A daily poem from the complete works of Emily Dickinson.
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The springtime’s pallid landscape
Will glow like bright bouquet,
Though drifted deep in parian
The village lies to-day.
The lilacs, bending many a year,
With purple load will hang;
The bees will not forget the tune
Their old forefathers sang.
The rose will redden in the bog,
The aster on the hill
Her everlasting fashion set,
And covenant gentians frill,
Till summer folds her miracle
As women do their gown,
Or priests adjust the symbols
When sacrament is done.
Tags: bee, forget, gentian, land, men, Nature, rose, spring, summer, year
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.
Tags: care, fair, first, fly, june, land, Life, Love, may, men, moon, music, poem, sea, see, ship, sun, think, year
Softened by Time’s consummate plush,
How sleek the woe appears
That threatened childhood’s citadel
And undermined the years!
Bisected now by bleaker griefs,
We envy the despair
That devastated childhood’s realm,
So easy to repair.
Tags: year
I measure every grief I meet
With analytic eyes;
I wonder if it weighs like mine,
Or has an easier size.
I wonder if they bore it long,
Or did it just begin?
I could not tell the date of mine,
It feels so old a pain.
I wonder if it hurts to live,
And if they have to try,
And whether, could they choose between,
They would not rather die.
I wonder if when years have piled –
Some thousands — on the cause
Of early hurt, if such a lapse
Could give them any pause;
Or would they go on aching still
Through centuries above,
Enlightened to a larger pain
By contrast with the love.
The grieved are many, I am told;
The reason deeper lies, –
Death is but one and comes but once,
And only nails the eyes.
There’s grief of want, and grief of cold, –
A sort they call ‘despair;’
There’s banishment from native eyes,
In sight of native air.
And though I may not guess the kind
Correctly, yet to me
A piercing comfort it affords
In passing Calvary,
To note the fashions of the cross,
Of those that stand alone,
Still fascinated to presume
That some are like my own.
After a hundred years
Nobody knows the place, –
Agony, that enacted there,
Motionless as peace.
Weeds triumphant ranged,
Strangers strolled and spelled
At the lone orthography
Of the elder dead.
Winds of summer fields
Recollect the way, –
Instinct picking up the key
Dropped by memory.
Podcast music by Monks and Choirs of Kiev Pechersk Lavra
Went up a year this evening!
I recollect it well!
Amid no bells nor bravos
The bystanders will tell!
Cheerful, as to the village,
Tranquil, as to repose,
Chastened, as to the chapel,
This humble tourist rose.
Did not talk of returning,
Alluded to no time
When, were the gales propitious,
We might look for him;
Was grateful for the roses
In life’s diverse bouquet,
Talked softly of new species
To pick another day.
Beguiling thus the wonder,
The wondrous nearer drew;
Hands bustled at the moorings –
The crowd respectful grew.
Ascended from our vision
To countenances new!
A difference, a daisy,
Is all the rest I knew!
Astute readers of this site will have noticed a new feature: audio versions of the poems can be played by clicking the little arrow icon, or downloaded in MP3 format with the “Audio MP3″ link.
Like much else on this site (indeed, like the genesis of the site itself), this new feature has as much to do with me playing with a technology toy as anything else. For a couple years now, I’ve been listening pretty widely to podcasts–from the wonderful Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Minnesota Public Radio shows, to Escape Pod and Pseudopod, to little gems like Miette’s Bedtime Stories and DicksnJanes. Eventually one starts to think one ought to try one’s hand at it.
If you’re an iTunes user, you can subscribe at this URL; if you use another podcast aggregator, paste this RSS feed URL into your subscriptions.
I make no apologies for the quality of these recordings; if you’re brave enough to listen, you’ll be hearing me fumbling around with getting things right–the recordings will probably improve, and if you have suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them.
The music is from Magnatune, a record label that is incredibly generous in its licensing for non-commercial podcasts. They offer a wide range of classical, folk, New Age, and ambient music; if you like what you hear, why not make a purchase or two? I’ve been particularly struck by the music of Ehren Starks and Claire Fitch.
And if you’re interested in contributing a recording of yourself interpreting a Dickinson poem, I’m all for it–leave a comment and I’ll provide you the details on where to send it. You can get a sense of the publishing schedule by looking at the Gutenberg Project complete poems: we’re closing out series two over the next couple weeks, and will start series three shortly. I typically have things queued up a week or two in advance, but I’d gladly replace one of my interpretations with a reader/listener’s version.
On August 13th (plenty of time to get your tickets!), the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California, will premier a new opera by Lesley Dill, Divide Light. The opera is “an interdisciplinary collaboration between New York visual and performance artist Lesley Dill and Colorado composer and conductor Tom Morgan” inspired by the poetry of Emily Dickinson.
Of the many interpretations of Dickinson that we’ve noted over the last year–like Helen Noonan’s Lieder-Opera, a sing-along with Seattle’s Choral Arts, and Don Cook’s architectural take on Dickinson’s poems’ structures–this one sounds the strangest and possibly most wonderful of all. A multi-media opera, “Divide Light” combines music and words and movement in illuminating and beguiling ways:
In Divide Light, Dill redirects the classic form of opera to a sparer and more closely developed theatrical presentation. The haunting visual element will feature large projections on a back screen and multiple scrims. The images will be a combination of Dill’s stark, edgy and evocative black-and-white photographs and projected text from Dickinson’s poetry. Poems will stream, scroll, flash, swirl, twirl, pop out, edge in, seep out, fade in, fall down, and rise up on the screen and scrims. The performers will sing Dickinson’s words and wear them scrawled across their costumes. Poems will appear in unusual places throughout the opera, interacting with the audience in unexpected ways.
You can sample some of the music and images at the Divide Light web site. The music is haunting and a little troubling, particularly the repetitive and layered “Much Madness is Divinest Sense” and the subtle “I Am Afraid”. The video is a little more difficult to follow, since it’s disconnected from the context of the stage. All the same, the combination of images and music is affecting. Pictures of the costumes–stark and simple, black and white, covered with letters–give some indication of how the pieces will weave together.
I suspect that “Divide Light” won’t be to everyone’s taste: sensitive souls may come away with a few weeks’ worth of troubling dreams, if not outright nightmares. But it has every hint of providing a rich and provocative look into Dickinson’s poems and its place in the dark spaces of the mind.
Tags: august, away, dare, die, fall, house, may, men, music, night, noon, poem, sea, see, sing, soul, star, year
