Tag Archives: poetry

Are some things better left unsaid? Emily isn’t saying “yes” or “no”. But she does have something to say about the sheer power of words. In particular the words uttered by a woman.

#479, c. 1862

She dealt her pretty words like Blades —
How glittering they shone —
And every One unbared a Nerve
Or wantoned with a Bone —

She never deemed — she hurt —
That — is not Steel’s Affair —
A vulgar grimace in the Flesh —
How ill the Creatures bear —

To Ache is human — not polite —
The Film upon the eye
Mortality’s old Custom —
Just locking up — to Die.

A woman with a mouth on her is just about the most dangerous thing in the world. Isn’t that right? If she controls the words, she controls everything. Steer clear. Run and hide! She will flay you right open.

(It’s been said many times that the thing women fear the most from men is that men will kill them. The thing the men fear the most from women is that women will laugh at them. Which is, of course, a fate worse than death.)

A woman has to be careful with her words, as if she carries a razor-sharp switchblade in her purse. The trouble is that when you’re really good at something, it’s hard to remember to be responsible and compassionate with your talent. That’s like asking the sharpest knife in the drawer not to do what it was born and cultivated to do: Cut.

For example, let’s say you do carry around the verbal equivalent of a razor-sharp switchblade in your purse. It would be really hard not to use it because it’s right there, after all. Easy to get to. Enormous power to cause absolute ruin in one small movement on the blade. You change everything by using your own extraordinary talent, even to its most destructive ends. That way you can know your power. It’s exhilarating. You’d have to be a saint to resist that temptation. Who among us can really say we are saintly? At most we can only hope to imitate the saints.

My take on Emily’s thrust here is to observe that women will use what they have. It’s a mistake to insist that they must deploy their power with more compassion than anyone else. They will do what they do, and use the talents they possess. That’s only natural.

Is it? Hope so. Or perhaps . . . a little stirring in the trees.

I have noticed that some folks trip across this blog because they are googling for an explanation of one of Emily’s poems. (No doubt grasping at straws in the middle of a Freshman Comp paper.) I am sorry to disappoint. No real explanations here. Mainly a deepening of the mystery or a detour into something just as circuitous.

Here we go again:

#619, c. 1862

Glee — The great storm is over —
Four — have recovered the Land —
Forty — gone down together —
Into the boiling Sand —

Ring — for the Scant Salvation —
Toll — for the bonnie Souls —
Neighbor — and friend — and Bridegroom —
Spinning upon the Shoals —

How they will tell the Story —
When Winter shake the Door —
Till the Children urge —
But the Forty —
Did they — come back no more?

Then a softness — suffuse they Story —
And a silence — the Teller’s eye —
And the Children — no further question —
And only the Sea — reply —

Here we pick up the pieces and wonder what’s left after the wind has settled. Is it really over? Is that it? She asks the same thing I am wondering. If the story itself has to subside before a thing is really done, then whatever it was that roiled before her eyes, continues to exist until the storytelling part—the noise bouncing off the echo chamber of memory—peters out. Then . . . nothing.

In fact, it is the prospect of nothing that often keeps the story going long past its natural death. No one wants to face the silence of no story. Few of us have the confidence that Something. Else. Follows. Nothing.

Even Emily, whose mind is as fine and sturdy a government as any, has to admit that some must slip away into silence beyond the gates of her fully imagined inner world. Some things she has to let slip into the sea and allow to be replaced with silence.