Category Archives: Emily Every Day

How to make a way in the world by making something beautiful, if that’s my job, your job, our job. And I use the word “job” loosely to mean the activity your nature compels you to do.

#880

The Bird must sing to earn the Crumb —
What merit have the Tune
No Breakfast if it guaranty

The Rose content may bloom
To gain renown of Lady’s Drawer
But if the Lady come
But once a Century, the Rose
Superfluous become —

Emily explains how or why she wrote nearly two thousand poems and only bothered to publish seven of them. One for each day of the week, one for each Blessed Sacrament, once for each color in the rainbow, one for each chakra and the quality of consciousness associated with it.

She looks at those whose entire being is devoted to the creation of something beautiful, such as the bird — or realizing its full potential as beautiful, such as the rose. And by the way, such a thing is not merely beautiful, but it serves a valuable function, which is to scent a Lady’s drawer. Some of you may think this is not the best use of one’s life purpose. Or that it is not the most practical. It’s not like building roads or manufacturing can openers. You know . . . something useful and worth money. No, the rose exists for the purpose of being beautiful and smelling good. The bird’s reason is to fill the air with beautiful song.

So, I would argue (and Emily would argue) that putting beauty into the world, anything that pleases our senses, constitutes a job well done. These things are worth paying for. And still . . . and yet . . . in her poem, the bird goes hungry and the rose becomes superfluous. If these beautiful things are not needed, what then?

Emily is being snarky here. She suggests the question: Why make something beautiful? If my work, my poem, my rose, does not adorn some lady’s drawer, isn’t it wasted then? Emily’s question is only posing as a serious question.

No one would forswear the existence of a rose or a bird’s song. She’s rubbing our noses in our value system. That’s the system that says a thing must fetch a price in the marketplace to have value. That it must serve some utilitarian purpose in order to justify its existence.

She drops this snide comment with such delicacy, you might miss it if you didn’t know better.

If you sing your song or open your beautiful face to the world, or craft a poem because you believe any of these things ought to fetch a good price or serve someone else’s need (scenting a drawer, etc) then you are done. You have destroyed the value of your own gifts.

Emily puts up the payment against these talents. A crumb? For a song? “To gain renown of Lady’s Drawer”? C’mon, that’s sarcastic. Renown? What paltry recompense for the perfume of a rose. There isn’t enough money in the world to pay for an act or being of such beauty. Beauty comes from innocence. And by innocence I mean devoid of any calculated hunger for recognition or payment. She alludes to art that arises from this innocent drive to create. No one ever made a birdsong or a rose because they though they’d be famous for it, or rich or grow fat on crumbs.

Emily says: Make your beauty. Don’t get lost in the marketplace. Stay in a state of innocent creation. . . . if you can.

We are only as strong as the circumstances that require our strength.

#1113, c. 1867

There is strength in proving that it can be borne
Although it tear —
What are the sinews of such cordage for
Except to bear
The ship might be of satin had it not too fight —
To walk on seas requires cedar Feet

Emily says that it is even a virtue to be broken by the things that are too much for our strength. We have to find that outer boundary of our tolerance for pain in order to know our true capacity for anything, whether pain or . . . something else. Building? Caring? Nurturing? Living. She asks why did we receive any of our gifts if not to have them threatened. You can’t know the value of something until you have to fight to keep it. The pressure to defend what you love shows you the depth and the quality of your love.

How many marriages have failed because one or both people involved found it not worth fighting to keep? That is the saddest moment of all, when one lets go of the other. This act announces: My love was present for you before this test. Now it has dissolved because I do not cherish this love enough to bear the passage through this difficulty. The cords that bind are not outside but within. In this dissolution, the urge to avoid the test or the pain of being tested, exposes the weaknesses of those inner bonds.

When one turns away from a test, it is because the prize on the other end is not worth it. Or not visible. Maybe one does not believe in one’s own strength to pass the test. The prospect of breaking while being tested is too terrifying. Sometimes we’d rather do without whatever might (or might not) be on the other side of the test.

Emily says: No, we are given all these treasures specifically to be tested. No one ever gets to enjoy a smooth ride on a ship of satin without some fight or some conflict. If you want a life free of conflict, you’ll bob along in a paper dinghy. No one will see you or bother you. Possessing a grand ship (grand spirit or grand vision) guarantees that you will encounter resistance, and you will have to demonstrate your strength to yourself. To grasp the value of what you possess.

The last line, “To walk on seas requires cedar Feet” points to Christ walking on water. None of us can do this. None of us has feet made of porous, floaty wood. We don’t have His magical powers. Our feet are made of clay. I hear Emily’s point as, “None of us are getting out of this alive.” No one will get out of any situation by sprouting miraculous cedar feet. We will have to proceed through each test in our path, each test that living on this plain earth gives. We have no other choice but to place our strength against others to see where we are in the continuum. Not only to see what strength we possess, but also to see who may be strong enough to bear the pain of being human along side us. These tests show us who can stick with us through the worst, as well as the best.

This is how you learn if your ship is seaworthy.

Here is the poem that jumped out after the last one. They speak to each other.

#569, c. 1862

I reckon — when I count at all —
First — Poets — Then the Sun —
Then Summer — Then the Heaven of God —
And then — the list is done —

But, looking back — the First so seems
To Comprehend the Whole —
The Others look a needless Show —
So I write — Poets — All —

Their Summer — lasts a Solid Year —
They can afford a Sun
The East — would deem extravagant —
And if the Further Heaven —

Be Beautiful as they prepare
For Those who worship Them —
It is too difficult a Grace —
To justify the Dream —

I love that: “Poets — All —” From your lips, Emily, to God’s ears.

That is the poet’s job, right? To compress the totality of some lengthy event or experience into a few dense words. So that we get all of it without labor or ratiocination. Leave it to the prose-writers like me, the mules of the wordy set, plodding that slow, linear, obvious, over-explained way up the hill. Not for the poets. Their poems arrive inside us with the same effortless effect as we would receive God’s grace. You don’t have to agree to anything for the poem, or earn it. The poem simply IS. All. At once.

Quantum physics has not yet been able to explain how one electron can be in two places at the same time. And no one has been able to explain exactly how Emily’s poems work. We can talk around them, close to them. But get to them? Not yet.

Emily herself has the same hesitation. The last lines make me pause, too. “It is too difficult a Grace — /To justify the Dream —” Sounds as though she sees the poem falling short. What begins as a brave shout of honor to the poets, ends with a slight diffidence. A pulling back. The true full grace lies beyond even her magnificent powers. Only a poet could see this trap. To be satisfied with your own poem is to fail.

Been thinking and talking about grace lately. My book group came to my house last night to discuss Wise Blood. Now, as for Flannery O’Connor, there is another tough nut. Her preoccupation with grace preoccupied us last night. What is grace? someone in our group kept asking. It’s a good question because it takes so may forms. Like Emily’s “Beauty”, it cannot be sought. It only abides. You may dimly apprehend it, if you’re lucky and sensitive. It may arrive in your life but if you look for it, you’ve lost it. Like love, if you try to explain it, that’s when it slips through your fingers.

In Flannery’s view, grace is the moment, that may occur more than once in a person’s life but more often it happens at the moment of death, when you experience a sense of being loved by God, even though you know you don’t deserve it. Grace is the knowledge that, even at your worst, your most vile, disgusting, inhumane, petty, greedy, nasty, foul, ugly state . . . God still wants you. Even when you smell like last week’s garbage, even when you don’t want you, God still wants you.

Here’s the question I always wanted to ask Flannery (and Emily): What if you don’t want God? I know what they would say. Not sure what I would say.

Write a poem and hope for the best. It’s all a crap shoot, anyway.