August 16, 2010

What the Pearl Said

We progress into the most dense part of summer, mid-August. They call it the “dog days”. I always thought it was a little unfair to lay that on dogs who didn’t ask for it and suffer more than most during this time. Most people assume the expression arises from the actual suffering dogs on our porches. More likely the title has to do with the passage of Sirius the Dog Star through our skies during these weeks. (Also the feast day of Saint Roch, the patron saint of dogs and one of my personal heroes, is August 16th.) So the bit about this time of year not being fit for dogs is a retrofit notion we applied later.

Each year, I try to hurry through this part of the calendar, even as everything associated with it conspires to slow me down. Now is the purgatorial slog. I dread it more each year. One day after the next is like a pile of oily, wet earth to push-off the porch. These go by in a progression toward the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. August 29th is tattooed on the inside of my eyelids. The movement toward that date is a peculiar mix of sludge in the forehead, black buzz over the vision and always, always that hot needle of anxiety boring into the cartilage over the ear. An echo of five years ago. We brace ourselves constantly, like a clenched fist . . . for what?

No one is at ease. We’re pretending but not very well. Emily coughed up a poem this morning, and I am not sure what to do with it. Here goes:

#693, c. 1863

Shells from the Coast mistaking —
I cherished them for All —
Happening in After Ages
To entertain a Pearl —

Wherefore so late — I murmured —
My need of Thee — be done —
Therefore — the Pearl responded —
My Period begin

The first thing that strikes my ear is that in her last line she writes “begin”, present tense. Not “begun” past tense, which would have completed the rhyme with “done” more nicely than “begin”. So what does she accomplish here. She irritates our ear with a slant rhyme. Then she ends her poem by launching it outward, into the eternal present tense where it remains in a perpetual state of beginning. All the previous verbs are in the past tense, telling us what happened in the past, fixed under her microscope. Only at the end does the energy change into an ongoing action, wide-open, changeable, uncontrolled.

So irritating this slant rhyme. It rubs the wrong way. It bothers the reader so much that the oyster mind ladles some soothing meaning around the sharp edges. That will make it work better, give it a smoother more acceptable shape. If we can attribute some meaning to it, then we can live with the irritation. To pearlize the problematic slant rhyme is to make a place for it in our minds. If we do that well enough, we may even come to cherish what had irritated us. Since we can’t spit this out, the mind may make it beautiful. But really we come to cherish the clever coating we have placed around it. That is the artful part, right? Not the irritation but our own genius for smoothing over the irritation.

I’d like to do the same for the entire month of August. It chokes me in the back of my throat, and I can’t dislodge this irritant. Nothing for it but to endure, leave town, or make something of it. The writing is not so much more complicated than the clever oyster who accommodates its tender insides to the unkindness of intruding sand. We’ll make a smoother coat for the thing that pains us. Nature compels us to write the story that soothes the mind. Some pearls are lumpier than others. Some are precious. Some only semi-precious. Several are flawed and would be better returned to the sea. Others are simple and lovely, both a remedy and pleasing for its own sake. Those I’ll keep.

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July 24, 2010

Subtle Cargo

Another tropical depression, this one called Bonnie, is heading toward us. Jeez, they’re coming in like jetliners at an airport. This Bonnie is losing steam, it sounds like. Maybe she’ll ramp up to a tropical storm. Maybe she’ll settle down and not give us too much trouble. We’ll see.

Emily remains unmoved by storms. She is still dithering on about love.

#580, c. 1862

I gave myself to Him —
And took Himself, for pay,
The solemn contract of a Life
Was ratified, this way —

The Wealth might disappoint —
Myself a poorer prove
Than this great Purchaser suspect,
The Daily Own — of Love

Depreciate the Vision —
But till the Merchant buy —
Still Fable — in the Isle of Spice —
The subtle Cargoes — lie —

At least — ’tis Mutual — Risk —
Some — found it — Mutual Gain —
Sweet Debt of Love — Each Night to owe —
Insolvent — every Noon —

All this mercenary language in a love poem can really put a girl off at first. Gives me a chill. It’s embarrassing to see a love relationship as a transaction, even though it’s true, when I give myself time to think about it. Even under the best of circumstances with people who have the best of intentions, a love relationship inevitably requires some contractual exchange. A quid pro quo so that all parties are satisfied—each got what each wanted. We seek something in another person. Otherwise why go looking, right? In order to get what we seek, we understand without explicit direction that we’ll have to give in order to get.

It’s vulgar but true. No one gives anything away for free.

I’d like to say that the relationship between mother and child is characterized by unconditional giving, but that’s not true. Even the best mother requires some quid pro quo for the life she gave. Children may not realize they’re paying for all that breast milk, but they are at some level. Mother always exacts her price. She may do so in ways that are perhaps more subtle than the robust exchange between adults, but there is a price all the same.

Emily says: No one can go into or out of any meaningful and intimate relationship with another person without some commerce. If your goal is to remain pure of these conditional exchanges—where you do this for me, and I do that for you—then you have to remain utterly solitary. Once you open the door to other people (or dogs for that matter) you stoop to commerce. There may or may not be literal money changing hands, but there is some form of legal tender making this relationship happen.

The line that keeps playing on my thoughts is “Subtle Cargoes” buried in the center of the poem. It seems to me that she points to an important shift here. That subtle cargo has no real inherent value. Its value is determined by who wants it and how badly they want it. The price of a house is set by the competitive vicissitudes of the marketplace. (Girls, girls, girls: Haven’t you noticed that as soon as one boy asks you to dance, all of a sudden, all the other boys who had previously been ignoring you, all of a sudden, as if out of nowhere, these boys practically break their own legs in the rush to dance with you? Writers: Haven’t you noticed that as soon as you get one story published in a pretty good journal, all of a sudden, all the other editors who had been studiously treating you like a nonentity, all of a sudden these editors are practically breaking their pencils to get you to write for them?) Emily suggests the same here. The value of the cargo she holds is subtle, not fixed or obvious. It is elusive, ephemeral. Without an interested buyer, she loses value. As a woman, as a poet, as an object. It’s a cold view, I’ll warrant.

Yet, the subtlety of her cargo stays with me. As something so fluid and unfixed it may rise as easily as it falls. This cargo may find another port if there are no interested buyers at the first stop. She’s thinking about the ups and downs of the marketplace. Wealthy at midnight. Broke at noon. We have to believe that wealth may return again. One is just as meaningless or meaningful as the other. So where does she locate her real value? In that subtlety, which may be another way of saying “agility”. The value of her cargo lies in its very mutability, it’s ability to shift, to rise to the next bidder as the market demands.

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July 20, 2010

Happy Letter

So there is good news in no particular order. The broken oil well in the Gulf has been plugged finally. The temperatures have dropped to around 90 degrees after cooking us in the hundreds for a while. Before During After, a book of Katrina photos and essays (some of which I edited) has been published and looks beautiful. Geoff and I are reading Emerson with the Lyceum group. We read On Self-Reliance a few weeks ago, and this week we’ll read The Over-Soul. I skipped my report on our reading of Beyond Good and Evil because my brain goes into lock-down when faced with Nietzsche. Emerson is such a breezy tonic by comparison.

Emily writes today with peculiar urgency.

#494, Version II, c. 1862

Going — to — Her!
Happy — Letter! Tell Her —
Tell Her — the page I never wrote!
Tell Her, I only said — the Syntax —
And left the Verb and the Pronoun — out!
Tell Her just how the fingers — hurried —
Then — how they — stammered — slow — slow —
And then — you wished you had eyes — in your pages —
So you could see — what moved — them — so —

Tell Her — it wasn’t a practised writer —
You guessed —
From the way the sentence — toiled —
You could hear the Bodice — tug — behind you —
As if it held but the might of a child!
You almost pitied — it — you — it worked so —
Tell Her — No — you may quibble — there —
For it would split Her Heart — to know it —
And then — you and I — were silenter!

Tell Her — Day — finished — before we — finished —
And the old Clock kept neighing — “Day”!
And you — got sleepy — and begged to be ended —
What could — it hinder so — to say?
Tell Her — just how she sealed — you — Cautious!
But — if she ask “where you are hid” — until the evening —
Ah! Be bashful!
Gesture Coquette —
And shake your Head!

My hand landed on the above poem, which is called Version II. The one that comes just before it is Version I. The two are almost identical except that this version uses the third person singular pronoun “Her” and Version I uses the “Him”.

The poem’s voice speaks directly to the writer’s own letter, asking it to “speak” to the letter’s recipient. This is a familiar literary conceit, to direct the poet’s message to the written paper as if it were a living entity, directed by the poet’s hand to convey some part of the writer to the reader. Also quaint is the faux modesty, pretending that the letter is a poor representation, spoiling the page, a waste of good paper, etc. (Shakespeare’s sonnets follow this tradition.) These faulty words written by this wretch of a poet, possessing a mind dulled by the sickly taint of overwhelming love, can never rise to the task of expressing to the beloved the full breadth of the poet’s true feelings. These are too vast and words alone too small . . . yadda, yadda, yadda. Emily, you are sooooo romantic.

The only problem here is that Emily can’t decide who should be the recipient of her letter, whether a “Him” or a “Her”. It looks like someone at some point made an arbitrary decision to call the Him version the first and the Her version the second. It’s difficult enough to assign dates to Emily’s work, so I imagine it’s fairly impossible to say for sure which of these she wrote originally and which was the amended version. Mainly scholars have settled on the dates of certain poems by the type of handwriting. They assumed that her handwriting style changed with age, so the poems appearing to match the style or slant found in Emily’s handwriting in dated letters, were given that same date. This process, although inexact, more or less helped to pinpoint when the poems would have been written.

So many, hundreds, were written in the 1862 handwriting that it appears she either had an astoundingly prolific year in 1862. (Possible.) Or that she revised and re-copied a large portion of her already existing collection of poems into a “fair hand”, perhaps in preparation for publication. Possible, although not likely given her dour view of publication. Or it may have been that she wanted to assemble a final or “fair” copy of her best work for her own records. She was sewing many of these into booklets, fashioning her own “publishing” house by hand.

Most likely this was so, but now we have these two highly stylized romantic love poems, almost exactly alike, written apparently at the same time in the same “fair hand”. One speaks to man and one speaks to a woman. What was she up to?

Did Emily seek to obscure her lesbian love affair by disguising the recipient of the poem’s letter as a man in one version? Then later did she decide to “come out”, at least to herself, by re-writing the poem to a woman? Maybe. Although I find it hard to imagine that Emily would be ashamed by any part of herself or hide from herself. She was too self-directed to start with. Plus it seems to me that a woman so sheltered from the world would be naive about sexuality and the social mores around sexuality, that it seems unlikely she would hold this conventional condemnation against herself. In addition, it was commonplace and accepted for women in this Victorian period to use passionate, overblown language to express affection for each other in their letters. Not hard to imagine that this afforded plenty of social latitude and a vocabulary for women to locate their sexual longing for each other as well, if they felt so moved.

Another possibility is that she was experimenting with voice and persona, both in her life and in her work. Emily would write the same poem twice and change the channel for each just to see what it would be like. That sounds more like her. Curiosity would push her to stand on both sides of the looking-glass, for no reason other than she’d like to know what it’s like over there. The lover’s perspective is by definition warped and one-sided. I can imagine Emily looking at that and wondering how it would sound to express the same sentiments to either one sex or the other. Emily the gymnast can take the stance of either.

The result is intriguing and varies depending on the disposition of the reader. Version I sounds like something out of a Bronte novel, a wild woman in the throes of passion beyond her control. Version II sounds like a Victorian girl, reaching for a literary model to channel her feelings toward a safe subject. The whole thing hangs on the letter being a failure due to its grammar. It is only syntax, says the poem, which is to say only the empty frame is there. The speaker/writer left out the verb and the pronoun, which is to say there is no action and no human presence. No life, no movement. How can love flourish in this place?

The poet with any sense of responsibility to her own curiosity wants to push her poem this way and that, just to see what it might do. Also to see how just a couple of letters changed here, makes all the difference in the world.

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June 30, 2010

Tropical Depression

We are still drenched in the feeder bands (like that weather report lingo? yep, we’re fluent in New Orleans) from this almost-hurricane Alex. They promise it won’t disturb the oil spill. Thank goodness. I’d hate to have anything mess that up—it’s been going so well. Speaking of lingo and fluency, I remember years ago, way before Katrina, someone told me, “There’s a depression out in the Gulf.” I puzzled over this for some time, wondering why she was telling me about a person suffering from chronic emotional distress out in the water. Should we get that person some help? A therapist? I was confused. Not any more. Now I know the short-hand terms better than I ever wanted to know. Although, it’s no accident that “tropical depressions” are called that. No mere weather pattern, these low-pressure systems infect our emotional core with an inexplicable heaviness. Anxiety, sure—that’s a conditioned response, rising from our collective memory of five years ago. But the hard-to-pinpoint sadness, the low-grade, enveloping grief that makes us move and think with a strange slowness—these seep into us from the air all around. An invisible density bores down on our brains from the Gulf and the past at once.

Makes me want to move to Canada for lots of reasons, not just the good gun control laws. Sheesh, don’t get me started.

Emily refused comment on the recent Supreme Court decision that overturned the ban on hand-guns. She’s only mildly interested in the weather. This was all she had to say:

#359, c. 1862

I gained it so —
By Climbing slow —
By Catching at the Twigs that grow
Between the Bliss — and me —
It hung so high
As well the Sky
Attempt by strategy —

I said I gained it —
This — was all —
Look, how I clutch it —
Lest it fall —
And I a Pauper go —
Unfitted by an instant’s Grace
For the Contented — Beggar’s face
I wore — an hour ago —

It’s true. Nothing like a moment’s happiness to make a person all that more aware of her misery. “Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length,” said another dour New Englander.

Emily goes further. She says that her moment of happiness made it impossible for her to be content with mere existence. She might have been satisfied with trundling along, not expecting too much, but then she couldn’t resist reaching for that treasure up high, that bliss. Now, she’s had it once, she is ruined, spoiled for regular life, which is never characterized by sustained Bliss.

So she asks us to ask ourselves: Is it worth it? Clearly she believes it so. But she can’t help falling into the shadow surrounding Bliss. It’s the memory of Bliss in the shadow that spoils her. When she removes herself from experience and dwells in the memory of experience, then she finds the source of her melancholy, or rather her sense of herself as a Pauper. She sees Bliss as something that belonged to her, an object she clutches with desperation. When it slips away, she feels depleted, as though someone drained her bank account. Interesting that she doesn’t know how to be happy as a dog. She had plenty of good teachers for that. Sorry to roll out the clichés, but that’s what they mean when they say, “Ignorance is Bliss.” That and a failure of memory too.

My grandmother was the happiest she has ever been during the last few years of her life when her memory left. It was replaced with doughnuts covered in powdered sugar and round-the-clock cable TV. There was a program that showed a continuous loop of random amateur wedding videos. My grandmother watched these and imagined she was actually in attendance at the wedding, that these strangers on TV were her nieces and nephews getting married, and she was witnessing a real and true blessed event. It made her happy because she loved weddings, especially the cake at the end.

So my grandmother spent her final days as a perpetual wedding guest, smiling with powdered sugar dusting her chin and blouse. That was her bliss. Hard to argue with that. More of this tomorrow.

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June 23, 2010

Cosmic Gymnast

Summer solstice glided past me a couple of days ago. Now we are well into the thick of the heat. A lunar eclipse happens this Saturday. Look alive.

This year summer begins with a thunderstorm. Lance is cowering inside the house, while I brave exposure to the elements on the porch. First Lance wants to escape from the house. Then he wants to seek refuge inside the house. He can’t stand the noise, and he can’t decide where he will be safe because the trauma is everywhere all at once. What does he imagine is happening? Probably it seems to him that the house and the sky and everything that makes any sense at all is about to cave in on his head. Poor dumb dog. How can he have so little faith in the essential stability of things? Really.

Emily says the following:

#576, c. 1862

I prayed, at first, a little Girl,
Because they told me to —
But stopped, when qualified to guess
How prayer would feel — to me —

If I believed God looked around,
Each time my Childish eye
Fixed full, and steady, on his own
In Childish honesty —

And told him what I’d like, today,
And parts of his far plan
That baffled me —
The mingled side
Of his Divinity

And often since, in Danger,
I count the force ‘twould be
To have a God so strong as that
To hold my life for me

Till I could take the Balance
That tips so frequent, now,
It takes me all the while to poise —
And then — it doesn’t stay —

Her intelligence and maturity will not permit her to accept the bland assurances of prayer. Talking to God as if he were a big Santa Claus in the sky? Not for Emily. So where does that leave a clever girl in a world that tips and whirls and crashes? Emily says she’d love to invent a God strong enough to hold her life and make sure all is well in each of the particulars. She might have been willing to believe in that until it goes out of balance. Something crashes and falls. Someone dies. The impulse then for some is to pray all the more. Danger makes us faithful. The response to catastrophe beyond our control is to create another intelligence and put that One in charge. We are thrown back into our childhood again and again. Wouldn’t it be nice to think someone could move the thunderstorm from over our heads? The noise! The confusion!

In the end Emily removes God from the conversation. She occupies the last stanza with her first person singular pronouns, all by herself. Balance is the sense of coherence in existence for a faithful doubter like Emily. Tipping out of balance is the thing the life inevitably does to all of us, “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” The difference between Emily and those who fall to their knees in prayer, is that Emily recognizes—in this final stanza—that the balance is hers to achieve. Not God’s to give. Her grammar makes her the originator of the balance or the coherence. In this stanza, she identifies “Balance” with the neuter third person pronoun “it”. Not a divine “Him” because the problem with inventing a God and giving that entity a gendered pronoun is that you also give Him a human mind. This creates all sorts of bafflement down below when He does things or allows things that no human would permit—death of the innocents, for example. Instead, Emily identifies “Balance” as a state of tension against that impersonal force in the world, the chaos that pushes up against the human mind, destabilizing it. The immature response is to beg for a parental cosmic entity (God as daddy) to make it all better. Emily takes responsibility for her own sense of balance.

The cosmic gymnast, Emily will bob and weave her way back to center. Forever holding her thoughts, bone, muscle, desire, all of herself on that balancing point that wobbles occasionally but then returns. Weighted more or less evenly on all sides, she remains mindful of her own life force at the center. A girl like that is indestructible.

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June 18, 2010

A Gnat’s Horizon

Happy Birthday to me and we are up to our eyeballs in blueberries. Geoff and I went blueberry picking last weekend and brought home three gallons. We gave away a lot but that still leaves us with enough blueberries to last us pretty much for the rest of the summer. I made blueberry waffles this morning. There will be crepes tomorrow morning with ricotta and . . . berries that are blue. I imagine a cobbler off in the distance. Muffins too. Good thing I like blueberries.

Emily sends a peculiar birthday greeting for me.

#372, ca. 1862

I know lives, I could miss
Without a Misery —
Others — whose instant’s wanting —
Would be Eternity —

The last — a scanty Number —
‘Twould scarcely fill a Two —
The first — a Gnat’s Horizon
Could easily outgrow —

Whew! Cold-hearted Emily. She begins and ends the poem with a reference to the expendable people. The center few lines describe the people (all two of them) whose lives matter to her. So the poem’s main concern is to let us know that there are lots of people around who could drop dead and Emily wouldn’t mind too terribly. Was she just in a bad mood when she wrote this? Or just a brutally honest mood? I suspect the latter.

Only in the privacy of her poem could her cold knife of a mind do its work. That means telling the unvarnished truth. Emily can’t be bothered with most people because most of them are, let’s be honest, dreadful. Dogs are better.

Her tone is not nasty or defensive. I do not get a sense of the wounded idealist huddling behind a show of toughness. No, Emily really truly can do without most people. And she did exactly that. You have to admire her consistency and conviction. The poem also makes me wonder what did a person have to do or be in order to enjoy the privilege of Emily’s care. I suspect there was no clear set of credentials. I imagine Em would just look you over, divine the content of your Soul, and then most likely put you out on the doorsill when it became clear (to her) that said Soul lacked sufficient substance. Or if your Soul emanated enough of what the poet wanted in her presence, perhaps she’d offer you a glass of sherry and gingerbread. The standard for entrance into the poet’s select society was whether she could use you. If your Soul offered the light and material grace for her to feel inspired by your presence, then you were allowed to stay.

Make no mistake: Emily stands at the doorway. She doesn’t have to explain or justify who gets in and who stays out. There is no point in cajoling or flirting with her either. She sees right through you. In fact, that is the worst thing you could do. In order to get across this threshold, you have to do the hardest things in the world. Be genuine and brave and risk everything. Good luck.

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June 1, 2010

Baffled at Her Shrine

You won’t believe this, but another giant alligator has appeared in my bayou. This time someone got a photo of him (or her) in the act of capturing a large white duck in his jaws, and posted it on the neighborhood bulletin board. A froth of dead white feathers pushing along the surface of the water with a lumpy snout and set of eyes following behind.

So that settles that. No swimming in the bayou this summer for Lance. Tough luck. And I’ll have to put in another call to Gary-the-Trapper. Bayou safety maintenance is a thankless and endless task.

Here is todays’ poem, one year to the day since I began this practice and one century before the year of my birth.

#506, c. 1862

He touched me, so I live to know
That such a day, permitted so,
I groped upon his breast —
It was a boundless place to me
And silenced, as the awful sea
Puts minor streams to rest.

And now, I’m different from before,
As if I breathed superior air —
Or brushed a Royal Gown —
My feet, too, that had wandered so —
My Gypsy face — transfigured now —
To tenderer Renown —

Into this Port, if I might come,
Rebecca, to Jerusalem,
Would not so ravished turn —
Nor Persian, baffled at her shrine
Lift such a Crucifixial sign
To her imperial Sun.

Emily the shape-changer takes on many forms here, as she takes us on a tour of her love life. Among other things she is at sea in her own emotions. Her response to this man’s touch is so overwhelming, so oceanic, that all her previous flirtations (those minor streams) are obliterated. Her second stanza tells us that love changes her, makes her more beautiful than before. (Blecchh . . it’s true.) This idea strikes me as a girlish view of womanhood that she is somehow initiated into a finer state when her physical life is destabilized by the arrival of a man. She simultaneously ascends to a higher status where she breathes “superior air” and wears a “Royal Gown”, and also comes down to earth. She loses those wandering gypsy ways of hers, when she was only Herself, Alone, Unique. The change that comes over Emily is that she turns toward some notion of herself as Wife, a notion that anchors her in this turbulent sea of feeling. This would be the Port for her, safety and shelter against the rock-and-roll of love without containment.

Yep, that is the inevitable destination for a woman in love, it seems, hence Emily’s comparison of herself to Rebecca, a famous Wife. I confess that I had to look up the story of “Rebecca at the Well.” I am not so conversant in the Old Testament as I should be. Here is a thumbnail version: Rebecca was chosen by Abraham’s emissary to be the wife of Isaac. She received this great honor because she displayed generosity at the well where the emissary rested and waited for a sign. Rebecca came to draw water and when asked by the emissary, she gave him some to drink. Then without prompting, Rebecca also gave water to the camels. This was the magic moment. Rebecca’s humble compassion for the animals was the quality that struck the emissary as the proper requirement to be Isaac’s wife.

It’s important to note here that the office Rebecca was running for was Wife. Not Lover, not Temptress. Not Queen, not Mother. Not Whore, not Mistress, not Schoolmarm, not Afternoon Dalliance. None of these other fascinating roles for women. No, Wife was the role that Rebecca—and by extension Emily—was up for. Unlike these other relatively simplistic roles, Wife carries a vast complex of social, sexual and political identifications that stick to a woman like flypaper, and she doesn’t have a lot of choice about what she’d like to accept and what not. It’s all there, packed into Wife.

The office of Wife contains the sexual aura of lover/temptress/whore, plus all the animalistic, nurturing, soul-defining stasis of Mother, plus the executive power of Queen, plus the requirement to provide wise restriction as Schoolmarm. Wife is a large bundle of duty, glamour, power and privilege all wrapped up in being the other half of a unit called “marriage” that a woman might easily side-step if she wishes by avoiding men. All these duties, etc. will not be hers to bother with if she just leaves well enough alone and doesn’t mess in the business of love. If she doesn’t concern herself with the oceanic feelings aroused in her by men, then she may remain simply Herself. She doesn’t have to run for office or take on the sticky flypaper of identifications that come to her from the outside. She may divine Herself from the inside, tend her garden, write poems, and be perfectly content for all of her days.

Our Rebecca, bless her heart, was elected to this office that radically disrupted her life and determined the future course of history because she displayed simple kindness to dumb animals. No good deed goes unpunished.

There is more to the story. Rebecca was a great choice for a couple of reasons. She was ready to change her life, and she wanted the job. The marriage was arranged by Abraham for Isaac, but the wedding could not happen without Rebecca’s consent. Isaac did not have the power to determine his own choice of wife, but Rebecca could say “no” if she wanted. She said “yes”. God only knows why. There is a certain line of text in this story that scholars have focused on because it stands out as unusual information. When Rebecca and Isaac met the first time, the text tells us, “And Isaac loved her.” We don’t get to hear Rebecca’s feelings for her future husband, but we do get the sense that Isaac fell hard. Rebecca remained opaque. She had a job to do, business to attend to. She spends the rest of her story running her husband’s life, providing him with two sons, securing water rights for her tribe and maneuvering to put her second son Jacob in line for Isaac’s throne, bumping the first-born (and rightful heir) Esau out of the job because he was incompetent. This is not a pretty view of Mother, favoring one child and scheming against the other. But politics is not pretty. Rebecca did what was best for the nation. It wasn’t personal.

Emily is no Rebecca and never will be. In her closing stanza, she also aligns herself with a “Persian, baffled at her shrine”, which is how a Muslim would regard the symbol of Christianity. When Emily regards marriage she says, “This is not my religion. This is not my story.” What begins as a spontaneous, oceanic feeling leads to a consequence, according to the pressures of a Society that Emily inherited and didn’t ask for. (You know, that dreaded Society that so vexed Emily.) Her Society wants to stuff love into a container of Marriage, which places a lot of social, legal and political constructs around what had been a boundless sensation. She rejects her inheritance. The rejection is complicated. She wants to be a Pilgrim of Love, but hasn’t found the story that fits her love. Given the options, Emily prefers to remain in the purity of Herself, Alone, Unique, where the consequences don’t stick to her—and she can know herself as herself.

Emily’s phrase, “Into this Port, if I might come” suggests that she is considering it, this safe harbor. What choice does she have? She has to look at it. Being Emily, she stands on the line and won’t go there without first looking hard at what she loses and what she gains. And does this really serve Emily as she is—Herself, Alone, Unique? We know the answer. She remained aloof because no one had written her story yet. Emily was left to craft that on her own.

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