Category Archives: Emily Every Day

The miraculous weather continues today. Cool, dry and clear. It is a parentheses in the swamp. No one can figure out where this came from. It’s a blessing for sure, to be relieved of suffering in late August. But it’s a freakish blessing. People have come pouring out of their houses in happy disbelief. We walk along the bayou, dazed like prisoners of conscience, newly released from solitary confinement. The lift is palpable. . . no one knows how or why it came, and we’re waiting, hoping against hope, until the customary suffocating blanket descends on us again.

Freaky, freaky, freaky . . . but I like it.

Emily, quite spontaneously, has offered the following bit of flummery to demonstrate that some things are not meant to be known, only experienced.

#701, c. 1863

A Thought went up my mind today —
That I have had before —
But did not finish — some way back —
I could not fix the Year —

Nor where it went — nor why it came
The second time to me —
Nor definitely, what it was —
Have I the Art to say —

But somewhere — in my Soul — I know —
I’ve met the Thing before —
It just reminded me — ’twas all —
And came my way no more —

I like the image of a thought going up her mind. Where would the thought have originated, then I wonder? In her gut? Or her feet? Maybe she absorbed it from the ground she walked on.

In any case it reminds me of something I’ve been reading lately, Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis. (I’m re-reading this because I had recommended it to a friend, and she’s reading it now in anticipation of a future discussion. So I’m cramming for the oral exam that is coming later.) This is Lewis’s story of his return to his faith in God after a period of time during which he was a confirmed atheist. He calls atheism the “cool evening of Higher Thought”. His word for faith in God is “Joy”. (Interestingly a year after he published this book, he married the one great love of his life, a woman named Joy.)

Lewis’s sense of Joy comes from a few experiences in his childhood. These were spontaneous eruptions of pure feeling. He trusts these as evidence of God’s grace precisely because Joy is innocent of any ideology or theology. It comes directly and wordlessly from within himself. The story that sticks in my mind is his description of feeling Joy over the sensation of Autumn. We all know what that feels like. I’m getting a taste of it right now with this early hint of fall. The sensation goes below thought. Like Emily, I lack the art to capture it in words. But I know it.

Last night Lance and I sat out by the bayou to take in the night air, clear, light, breathable. How long can this last? I even turned off the air conditioning at home! Lots of folks around the neighborhood had come out with the same plan. We were quiet and private in our own patches of grass. Bits of conversation floated over the bayou. Amazing how well sound carries over water.

Not far away, someone played the violin. In the dark, I could just make out the silhouette of the musician sitting in the grass by the water, her bowing arm dancing up and down. Jaunty Irish fiddle tunes rose on the air. Quick and happy music, yes. However, because these were Irish songs and because they came from a fiddle, they held a slight gray undertone. A whine of old pain. The music conveys a subtle sense of taking your joy while you can, always with a reminder underneath of loss and sorrow. There is no purity of feeling past childhood. Certainly not in fiddle music.

The night was lovely and complex. Magic in the air. Clarity and depth. This change in the weather brought us all out into the open for the same reason. So we could grasp this quicksilver time before it changed again.

Miraculous day! We stepped out of our houses this morning and felt the air. Strange. Cool and dry. I am sitting on the porch, and get this . . . not sweating. As if October had visited a little early. Or we all went to sleep in New Orleans last night but woke up in Asheville, North Carolina. It’s downright freakish this completely out-of-character shift in the weather. A gift. A respite from the oppressive damp muffling blanket of August. Doesn’t seem possible. It won’t last. Nothing ever does. But I’d like to say “thank you” to whatever produced this blessing of a morning. Makes a girl feel almost human again. An unexplained and undeserved release from suffering can make the memory of suffering evaporate like spit on a hot sidewalk.

My metaphors are not nearly so elegant as Emily’s. She’s in a good mood this morning, too.

#850, c. 1864

I sing to use the Waiting
My Bonnet but to tie
And Shut the Door unto my House
No more to do have I

Till His best step approaching
We journey to the Day
And tell each other how We sung
To Keep the Dark away.

Nothing like a new bonnet and a boy at the front door to put a lilt in the poet’s voice. She’s not frivolous, nor am I. But it’s true that everything changes all the time, and we do possess the capacity to rise out of the dark. Our psyche, spirit or whatever wants to sing. Will sing. Because that is the natural flow that follows the ebb tide. No one remains in the dark forever. Nor do we have any control over how or when the shift happens. We exist in concert with patterns beyond our peculiar circumstance. Patterns that are frequently a mystery to us. So what do we do? We sing. When we can. As Emily says, there is nothing else to do sometimes.

What I like about her and her poem is that she drops her killer line at the end: “To Keep the Dark away.” Emily points to the dark in the periphery around the bright bubble that she walks in this day. She can’t help it. Emily and her companion may walk and sing and enjoy the simple pleasure of being . . . just fine . . . for the moment. Yet Emily, with her relentless gaze, can’t pretend she doesn’t see the shadow following them down the street on their merry walk. She’s too honest for that. Her honesty is a form of compulsiveness. She lives at the mercy of her own honesty, which doesn’t come from any learned ethics or structured integrity. It’s more a function of her constitution. She sees what others can’t or won’t. That all the tap dancing and whistling holds something dark at bay, something that follows ever near.

I don’t sense that she enjoys her day any less. Perhaps more so. Instead she focuses on the thread that stitches the merry brightness to the suffocating dark sludge. Emily can’t stop running her fingertips over this border that joins the two opposites. Each is intoxicating in its own way, each powerful and mesmerizing. Both the dark night and the bright morning has the power to convince you that it will last forever. Each speaks so loud and so close that it can make you believe there will never be another. Then change it does. Always. That is the only thing that lasts forever. These qualities may fool most of us into thinking either: “Everything is great and now my life progresses on an endless upward trajectory. I am the champion!” Or: “I will remain in the grip of this agonizing pain for all of eternity.” Both of these are equally false and yet equally persuasive.

Only Emily keeps tapping her fingertips on the seam that marries the two liars. For her the only truth is the paradox in this bond. She is not fooled by either party. Rather she embraces them both.

In the meanwhile . . . enjoy.

The drama of the gifted child. To be great is to be misunderstood.

#613, c. 1862

They shut me up in Prose —
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet —
Because they liked me “still” —

Still! Could themself have peeped —
And seen my Brain — go round —
They might as wise have lodged a Bird
For Treason — in the Pound —

Himself has but to will
And easy as a Star
Abolish his Captivity —
And laugh — No more have I —

Imagine for a moment that Emily was your daughter. Would you know what to do with her? Probably not. I’ll bet no one knew what to do with her. So she was left alone with herself and her dashes.

I imagine Emily knew what to do with herself as long as people would leave her alone. Why was that not possible? We could blame the 19th century, and the prevailing attitudes toward girls and women. That would be a good place to start. Nothing more dangerous to the status quo than a girl who knows her own mind. Or a girl who is free to roam the physical landscape around her and free to roam the landscape of her thoughts, as well. So Emily was like a bomb in their midst, exploding assumptions about how a girl ought to behave and think. Or not think, really. I’m sure there were other girls like her. But Emily is distinct in her fierce refusal to knuckle under. (at least on paper) Her tenacious loyalty to her own instincts in defiance of all the received wisdom and custom of her society makes her remarkable.

Really when you think what she was up against, she has the courage of a small army.

I’d even suggest here that her resistance to her surroundings made her stronger. Drove her into a deeper embrace of her truth and her passion as a poet. In a perverse way, the restrictions of her society may have squeezed Emily in toward an even closer examination of her life’s purpose. The threat of losing her sense of self made her fight for it more aggressively, which may be how she produced all these diamonds. It was the pressure that squeezed them out. I say this mindful of the fact that Emily is a rare case and that so many of her contemporaries were crushed into silence. They did not strengthen themselves against the resistance, but folded down on themselves and died. A psychic death, at least, if not a literal one as well.

So the 19th century is a good place to start, but there is more. I believe Emily is a mystery to herself. I envision her spending her days in continual discovery. Her mind moves like a bird from here to there and on again. It takes strength to remain curious all the time. This relentless curiosity also puts one in a constant state of loathing for any confinement at all.

Her last stanza here is interesting because she chucks her rhyme scheme completely. Almost as though she lost interest in it. Or maybe she just exploded with frustration at the end and decided: “Hell! I’ll say what I have to say. I will not be confined by my own poem!” Also interesting that she begins by referencing Prose as the symbol of prison. Then in the end she breaks out of the limits imposed by her poem by speaking in prose, unrhymed. The lines are somewhat metered, but c’mon . . . “Star” and “I” . . . we don’t even get a slant rhyme here. There is her divine discontent again. And her complete originality. Self-governed and fearless.

She directs her anger at the end toward God. His perfect freedom is the freedom she feels she ought to have, at least in her mind’s movement. That will to freedom belongs only to God, she says, but she wants it for herself.

She has the guts to say it. She believes her ability to think is God-like in its expansive movement. Or nearly so. Near enough that she can imagine what’s missing. Her perfect freedom.