Monthly Archives: June 2009

I had to skip a day and start over because the poem yesterday threw me into a whirl of misunderstanding.  I needed to dwell on it a while longer and try again today.  It’s painful.

#1299, c. 1874

Delight’s Despair at setting
Is that Delight is less
Than the sufficing Longing
That so impoverish.

Enchantment’s Perihelion
Mistaken oft has been
For the Authentic orbit
Of its Anterior Sun.

Yes, Emily you are correct.  The actual fulfillment of longing or desire is never what one hopes.  The anticipation, because it is all in the vapors of the mind, grows beyond  any physical possibility.  The tendency to focus on those vapors is a kind of addiction that may “impoverish”.  By that she means this misdirected obsessive focus drains the life out of your Life.  Em is saying: Don’t mistake your desire for the thing itself that you desire.  Desiring only the experience of desire will rob you of energy or life force.

In the next stanza, the one I love more, we reach “Enchantment’s Perihelion.”  Beautiful.  Her metaphor of the sun here is lovely and a perfect counterweight to my moon visit two nights ago.  The thought that rises up is a warning:  You will miss the true experience, the great source of all life, heat, energy, if you mistake “enchantment” for the force that produces it.  It takes courage to let go of enchantment because it is so delightful, or seems so at least.  Clearly enchantment is not all there is.  

Preferring enchantment over real connection to life is like taking in the fragrance of a freshly baked loaf of bread and thinking you have been sufficiently fed—while the bread itself goes stale and uneaten.  This homely loaf is not nearly as glamourous as that glorious fragrance that fills all the air at once, swirls around you, takes control, entices you into the kitchen.  This actual loaf of bread, if you were willing to take it and eat it, would sustain your body and give you strength in a real and lived way.  Yet, the loaf itself does not produce nearly the excitement sparked by its heraldic scent.

So why would anyone prefer the enchantment over the true source of energy and life?  Well, because it’s there.  Enchantment is charming.  It comes to you.  You don’t have to look for it.  Then it sweeps over you without effort.  It’s easy to think that is enough.  The real source takes more active engagement.  Perhaps also, the real source of life is too much.  Too consuming.  Continuing the theme of the Sun, to contact the real source of life that throws this enchantment over us, would mean being burned up in the fire, melted and absorbed into that enormous power.  Loss of boundaries.  Loss of identity.  Loss of control.  

In any event, the sun (or God or the Beloved or who or what you want to slot into the role of life’s source) is too bright  for our frail, limited, human eyes to see directly.  We can only apprehend it by looking at the perihelion.  Emily tells us not to get confused about what you’re looking at, really

Emily also offers us a lesson in love and relationship.  Come down out of the ether of enchantment and partake of the real sustenance.  Don’t mistake the diverting perihelion of desire for the sun/source of love itself.

Emily is probably offering a lesson in lots of things.  Her metaphors are so dense, they travel well and can support just about any structure we build on them.

This poem continues to give me a pain in my chest.  I don’t know where this feeling comes from.  I could blame the poem, but honestly I don’t mind the pain.  It is settling, and I am arranging myself around it.  

Now, I am holding it like a flower.

Today I am invoking my privilege as Creator and changing the rules.  Rather than meditate on yet another poem about death, I have deployed the Genius of Random Chance.  I opened the book at random and chose the first poem that my eyes settled on.  I got a good one, good for this Strawberry full moon.

According to my research it was the Algonquin people who decided to call the first full moon in June the Strawberry Moon.  Ever since, white people have stuck with it and it’s considered fact by the Farmer’s Almanac.  It makes sense that the Algonquin would call it that.  Our strawberry season, this far south in Louisiana is nearly done.  Too hot.  In the region where the Algonquin lived, the strawberries would still be coming in around this time of year.

Here’s what Emily has to say today:

#334, c. 1862

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—

Oh, my.  The poet is a flower.  Her poem a hungry humming bird, bringing sweet nectar to another.  Who?  Who cares.  After some little meditation on these lines, I’m a little twitter-pated.

Is it me, or is it hot in here?

How interesting that poem #6 falls on June 6th.  The sixth poem on the sixth day of the sixth month.

Emily’s contribution to this day consists of a quick series of images from the landscape around her.  What happens in the course of a year.

Frequently the woods are pink—
Frequently are brown.
Frequently the hills undress
Behind my native town.
Oft a head is crested
I was wont to see —
And as oft a cranny
Where it used to be —
And the Earth — they tell me —
On its Axis turned!
Wonderful Rotation!
By but twelve performed!

Okay, I’m sorry . . . but the hills undress?!  Yes, of course they do. But if  I had written that or something like it, I’d be accused of excessive cuteness or projecting my own coy sexual agenda onto the landscape.  “Pathetic fallacy!” someone would cry.  And in my case really pathetic.  What would be the harm in that, I’d ask.  We’ll get to that later.

When Emily drops this borderline naughty verb into her poem, vivifying the hills (hills,hills, c’mon people, hills)  she gets away with it because she’s Emily Dickinson.

Enough.  Okay.  So the hills undress.  Got it.  Then we are sliding into winter and all the rest of it, alluding to the apostles and the months of the year. Isn’t that all a great coincidence that these both come in twelves? Got it.

Two things I notice about the end.  The first is this side comment:  “they tell me”.  Emily doesn’t take any of this scientific information as the manifest wisdom of God’s creation to be observed and known by any sensate being.  She has to be told by some clever scientist.  This knowledge is distinct from the knowledge Em receives through her own five senses and her imagination.  Her ability to perceive the truth of God’s creation, this world, depends simply on being in it, and keeping her third eye open to “see”.  The sunlight in the darkness.

The second thought that occurs is that her poem follows a line toward fall and winter.  Because she is Emily and I am me, we don’t understand “undress” in the same way.  She is not inserting this verb into her landscape as an allusion to the actions one takes in anticipation of making love.  She alludes to the actions one takes to prepare a body for burial.  When her landscape undresses, the leaves die and drop from the trees, all green signs of life turn brown, crumble and fall away, leaving the bare bones/branches.  The exposed rocks show fissures or a “cranny” where once there had been a verdant cover of foliage.

Bringing the two of us together:  So the world is beautiful dressed.  And undressed?  The change in nature signals the end for us as well.  The ultimate destination for all that creative energy is to drive us all closer to the grave.  No wonder we prefer to sleepwalk our way there.  Only Em will look unflinching at this prospect.  And call it “wonderful Rotation.”  What else is there?

Strawberry Moon tomorrow night.  Look out for it.