As by the dead we love to sit,
Become so wondrous dear,
As for the lost we grapple,
Though all the rest are here, –
In broken mathematics
We estimate our prize,
Vast, in its fading ratio,
To our penurious eyes!
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I years had been from home,
And now, before the door,
I dared not open, lest a face
I never saw before
Stare vacant into mine
And ask my business there.
My business, — just a life I left,
Was such still dwelling there?
I fumbled at my nerve,
I scanned the windows near;
The silence like an ocean rolled,
And broke against my ear.
I laughed a wooden laugh
That I could fear a door,
Who danger and the dead had faced,
But never quaked before.
I fitted to the latch
My hand, with trembling care,
Lest back the awful door should spring,
And leave me standing there.
I moved my fingers off
As cautiously as glass,
And held my ears, and like a thief
Fled gasping from the house.
Tags: bee, care, dare, dead, fear, house, Life, ocean, spring, star, year
Robert Pinsky, former United States Poet Laureate and poetry editor at Slate, discusses the task of popularizing poetry in a country where poetry is dead. Pinsky’s interests are wide-ranging, though: in addition to championing Dickinson (and Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, and Walt Whitman), he praises “The Simpsons” and “The Colbert Report” (“I think we’re in a great period of comedy, maybe our greatest period of comedy in American history”), Big Mama Thornton, Buddy Guy, and Professor Longhair.
Of particular interest is his useful distinction between a great song and a great poem:
The crucial distinction for me between something that may be a great song and poetry is, Does it depend upon the performer? The poem must sound like a poem in the voice of anyone who chooses to say it aloud.
To see and hear great poems in many voices, take a look at Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project, which features normal folks reflecting on and reciting great words.
Tags: care, dead, ice, may, moon, must, poem, see, sky, song, think
The last night that she lived,
It was a common night,
Except the dying; this to us
Made nature different.
We noticed smallest things, –
Things overlooked before,
By this great light upon our minds
Italicized, as ‘t were.
That others could exist
While she must finish quite,
A jealousy for her arose
So nearly infinite.
We waited while she passed;
It was a narrow time,
Too jostled were our souls to speak,
At length the notice came.
She mentioned, and forgot;
Then lightly as a reed
Bent to the water, shivered scarce,
Consented, and was dead.
And we, we placed the hair,
And drew the head erect;
And then an awful leisure was,
Our faith to regulate.
Tags: dead, dying, faith, ice, men, must, Nature, night, rose, soul, water
The Amherst Bulletin reports that an Amherst resident, whose nom du blog is Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, put the authorities onto a scam reminiscent of the classic 419 Scam (“an old scam in new scamshell”, quips Miss Dickinson).
Beyond the crime fighting angle, though, Amherst 01002 is worth a visit on gentler merits: lovely garden photographs, thoughts on poetry and nature, and commentary on life in Amherst.
By way of Louise Doughty’s article on the ways in which writers, under deadline and hounded by editors, find ways to relax, here’s a nice bit of doggerel by Wendy Cope:
Higgledy-piggledy
Emily Dickinson
Liked to use dashes
Instead of full stops.Nowadays, faced with such
Idiosyncrasy,
Critics and editors
Send for the cops.
I’m sorry to say that I’d never heard of Wendy Cope before today, but happy to say that I’ve heard about her now. She’s not much like Dickinson–the British Council says that “[t]he poets she most resembles are John Betjeman and Philip Larkin”, and that certainly seems the case with the sampling I’ve read: sardonic, a little caustic, but with a playful and even kind streak. Then again, maybe she is a bit like Dickinson, but with a very different style.
There’s a nice sample of her poems here; and if you like those (and who doesn’t love a limerick version of “The Waste Land”?), hurry out and grab a copy of Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, If I Don’t Know, or Serious Concerns.
A lot more can and will be said about Dickinson’s idiosyncratic use of punctuation. But on a Friday afternoon, a nice little rhyme suffices.
Tags: days, dead, ice, land, Love, may, noon, poem, see, year
This is one worth looking forward to this Fall:
An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England by Brock Clarke is scheduled to hit the shelves in September. Brock Clarke is a writer with a distinctive voice–charming and strange and wholly engaging. Carrying the Torch was one of my favorite story collections of the last couple years: nine stories that were funny and sad at the same time, and worth many return visits. There have been rumors about this novel for a couple years now, and I’m very happy to see those rumors come to fruition.
An Arsonist’s Guide is the story of Sam Pulsifer, “the man who accidentally burned down the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Massachusetts”. While in prison for this act, Puslifer receives letters from professors of literature condemning him to hell, from arson enthusiasts, and from people demanding a curtain call:
All of them wanted me to burn down the houses of a variety of dead writers—Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Robert Lowell, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Some of the correspondents wanted me to burn down the homes of writers I’d never even heard of. All of the letter writers were willing to wait for me to get out of prison. And all of them were willing to pay me.
I expect something touching and madcap at the same time–add this one to your reserve list today!
Tags: bee, book, dead, fall, house, ice, land, Life, may, see, september, touch, year
The heart asks pleasure first,
And then, excuse from pain;
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;
And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.
A grim little poem, no? Perhaps it’s dangerous to read this through the prism of current events; one can hear echoes of the torture and “right to die” debates in the “liberty to die”. Dickinson probably has more cosmic than temporal concerns here, with the capitalized Inquisitor representing a God who has a very different aspect than Emerson’s transcendental and immanent God (but may not be so different from Jonathan Edwards’ “God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider”).
This photo is available as a greeting card.
Keeping Up with Emily
