joy

High from the earth I heard a bird;
He trod upon the trees
As he esteemed them trifles,
And then he spied a breeze,
And situated softly
Upon a pile of wind
Which in a perturbation
Nature had left behind.
A joyous-going fellow
I gathered from his talk,
Which both of benediction
And badinage partook,
Without apparent burden,
I learned, in leafy wood
He was the faithful father
Of a dependent brood;
And this untoward transport
His remedy for care, –
A contrast to our respites.
How different we are!

One blessing had I, than the rest
So larger to my eyes
That I stopped gauging, satisfied,
For this enchanted size.

It was the limit of my dream,
The focus of my prayer, –
A perfect, paralyzing bliss
Contented as despair.

I knew no more of want or cold,
Phantasms both become,
For this new value in the soul,
Supremest earthly sum.

The heaven below the heaven above
Obscured with ruddier hue.
Life’s latitude leant over-full;
The judgment perished, too.

Why joys so scantily disburse,
Why Paradise defer,
Why floods are served to us in bowls, –
I speculate no more.

It might be easier
To fail with land in sight,
Than gain my blue peninsula
To perish of delight.

Who never wanted, — maddest joy
Remains to him unknown:
The banquet of abstemiousness
Surpasses that of wine.

Within its hope, though yet ungrasped
Desire’s perfect goal,
No nearer, lest reality
Should disenthrall thy soul.

I had a daily bliss
I half indifferent viewed,
Till sudden I perceived it stir, –
It grew as I pursued,

Till when, around a crag,
It wasted from my sight,
Enlarged beyond my utmost scope,
I learned its sweetness right.

By the end of the week Emily began to be sighted outside her room, a mysterious and elusive figure fleeting as a woodland creature no sooner glimpsed than it has vanished.

“EDickionson RepliLuxe” by Joyce Carol Oates, from Wild Nights!

In “EDickinsonRepliLuxe”, Joyce Carol Oates offers a science fiction fable about Emily Dickinson–or, rather, a stunted facsimile of the Belle of Amherst–come to live with a modern suburban couple. Sold by RepliLuxe, Inc., the “child-sized Emily . . . wearing tiny buckled shoes” was supposed to “enrich, enhance, ‘double in value’ one’s life,” but instead becomes a disturbing and disruptive presence in their house. Both husband and wife seek to “own” Dickinson–the wife through an appeal to sisterly and poetic urges, the husband through brute force–but in the end, it is the Dickinson automaton who possesses herself.

I’ll admit that I’m not always an Oates fan; while I recognize that she has made an interesting marriage of realism and the Gothic, I find that her stories are often overwrought and predictable. But this story, though not terribly surprising in plot, is more subdued than I had expected; perhaps the gnomic Dickinson has a calming effect. The story is told in the broad strokes of a fairy tale, with the Dickinson mannequin a more deeply realized character than the husband and wife, but the sketchiness works where a more detailed treatment would not, hinting and suggesting with an economy of language much like Dickinson’s poems.

“EDickinsonRepliLuxe” is on of five stories in Oates’ new collection, Wild Nights! Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway. The subtitle is a bit misleading: the Dickinson story takes place more than a century after her “last days,” and the Poe story is a Gothic fantasia on Poe’s life-after-death, or perhaps an alternate history in which he lives on; though the other stories do imagine their subjects’ last hours in intriguing ways. This is certainly a collection that will appeal to the English (or American Studies) major, full of allusion and pastiche. Indeed, it may be a bit much of that, a little too flattering to the students who paid attention in that survey of American literature class. But sometimes it’s nice to be flattered for knowing about Poe, Dickinson, et al, when one is out of touch with “Survivor” and “American Idol.”

Before you thought of spring,
Except as a surmise,
You see, God bless his suddenness,
A fellow in the skies
Of independent hues,
A little weather-worn,
Inspiriting habiliments
Of indigo and brown.

With specimens of song,
As if for you to choose,
Discretion in the interval,
With gay delays he goes
To some superior tree
Without a single leaf,
And shouts for joy to nobody
But his seraphic self!

The official Daily Dickinson 2008 Calendar is available, featuring poems and pictures that have been featured on this site.

Jeanette Winterson (herself a bit of a celebrity) writes in the Times Online of the conflict between celebrity and creativity. She imagines an “American Idol”-style competition for young writers, and suggests that the successful competitor “should be good-looking, funny, talkative, personable, the right shape for an Armani suit, and a bit of a psychopath.”

Some writers would probably have thrived in this setting; Winterson suggests that Byron, Dickens, and Gertrude Stein would have found something to like in the arrangement (and I’d add Twain, I think, and probably Emerson). Others, like Wordsworth, “would have had a nervous breakdown or gone to join D.H.Lawrence in Mexico.” As ever, Dickinson is mentioned in passing as the shorthand example for shyness.

But there’s quite a bit more to Dickinson’s relationship to fame (or, as it has devolved over the last 121 years since her death, mere notoriety) than simple shyness. It wasn’t that she feared attention or hid from the world; fame was a game that she chose not to play. In I’m nobody, she used her deft humor to mock those who are driven by fame:

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog

There’s a “Don’t give up!” list circulating around the blogosphere (you can see it here, here, and here, for example) that includes the observation that “Emily Dickinson had only seven poems published in her lifetime.” What this list fails to note, of course, is that publishing her poems seems not to have been a very high priority for Dickinson; it was the writing of them, not the publishing of them, that mattered. She was none too keen on having them see the light of day. Rather than a model for the unpublished writer striving to break into print, Dickinson is an example of the amateur who does what she loves for no reward but joy. How dreadfully out of step!