Monthly Archives: June 2009

One right after the other.  Emily every day, each day more horrible than the next.  And more amusing.

#410, c. 1862

The first Day’s Night had come—
And grateful that a thing
So terrible — had been endured —
I told my Soul to sing—

She said her Strings were snapt—
Her Bow — to Atoms blown —
And so to mend — gave me work
Until another Morn —

And then — a Day as huge
As Yesterdays in pairs,
Unrolled its horror in my face —
Until it blocked my eyes —

My Brain — begun to laugh —
I mumbled — like a fool —
And tho’ ’tis Years ago — that Day —
My Brain keeps giggling — still.

And Something’s odd — within —
That person that I was —
And this One — do not feel the same —
Could it be Madness — this?

I love the image of Emily’s Brain giggling.  My focus goes to the last stanza where she questions her own sanity.  I don’t believe she really thinks her grip on her mind is loosening.  Or if it is, then it is a divine sort of madness.

The part I zero in on is that she looks at herself in the past, the girl who has suffered some horror, and feels she is not the same person now, who can see the past and laugh at it.  In the past, the horror filled her eyes such that it felt real, as if it would be all she’d ever see again . . . for the rest of her life!!  Oh, the drama.  Emily has sport with her own emotional extremes.  I love her self-mockery here.  She calls herself a fool, but it doesn’t sound angry so much as amazed at her own ability to create dramas with her mind.

This is the same mind or “Brain” that can also look with some distance on her emotional melodrama and be amused by it. Maybe there is a difference between Brain and mind.  Or Brain and Soul.  The Soul can’t sing.  She is wounded, her bow and strings destroyed.  Forever!!

The Brain, that thinking organ, is able to take the long view and see the humor in all the Soul’s heart rending drama.  So that split between Brain and Soul is where Emily gets caught and wonders if she is crazy.  Both seem real, but how can they co-exist?

Again, I don’t take the question seriously, and I don’t think Emily does either.  This is a divine separation that she must navigate in order to understand herself.  She and I and you have many selves being born, living and dying within us all the time.  And what a relief to know there is some cool, observing intellect who can see the humor in the situation.  There is a whole village of selves, unruly, noisy, within any one of us, I imagine.  Thank God.  How boring otherwise.

I like that Emily folds herself into the embrace of her larger, intellectual self.  The Brain is the governess of this village, and She is a benevolent dictator.  What else can one do with these other noisy selves but laugh?  Treat them like a litter of puppies.  How humbling and how healthy, and what a relief to be able to laugh.  It’s a sign that we are bigger, more inclusive, than we might think.  There is more to us, more citizens in our village, than we thought at first.  More resources, more back-up.

Hey!  I welcome more selves to my village.   Strength in numbers, I always say.  Who cares if I don’t immediately recognize them.  We’ll get to know each other eventually.  I have room enough in my psyche to hold them all.  It’s big in there.  I know.  I’ve spent a lot of time wandering in that space, and I haven’t found the outer boundary yet.  Besides, I can always add another wing if need be.

Good morning.  Sweltering day.  It’s getting so I can’t even sit on the porch anymore.  Drat.  I have come to rely on this space.  The heat makes me write faster because I can’t wait to return to the refuge of the air conditioning.

here goes:  #743, c. 1863

The Birds reported from the South—
A News express to Me—
A spicy Charge, My little Posts —
But I am deaf — Today —

The Flowers — appealed — a timid Throng—
I reinforced the Door—
Go Blossom to the Bees — I said —
And trouble Me — no More—

The Summer Grace, for Notice strove —
Remote — Her best Array —
The Heart — to stimulate the Eye
Refused too utterly —

At length, a Mourner, like Myself,
She drew away austere —
Her frosts to ponder — then it was
I recollected Her —

She suffered Me, for I had mourned —
I offered Her no word —
My witness — was the Crape I bore —
Her — Witness — was Her Dead —

Thenceforward — We — together dwelt —
I never questioned Her —
Our Contract
A Wiser Sympathy

It’s interesting for me work out these poems because I find myself rolling them  between my  hands like clay rather than reading them straight through and trying to wrestle them into submission.  This one threw a shot of light to my eye when I was writing it into my notebook.  When I saw the words on the page, I read them top to bottom instead of left to right.

“The Summer Grace, for Notice strove—

Remote — Her best Array —

The Heart — to stimulate the Eye

Refused too utterly —”

From reading this down not across, I get “Remote the Heart Refused too utterly.”  Then it seemed the uppercase “Her” is Mother Nature herself, not a literal, flesh-clothed woman.  Emily is aligning herself in concert with Nature and her movement from blossom to frost-covered death.

When I return to “Remote the Heart Refused too utterly,” I close in on “too”.  Why not just “utterly”?  That would make the point.  No, Em says “too utterly”.  The angry heart has gone too far, refused too much.  Closed the door to life with too extreme a renunciation.  A little melodrama, perhaps?  Surely, spring will come again.  It always has in the past.  Or this is the strength and the passion of a girl’s heart that knows no moderation.  Has no experience to measure its pain against and so goes too far.  This is all the heart knows.  An untutored heart cannot anticipate some other life beyond the moment at once.  This is the hearth’s truth.  

Emily plunges into this truth without hesitation or fear.  Some might call her reckless.  She would call herself “too utterly”.  Funny, she knows she’s going too far.  But that doesn’t slow her down a bit.  This, too, is the way of girls.

We’d be awfully bored without them.

What are the chances?  I chose a poem yesterday by flipping randomly through the pages of my book.  Didn’t like what I came up with so waited a day and tried again.  Random flipping, random flipping, and asking:  “Emily, what do you want to tell me today?”  Yep, the same poem came to hand again.  She is relentless, this woman.  Here it is:

#586, c. 1862

We talked as Girls do —
Fond, and late —
We speculated fair, on every subject, but the Grave —
Of ours, none affair —

We handled Destinies, as cool —
As we — Disposers — be —
And God, a Quiet Party
To our Authority —

But fondest, dwelt upon Ourself
As we eventual — be —
When Girls to Women, softly raised
We — occupy — Degree —

 We parted with a contract
To cherish, and to write
But Heaven made both, impossible
Before another night.

 When Emily writes, “We talked as Girls do” she means something more than a frank discussion of our favorite shoes.  She points to the innocent arrogance of young, smart girls.  We think we are in charge of our lives, while God listens silently.  Makes me think of the proverb, “Man proposes. God disposes.”  Except that here Emily claims the power of the disposer.  God is the silent partner.  He quietly dispatches while we girls, with the folly of youth, plan our futures as we grow to be the women we imagine.

The promise to cherish and to write is also awfully girlish.  Something happens in the lives of young girls, their relationships to each other, their awareness of their ability to create with their words and their love, that makes them feel wondrous and powerful.  And Em here dwells on the cruelty of denying that.

The part that moves me most deeply is, “talk as Girls do”.  The phrase assumes so much, as if Girls are a well known, well studied and documented species.  That one can consolidate their discourse to a shorthand.  You know how girls are.  How they do go on.

What pains me is the truth of this assumption.  I recognize it immediately.  Emily honors the innocent arrogance of girls, not merely their youth but their gender as well.  Girls, in Em’s view, have a special fondness for this feeling of direction and creativity over their own destiny.  A direction born out of an ability to imagine and articulate the future.  These girls “speculate fair”.  There is no ground they can’t traverse within the fruitful fields of their imaginative conversation.  And that’s the center of it right there—the magic for girls is in the sharing of the ideas.

The other thing that girls do like nobody’s business is make promises to cherish each other.  And to write!  Absolutely one must write!  Girls have to communicate or they don’t exist.  (Cell phones were devised with girls in mind.)  Writing, speaking, sharing, cherishing—all this is how girls stay alive.  Transferring information.  Constantly.

And when girls make a promise to cherish each other and remain connected through words, it’s a promise for real and for good.  I am remembering my best friend from childhood, Helene.  I usually went away during the summers, and we wrote pages and pages of letters to each other. Helene signed her letters, “friend always.”  She is the only person in the world for whom those words actually mean what they say.  Helene is still my friend.  She will not let me go, no matter how much time or distance there is between us.  She wrote “friend always” about 35 years ago.  And she has made good on that promise.

In Emily’s poem nothing could put a stop to the promise made between these two girls but the will of Heaven itself.  Only God, the eavesdropper, who silently allows the girls to go on about their imaginary authority over their own lives, can put a stop to it.  And He does.  Without a word.  He takes Emily’s friend away without an explanation.  He doesn’t have to explain.  He’s God.

Emily’s tone here is indulgent toward girls and their belief in themselves, but she is not patronizing.  She believes in their talk and their promises.  She also sounds angry.  It’s not fair to give girls all that power to imagine and speak, and then take it all away.  Not fair at all.  Downright mean, in fact.

Another proverb comes to mind:  “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”  I have always thought this was a gentle reminder to be humble in the face of time and change.  Now I hear it more as a cruel joke.