Category Archives: Emily Every Day

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.

Uncanny how she does this.  Today I have been sitting here, marveling at the sudden surge in bird life around my porch.  The starlings are going nuts because a blue jay has invaded the space.  God knows what he’s doing here, but they want him out.  Nobody is playing nice in my trees this morning.

Lance is outraged.  He paces up and down the porch and attempts to bring rapprochement to this war by adding his voice to the fray.  No one pays attention to him.  I suspect that they do not take him seriously.

Then I read Emily’s next poem.  It begins: “I have a Bird in spring/ Which for myself doth sing—”  Again this is a discussion of loss and her acceptance that this brief physical life is not the only one.  Today Emily is missing others who are gone.  “though they now depart,/ Tell I my doubting heart/ They’re thine.”

Here’s my favorite:

In a serener Bright,
In a more golden light
I see
Each little doubt and fear,
Each little discord here
Removed.

For one thing, I love that she doesn’t even try to rhyme “see” and “removed”.  She does this throughout.  Among all these lovely perfect rhymes she’ll drop a complete clunker.  Not even a slant rhyme.  Such defiance!  The turd in the punch bowl.

Or the alternating shocks in  an ordinary lifetime.  The painful pause when we know something has gone wrong. Of course this causes one doubt.  How can any of this so-called life be worthwhile if it hurts so much?  Emily draws the reader back into her rhyme and rhythm.  Find the next beat in the music, she asks.  pain/pleasure    harmony/discord    fight/ peace     flight/return

Today feels like a pause between two beats of music.  As if I am holding my breath, waiting for the music to carry my foot into the next step of the dance.  It is an interval between discord and harmony, where I hang in nothingness.  No movement.  A portion of time where anything is possible.

For now I’ll stick to the original plan which was to read the poems in chronological order.  The purpose being to use the poems simply as a launch into spontaneous writing.  So I’ll take each poem and respond as I do to each morning, each moment, each thunder clap, each season, each love.

Today gives us a glorious pouring down rain, rattling the leaves of the banana trees.  Lance and I got caught in the downpour on our walk.  Good thing I remembered my sunglasses.  We were both soaked by the time we got back home.  That’s okay.  I’ve been told that I am not made of sugar, and I won’t melt.  For whatever that’s worth.

#4, 1853  Emily and her “Pilot” proceed.

On this wondrous sea
Sailing silently,
Ho! Pilot, ho!

Knowest thou the shore
Where no breakers roar —
Where the storm is o’er?

In the peaceful west
Many the sails at rest —
The anchors fast —
Thither I pilot thee —
Land Ho! Eternity!
Ashore at last!

She’s asking a lot of questions of her pilot.  Who’s in charge?  In the end of this short poem, Emily has taken the wheel of the vessel and announces that she will pilot it to “Eternity”.  

“Ashore at last!”

I like that shift when she/poet takes control.  I hear her claiming authority over her own spiritual life.  She knows where she is going.  Who is this other Pilot?  A minister?  The clergy guiding our vessels across the sea?  Emily pilots her own ship, her own body and soul toward the shore “where no breakers roar.”  Moving on her own toward silence.

Funny that.  The writer’s ultimate destination is silence.  All these words, thousands, maybe millions, stones in a path toward infinite silence.  She’s looking for that, anticipating it.  There is peace and rest in that silence.  And I must wonder at the temperament of a woman who devotes nearly every minute of her life to the crafty consignment of words to paper, who also knows at this young age (she was 22 years old when she wrote this poem) that the long arc of her busy, wordy life would lead to silence.  And that she looks to that with some pleasure—it sounds like.  I imagine her/me/all of us as chattering magpies, saying as much as possible before someone puts out the lights.

For what, for what?  Well, in Em’s case: The purpose was to provide something for me to read here on my porch, while Lance yarfs and snorfles at the squirrels.  Something to read. A hook to hang my thoughts on.

Thank you, Emily.