A daily poem from the complete works of Emily Dickinson.
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She sweeps with many-colored brooms,
And leaves the shreds behind;
Oh, housewife in the evening west,
Come back, and dust the pond!
You dropped a purple ravelling in,
You dropped an amber thread;
And now you ‘ve littered all the East
With duds of emerald!
And still she plies her spotted brooms,
And still the aprons fly,
Till brooms fade softly into stars –
And then I come away.
I know a place where summer strives
With such a practised frost,
She each year leads her daisies back,
Recording briefly, “Lost.”
But when the south wind stirs the pools
And struggles in the lanes,
Her heart misgives her for her vow,
And she pours soft refrains
Into the lap of adamant,
And spices, and the dew,
That stiffens quietly to quartz,
Upon her amber shoe.
There came a wind like a bugle;
It quivered through the grass,
And a green chill upon the heat
So ominous did pass
We barred the windows and the doors
As from an emerald ghost;
The doom’s electric moccason
That very instant passed.
On a strange mob of panting trees,
And fences fled away,
And rivers where the houses ran
The living looked that day.
The bell within the steeple wild
The flying tidings whirled.
How much can come
And much can go,
And yet abide the world!
Arcturus is his other name, –
I’d rather call him star!
It’s so unkind of science
To go and interfere!
I pull a flower from the woods, –
A monster with a glass
Computes the stamens in a breath,
And has her in a class.
Whereas I took the butterfly
Aforetime in my hat,
He sits erect in cabinets,
The clover-bells forgot.
What once was heaven, is zenith now.
Where I proposed to go
When time’s brief masquerade was done,
Is mapped, and charted too!
What if the poles should frisk about
And stand upon their heads!
I hope I ‘m ready for the worst,
Whatever prank betides!
Perhaps the kingdom of Heaven ‘s changed!
I hope the children there
Won’t be new-fashioned when I come,
And laugh at me, and stare!
I hope the father in the skies
Will lift his little girl, –
Old-fashioned, naughty, everything, –
Over the stile of pearl!
Tags: children, flower, fly, hope, Love, men, skies, star, woods
An altered look about the hills;
A Tyrian light the village fills;
A wider sunrise in the dawn;
A deeper twilight on the lawn;
A print of a vermilion foot;
A purple finger on the slope;
A flippant fly upon the pane;
A spider at his trade again;
An added strut in chanticleer;
A flower expected everywhere;
An axe shrill singing in the woods;
Fern-odors on untravelled roads, –
All this, and more I cannot tell,
A furtive look you know as well,
And Nicodemus’ mystery
Receives its annual reply.
The official Daily Dickinson 2008 Calendar is available, featuring poems and pictures that have been featured on this site.
Tags: april, bee, flower, fly, hills, poem, sing, singing, sun, woods
From cocoon forth a butterfly
As lady from her door
Emerged — a summer afternoon –
Repairing everywhere,
Without design, that I could trace,
Except to stray abroad
On miscellaneous enterprise
The clovers understood.
Her pretty parasol was seen
Contracting in a field
Where men made hay, then struggling hard
With an opposing cloud,
Where parties, phantom as herself,
To Nowhere seemed to go
In purposeless circumference,
As ‘t were a tropic show.
And notwithstanding bee that worked,
And flower that zealous blew,
This audience of idleness
Disdained them, from the sky,
Till sundown crept, a steady tide,
And men that made the hay,
And afternoon, and butterfly,
Extinguished in its sea.
The official Daily Dickinson 2008 Calendar is available, featuring poems and pictures that have been featured on this site.
Tags: bee, cloud, die, flower, fly, Love, men, noon, poem, sea, see, sing, sky, summer, sun
I never hear the word “escape”
Without a quicker blood,
A sudden expectation,
A flying attitude.
I never hear of prisons broad
By soldiers battered down,
But I tug childish at my bars, –
Only to fail again!
My cocoon tightens, colors tease,
I’m feeling for the air;
A dim capacity for wings
Degrades the dress I wear.
A power of butterfly must be
The aptitude to fly,
Meadows of majesty concedes
And easy sweeps of sky.
So I must baffle at the hint
And cipher at the sign,
And make much blunder, if at last
I take the clew divine.
Dickinson combines her naturalistic observation with her mystical bent to great effect in many of the “Time and Eternity” poems. “FROM THE CHRYSALIS” in particular builds on an image from nature–the confining chrysalis that opens up to the “easy sweep of sky”–as a metaphor for spiritual growth and change. The speaker feels confined–”[m]y cocoon tightens”–and her earthly form is inconsistent with her spiritual: “[a] dim capacity for wings / Degrades the dress I wear.” (“Degrades” is an interesting choice of words here: earthly clothing exalted over spiritual wings? Degraded in the eyes of convention?)
Unlike a butterfly, though, that knows instinctively how to dry its wings and fly when it emerges from its chrysalis, the speaker of this poem is not gifted with certainty; she expects to “make much blunder” in her halting attempts to fly. The divine is not clearly expressed to the human eye: one must solve the puzzle (“cipher at the sign”) of a mysterious divinity that is only hinted at.
The use of the archaic spelling “clew” is interesting here as well, and suggests some intriguing puns. While it may be just an alternate for “clue”, which fits the poem, “clew” also has nautical and mythological meanings. On a ship, clew lines are used in rigging sails; in this reading, the speaker’s wings become sails that are blown toward the divine. “Baffle” then takes on shades of controlling wind, and “cipher at the sign” suggests the tricky art of celestial navigation. A “clew” is also a skein of thread, and is used in reference to the thread that Theseus followed out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. Taking the “clew divine”, then, might mean following a thread out of confusion, with a suggestion of danger lurking in that befuddlement.
Tags: eternity, eyes, fly, ice, may, men, must, Nature, poem, ship, sky, spirit
