ship

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.

A something in a summer’s day,
As slow her flambeaux burn away,
Which solemnizes me.

A something in a summer’s noon, –
An azure depth, a wordless tune,
Transcending ecstasy.

And still within a summer’s night
A something so transporting bright,
I clap my hands to see;

Then veil my too inspecting face,
Lest such a subtle, shimmering grace
Flutter too far for me.

The wizard-fingers never rest,
The purple brook within the breast
Still chafes its narrow bed;

Still rears the East her amber flag,
Guides still the sun along the crag
His caravan of red,

Like flowers that heard the tale of dews,
But never deemed the dripping prize
Awaited their low brows;

Or bees, that thought the summer’s name
Some rumor of delirium
No summer could for them;

Or Arctic creature, dimly stirred
By tropic hint, — some travelled bird
Imported to the wood;

Or wind’s bright signal to the ear,
Making that homely and severe,
Contented, known, before

The heaven unexpected came,
To lives that thought their worshipping
A too presumptuous psalm.

This story isn’t about Emily Dickinson the poet, but rather about Emily Dickinson the six-toed cat.

The descendants of Ernest Hemingway’s six-toed cat have been granted a reprieve. Since Hemingway’s death, his Key West, Florida, residence has been a museum, and the cats–about 60, according to the Hemingway Home cat page–have had the run of the place. The USDA ruled last year that the cats “must be caged or evicted, because they were ‘performing animals’ at the town’s most popular paid-for tourist attraction.” The museum begs to differ: the cats may be a popular draw, but they hardly perform (cats being not much for the performing arts, after all).

The Key West city council has weighed in with an exemption for the cats:

The cats reside on the property just as [they] did in the time of Hemingway himself.

They are not on exhibition in the manner of circus animals. The city commission finds that the family of polydactyl Hemingway cats are indeed animals of historic, social and tourism significance … an integral part of the history and ambiance of the Hemingway House.

About half the cats inherited the extra-toes trait from that early ship’s captain’s gift to Hemingway, and most bear literary names. The museum web site displays pictures of Simone De Beauvoir, Archibald MacLeish, and, of course, Emily Dickinson, a “healthy cat with dilute calico fur.”

The polydactyl trait, according to lore, was bred into New England cats because sailors considered extra-toed cats lucky. Whether any seafaring branch of the Key West clan made it as far inland as Amherst is unclear.

A few items of note from the blogosphere:

• Writing Science Poetry from Students Of Success: Susan Shaw reflects on the uses (and abuses) to which poets have put science over the centuries, from Wordsworth’s excoriations to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sublimity. Dickinson rates a mention–for “Arcturus”–and certainly stands as a solid example of a poet who closely observed and noted the natural world. “Arcturus” seems at first reading to be in the party of Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned”, but her take on the apparent demystification to which science puts the natural world is of a more humorous tone than Wordsworth’s strident Romanticism.
• The Dinner Party from ectoplasmosis: John Brownlee reflects on Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party”, a piece that consists of place settings “for 39 famous or imaginary women at an enormous triangular banquet table, with each plate specially designed in a vaginal motif symbolic of their personality.” Emily Dickinson’s setting, pictured here, “is a puffy pile of pink lace.” Though given the passion of Wild Nights, I would have expected something with a little more passion.
• Excuses, Excuses from Literary Rejections on Display: in a list including James Joyce, John Knowles, Herman Melville, and Pearl Buck, Dickinson’s poems are rejected thus: “The rhymes are all wrong.” (Which, of course, they are; that’s part of the magic.) A discussion of the wisdom of airing one’s rejections, in what may seem to be a tone of self-righteousness, ensues. I got a rejection myself tonight for a story that’s collecting a lot of interesting comments; in this case, the editor noted that she likes things a little “dark”, but this one was too much on the “nasty” side. An earlier rejection of this story thought it “amusing”, but continued that “I’m afraid that I simply didn’t understand the point of this story.” I like getting a little note on a rejection, and by the time I’ve sent something out it’s so long since the writing (this particular story is almost two years old) that I have trouble mustering much pique. But I can understand (and admire) someone who chooses not to submit, who hoards nearly 2,000 carefully crafted little verses that make the reader “feel physically as if the top of [their] head were taken off.”
• Britney Spears Is The Next Emily Dickinson from Celebrity Watch (and oh so very many others…): another namecheck (maybe even more unfortunate than the one from Oxford County’s Labor Day killer) has Britney Spears’ poison poem to her mother resonating with Emily Dickinson. One suspects that this is because the only woman poet the blogosphere could think of on such short notice was Dickinson; here’s hoping these fall out of the Google index quickly enough…

Glee! The great storm is over!
Four have recovered the land;
Forty gone down together
Into the boiling sand.

Ring, for the scant salvation!
Toll, for the bonnie souls, –
Neighbor and friend and bridegroom,
Spinning upon the shoals!

How they will tell the shipwreck
When winter shakes the door,
Till the children ask, “But the forty?
Did they come back no more?”

Then a silence suffuses the story,
And a softness the teller’s eye;
And the children no further question,
And only the waves reply.

I love the way the last stanza undercuts the thunderous joy of the first two. The uncomfortable silence after the children ask their difficult but obvious question is palpable; the waves beating against the shore–the waves that know all too well what became of the forty–make the silence that much darker.

This photo is available as a greeting card.