Tag Archives: poetry

March 29, 2010 · 7:53 am

Hermetic Memory

I wrote this a week ago when it was actually the first day of spring. So it would have made more sense to post it then, but my week ran away with me. Here I am seven days later, still freezing cold, damn unnatural to have the heat running this time of year, and not sure where the time went. In any case . . .

Today is the first day of spring, the Vernal Equinox, equal hours of daylight and darkness. We are perfectly balanced on the borderline. Pause. Hold the breath. Now exhale. What next? Gradually, more light.

What a weird way to begin our incremental slide toward summer. This morning is freezing cold. Not an auspicious beginning. My Bougainvillea has not decided if it’s dead or not. I am still waiting to see if those roots underground survived the hard freeze this past winter. Too soon to tell.

Here is Emily’s contribution:

#895, c. 1864

A Cloud withdrew from the Sky
Superior Glory be
But that Cloud and its Auxiliaries
Are forever lost to me

Had I but further scanned
Had I secured the Glow
In an Hermetic Memory
It had availed me now.

Never to pass the Angel
With a glance and a Bow
Till I am firm in Heaven
Is my intention now.

She announces her intention at the end. She will not take angels for granted until she lives among them in Heaven itself. I find this amusing because I don’t think Emily bought this idea of Heaven as a garden of nursery school delight, presided over by a God who resembles Santa Claus. I think she peered over the edge into nothingness, and she was not content to lie to herself that any story made up by humans could explain what lay on the other side.

So when Em goes on about Heaven and Angels, she is setting up a construct for us to see the pointlessness of capture. Holding an experience (or Glory) is like trying to hold onto a cloud. These slip through her hands. She says that if she had held the cloud in memory it might comfort her now. Isn’t she sealing up the cloud in an hermetic memory by writing the poem. No, the poem falls short of the cloud, always.

The moment of capture, the poem, also opens wide the sense of disappointment. The poem catches itself in a perpetual unfulfilled straining to hold the cloud that recedes forever into the sky. Try pursuing that glimmering mirage on the sunny road ahead. It looks like a reflecting pool. The moment you pursue it, the moment you put words to it, is the moment it evaporates.

Emily’s pose in the poem is to pretend to be disappointed. The last stanza that offers Angels in Heaven is the conventional fear-based story, made by humans to explain a mystery that defies human apprehension and language. From behind this mask, she asks: Can we watch the cloud go by? Can we deeply imbibe that glory and let it go without attempting to capture it? Can any one of us co-exist peacefully with this mystery, sensed but not known?

She’d like to leave it alone, but she can’t. The poet, despite herself and her better judgement, cannot stop peering into things that are none of her business. This is not the hell of being human but the hell of being Emily.

Define the Divine

We are gliding toward that full moon in Leo (drama!) which is followed a couple days later by the Saturn-Pluto square. Here, to quote an informed observer of the planets, “immovable object (Saturn) meets irresistible force (Pluto).” Which role will you play? Me? Count me out of the whole scene. I am the thing with feathers these days. You can find me at the top of the pine tree with Emily.

#797, c. 1863

By my Window have I for Scenery
Just a Sea — with a Stem —
If the Bird and the Farmer — deem it a “Pine” —
The Opinion will serve — for them —

It has no Port, nor a “Line” — but the Jays —
That split their route to the Sky —
Or a Squirrel, whose giddy Peninsula
May be easier reached — this way —

For Inlands — the Earth is the under side —
And the upper side — is the Sun —
And its Commerce — if Commerce it have —
Of Spice — I infer from the Odors borne —

Of its Voice — to affirm — when the Wind is within —
Can the Dumb — define the Divine?
The Definition of Melody — is —
That Definition is none —

It — suggests to our Faith —
They — suggest to our Sight —
When the latter — is put away
I shall meet with Conviction I somewhere met
That Immortality —

Was the Pine at my Window a “Fellow
Of the Royal” Infinity?
Apprehensions — are God’s introductions —
To be hallowed — accordingly —

She can look out her window and see an entire ocean where the rest of us would find a pine tree. The question that stays with me is: “Can the Dumb define the Divine?” She answers the question in the next line two lines: “Definition is none.” There is no way to attach words to something that springs from the mind of God. We keep trying. Writing poems about it. In the end, Emily draws us nearer and nearer to the non-verbal experience of the words, if that’s possible. Sounds and syllables that move us like a gentle tide toward a sensed apprehension. If it weren’t so lovely, the tree, the wind, the fragrance of the pine, it would be maddening to know it, while also knowing simultaneously, the definition falls short.

Panther In the Glove

Begin where you are.

Trust Emily to put a Panther in a Glove. How did the Panther get into the Glove? Trouble put it there. Only the sort of trouble that a sensitive girl poet could find.

#244, c. 1861

It is easy to work when the soul is at play —
But when the soul is in pain —
The hearing him put his play things up
Makes work difficult — then —

It is simple, to ache in the Bone, or the Rind —
But Gimlets — among the nerve —
Mangle daintier — terribler —
Like a Panther in the Glove

Even when she doesn’t feel like work (terribler! and curiouser, too) Emily is working. She can’t help it. The factory between her ears never shuts down. Well, maybe after she’s dead. Although knowing her, she’ll find a way to continue producing a poem a day even after that change in management.

Yet even when her soul feels like a panther tearing at the inside of the glove, her skin, she writes her daily missive from the darkness behind her eyes. She does this by bringing her attention to what is, instead of dwelling on what she’d rather be. Imagine the force of will it takes to come to the task and craft a sensible work of beauty, when you feel as though the underside of your entire body’s worth of skin is opening to shreds beneath the claws of a wild animal. We have each felt that way at one time or another, although we might not have pulled that precise image from the darkness: a panther inside a glove. Most of us would not be able to make coffee in such a state, let alone write a poem.

Emily sits down to work and makes work out of the thing that wants to stop her work. Even the most ugly, most threatening, all these are fit for her pen because she is writing herself always.

It’s a good thing she is so complex, otherwise this self-interest could become sterile. Sometimes I think Emily withdrew from society because she knew her inner life was so rich, too rich really, that it would require all her attention to investigate. The world must have shrunk into trivial chaff by comparison.

She is sometimes criticized for being self-absorbed and not writing about the worldly events of her time. For example, she lived through the Civil War, but does not take this as material for her poems. My sense is she was after a form of purity by compulsion. A mind seeking an unadorned sense of itself. Anything that did not contribute to that investigation undermined the work.

Not merely a miniaturist, Emily telescoped into the war within herself. When you can conceive of your own soul as a panther, you are locked in a psychic civil war. Not the quivering mouse, her soul is the wild hunter (characterized here with the masculine “him”) driven by pain to ferocious attacks on its own container. The image of the panther does not make concrete the “pain” of the poem, not the cause of the distress. The panther is the soul transformed by pain.

That such a slip of a girl could envision her own soul as something so enormous, destructive, savage, intractable, muscled, fur-covered, ravenous, crazed with pain . . . (Here again is that spiritual hunger for the communion table but now enlivened, shocked, made violent and huge.) All this strikes me, not as self-absorbed or self-indulgent, but astonishingly self-aware. Subtle difference. What an intimidating revelation of Self to Self. Daunting because she knows that once she names it and claims it, she has to hold that panther, live with it, feed it. She has to find a place at the communion table for this ravenous animal.

It must be exhausting to be Emily all day.

Tag Archives: poetry

Hermetic Memory

Define the Divine

Panther In the Glove

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