land

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

I had a guinea golden;
I lost it in the sand,
And though the sum was simple,
And pounds were in the land,
Still had it such a value
Unto my frugal eye,
That when I could not find it
I sat me down to sigh.

I had a crimson robin
Who sang full many a day,
But when the woods were painted
He, too, did fly away.
Time brought me other robins, –
Their ballads were the same, –
Still for my missing troubadour
I kept the ‘house at hame.’

I had a star in heaven;
One Pleiad was its name,
And when I was not heeding
It wandered from the same.
And though the skies are crowded,
And all the night ashine,
I do not care about it,
Since none of them are mine.

My story has a moral:
I have a missing friend, –
Pleiad its name, and robin,
And guinea in the sand, –
And when this mournful ditty,
Accompanied with tear,
Shall meet the eye of traitor
In country far from here,
Grant that repentance solemn
May seize upon his mind,
And he no consolation
Beneath the sun may find.

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!

If the foolish call them ‘flowers,’
Need the wiser tell?
If the savans ‘classify’ them,
It is just as well!

Those who read the Revelations
Must not criticise
Those who read the same edition
With beclouded eyes!

Could we stand with that old Moses
Canaan denied, –
Scan, like him, the stately landscape
On the other side, –

Doubtless we should deem superfluous
Many sciences
Not pursued by learnèd angels
In scholastic skies!

Low amid that glad _Belles lettres_
Grant that we may stand,
Stars, amid profound Galaxies,
At that grand ‘Right hand’!

Podcast music by Antonio Meneses

Kurt Anderson’s Studio 360 rebroadcasts a 2006 piece on Emily Dickinson as part of the show’s American Icons series. Focusing on Dickinson’s The Chariot (a.k.a. “Because I could not stop for Death”), the piece highlights the strange and gnomic characteristics of Dickinson’s poetry, particularly as opposed to the loquacious style of the Fireside Poets.

Interviewed for the show was Belinda West, who portrays Dickinson (among others) for the Vermont Humanities Council, PBS and the History Channel. She wove Dickinson’s words about the perils of publication (“the auction of the Mind of Man”) and the pitfalls of fame into her responses in a natural, witty way.

The “common meter” peril–singing Dickinson to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” “Gilligan’s Island,” or any number of hymns–is, of course, brought up; but so is the wordplay and subtlety of the poems that Dickinson dressed in such homespun garb. (Or in gossamer gown and tulle tippet; Billy Collins has his say, too, with thoughts on taking off Emily Dickinson’s clothes.)

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.”

It was not death, for I stood up,
And all the dead lie down;
It was not night, for all the bells
Put out their tongues, for noon.

It was not frost, for on my flesh
I felt siroccos crawl, –
Nor fire, for just my marble feet
Could keep a chancel cool.

And yet it tasted like them all;
The figures I have seen
Set orderly, for burial,
Reminded me of mine,

As if my life were shaven
And fitted to a frame,
And could not breathe without a key;
And ‘t was like midnight, some,

When everything that ticked has stopped,
And space stares, all around,
Or grisly frosts, first autumn morns,
Repeal the beating ground.

But most like chaos, — stopless, cool, –
Without a chance or spar,
Or even a report of land
To justify despair.

Podcast music by Antonio Meneses

What inn is this
Where for the night
Peculiar traveller comes?
Who is the landlord?
Where the maids?
Behold, what curious rooms!
No ruddy fires on the hearth,
No brimming tankards flow.
Necromancer, landlord,
Who are these below?