Where Ships of Purple — gently toss –
On Seas of Daffodil –
Fantastic Sailors — mingle –
And then — the Wharf is still!

“Sic transit gloria mundi,”
“How doth the busy bee,”
“Dum vivimus vivamus,”
I stay mine enemy!

Oh “veni, vidi, vici!”
Oh caput cap-a-pie!
And oh “memento mori”
When I am far from thee!

Hurrah for Peter Parley!
Hurrah for Daniel Boone!
Three cheers, sir, for the gentleman
Who first observed the moon!

Peter, put up the sunshine;
Patti, arrange the stars;
Tell Luna, tea is waiting,
And call your brother Mars!

Put down the apple, Adam,
And come away with me,
So shalt thou have a pippin
From off my father’s tree!

I climb the “Hill of Science,”
I “view the landscape o’er;”
Such transcendental prospect,
I ne’er beheld before!

Unto the Legislature
My country bids me go;
I’ll take my india rubbers,
In case the wind should blow!

During my education,
It was announced to me
That gravitation, stumbling,
Fell from an apple tree!

The earth upon an axis
Was once supposed to turn,
By way of a gymnastic
In honor of the sun!

It was the brave Columbus,
A sailing o’er the tide,
Who notified the nations
Of where I would reside!

Mortality is fatal –
Gentility is fine,
Rascality, heroic,
Insolvency, sublime!

Our Fathers being weary,
Laid down on Bunker Hill;
And tho’ full many a morning,
Yet they are sleeping still, –

The trumpet, sir, shall wake them,
In dreams I see them rise,
Each with a solemn musket
A marching to the skies!

A coward will remain, Sir,
Until the fight is done;
But an immortal hero
Will take his hat, and run!

Good bye, Sir, I am going;
My country calleth me;
Allow me, Sir, at parting,
To wipe my weeping e’e.

In token of our friendship
Accept this “Bonnie Doon,”
And when the hand that plucked it
Hath passed beyond the moon,

The memory of my ashes
Will consolation be;
Then, farewell, Tuscarora,
And farewell, Sir, to thee!

At the intersection of family history and literary scholarship, Carol Damon Andrews has found what may be the secret source of much of Emily Dickinson’s most interesting and passionate poetry: a doomed love affair with George Gould.

Gould was a student at Amherst College at the time, and a friend of Dickinson’s brother Austin. He worked on the Dickinson farm before going west to work on the railroads, and returned to Amherst to follow a career as a respected clergyman. And, according to the journal of Andews’ ancestor Ann Eliza Houghton Penniman, he was briefly engaged to Emily Dickinson, before her father “vetoed the whole affair, . . . and poor Emily’s heart was broken.”

Andrews is not the first to have proposed the Gould engagement theory; Genevieve Taggard explored the possibility in The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson in 1930, presenting the “purloined valentine” that Taggard argued was intended for Gould. 1930, though, was a bit too close still to 1886, and Taggard’s search for Dickinson’s doomed love affair was quashed by the Dickinson family and the scholarly world. Dickinson as lovelorn spinster remains the received image of her, rather than Dickinson the passionate young woman.

Published in the June issue of The New England Quarterly, Andrews’ article discloses not only the sketch of this doomed affair but also Dickinson’s early musical education. Both revelations are of interest to Dickinson scholars and readers: that the musicality of her poetry has its roots at an earlier age than previously suspected (she was eight years old in the Penniman journal), and that her aching, longing love poetry is grounded in an all-too-real disappointment, enrich our understanding of her poetry, and add a human dimension to the “Belle of Amherst” prism through which we too often see her life.

That there was a flesh and blood source for Dickinson’s love poems–often bitter, frequently playful, sometimes passionate–should not come as a surprise to those who’ve spent some time reading them. And should come, too, as a relief to those who have shared with Dickinson “the kind of early romantic entanglement and disappointment that so many young people have,” as Christopher Benfey has it in Slate, that she made something so extraordinary from such ordinary sources.

Finite to fail, but infinite to venture.
For the one ship that struts the shore
Many’s the gallant, overwhelmed creature
Nodding in navies nevermore.

Death sets a thing significant
The eye had hurried by,
Except a perished creature
Entreat us tenderly

To ponder little workmanships
In crayon or in wool,
With “This was last her fingers did,”
Industrious until

The thimble weighed too heavy,
The stitches stopped themselves,
And then ‘t was put among the dust
Upon the closet shelves.

A book I have, a friend gave,
Whose pencil, here and there,
Had notched the place that pleased him, –
At rest his fingers are.

Now, when I read, I read not,
For interrupting tears
Obliterate the etchings
Too costly for repairs.

Where ships of purple gently toss
On seas of daffodil,
Fantastic sailors mingle,
And then — the wharf is still.

From Melbourne, Australia, comes word of another artistic interpretation of Emily Dickinson, this time soprano Helen Noonan’s “lieder-opera” Voicing Emily. According to The Age:

Voicing Emily explores various aspects of her life and times, including the impact of the American civil war. . . . The work also explores the two loves of the poet’s life — her sister-in-law, Susan, and a newspaper editor, Samuel Bowles. Both relationships were unconsummated and Noonan speculates that consummation might have brought closure to the infinite possibilities that Dickinson saw.

Three sopranos perform Dickinson at various ages: Noonan is joined by Theresa Borg and Caitlin Fowler. The songs that make up the piece were commissioned from three composers, including Eddie Perfect, better known for his satirical political songs.

Australia is quite a hotbed of Dickinsonian efforts; the Dickinson Periodicals Project, based at Macquarie University, was started in 1993 to “study the religious, philosophical and social debates that were represented in Emily Dickinson’s periodical reading”; and Mark Ragg’s The Dickinson Papers was published last year by Random House Australia to much acclaim. Dickinson once referred to herself as “the only Kangaroo among the Beauty”, notes the Dickinson Periodicals Project, so perhaps there’s some deep tie to Oz that makes her so well-loved down under.

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!

Two swimmers wrestled on the spar
Until the morning sun,
When one turned smiling to the land.
O God, the other one!

The stray ships passing spied a face
Upon the waters borne,
With eyes in death still begging raised,
And hands beseeching thrown.

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.