’s a poem that became associated with that, and it became sort of The Poem of Emily Dickinson, and that was Because I could not stop for Death. And that cooked Dickinson persisted until the 70’s or so, and then another poem just sort of blew it out of the water, and that was My life had stood a loaded Gun, and you just know the movie’s going to end with that poem. But then we have in this other, explosive poem that Adrienne Rich, which she famously first delivered at a commencement address at Smith, when she said, “This is the poem that gives us the real Dickinson, the raw – Vesuvius at Home. And I think we still have these dueling Dickinsons. Every time there’s a new movie, every time there’s a decision about the Homestead …….

There’s a whole body of writing about Dickinson’s “definition poems.” Sharon Cameron in a famous book called “Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre,” has a whole chapter about the definition poems, and it seemed to many of us with this magical biographical factoid that Emily Dickinson lived on one side of Main Street and Noah Webster lived on the other, [this is not true] and she said “for several years my lexicon was my only companion,” there was something about dictionary definitions that just obsessed her. Her definitions are pretty weird definitions; we all know that she doesn’t go to Webster’s book from across the street – that other word horde from Main Street in the nineteenth century. You know, if you look up “hope” in Noah Webster’s 1844 dictionary it says something like the religious meaning, an expectation of salvation is like, number two. All of the definitions that can be drawn into a religious orbit are. And then, we get Emily Dickinson’s indelible – somebody said it was the best lyric for a punk rock song – Hope is the thing with feathers. Very strange definition. And, right below it [on handout] is another strange definition. If you look up “doom” in the dictionary you get a again a hell-oriented religious thing Or, Doom is the house without the door. And, for our spinach purposes, the beginnings of the poems are almost what we need for this little introduction. One thing that we perhaps notice right away with these definitions is that Dickinson tends to define, almost exclusively, abstractions. That’s what she’s interested in defining. She doesn’t say “A bird is –.“ A whole series of words that she defines are BIG abstractions. Greif is a Mouse. And her riddle poems tend to be about concrete things – A Route of evanescence – I wrote a whole book about this poem. Nobody on first reading of this poem knows the answer; that’s the interesting thing about it. When I test it on smart undergraduates – what do you do with it? – A Route of evanescence? You all know the answer, right? But not for my very bright, brilliant, intelligent students.

Member 1.  Not for me, either. I don’t know what it is.

Member 2. Me either.

Chris. Oh Good! Sol we have two guinea pigs. Let’s give it a quick try with just the two of you, OK? Are there any words that you don’t know? … Cochineal is a deep red dye.

Wendy Reads:

A Route of Evanescence
With a revolving Wheel—
A Resonance of Emerald—
A Rush of Cochineal—
And every Blossom on the Bush
Adjusts its tumbled Head—
The mail from Tunis, probably,
An easy Morning's Ride—

                         -J1463/Fr1489/M618

[To hear this poem read aloud, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hxD1eWYH7I ]

Chris. So, this is a late-ish poem, it’s not a late, late poem, but she sent it to more people than she did any other poem [that we know of], and she sent it to some of her closest friends, to some of her literary friends, and you sometimes find it with her own name, like it was some sort of self-portrait. It was a very important poem to her. It’s a very finished poem. Some of them you don’t know if they’re quite finished, or whether they’re drafts, she doesn’t say.

                        First of all, we might not want to assume that it’s a riddle by reading it. It does seem a little unclear, what it’s about, right? – even if we don’t say,” Ah, this is a riddle like ‘what’s black and white and read all over?’”

Member 3. At first it’s like it’s a shrub of some sort. Then you get to the mail.

Chris. Yeah, what’s that mail doing in there? [laughter] It’s some kind of moving shrub. [laughter]. None of us would know what it’s about. She provided an answer.

Member. When I read that I thought it was about a carriage, bringing in mail – the wheel going around and bringing the world to you.

Chris. Yes. To the degree that there’s something to visualize here, one of those things is some kind of letter bearing– and she loved letters. She said “A letter is a joy of Earth. It is denied the gods.” That’s a good reason to be mortal – that you get letters. [laughter] “The way I read a letter’s this/ Tis first I lock the door.” So, some kind of grand letter delivery system, from North Africa. And it only takes the morning to get there, right? – like FedEx.

Lynn. The resonance – I got the idea that one creature is resonating to something violent and exciting. So, from the whole thing I get this idea of creatures responding to one another.

Chris. Good. Yeah, I see that too. … So, we have a lot of abstract words, but they’re sort of concrete in a way – their tumbling, their resonance. Yeah, I think that’s good. Some of the answers I’ve gotten from my students are: something about the seasons, and the changing of colors – green to red in the fall, or the passage of time, which is related to the seasons, or the turning of the earth through the seasons. My gut feeling is that those answers aren’t wrong answers. One of the things about Dickinson’s riddle poems is that they have multiple answers. I also think the reason Dickinson gave the answer to this one is either because she had tried it on people and they didn’t know what in the hell it was about, or because she has such a self-identification with it’s subject that she liked signing it “hummingbird.” … Higginson and Mabel Todd ruined all of the riddle poems by titling them [general sighs of dismay] with the answer. It had already started with “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” which was published by the Springfield Republican – under the title “The Snake.”

Margaret F. She often has much longer poems when she’s younger, and then redacts them into short little things later, and I think she did that with the hummingbird poem as well. … “Within my Garden rides a Bird.” She just comes back to the same idea. Listen to this one.

All the letters I can write

Are not fair as this —

Syllables of Velvet —

Sentences of Plush,

Depths of Ruby, undrained,

Hid, Lip, for Thee —

Play it were a Humming Bird —

And just sipped — me —

Chris. And also “I taste a Liquor never brewed” is also supposed to be another hummingbird poem.

Polly. When a hummingbird is near, the first thing you is that you hear it,

Chris. That’s why it’s called a hummingbird.

Polly. Yes, there’s a noise like bad weather. She doesn’t mention the sound of the bird.

Chris. She wants it to be silent, actually. I think she loves the evanescence of it. [crosstalk].

Member 2. Can we get back to the mail? From Tunis, probably? Does this have to do with the exotic coloration?

Chris. Well, the main thing is the speed. The idea is that the hummingbird is so fast that it can get from Tunis to New England in a morning.

Margaret M. I just think she’s really teasing in this poem. “You’ll never guess it.” [laughs]

Chris. I have never had a student guess this correctly. Never.

Margaret F. It’s a lot like the Anglo-Saxon riddle poems. Some of those still haven’t been answered.

Chris. Exactly right. You read the Exeter book and down below, in a footnote, it says something like, “Possibly the Crucifixion.

Greg. I suspect a lot of your students have never seen a hummingbird.

Chris. That's true, About a quarter of the students in any given class have never seen a hummingbird. [crosstalk] So now, back into my narrow little “cooked” point. The riddle poems take very concrete thing and turn it into just a cloud of abstraction. We’ll take this little hummingbird and turn it into a Route of Evanescence. And even “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” which ends in that famous line, “Zero at the Bone,” moves from the concrete to the abstract. My theory about the definition poems is that they take an abstract thing and take it in a concrete direction. I do think that there’s another turn of the screw though, and that is that the definition poems tend to have built-in riddles, and the riddle poems have a built-in definition. So – "Hope" is the thing with feathers – it ain’t much of a riddle, eh kids? What’s the thing with feathers? A bird!. What’s “the house without the door? A prison!

Lynn. Or a tomb.

Chris. Or a tomb. Then you might ask, how conscious is she of this concrete/abstract idea? So that’s why I went to this poem, Some things that fly there be. I’ve always loved this poem. Dickinson has several gorgeous poems; one is These are the days when birds come back – these gorgeous poems that are in tercets. There’s something special about her poems that are in three line stanzas. There’s that wonderful spider poem – A Spider sews at Night. So, look at this poem.

Some things that fly there be —
Birds — Hours — the Bumblebee —
Of these no Elegy.

Some things that stay there be —
Grief — Hills — Eternity —
Nor this behooveth me.

There are that resting, rise.
Can I expound the skies?
How still the Riddle lies!
                      - J89/Fr68/M52

[ To hear this poem read aloud, go to https://youtu.be/tAT8sFlUAgM ]

Another riddle poem. In the Exeter book of riddles, down at the bottom there’d be a [inaudible]. What do we think this is – what does this sound like?

Member 4. Death

Chris. Yes, death or resurrection. Dickinson is always saying, like, “With what bodies do they rise” [laughs] Like, “I don’t get this whole resurrection thing – bodies in the ground? Does the whole body go up? But it’s the two second lines of the first two tercets that interest me. Some things that fly there be/ Birds — Hours — the Bumblebee. What about that statement?

Margaret F. Well, it’s two positives with an abstract in the middle.

Chris. Yeah, so it’s concrete – abstract – concrete. And it has a surprise to it. Yeah, there are things that fly – birds. Hours? There’s a certain cognitive re-positioning in our brains. We say, “Oh yeah. Tempis fugit. OK., I get that.” And then she says, the Bumblebee and we’ve got to flip back again, right? I mean, our minds do this very quickly and automatically, but there is a sort of – to use her words – adjust it’s tumbled hear, right? Mm. We adjust our tumbled head. Of these no Elegy. We don’t write poems to mourn their flying. Then, I think the real kicker in this poem – the emotional gagger. Some things that stay there be and we think we’re going to get concrete-abstract-concrete again, right? Houses. But look what she does, she doesn’t say guest or house or rock. Some things that stay there be – Grief! For me it’s like the whole poem. Then she does that little cognitive thing again – Hills, the she pulls the rug out from under you again – Eternity. All I mean to suggest here is that when Dickinson is thinking about riddles, How still the Riddle lies – she’s thinking about this kind of switching back and forth between the abstract and the concrete.