Category Archives: Emily Every Day

Now, this is beautiful. Everyone should read Emily every day.

#751, c. 1863

My Worthiness is all my Doubt
His Merit — all my fear —
Contrasting which, my quality
Do lowlier — appear —

Lest I should insufficient prove
For His beloved Need —
The Chiefest Apprehension
Upon my thronging Mind —

‘Tis true — that Deity to stoop
Inherently incline —
For nothing higher than Itself
Itself can rest upon —

So I — the undivine abode
Of His Elect Content —
Conform my Soul — as ’twere a Church,
Unto Her Sacrament —

Today Emily is feeling small, unworthy. And afraid that whoever or whatever it is that her society, education or culture refers to as “that Deity” is too far away, too perfect, too inconceivable for one thoughtful girl to find her way toward a relationship with this Deity. The concept, if true, is too vast. There is her “thronging Mind” trying to hold it and falling away in fear.

I love it when Emily tell us how her mind works. “The Clutch of Thought” “my thronging Mind” She perfectly exposes a vision of teeming industry in that head of hers. Emily of the diamond sharp mental faculties. I see her mind as a bee hive. Her greatest asset is also her great weakness when faced with an apprehension of the divine. She admits this right up front.

As usual she leads us through her struggle and then opens a flower of new experience, and new next step in her process in the final stanza. Here she introduces a new character, her Soul. Something separate from her identity, as small Emily whose body is “the undivine abode”. The fleshy doorway for Soul does not interest the Deity. The Soul is another matter.

Emily’s vision of Soul is feminine with “Her Sacrament”. She is distinct from the masculine God and “His Merit”. Here the Soul is receptive and malleable. It may conform to meet “His beloved Need”. Little, frail bag-of-bones Emily can’t do it. But she can point to a part of herself she knows within. Her sense of Soul doesn’t come from the sky God or from old mythologies preserved in books. This Soul is Emily’s alone. She knows it by intimate association. Here is Emily’s church, where she may permit this far away God inside. Maybe.

I see this as a brave poem. She is afraid to be separated from God. But she insists in the end that if they’re going to have any kind of relationship at all, it’s going to have to be on her terms. That she can understand. These are the terms or the Sacraments that emanate from the instinctive natural part of her she grasps below thought. That feminine soul that originates within her. This soul she never doubts or questions because it is as much a part of her as the taste of her own spit. This soul is the only thing she knows for sure that makes a church of Little Emily, the meek and the mild.

Be sure to genuflect upon entering.

The blue jay wars continue in my tree. A third has joined the fray. Now I wonder if there is some sexual competition going on. One male bird screams: “Mine!” The other: “No way! I was here first!” Meanwhile the female flits back and forth, trying to decide which one she is more or less disgusted with. They are both obnoxious idiots. But she has a nest in mind, and these are the idiots she has to work with. One proffers a twig, as if to say: “Here are my assets. See what I can do!” She considers it. When a man starts talking real estate, this is more binding than diamonds. Still, she’s not sure. Does this twig truly answer her deepest need?

If Emily were here on the porch today, she would say this:

#1311, c. 1875

This dirty — little — Heart
Is freely mine,
I won it with a Bun
A freckled shrine —

But eligibly fair
To him who sees
The Visage of the Soul
And not the knees —

It’s almost unfair what Emily does to men with her pretty hair tied up in a bun and her sun-dappled face, a shrine to the goddess within. It’s shooting fish in a barrel, really. Hardly sporting. Any one of these dirty little hearts can be putty in her hands. Sorry, I’m mixing my metaphors, but you take the point.

She knows how easy it is to beguile a passing heart with whatever gifts a woman may have been blessed to possess for a time. The gifts don’t last. That is what makes the capture of a man’s dirty little heart in the end a hollow victory. It’s too easy. The heart that gives itself over to her on those terms, drawn in by her lovely hair and freckles, is a dirty heart because such an exchange is a bad contract. Dirtied by an improper and undue emphasis on these accidental physical attributes. Mistaking the icing for the cake. (Whee! Another lofting metaphor. Stay with me now.)

Emily wants a heart proffered to her by one who can see the face behind her freckles. A man who does not mistake the shrine for the ineffable light that her shrine leads him to. How many of us become preoccupied with the utensils of the sacred ritual. The bells and whistles. The Eucharist and chalice. The feathers and freckles. All these point to something invisible, the true source that enlivens all. The origin of the beauty that beguiles is not visible to the eyes in our head. We only think it is. We have to look with another set of eyes to see this beauty.

Emily wants that holy matrimony. To see and be seen as she is. Not for her adorable knees which will sag in time. She asks for a pilgrim with true sight to see the invisible part of her that never decays and never dies.

Emily, I wish you luck and sympathize with your dismay over dirty hearts too easily given. It’s not their fault. There just aren’t enough out there like you. I’d say almost no one has your sight or even your hunger for this sight. Consider the pool of idiots you have to work with. They have their own agenda, and it involves real estate. Women are just another asset on that agenda.

My advice Emily is that you should hold your place. Hold your vision. You keep the world spinning on its axis with your poems and your truth. Without that, there is nothing. No real estate, no nests. Nothing. No one else may know that, but I do.

So just keep knowing what you know. If nothing else, know that I love the visage of your soul. I don’t care about your silly hair or your freckles. Although, I’m sure they’re very nice.

Saturday morning. Blue jay screaming in the crape myrtle tree. Another nearby screams in reply. Noisy obnoxious birds. Same damn thing over and over. Lance has finished licking his feet and now contemplates the pink drifting flowers as the wind brings them down from the branches. He stands up and coughs through the screen at a passing Yorkie. Lance doesn’t have the energy for a full-throated objection this morning, but each passing dog must be observed and duly noted. Because . . . that’s how it works on this porch.

There is a change in the air. I don’t know what yet, if it is an inner or outer change, yet a palpable shift in the weather hangs overhead without obvious signifiers. The sun is shining, but the wind smells like a storm.

Emily is exhausted today. Her mood reflects mine.

#1010, c. 1865

Up Life’s Hill with my little Bundle
If I prove it steep —
If a Discouragement withhold me —
If my newest step

Older feel than the Hope that prompted —
Spotless be from blame
Heart that proposed as Heart that accepted
Homelessness, for Home —

Here is the plain that opens from intense struggle, before her agile mind has had a chance to make sense of what happened. The blasted space, empty of hope or distrustful of hope, that characterizes the struggle. Before she can integrate it or find a context she has to own the hopelessness. Interesting, the word factory between her ears never rests. So she has to write about it. But what can one write about such an experience? Here she writes about a place of not knowing. Of pure experience. Trouble and the Heart’s response. In this space of discouragement, the heart that lacks common sense can hardly be blamed for believing only what stands before it. All hearts lack common sense. This is the definition of the heart’s function. Common sense exists northward of the heart. Don’t expect common sense from the heart.

The heart is a child who only knows this immediate moment, whether joy or despair. Whether safety or homelessness. This heart in concert with the struggling body that encloses it will make real and eternal (for the moment, for all eternity lies in a moment by the Heart’s calendar) what may appear to the common sensical adult mind as just another problem to be solved.

Emily’s compassion for her own believing heart is so moving. She possesses a tender understanding of her own willingness to accept the truth as her heart knows it, as a legitimate truth, even though she is big enough to see all sides of the trouble. She honors that childlike belief in her heart’s own story. Though the story may be despair, Emily will not dismiss the integrity of her heart’s announcement of itself. That would be disloyal and ultimately false. A denial of the heart’s story, however childlike, is a lie.

It’s all story, and it’s all true. The story may change with the weather. Still it’s a true story.