When Poetry Defined Lives, Adam Kirsch’s Eulogy

Helen Vendler died on the 23rd of April and Marjorie Perloff March 24th. The poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch took this as an opportunity to write a eulogy for the Atlantic entitled “When Poetry Could Define a Life” (available here without a paywall). Reading the article elicited contradictory emotions. The first was regretting every snippy thing I’ve ever written about Helen Vendler. In Shakespeare In Love, Viola De Lesseps tells Shakespeare that she’s never heard him praise Marlowe before. Shakespeare answers: He wasn’t dead before. Have I mentioned that I have nothing but praise for Vendler? Anyway, I acknowledge that Kirsch was writing a eulogy and that there are certain rules attached to that, such as the assertion that no other, like the deceased, shall ever walk the Earth again. To wit:

…the loss of these towering scholars and critics feels like the definitive end of an era that has been slowly passing for years. In our more populist time, when poetry has won big new audiences by becoming more accessible and more engaged with issues of identity, Vendler and Perloff look like either remote elitists or the last champions of aesthetic complexity, depending on your point of view.

Not only is it the end of Vendler and Perloff, but the end of an entire era. Fine. I won’t begrudge them their epic-ending panegyrics. Seldom are we so richly praised as when we die. But this sort of sentiment always reminds me of the quip attributed to Charles de Gaulle: The graveyards are full of indispensable men. But anyway, what “era”? The era “when poetry could define a life“?

But that’s not what caught my attention. What did was Kirsch’s statement that readers are more engaged with poetry because of greater accessibility and issues of identity. But Kirsch’s “Becoming more accessible” could mean just about anything. A poem by Megan Fox is lexically “more accessible” than anything by John Ashbery, and while the poems of the bland and generic W.S. Merwin are numbingly accessible, they still aren’t as interpretatively accessible as instapoetry. As regards “issues of identity”, I’m just not seeing the evidence. Maybe on college campuses? But go to any Barnes & Noble (let alone any best sellers list) and the big new audience of the populist age is crying out for self-soothing and self-healing. Poets like Kaur, selling books in the millions, are cutting straight to the chase. Her latest book is a self-healing poetry workbook—literally a therapeutic instapoetry workbook. And if you went to that second link in the first paragraph above, (as of this writing) Microsoft Start offered a “related video” entitled “Author releases collections of poetry to support healing and personal growth (KRON San Francisco)”. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up.

And it’s striking how similar the poems of the instapoets are to Taylor Swift’s lyrics (or the other way around). Swift’s lyrics could easily fit between the covers of any self-help, self-actuating, self-affirming book by an instapoet.

I'm lonely, but I'm good
I'm bitter, but I swear I'm fine
I'll save all my romanticism for my inner life and I'll get lost on purpose
This place made me feel worthless
Lucid dreams like electricity, the current flies through me and in my fantasies I rise above it
And way up there, I actually love it

Or

sweetheart
honey
babygirl
cutie

these are not my name
and I am not yours

but you use intimate words
to give yourself a false sense
of dominance over me

these are bullets you keep ready
for when you feel threatened
by my feminine energy

The first is by Swift and the second by Bridgett Devoue.

And then there’s Megan Fox’s recently released book, Pretty Boys are Poisonous. If I sampled one of her poems, you would be hard pressed to distinguish it from Swift or Devoue. It may seem random to mention Fox’s book, but we all know that no other contemporary book of poetry has remotely sold like celebrity Megan Fox’s. Let’s be honest, there’s a theme running through Swift’s lyrics, the poems of the instapoets, and Megan Fox’s poetry (and none of them are engaged with “issues of identity”). A Goodreads reviewer, reviewing Fox’s poetry, said it best: “this feels like a great therapeutic and cathartic experience for her to be able to finally speak her truth.”

In short, contemporary poetry has emphatically not won big new audiences by engaging with issues of identity but by engaging with issues of therapy and catharsis. Poetry books are literally turning into therapeutic regimens and the poems into therapeutants. Perhaps one can argue that therapy and catharsis entails “issues of identity” but I’ve read Kaur and the other instapoets (about 3 minutes per book) and dealing with identity, in the academic sense of the word, ain’t it.

Kirsch next contrasts Vendler and Perloff’s very different outlooks on poetry. For Vendler, “the best poets use all the resources of language—not just the meaning of words, but their sounds, rhythms, patterns, and etymological connections.” For Perloff, he writes, her preferred poetry is “drawn [from] the avant-garde tradition in modernist literature, which she described in her book Radical Artifice as ‘eccentric in its syntax, obscure in its language, and mathematical rather than musical in its form.’” Vendler was the traditionalist while Perloff insisted, in Kirsch’s words, that poets “had a moral duty to resist [the bland co-option of words by television and advertising] by using language disruptively…”

This leads Kirsch to lament that the values of Vendler and Perloff, who felt that the study of “poetry was valuable in and of itself” have together given way to a “desperate” attempt at relevance by teaching —wait for it — wait for it— Taylor Swift.

Today college students are fleeing humanities majors, and English departments are desperately trying to lure them back by promoting the ephemera of pop culture as worthy subjects of study. (Vendler’s own Harvard English department has been getting a great deal of attention for offering a class on Taylor Swift.)

Consider that Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 (and by “Literature” we mean poetry), and we see a pattern. Dylan wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, Swift’s lyrics are being taught in Literature Departments, and the New York Times puts out headlines that read, The Artists Dismantling the Barriers Between Rap and Poetry.

What’s the take away? Have the last twenty years been, effectively, a repudiation of twentieth century poetics and criticism? Maybe? Finally? (That would be delightful—to me. I’m of the burn it all down and build it anew school of art. I find the latter 20th century to be as stultifyingly formulaic as the worst of the latter 19th century—the former for its vapid transparency and the latter for its vacuous opacity.) It might be argued that Sylvia Plath anticipated the twenty-first century’s use of poetry as therapy. Her poetry was nothing if not a “great therapeutic and cathartic experience” for her readers (though perhaps not for her—in the end). There’s also Robert Lowell, but who reads Lowell anymore? But poetry as the purview of academia’s high priests—namely Vendler and Perloff—has been repudiated at the sales counter. The “big new audience” of our “populist” times (is there the sniff of contempt in Kirsch’s appellation?) don’t want poetry that needs a Vendler or Perloff to explain it to them (and not that I don’t myself enjoy reading Vendler). Whole decades of twentieth century poetry written to the academic(?) taste for studied obscurity—largely pointless and unrewarding—are being confined to special order status. Is that good? Is that bad? Is poetry being improved by the Megan Fox’s of the world? Maybe not. Yet the history of art is the history of the rare genius only emerging on the shoulders of those with an equal passion, if not ability, for their art.

Lastly, Kirsch writes that there are “no obvious heirs to Vendler and Perloff in American poetry today”. William Logan might have an opinion as regards that assertion, and is still alive as far as I know. Besides that, here I am and here I’ve been—for well over a decade—writing, reading, and discussing poetry. I, and others like me, who devote themselves to the discussion and exploration of poetry, are the heirs to Vendler and Perloff. Kirsch qualifies his assertion by writing: “it seems unlikely that we will see a similar conjunction of scholarly authority and critical discernment anytime soon”. But what does he mean by “scholarly authority”? If he means having the imprimatur of academics like Kirsch, then no. Of interest in this regard, a New York Times essay entitled, Has Academia ruined Literary Criticism? Which writes:

“Professionalization, he argues, secured intellectual autonomy for criticism’s practitioners. They could produce knowledge about literature in a manner intelligible chiefly to others producing the same kind of knowledge—a project that became both increasingly specialized and increasingly justified by political concerns, such as race, gender, equality, and the environment. “This is a world in which some of us can specialize in the study of cultural artifacts, and within this category to specialize in literary artifacts, and within literature to specialize in English, and within English to specialize in Romanticism, and within this period to specialize in ecocriticism of Romantic poetry,” Guillory writes. The cost of this professional autonomy is influence. “How far beyond the classroom, or beyond the professional society of the teachers and scholars, does this effort reach?” he asks, knowing that the answer is: not far at all.”

But if not that, then he’s welcome to contrast and compare anything I’ve written to Vendler or Perloff in terms of scholarship. If I’ve made a mistake, I’ll correct it. If he finds nothing to complain about, then may he be as amenable to correction. Which is to say, poetry still defines my life, thank you very much.

And that’s my opinion about that.

Do People moulder equally in the Grave…? Hold my beer.

“When I state myself, as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person.”

“Death—so—the Hyphen of the Sea—” 1454

Do People moulder equally,
They bury, in the Grave?
I do believe a species
As positively live

As I, who testify it
Deny that I—am dead—
And fill my Lungs, for Witness—
From Tanks—above my Head—

I say to you, said Jesus—
That there be standing here—
A Sort, that shall not taste of Death—
If Jesus was sincere—

I need no further Argue—
That statement of the Lord
Is not a controvertible—
He told me, Death was dead— 

  FR391/J432

I included the quotes above because the first is Dickinson stating that she adopts personas in her poetry. The word “persona” was first used in the 17th century, but may or may not have been one Dickinson was familiar with. The second because Dickinson, in many, many of her poems, treats the sea as a kind of burial ground in and of itself. A great article at the Dickinson Electronic Archives examines just this propensity later in her career, writing:

Dickinson began writing poems that referred to the sea, and particularly to the experience or threat of drowning, with increasing frequency.

One of the poems, given as an example, begins: “Drowning is not so pitiful/As the attempt to rise.” Yothers, the author of the article, cites another poem, writing that “this capacity of the sea to engulf the human body and brain appears in another poem from 1863, Fr. 631A (MS H 90). The poem includes the lines: ““The River reaches to my Mouth – / Remember – when the Sea / Swept by my searching eyes – the last – / Themselves were quick – with Thee!”

The point is that like the earth’s surface, the sea’s surface is another division—a metaphorical and symbolic boundary—between living (above) and death (below). But undermining this nice metaphor is the diving bell and the diving suit, which Dickinson—given her love and knowledge of science and her frequent references to sailing and the sea—would certainly have been aware of. She took it as an opportunity to wryly undermine Christian theology. She starts by asking if people moulder differently:

  Do People moulder equally,
  They bury, in the Grave?
  I do believe a species
  As positively live

The initial question mischievously undermines the temptation to read this poem in the manner that some readers do. To wit, the question she asks isn’t: Do some live and some die in the Grave? No. Implicit in the question is that everyone moulders. Period. Do they moulder/rot unequally? Maybe. Possibly. But who cares? They’re dead. They’re mouldering. So there’s that. But then she goes on to say that there’s a “species” who live, but we won’t find them in the Grave, because she’s already eliminated that possibility through her mischievous rhetorical question. A “species” does live.

  As I, who testify it
  Deny that I—am dead—
  And fill my Lungs, for Witness—
  From Tanks—above my Head—

The temptation, including my own, is to treat a passage like this (as in so many of her poems) figuratively—as metaphor or metonymy. For example, does she really mean lungs? What does she mean by Tanks? What does she really mean by above my Head? And yet the quatrain is written with a straightforwardness that clearly describes a diving bell or suit. I see two possibilities. If one wants to read this figuratively, which is possible given Dickinson’s poetics, then the Lungs could be her poetry. Spoken poetry, after all, requires that the lungs be filled. The Tanks could be inspiration or even divine inspiration.

In short, Dickinson could be stating that she lives on in her poetry (a hoary old conceit, just ask Spenser and Shakespeare). Her poetry “testifies” to the denial of death. She writes, “[I] fill my lungs—[behold! or “for Witness” or look at the Tanks]—from Tanks—above my Head—” The Tanks could also mean you, the reader, though this strikes me as pushing the conceit to its limits and beyond. That said, we are, literally, above her Head (Dickinson, being buried). The second way to read this quatrain is to treat Dickinson as assuming a persona (that of the diver) and that she is straightforwardly describing a diving bell or suit. She is speaking to us as a diver who, in the next two quatrains, will use their living burial to troll scripture.

  
  I say to you, said Jesus—
  That there be standing here—
  A Sort, that shall not taste of Death—
  If Jesus was sincere—

Except that’s not quite what Jesus said. According to the King James translators, he said: “Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.” She could have written: “Some be that shall not taste of Death…” That would have kept the meter. Instead, one can read—”A Sort“—as Dickinson’s sly riposte. Remember that the poem’s opening lines flatly deny that there’s anything other than mouldering in the Grave. Option A is mouldering. Option B is mouldering. There is “a “buried Sort”, however, who don’t moulder. And they are buried at Sea. Viola!

  I need no further Argue—
  That statement of the Lord
  Is not a controvertible—
  He told me, Death was dead— 

Dickinson no longer needs to Argue with the true believers. She’s persuaded. Behold! For Witness! The statement of the Lord truly is incontrovertible. Here I stand, in my diving bell, buried and living where centuries and centuries of men lie dead and mouldering.

For witness what science and engineering have wrought!

The entirety of the poem, read this way, is Dickinson trolling Christian faith. You can almost see her in her diving suit, shrugging: See? Just like he said: Death is dead! The joke is that it isn’t faith but science and engineering that have defeated death, utterly undermining the scripture’s intent. On these terms, in other words, Dickinson will accept Jesus’s words as incontrovertible—but not on faith. (I do think there’s a lot of laughter in Dickinson’s poetry, and possibly more so than any of her 19th century peers.)

Nonetheless, one can also read the conceit as metaphor—ourselves as the “tanks” that give air and lungs to her poetry. But read this way, the deadpan “He told me, Death was dead—” loses its punch and humor. If Dickinson is declaring that she will live on in her poetry, then one wants to read the last line earnestly and devoutly. I have a hard time reading it that way (and the conceit would strike me as uncharacteristically ham-handed). Its colloquial directness suggests a dead-pan delivery. My instinct is to read Dickinson as assuming a persona (as she told Higginson she was wont to do) in order to impishly troll Christian doctrine (“I do not respect doctrines,” she once wrote a Mrs. Joseph Haven to explain her non-attendance at a church service [p. 8 Emily Dickinson’s Poetry, Weisbuch].) It’s as if someone said to her: If you don’t accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior then there will be no afterlife for you. To which she said: Hold my beer.

The Color of the Grave is Green | Color me dead…

The Color of the Grave is Green—
The Outer Grave—I mean—
You would not know it from the Field—
Except it own a Stone—

To help the fond—to find it—
Too infinite asleep
To stop and tell them where it is—
But just a Daisy—deep—

The Color of the Grave is white—
The outer Grave—I mean—
You would not know it from the Drifts—
In Winter—till the Sun—

Has furrowed out the Aisles—
Then—higher than the Land
The little Dwelling Houses rise
Where each—has left a friend—

The Color of the Grave within—
The Duplicate—I mean—
Not all the snows c'd make it white—
Not all the Summers—Green—

You've seen the Color—maybe—
Upon a Bonnet bound—
When that you met it with before—
The Ferret—Cannot find— 

[FR424/J411]

This is actually one of Dickinson’s more straightforward poems, and another request. The mystery is less in trying to sort out “nonrecoverable deletions”—missing grammar that makes allusions a guessing game—than the more normal game of interpreting imagery (in this case colors). The one real curve ball in the poem is in sussing out the meaning of Duplicate, but we’ll get to that. The poem is six stanzas that can be divided neatly into thirds, each third reflecting on a color of the grave.

  
  The Color of the Grave is Green—
  The Outer Grave—I mean—
  You would not know it from the Field—
  Except it own a Stone—

  To help the fond—to find it—
  Too infinite asleep
  To stop and tell them where it is—
  But just a Daisy—deep—

Dickinson establishes the poem’s stake, as she often does, in the first line. Color will be the nexus round which the poem’s meaning is adjudicated. The color of the grave is green, she says, and she will devote the next seven lines giving us context for that color. It is the color of the field, presumably—the grass, the flower’s leaf, and perhaps the limb of a weeping willow. Green is the color of life. We might be inclined to forget the dead. Being green ourselves, in a sense—being alive— our understanding of death can only be of the “outer grave” and will be colored/covered by that. If not for the stone, you would not know the burial plot (or the dead) from the field. They otherwise vanish both figuratively and literally. Green is the color of spring and vigor and, in that sense, we’re not meant to be thinking of the dead. The fact of our aliveness separates us truly comprehending death. The youthful/vibrant color of green, of life and growth, is a barrier. Only the outer grave is knowable or discoverable, and that is only discoverable—by the fond—because of the Stone. The dead are too infinite asleep to be guides. In that regard, the only thing that tells where the dead is, is the daisy—alive and whose roots go deep. The suggestion, perhaps, is that the daisy’s realm is both in life and death. The daisy alone comprehends both life and death, being half above the burial ground and half among the dead—and so can tell where the dead lie. As for ourselves, what we comprehend of the daisy is the green of its stem and leaves, and the flower itself (fed by death).

  
  The Color of the Grave is white—
  The outer Grave—I mean—
  You would not know it from the Drifts—
  In Winter—till the Sun—

  Has furrowed out the Aisles—
  Then—higher than the Land
  The little Dwelling Houses rise
  Where each—has left a friend—

The next two stanzas move us from green to white, from youth to age, when the skin becomes pale and the hair gray. Now we return to graveyard in old age. As in us, so in the world. Youth and growth—green—is forever behind us. The color of the grave is white, the color of the marble stone and of bones. We begin to know it from the field. We are no longer greenly oblivious to the grave. The sun, which had been our ally in youth, a symbol of warmth, life and regeneration, becomes the teller (rather than the stone and daisy), telling us ‘where it is‘, where death lies. The sun ‘furrows the the Aisles‘, showing us the path from which cannot escape, the aisle that leads us to our own death and subsidence. We are shown the piles of dirt marking where the newly dead are buried. In each is “left a friend” in their little “Dwelling Houses”. They are “Friends” because they were of our own generation and have become the changeless generation of the dead. The piles of dirt will melt into the coffins as the coffin itself breaks and dissolves along with our bodies—all of it subsiding like the melting snow. White is the color of snow, of the grave stone, of the bones, of the life’s melting and dissolution.

  The Color of the Grave within—
  The Duplicate—I mean—
  Not all the snows c'd make it white—
  Not all the Summers—Green—

  You've seen the Color—maybe—
  Upon a Bonnet bound—
  When that you met it with before—
  The Ferret—Cannot find— 

The final stanza takes us into the dwelling houses. Dickinson doesn’t say the color of the grave is black. She calls the color “The Duplicate”. She says that we’ve maybe seen the color “upon a Bonnet bound”, such as a mourner might wear, but this is only a duplicate of the color within the grave—the color of the bonnet is in no way as final as that terrifying absolute of the grave. The living may wear the color, but the color remains a mere facsimile/duplicate. The color is unnameable. And that is the truly terrifying twist in this poem. And the genius of the poem. She cannot name it. By it’s very nature, the color has no name. To even have a name places it within our world. The color she describes is the color of absence—an absence that is no color, so unconditional in its nameless annihilation that it can only be like a color that you’ve seen elsewhere. The color even annihilates its own name. And not all the summers, now, past or future, can undo that annihilation. Not all the snows, not all the symbolism we attach to white—not the shroud, the white of the sun, poetry, the robe of Christ or the white pages of religion’s rhetoric (in other poems she has referred to her poetry as “snow”)—can undo that color, that abnegation of being, that denial and complete negation of the the world itself. Maybe you’ve seen it, she writes. That you’ve seen the color on the bonnet, in other words, is no guarantee that you’ve actually understood or comprehended that last and final “Color of the Grave”. Maybe. If you’ve understood her poem—then maybe “you’ve met with it before”. And yet, can you really? No matter how deep the ferret digs—she writes as though changing her mind—you will never find the color she’s describing. If you find it, if you think you’ve dug deeply enough, then you haven’t found it. What the ferret, or you, could find will never be the color she’s describing. This is no ride in a carriage with death personified. To see this color is to be annihilated. You may comprehend this color in a mourner’s bonnet but, to truly see this color, is to be dead.

• For a superb youtube analysis of this poem.

up in Vermont | March 4 2024

I know those strains

I know those strains you’re whistling now
  You hear the music too—
Seductive little madrigals—
  O yes, I’m sure you do.

You talk to me about the starlings
  I say it’s chickadees.
Let’s both of us debate the birds
  And never mind the bees—

The bee that flies melodiously
  To kiss the neighbor’s flower;
The neighbor’s hummingbird that sips
  The nectar from the bower.

We both of us know that refrain.
  Our better angels wring
Their hands all while we hum the tunes
  Those other angels sing.

I know those strains
by me, Patrick Gillespie April Fools 2024

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up in Vermont | April 1 2024

This was a Poet | This, That and Who?

This was a Poet — 
It is That
Distills amazing sense
From ordinary Meanings —
And Attar so immense

From the familiar species
That perished by the Door —
We wonder it was not Ourselves
Arrested it — before —

Of Pictures, the Discloser —
The Poet — it is He —
Entitles Us — by Contrast —
To ceaseless Poverty —

Of portion — so unconscious —
The Robbing — could not harm —
Himself — to Him — a Fortune —
Exterior — to Time —

[FR 446/J448]

So. I’ve read a second interpretation of this poem, now by Cristanne Miller (the first by Helen Vendler) and both interpretations seem to fudge the final quatrain. Both seem to muddle. The reasons for the confusion, as with many of Dickinson’s more abstruse poems, are the “nonrecoverable deletions” (as Cristanne Miller nicely describes them). Essentially, because of the constraints of form, Dickinson chooses to delete connectives and syntax that would guide a reader’s understanding.

• Aside: I know it’s peak heresy to ask this question, but I do wonder to what degree Dickinson was aware of her poetry’s frequent obscurity. I’ll make the baseline assumption that her poems made perfect sense to her. If you had asked her what she meant by the final quatrain of This was a Poet, she might have looked at you like you were daft. (She didn’t take well to Higginson’s critiques and he learned—quickly—not to offer them.) And that makes me wonder if anyone ever asked her for clarification? She did send many of her poems to friends and relations, especially Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson. Based on my own lifelong experience as a poet, I’m going to say, No. On the other hand, maybe they didn’t need clarification? They were living in the same town, the same culture, spoke over tea and exchanged letters. We might expect a reader like Susan to fill in the blanks. So the question is this: Was Dickinson knowingly obscure or was she too familiar with her own poetry to recognize its obscurity? To say that she was knowingly obscure strikes me as out and out anachronistic. Poets in the mid 19th century were writing to be understood. Full stop. The 20th century’s infatuation with “pointless obscurity”, as William Logan nicely put it, just wasn’t a thing when Dickinson was writing. Does that mean that Dickinson was too familiar with her own poetry? There’s probably an element of truth to that. Another way of putting is that she might have expected too much from readers other than friends and family. Her syntactic compression/ellipsis/metonymy is part and parcel of her poetic art, but that’s a fine line. I wouldn’t have her poetry any other way, but sometimes, we must admit that her meaning is every reader’s best guess.

  This was a Poet — 
  It is That [poetry]
  Distills amazing sense
  From ordinary Meanings —
  And Attar so immense

My impression is that most readers interpret That as referring to the Poet. This would be Miller’s interpretation and, unless I’m mistaken, Vendler’s. I actually read That as referring not to the poet but to poetry in general. Normally this would be a four line stanza. R.W. Franklin notes that these lines are made four lines in “derivative collections” and Miller prints the poem this way (in her book A Poet’s Grammar). This makes the first line read: This was a Poet — It is That. Printing the poem this way makes it more tempting to associate That with the Poet. But if we print it according to Dickinson’s own lineation, then the assertion This was a Poet stands by itself. The statement is in the past tense and I read it, in a sense, as an epitaph. I read the poem as like a scene in a play. We’re accompanying Dickinson (or the speaker) on a nice afternoon’s walk through the graveyard (actually a thing in Victorian times). As we accompany Dickinson, she pauses at a grave stone we might have overlooked. She says,”This was a Poet.” Recognizing the poet’s grave, she then is reminded of his poetry and says, almost to herself, “It is That, that distills amazing sense from Ordinary meanings”. In her book “Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them”, Miller notes that in his “Letter to a Young Contributor”, Higginson wrote, “Literature is attar of roses, one distilled drop from a million blossoms”. This was the letter that prompted Dickinson to write Higginson and suggests that Dickinson’s own imagery was inspired by Higginson.

  And Attar so immense

  From the familiar species
  That perished by the Door —
  We wonder it was not Ourselves
  Arrested it — before —

  Of Pictures, the Discloser —

That Dickinson uses the word “immense” suggests Higginson’s “million blossoms”. Also worth noting, I think, is the notion that what “perished by the Door” was made into attar. Keep that in the back of your mind. The narrator, standing by the gravestone, next expresses appreciation for the genius of poetry. The poet’s skill is such that she wonders why we don’t ourselves “arrest”/grasp/comprehend what poetry, after the fact, makes self-evident. Poetry is “Of Pictures” (possibly meaning imagery) the “Discloser”. That is, poetry is the art that reveals truth through the language of imagery, archetype, and symbol.

So far, so good. It's the last third of the poem where matters get muddled. [Note: For an interpretation I find more convincing and simpler than my own, be sure to read the comment section; then decide for yourself.]

  The Poet — it is He —
  Entitles Us — by Contrast —
  To ceaseless Poverty —

  Of portion — so unconscious —
  The Robbing — could not harm —
  Himself — to Him — a Fortune —
  Exterior — to Time —

Now, here’s my thought: If we keep in mind that Dickinson, at the very outset of the poem distinguishes between two subjects, the Poet (deceased) and “Poetry”—the That that makes the perished into attar—we have the makings of a contrast. Dickinson even spells it out. “By Contrast—” she writes. The speaker returns our attention to the deceased Poet (after describing poetry’s power). That is, unlike his or her poetry, by contrast, the Poet will not be made into attar. The Poet has perished. It’s possible to break down these lines into three separate assertions:

  The Poet — it is He —
  Entitles Us — by Contrast —
  To ceaseless Poverty —

The death of the Poet, in contrast to his poetry, is a cause of ceaseless Poverty. Ceaseless because his death is final. Dickinson isn’t referring to the The Poet, but to Death. Then she moves on to her next thought:

  Of portion — so unconscious —
  The Robbing — (!)

In a highly compressed fashion, she is accusing Death of thoughtlessness and indifference. Of portion, she says sarcastically, Death is unconscious/thoughtless/indifferent. In other words, she expresses dismay at Death’s indifference to the “portion” that is really being robbed from us—not just a man but a great artist—a Shakespeare, a Keats or a Brontë. She expresses dismay at Death’s indifference to who he robs from us.

                  — could not harm —
  Himself — to Him — a Fortune —
  Exterior — to Time —

Now she moves onto her third thought. And here, if I’m interpreting the poem correctly, Dickinson’s final lines remind me very much of the closing lines to her poem, Because I could not stop for Death:

  Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
  Feels shorter than the Day

There’s that same sense of timelessness—not the timelessness of paradise, but of awareness exiled from time’s rituals—a nothing that is both death and deathless. That is, just as with the narrator in Because I could not stop for Death, the Poet’s centuries feel shorter than the day. The conclusion just as laden with contradiction—but also consistent. According to biographers, Dickinson refused to “accept Christ” (and presumably the afterlife that went along with that) but she also seemed unwilling to accept the death of the soul. This may disappoint some metaphysical naturalists among my readers (and you know who you are) but asking Dickinson, in her era and culture, to throw the soul out with the Christian bathwater, is probably asking too much.

Though Death has robbed us of the Poet, Death cannot rob the Poet of his “Fortune”. The Poet takes what is most precious about him with him (Dickinson was untroubled, according to Vendler, by the use of He/Him in reference to herself as a poet). He takes his creative genius—his Fortune—into that deathless death that is exterior to time. Death can rob us of the poet’s creative genius, but cannot rob the Poet himself. “[Death] could not harm—Himself [the Poet]”. To Him—to himself—the poet’s Fortune is now exterior to time. Yet one is very hesitant to read this as triumphing over Death. Dickinson ends the poem, as with Because I could not stop for Death, with irreconcilable contradiction. She is both deceased and conscious. And that might be part of the point. The contradiction, the dissonance, is part of the tragedy.

• From Vendler’s Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries: “Dickinson here uses a capitalized universalized “he” in reference to the Poet; I follow her reverent practice. She assumes the ungendered nature of the Platonic Idea of the Poet. She would not have said that she meant to exclude, by the pronoun “He,” the women Poets whose works she admired: Elizabeth Barret Browning, George Eliot, and Emily Brontë.” [p. 212-213]

Edit: It’s tempting to read “Exterior — to Time” as the poet’s poetry triumphing over time. In other words, his fortune—his poetry—is exterior to death and time. The problem with this reading is that it seemingly contradicts the speaker’s earlier assertion that He entitles us to “ceaseless poverty”. One has to explain this apparent contradiction. My own way around this is to treat her final lines as a reference to the deceased Poet rather than to His or Her poetry (and Because I could not stop may give us a precedence for such a reading).

Worth mentioning is that she could be describing herself in This was a Poet—commenting on her own death. In this sense, This was a Poet and Because I could not stop for Death can be read as describing the same event—her own death. The former is from the perspective of the living, reflecting on the poet’s death, while the latter is from the perspective of the deceased poet.

I haven’t said much about Vendler or Miller’s interpretations because they’re so different from mine. I don’t know how to summarize their readings (and frankly find them somewhat scattershot and confusing). How exactly does Vendler land on plagiarism, for example? What and where does that come from? Vendler summarizes the closing couplet this way:

“Dickinson points out the degree to which the Poet’s capacity to notice, to notice everything, and then disclose His “Pictures,” makes us notice things too… And third, Dickinson points out the indifference of the Poet to us (or to anyone else), an indifference arising not from self-esteem but from His (to him unconscious) Fortune. He is so unaware of the grace bestowed on Him, of the great “Portion” of wealth He has inherited, that no robbing from his worth can harm Him (plagiarism of His work by others does not affect our recognition of the true Poet). He moves in a world (in Dickinson’s great phrase) “Exterior — to Time — “… He is as unaware of Time (and its obverse, Eternity) as He is of us. [p. 213-214]

So you can see how different our interpretations are. Vendler doesn’t even interpret the poem as being that of a deceased Poet (and this despite describing the opening line as a past-tense epitaph in the very first sentence of her analysis). According to Vendler, if I understand her correctly, Dickinson is describing the archetypal experience(?) of reading poetry. It seems to me that Vendler spends less time interpreting the poem than ‘biographizing’. Miller interprets the poem as Dickinson expressing (for lack of a better term) gender resentment(?). She reads Dickinson as addressing male poets (and not the Platonic Idea of the Poet) in her use of He, and frames the contrast as one of “difference and of strength”.

“As a younger sister of a favored son and as a consciously female poet, however, Dickinson might well differentiate herself with some resentment from the poet who creates unconsciously and with ease, the man of ceaseless, inherited cultural wealth. Evidently during this time when she wrote or at least copied “This was a Poet” for her own safekeeping, the contrast between herself as artist and the world was particularly vivid. In the fascicle where she binds this poem, Dickinson precedes it with two poems on similar differences. In the first, “It would have starved a Gnat — / To live so small as I — ” (612), the speaker brags that she can live on even less that a gnat, and without his privileges to fly to more sustaining places or to die. In the poem immediately preceding “This was a Poet,” the speaker is a “Girl” poet “shut… up in Prose — ” by uncomprehending adults, whom she escapes “easy as a Star” by willing herself to be free (613).  Later in the fascicle Dickinson includes “It was given to me by the Gods” (454), a poem about another “little Girl” far richer with her handful of “Gold” than anyone could guess and richer than anyone else is: “The Difference — made me bold —” she confides. These are poems of difference and of strength, whether these qualities stem from unique starvation or mysterious wealth.” [Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar p. 120-121]

Miller interprets Dickinson’s use of That, in reference to the Poet, as suggesting the poet’s “lack of humanity”.

“The poet’s lack of humanity is further suggested by his peculair invulnerability in the last stanza: “a Fortune — / Exterior — to Time —” is glorious as a description of immortal poems but somewhat mechanical and materialistic as a description of a man. We are poor, capable of “wonder,” within “Time,” while He is alone, “Exterior” to our world, knowable only “by Contrast.” [p. 120]

“The poet/narrator who speaks in Dickinson’s poem considers herself a part of the admiring, ordinary crowd rather than separate from it. Her stance indicates that not all poets share “His” isolation from community.” [p. 121]

So, from Miller, we have a feminist critique based on a reading of He as a specifically gendered reference; and not, as Vendler asserts, a universalized He. It could be argued, in that respect, that Miller’s reading is potentially anachronistic (giving too much weight to the pronoun). Miller’s interpretation is also, arguably, based on reading the first two lines as one (which is not how Dickinson preserved the poem).

At any rate, there’s my 2 cents. Spend it how you will.

upinVermont | March 12 2024

Emily Dickinson, The Wicked Queen of Snark

I was thinking about how often I read Dickinson’s poems as hot-blooded and sarcastic. The respectable term ‘Irony’ is applied to her poetry, but that strikes me as a high brow euphemism. Hers is not a coiffed literary irony. Hers is the raw snark of a modern troll—a sarcasm meant to bait and mock. I’m not a feminist scholar or critic, but it would seem to me that this would be fertile ground. What better way for a woman, isolated and hemmed in by societal expectations, to speak truth to power? I won’t be that critic, because I don’t have the background, but there’s a graduate thesis, if not a book, waiting to be written. I can’t think of any other female poet who compares to Dickinson until, possibly, Dorothy Parker (who generally treats sarcasm as a display of wit) rather than the often furious, despondent, and scathing sarcasm of Dickinson.

An example of one of our most renowned close-readers who seems to entirely miss Dickinson’s sarcasm, again and again, would be Helen Vendler. I have to stress my gratitude for Vendler’s writings on Dickinson, but I do think she treats Dickinson too much like just another very serious poet. When John Milton, as a young man, professed his poetic ambitions, he was thinking of Paradise Lost—a very serious epic without a shred of sarcasm. Keats would go on and on about poets’ laurels and would write the Odes and Hyperion—and there is not a shred of snark in those. Emily Brontë, who Dickinson read and favored, never once let her poet’s mask fall, but adopts the elevated, lofty and literary distancing of her peers. Christina Rossetti was sometimes so elevated as to be insufferable. In a fit of righteous pique, she figuratively sent her brother and his “merry lovers” straight to the bottom of the sea. Walt Whitman? Sarcasm? You jest. The only contemporary poet, to my knowledge, who compares to Dickinson in his unembarrassed sarcasm would be George Gordon Lord Byron. Consider Byron’s skewering of Wordsworth:

  What! can I prove "a lion" then no more?
    A ball-room bard, a foolscap, hot-press darling?
  To bear the compliments of many a bore,
    And sigh, "I can't get out," like Yorick's starling;
  Why then I'll swear, as poet Wordy swore
    (Because the world won't read him, always snarling),
  That taste is gone, that fame is but a lottery,
  Drawn by the blue-coat misses of a coterie.

Or, earlier on:

  Don Jòse and the Donna Inez led
    For some time an unhappy sort of life,
  Wishing each other, not divorced, but dead...

Which leads to Byron's beautifully snarky comments on the noble and admirable equanimity with which Donna Inez (and Spartan wives) suffer and suffered the agonies and deaths of their husbands:

  And then this best and weakest woman bore
    With such serenity her husband's woes,
  Just as the Spartan ladies did of yore,
    Who saw their spouses kill'd, and nobly chose
  Never to say a word about them more—
    Calmly she heard such calumny that rose,
  And saw his agonies with such sublimity,
  That all the world exclaim'd, "What magnanimity!"

Of lordly and aristocratic accomplishments:

  Then for accomplishments in chivalry,
    In case our lord the king should go to war again,
  He learned the arts of riding, fencing, gunnery,
  And how to scale a fortress — or nunnery.

Or

  Sermons he read, and lectures he endured,
    And homilies, and lives of all the saints;
  To Jerome and to Chrysostom inured,
    He did not take such studies for restraints;
  But how faith is acquired, and then ensured,
    So well not one of the aforesaid paints
  As Saint Augustine in his fine Confessions,
  Which makes the reader envy his transgressions. 

Dickinson’s snark isn’t as urbane. Byron was an aristocrat, a Lord, and while he left England in disgust, subjected to the proto gossip columnists of the 19th century, he could nevertheless afford to leave. Not Dickinson. Hers is the snark of the caged starling. Unlike Byron, who filters his mockery and sarcasm through the conventional literary mask of Don Juan’s narrator, Dickinson speaks with the necessity of directness, less urbane humor than a biting cry to be heard. It’s what makes Dickinson feel so much more modern than her peers—to me.

My first example of this would be a poem I’ve already discussed here, I never saw a Moor.

  I never saw a moor;
    I never saw the sea —
  Yet know I how the Heather looks
    And what a Billow be.

   I never spoke with God,
    Nor visited in Heaven.
  Yet certain am I of the spot
    As if the Checks were given —

As I wrote in my prior post, I read this little hymn as dripping with snark. It’s possible to read this as a piously conventional Victorian poem affirming Christian faith, but as I wrote previously, one must (in my view) ignore the obviously mocking colloquialism (even in her day) of “Yet certain am I of the spot…” Yes, Emily knows just where to go if you want to speak with God and visit Heaven. Yesireebob. There’s a “spot” alright, otherwise known as a plot—as in a plot in a graveyard (if we’re spelling this out). Dickinson will suffer none of that happy talk about some insubstantial and eternal paradise. It’s a spot. Checks are always available! Enjoy your trip.

The earnestly pious, Victorian Christian poet does not describe God in Heaven as, wait for it, a spot.

Another poem dripping with snark would be the recently discussed ‘Tis so appalling — it exhilarates —.

  'Tis so appalling — it exhilarates —
  So over Horror, it half Captivates —
  The Soul stares after it, secure —
  A Sepulchre, fears frost, no more —

  To scan a Ghost, is faint —
  But grappling, conquers it —
  How easy, Torment, now —
  Suspense kept sawing so —

  The Truth, is Bald, and Cold —
  But that will hold —
  If any are not sure —
  We show them — prayer —
  But we, who know,
  Stop hoping, now —

  Looking at Death, is Dying —
  Just let go the Breath —
  And not the pillow at your Cheek
  So Slumbereth —  

  Others, Can wrestle —
  Yours, is done —
  And so of Woe, bleak dreaded — come,
  It sets the Fright at liberty —
  And Terror's free —
  Gay, Ghastly, Holiday!

The entirety of the poem concerns the joy and liberation of death! Once you’re dead, no need to fear the cold! As Emily says, the “Sepulchre, fears frost, no more —”. Yay? Once you’ve turned into a ghost. Voila! No need to fear ghosts anymore! “To scan a Ghost, is [makes one] faint —” she writes, “But grappling [becoming a ghost], conquers it [that fear]—” Aside: I should think. Let others “wrestle [with their fear of death]/Yours, is done”. Death liberates you from Fright! Death frees you from Terror! And then, all but writing “/s”, she concludes, “Gay, Ghastly, Holiday!” 🥳 Whoopee! 🎉 I haven’t read all of world literature before she wrote that line but, arguably, in the entirety of the English canon, there’s nothing quite so transparently snarky. Do please correct me if I’m wrong.

For a third example, I thought I’d turn to some pages at random, lest I be accused of cherry-picking.

  Take your Heaven further on—
  This—to Heaven divine Has gone—
  Had You earlier blundered in
  Possibly, e'en You had seen
  An Eternity—put on—
  Now—to ring a Door beyond
  Is the utmost of Your Hand—
  To the Skies—apologize—
  Nearer to Your Courtesies
  Than this Sufferer polite—
  Dressed to meet You—
  See—in White!

And I landed on this. It’s—pure, undiluted snark. That doesn’t stop the website All Poetry from treating the poem as an earnest meditation on the afterlife. They write, “This poem explores themes of loss, grief, and the nature of heaven.” The analysis goes on to write, “The use of religious imagery and language suggests the speaker’s struggle to come to terms with the idea of an afterlife. The poem’s concise and direct language emphasizes the speaker’s sense of loss and pain.” Really? The analysis, like so many, casts Dickinson as the victim of life and circumstances—a woman of endless loss and pain. As with so many interpretations, we walk away thinking to ourselves — Poor Emily.

I read this poem — very differently.

The poem expresses Dickinson’s sly power and refusal to be a victim. The final line, like the final line in ‘Tis so appalling — it exhilarates — all but drips with snark. As I read it, her poem is like a missive to a suitor who missed his chance.

  Take your Heaven further on— 
[Take your propositioning, promises of love, elsewhere] 
  This—to Heaven divine Has gone—
["Heaven divine" could be poetry or the gratitude of her own company]
  Had You earlier blundered in
[If you'd had the wits to strike when the iron was hot]
  Possibly, e'en You [even a fool like you] had seen
  An Eternity [my erstwhile affections for you]—put on—
  Now—to ring a Door beyond
  Is the utmost of Your Hand—
[Now, you'll have better luck at the next house]
  To the Skies—apologize—
[Apologize to God in Heaven for all I care]
  Nearer to Your Courtesies
  Than this Sufferer polite—
 [You'll have better luck there than with me]
  Dressed to meet You—
  See—in White!

  [FR672/J388]

And then that killer pun in the final line: White is the color of the virgin and of the bride. Look what you could have had, she says, with all the hot-blooded venom of a scorpion. (Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.) I was dressed for your company—in the white of a virgin and bride but, I have news for you, White(!) is also the color of death, my dear, of the burial shroud. In other words, your chances with me are dead, dead, dead. I’m dressed to meet you, not like a virgin, but like a corpse! Exclamation point.

This is not the poetry of a victim.

Sewall is the first biographer credited with freeing Dickinson from the perception that she was a hapless and delicate violet trapped in her room like a forlorn Rapunzel. When I read so many interpretations of Dickinson’s poetry that nevertheless portray her as an earnest, perturbed and death-obsessed damsel, I have to wonder whether critical readers have caught up?

Of course, I could be completely wrong with my interpretations. You decide.

Higginson called his meeting with Dickinson—intense. I think these poems give some clue as to why he would write that.

up in Vermont | March 3 2024

I felt a funeral in my brain | Oblivion or Breakthrough?

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading - treading - till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through -

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum -
Kept beating - beating - till I thought
My mind was going numb -

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space - began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here -

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then -

[F340/J280]

This is a fascinating poem simply because so much of its weight and meaning rests entirely on how one interprets the meaning of a handful of words. Each word exists in a sort of splendid isolation that conversely affects the meaning of every other word. To begin with, how does one interpret “sense”? How does one interpret “Plank”, “World”, “Finished” or “knowing” ? How does one interpret “breaking through”. This latter phrase, fascinatingly, appears twice in an alternative draft. Rather than writing “And Finished knowing”, Dickinson wrote “And Got through — knowing”. So, in one draft at least, the conceit of breaking through and getting through appears both in the first and last stanza, arguing that this conceit of break through is something we should be paying attention to. That is, the central conceit of the poem may not be oblivion or defeat, which is understandably how the poem is universally (as far as I know) interpreted (including recently by Vendler), but the opposite. In my usual contrarian way, I read this poem as a grim triumph; and my reasons for doing so are not just internal to the poem but have to do with the poem that follows it in Dickinson’s fascicle.

  I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
  And Mourners to and fro
  Kept treading - treading - till it seemed
  That Sense [sanity] was breaking through - [in the sense of falling into a chasm]

It’s tempting to read “breaking through” in the sense that sanity was “breaking through” the imagined drama of the funeral, but based on the stanza that follows, my hunch is that this would be misreading Dickinson’s meaning and anachronistic. I looked up breakthrough in the Oxford English Dictionary and was surprised that the noun—a breakthrough—doesn’t appear. I had to go to Webster’s where they pinned the noun’s appearance at 1918 and only in the sense of a military “breakthrough”—as in there was a breakthrough of the enemy’s defenses. It wasn’t until 1968 that the modern usage of “a scientific breakthrough” appeared.

What is the “Funeral”? No one seems to be certain. Some speculate that it was dissappointment as regards a love or friendship, while others suggest a spiritual crisis (her rejection of Christian belief and dogma). (Dickinson’s biopgrahper Sewall writes, for instance, that “Reason “breaks” may be a tortured requiem on her hopes for [Samuel] Bowles both to love her and to accept her poetry… [p. 502]) Later in the poem she will describe the footfall of the funeral attendants as creaking across her soul. In that sense, her soul is the floor, the foundation upon which her existence is predicated, and it’s this floor—her soul—that her sanity is breaking through. In other words, not even her soul can support the weight of her suffering. That floor, her soul, gives out and she plunges into nothingness.

  And when they all were seated,
  A Service, like a Drum -
  Kept beating - beating - till I thought
  My mind was going numb - 

This stanza is fairly straightforward, but for modern readers, I think, it does the work of clarifying the meaning of the first stanza. Clearly, Dickinson is describing a sort of mental breakdown, first of sanity, then of awareness. I interpret her ‘mind going numb’ as her failing awareness of anything other than suffering.

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,

The reader is likely meant to interpret the ‘Box’ as a casket (within which lies her “deceased” relationship, beliefs or she herself), but in her numb (touchless) and senseless (visionless) state, the only sense left to her is hearing. Lead would be a highly unlikely metal for heels, being soft and malleable, but I was curious if metal heels, of any kind, were a thing in the 19th century. A not-exhaustive search didn’t turn up anything. Dickinson was likely describing the heavy footfall of the mourners as leaden. Additionally, those carrying a casket are likely to walk in lock-step and their steps will be made heavier by the weight of the corpse within. If the corpse is Dickinson herself—or her mind—then the floor (her soul) is the last creaking stay against her ultimate descent into nothingness—although that begs the question: What exactly is her soul—what does Dickinson consider it?—if it’s the floor on which her being exists, then what falls through? How does she distinguish her soul from her mind? If it’s not her soul tumbling into nothingness, then what is it? But it’s also possible to read too closely and too literally. Her imagery is not static but makes her soul both the floor and the essence that falls through its own being.

  Then Space [existence] - began to toll,

  As all the Heavens were a Bell,
  And Being, but an Ear, 
[All of existence was the bell and I was nothing but the Ear.]
  And I, and Silence, some strange Race
  Wrecked, solitary, here -
[Both Dickinson and silence are, in a sense, banished and alone] 

This stanza is difficult to parse. Cristanne Miller clumps this sort of syndetic writing (the repeated use of conjunctions) under parataxis (in that there are no subordinating conjunctions to guide our understanding). Is each ‘and’ meant to refer Ear, I and Silence back to ‘being’?—or is Dickinson imitating a sort of cumulative madness. My reading is that the latter is the case, but that two different states of being are described. In the first two lines she’s describing her experience consumed by the tolling bell. The second two liken that experience to being banished, wrecked and helplessly alone. She is banished. The Emily Dickinson Lexicon defines Race, among other definitions, as a “Course; journey; progression; steady movement toward a goal; [fig.] life; continued course of existence after death.” So Dickinson could be referring to her experience as a kind of ‘strange journey’. She could also be using “Race” in the sense of not belonging. If this is a spiritual crisis (a rejection of Christian theology) then she’s apt to feel as though she belongs to an altogether different “race” or society—wrecked/ostracized and solitary/alone. The same feeling may apply if her romantic overtures have been rejected. Her strangeness, her identity as an ambitious female poet, also could make her feel like an altogether ostracized “race”—and both interpretations could apply. One gets the sense that she wasn’t the kind of woman men pursued in those days.

  And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
  And I dropped down, and down -
  And hit a World, at every plunge,
  And Finished knowing - then -

And now, as usual with Dickinson’s final stanzas, things get interesting—very interesting. There are two very different ways to read this stanza. I think most, if not all, interpret this stanza as the threatened conclusion to the prior three stanzas. If Dickinson is describing the pain of a lost relationship, for example, then it makes sense to read this stanza as her descent into madness or nothingness. We interpret “plank” as a continuation of the imagery that associated the creaking floor with her soul and we might associate Reason with the Sense or sanity in the first stanza. In other words, her sanity and reason finally give way to madness. Her soul, the floor/plank upon which the funeral takes place, breaks or “breaks through”. She drops down and down. ‘World’, in this sense, might be her memories. In other words, every memory is a “world”. Once she has exhausted those memories, she is “finished knowing”. Even hearing is gone. (Interestingly, one will read that hearing is the last sense to die in a dying patient, but how scientists know this has never been explained.) The loss of her relationship, or hoped for relationship, is like a death to her. Vendler, who apparently can’t bear to kill poor Emily, describes the final lines as “leaving madness for a merciful unconsciousness”. But this poem would hardly be the first to suggest oblivion as the last word.

But let’s suppose the crisis is spiritual, then that makes an entirely different interpretation possible. A plank can also be “one of the separate articles in a declaration of the principles of a party or cause; as, a plank in the national platform.” This is not a possibility that you will find at the Dickinson Lexicon, but according to the Oxford English Dictionary, this understanding of the word plank appeared in poetry nearly a quarter century before Dickinson wrote this poem, as well as in Newspaper articles going back to 1848. That Dickinson, of all poets, would have been unaware of this meaning of “plank” is unlikely.

• In William Logan’s book Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods, wherein Logan gives I felt a funeral a close reading, he credits Cynthia Griffin with the observation that “a telling emblem from the book Religious Allegories (1848), [shows] a gentleman crossing a plank that bestrides a dark abyss. The man holds a radiant book that must be the Bible, the plank is carved with the word “FAITH” and a shining mansion awaits his crossing.” [p. 260]

If “I felt a funeral in my brain” was prompted by a spiritual crisis, and we know, according to Richard Sewall, that Dickinson was greatly troubled by her refusal to join her peers in declaring Jesus as their Lord and savior. This wasn’t just a figurative refusal. There were repeated calls for her to join the revivals at Amherst.

It is in the sixth letter, written a fortnight later (January 31, 1846), that a New Year’s meditations come to a focus on spiritual matters. Save for a gossipy postscript, the letter, a long one, is entirely given over to religion. Emily confesses to Abiah that she did not become a Christian during the revival of the previous winter in Amherst. She has seen “many who felt there was nothing in religion… melted at once,” and it has been “really wonderful to see how near heaven came to sinful mortals.” Once, “for a short time,” she had known this beatific state herself, when “I felt I had found my savior.” “I never enjoyed.” she wrote, “such perfect peace and happiness.” But “I soon forgot my morning prayer or else it was irksome to me. One by one my old habits returned and I cared less for religion than ever.” At Abiah’s recent announcement that she was close to conversion, Emily “shed many tears.” She herself longs to follow after: “I fell that I shall never by happy without I love Christ.” But midway through the letter she makes a striking admission. a real bit of self-discovery. Putting aside the revival rhetoric, she seems to be speaking her own voice (even to the misspelling):

Perhaps you will not beleive it Dear A., but I attended none of the meetings last winter. I felt that I was so easily excited that I might again be deceived and I dared not trust myself.

This revelation is followed by a long passage on the dreadful thought of Eternity… [p. 381]

Knowing this, the meaning of “plank” takes on a whole new meaning. It’s not just a reference to her soul (which she earlier compared to the creaking floor) but a punning reference to the “plank” of Christian beliefs.

  And then a Plank [an important principle on which the activities of a group... are based] in Reason [her own reasoning or the reasoning of others], broke,
  And I dropped down, and down -
  And hit a World, at every plunge,
  And Finished knowing - then -

What does she mean by “hit a World” in this case? In Dickinson’s poem Bereavement in their death to fell, Dickinson offers us some possibilities. In the line ‘’tis as if Our souls/Absconded‘, she also considers the words World, selves and Sun for souls. In other words, these were all in some sense synonymous. Interestingly, the context is also similar, arguing that this is a sort of Dickinsonian image cluster.

• Certain images seem regularly to have led Shakespeare’s mind along a train of associated ones. Walter Whiter, in his Specimen of a Commentary on Shakespeare (1794), showed that flattery suggested dogs, which suggested sweetmeats. The phenomenon was more fully discussed by E. A. Armstrong in his Shakespeare’s Imagination: A Study of the Psychology of Association and Inspiration (1946), and is used by Kenneth Muir as evidence of authorship in his Shakespeare as Collaborator (1960).

So, with that in mind, Dickinson gives us at least two alternate readings for World—soul and self. And in that light, her hitting “a World, at every plunge” might refer to previous selves, or other versions of Emily Dickinson (like the Dickinson who had found her savior) until she finally gets through (got through in one revision of the poem) her “Knowing”. And what does ‘knowing’ mean? As it turns out, ‘knowing’ has a very specific meaning in Christian contexts. Look up the meaning of know and you will read that “knowing God is not simply an intellectual apprehension, but a response of faith and an acceptance of Christ.”

It is he who has made God known ( John 1:18 ).To know Christ is to know God ( John 14:7 ). Eternal life is to know the true God and Jesus Christ ( John 17:3 ). Paul desires to know Christ in his death and resurrection ( Php 3:10 ). Failure to know Jesus as Lord and Messiah ( Acts 2:36 ) resulted in his rejection and crucifixion ( 1 Cor 2:8 ).

To know Christ is to know truth ( John 8:32 ). While this is personal, it is also propositional. Knowledge of the truth ( 1 Tim 2:4 ; 2 Tim 2:25 ; 3:7 ; Titus 1:1 ) is both enlightenment and acceptance of the cognitive aspects of faith.

This knowing, this acceptance of Christ, is precisely what Dickinson could not accept. So, read in this light, what Dickinson might be saying is that the funeral in her brain is the rhetoric of proselytizing that already condemns her as dead to God and comes or threatens to bury her. The good Christians “mourn for her” and their mourning is like an endless treading that threatens to drive Dickinson to madness. Their “service” is like a drum that keeps beating, that won’t leave her in peace or silence. The culture of Christianity surrounding her cajoles, threatens, and proselytizes until she feels her mind going numb. Their insistence is like a drumbeat. Their boots (their own beliefs) are, to Dickinson, leaden. Their step is heavy on her soul and creaks under their weight. The religious imagery continues as she describes all the Heavens as a ringing bell, so pervasive that she feels herself reduced to a tortured ear. In another of her poems, she gives tongues to the bells and, in that sense, the bell is also proselytizing.

• Isaiah 55:3

  “Incline your ear and come to Me.
  Listen, that you may live;
  And I will make an everlasting covenant with you…

• Matthew 13:16-17

  But blessed are your eyes, because they see; and your ears, because they hear.

She, and her precious silence, are wrecked and solitary. As a fascinating side note, John Keats so despised the ringing of church bells that he wrote a sonnet on the subject:

  Sonnet. Written In Disgust Of Vulgar Superstition

  The church bells toll a melancholy round,
  Calling the people to some other prayers,
  Some other gloominess, more dreadful cares,
  More hearkening to the sermon's horrid sound.
  Surely the mind of man is closely bound
  In some black spell; seeing that each one tears
  Himself from fireside joys, and Lydian airs,
  And converse high of those with glory crown'd.
  Still, still they toll, and I should feel a damp,--
  A chill as from a tomb, did I not know
  That they are dying like an outburnt lamp;
  That 'tis their sighing, wailing ere they go
    Into oblivion; -- that fresh flowers will grow,
    And many glories of immortal stamp.

This poem absolutely would have been read and known to Dickinson (note some of the interesting parallels—the drumbeat of Dickinson’s service, the horrid sound of Keats’s sermon; the melancholy round of Keats’s churchbells, the tortuous tolling of Dickinson’s bell; Keat’s damp chill, as from a tomb, and Dickinson’s funeral). Remember, from our previous discussion, that Dickinson put Keats at the top of her reading list during the same year that she wrote I felt a funeral.

  And hit a World, at every plunge,
  And Finished knowing - then -

The poem concludes with grim determination. The plank (the stated beliefs of their and/or her own reasoning) breaks under so much weight. She plunges through untold “Worlds” or selves or beliefs, her own and those of others, until she finally, as she wrote in one revision, gets or “got through”. She is finished with “knowing”—she will not accept Christ. And then the poem ends on the word then. This is where things get even more interesting. When Dickinson placed “I felt a funeral in my brain” in her fascicles, she followed it with ‘Tis so appalling — it exhilarates. Both poems were written the same year, and if we don’t know the reason Dickinson placed these poems next to each other, we know that she did. It is possible, for example to read “then” as leading directly into the next poem, such that both poems can be read as one:

  (...)
  And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
  And I dropped down, and down -
  And hit a World, at every plunge,
  And Finished knowing - then -

  'Tis so appalling — it exhilarates —
  So over Horror, it half Captivates —
  The Soul stares after it, secure —
  A Sepulchre, fears frost, no more —

  To scan a Ghost, is faint —
  But grappling, conquers it —
  How easy, Torment, now —
  Suspense kept sawing so —

  The Truth, is Bald, and Cold —
  But that will hold —
  If any are not sure —
  We show them — prayer —
  But we, who know,
  Stop hoping, now —

  Looking at Death, is Dying —
  Just let go the Breath —
  And not the pillow at your Cheek
  So Slumbereth —  

  Others, Can wrestle —
  Yours, is done —
  And so of Woe, bleak dreaded — come,
  It sets the Fright at liberty —
  And Terror's free —
  Gay, Ghastly, Holiday!

In this case, the word then is a transition to the next poem and the revelation that once the horror is past, the soul can “[stare] after it, secure”. But let’s say that Dickinson did put these two poems together meaning them to be read together. She still does the unexpected. ‘Tis so appalling (as discussed earlier) is more sarcasm, scorn and contempt, than celebration. If one reads ‘Tis so appalling as a companion poem, then I felt a Funeral, in my Brain is Dickinson refusing to accept Christ while ‘Tis so appalling — it exhilarates — is her sarcastic, darkly humorous riposte, saying, Great! “Gay, Ghastly Holiday!” Now what? She has escaped the leaden boots of Christian dogma, to believe in what?

One might object by saying that if these two poems are meant to be read as one, then why not every poem in her fascicle? That’s a fair objection but, conversely, she didn’t just roll the dice. The whole point of the fascicle, after all, was to arrange the poetry. It’s not far-fetched to assert that the reason these two poems are together is that, for Dickinson, they were associated.

Which interpretation do I prefer? If the poem is about a disappointment in love, friendship or her disappointment as an artist, then we’re greeted with a poem that conveys her suffering through analogy with the Christian rituals of burial. Her suffering is like a funeral. The persistence of the suffering and weight of it is like the leaden tread of the mourners. Heaven in her poem is not the heaven of paradise but the remorseless tongue of dogma, the church bell, ostracizing her, rejecting her, driving her to desperate madness. The service meant to offer solace and comfort is a brutal and annihilating drumbeat. Even if Emily Dickinson is not having a spiritual crisis, Emily Dickinson’s imagery is.

Lastly, Sewall credits Ruth Miller with identifying I felt a Cleaving in my Mind— as a variant poem of I felt a funeral.

  I felt a Cleaving in my mind —
    As if my Brain had split —
  I tried to match it, Seam by Seam —
    But could not make them fit —

  The thought behind, I strove to join
    Unto the thought before —
  But Sequence ravelled out of Sound —
    Like Balls — upon a Floor.

[FR867/J937,J992]

Similar themes appear, though without the oppressive Christian rituals. The poem is said to be written in 1864, two years after I felt a funeral. I know I’m treading on sacred ground with leaden heels, but compared to the former, this poem feels more like the product of a doodle taken from one of her envelope poems—as though the conceit occurred to Dickinson and she ran with it. That’s not to say that the poem doesn’t succeed, just that it reads as though it’s eight parts “art” and maybe two parts “autobiography”. The impression is made more so with the revision she later sent to Susan Dickinson:

  The Dust behind I strove to join
  Unto the Disk before —
  But Sequence ravelled out of Sound
  Like Balls upon a Floor —

What I like about the revision is what it reveals as regards Emily the artist and craftsman. She wasn’t just an instinctive genius, but a thinking and discerning artist perfecting her craft. Sure, there is a portion of her poetry that are her letters to the world—but I would argue that a portion are also the product of a craftsman, someone to whom metaphors and analogies came easily, along with the ideas usefully expressed by them. Her first version—”thought behind, I strove to join/Unto the thought before“—effectively communicates the central idea, but “a thought” is an abstract thing. Like any poet/craftsman, she knew that a poem lives or dies in its imagery, its power to evoke through figurative language and the five senses. The fragments of the poem’s thoughts don’t just roll out of reach (her first version), but ravel out of Sound. So, she added specificity to the thoughts. The thought behind becomes dust and the thought before becomes the Disk. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” explains “the dust”, but what is the Disk? Vendler interprets Disk as “the Sun of sunrise”, symbolizing a new beginning, and I think she’s right. She quotes Dickinson’s four line poem “The pattern of the sun”, as evidence for her interpretation:

  The pattern of the sun
  Can fit but him alone
  For sheen must have a Disk
  To be a sun —

So anyway, whereas I felt a funeral reads like a poem arising from a real crisis, I felt a Cleaving reads more like a work of art—to me.

Amherst MA
Amherst Manuscript # 421
Amherst – Amherst Manuscript # 421 – The pattern of the sun – asc:7785 – p. 1

I died for Beauty | On the true and beautiful death of truth and beauty…

I died for Beauty — but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb,
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining room —

He questioned softly "Why I failed"?
"For Beauty", I replied.
"And I — for Truth - Themself are one —
We Brethren are", He said —

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night —
We talked between the Rooms —
Until the Moss had reached our lips —
And covered up — Our names — 

[FR448/J449]

 O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
         Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
         Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
         When old age shall this generation waste,
                Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
         "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

From the closing stanza of Ode on a Grecian Urn

Here lies One 
Whose name was writ in Water.

Dickinson’s I died for Beauty is one of those Dickinson poems that is, relatively, straightforward. We’re not confronted with, as Cristanne Miller calls them, nonrecoverable deletions—omitted words that are otherwise essential to meaning—deletions that make Dickinson difficult to read but also interpretively flexible. They’re often what I’m trying to fill in and what none of us can agree on. Which is fine. In my post, The Tint I cannot take, I filled in those nonrecoverable deletions like this:

Their [the squirrels] Graspless [failure to grasp] manners — mock us — [belittle the poet's efforts or more generally mock/resemble all of us]
Until the Cheated [the deceived/wasted] Eye [arc of life/surmise]
Shuts arrogantly [triumphantly] — in the Grave —
Another way — to see — [our/their opportunity to see the world through Dickinson's eyes or more generally the ineffable]

The bracketed insertions in the first, second and fourth lines. Dickinson never specifies what “Their” refers to, or the “Cheated Eye”. And so we entertain alternative readings like this:

  Their [the onlookers or the squirrels?] Graspless manners — mock us —
  Until the Cheated Eye [the landscape painter’s?—the onlookers?—the squirrels?]
  Shuts arrogantly — in the Grave —
  Another way — to see — [who’s way? the landscape painter’s?—the onlookers?—the squirrels?] 

‘I died for beauty’ is less about establishing what Dickinson even is talking about and more along the lines of normal interpretive debate. What, after all, does she really mean by truth?—beauty?—and, above all, failure? Are these abstract notions? Are these the broad gestures of nebulous romantic affectation? Or might she be referring to something more specific? But before we get to that, there are a couple interesting rabbit holes I want to go down. And they’re rabbit holes because everything I’m going to write is utterly speculative and can be safely ignored by anyone demanding facts.

At the entrance to the rabbit hole is the (generally not disputed) assumption that Dickinson’s poem was inspired by (or is a reference to) Keats’s poem Ode on a Grecian Urn. And as far as I can tell, that’s about as far as responsible readers are willing to go. But there’s another possible reference in Dickinson’s poem, and that’s to the lines written on Keats’ tombstone: “Here lies One Whose name was writ in Water.” Is it coincidence that Dickinson ends her poem with the line: “Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.”? Possibly. And that sent me on a not-exhaustive-as-it-could-have-been search for what books were in Dickinson’s library, and whether she would have been familiar with Keats’s tombstone. According to this site (by one Gary Martin) the phrase appeared in the 1821 edition of Keats’s Poetic Works (if I’m reading his site correctly). I was unable to confirm that. But if Martin is correct, could Dickinson have read this early edition? Would the book have been available to readers in the States? What seems virtually indisputable is that Dickinson was exposed to Keats at a young age and that if her father didn’t have the book in his library, she almost certainly came across Keats’s poetry in the course of her Amherst education. Given what any reader quickly surmises as regards Dickinson’s interests, the story of Keats’ death, his tombstone and what is written there probably would have made a forceful impression on the poet—not something she would have forgotten.

And there are some other interesting coincidences.

The poem was written in 1862 according to Dickinson’s biographer Richard Sewall. Curiously, this is the same year that Dickinson wrote a letter to Higginson in which she answers questions pertaining to what books she’s been reading. The letter was dated April 25, 1862 and she writes:

“You inquire my Books — For Poets — I have Keats — and Mr and Mrs Browning. For Prose — Mr Ruskin — Sir Thomas Browne — and the Revelations.”

As Sewall points out, that’s an awfully odd list.

“Emily’s reading list (Keats, the Brownings, Ruskin, Browne, “the Revelations”) is as misleading, in what it says and what it omits, as anything in the letter. Ruskin and Browne seem to have been of minor importance to her; perhaps she mentioned them because Higginson did in his article. Where is Thoreau, for whom her few tantalizing references show a kinship greater than she ever acknowledged? Where is Merson, a major influence, whose Poems (1847) Ben Newton had given her in 1850? Above all, where is Shakepseare, of whom she was later to ask Higginson, “Why is any other book needed?” [The Life of Emily Dickinson p. 543]

And yes, where are all those books? But what interests me is that Keats is first on her list. It’s hard not to conclude that she must have been closely engaged with Keats at this time, hence the reason he was first on her book list. And at this point, which collection of Keats’s poetry might she have been reading? Interestingly, I found a source that lists all the books in the Dickinson estate (no doubt incomplete) here (a PDF listing all the books and magazines). Keats is nowhere to be found. However (another coincidence) a complete edition of Keats’ poems was published in 1858 by London: E Mocton, which you can read here. There’s a short memoir of John Keats included, and you can be sure Dickinson would have read the memoir if the book had been in her hands. And if she had read the memoir, she would have read this:

“In one of these mental voyages into the past, which precede death, Keats had told Severn that he thought ” the intensest pleasure he had received in life was in watching the growth of flowers,” and another time, after lying a while quite still, he murmured, ” I feel the flowers growing over me.” And there they do grow even all the winter long, — violets and daisies mingling with the fresh herbage, and in the words of Shelley ” making one in love with death, to think one should be buried in so sweet a place.” Some years ago, when the writer of this memoir was at Rome, the thick grass had nearly overgrown the humble tomb-stone, which however few strangers of our race omit to visit…”

Can you just imagine Dickinson reading these lines? The imagery could come straight from one of her own poems. And so, we know that Dickinson was reading Keats during the same year that she wrote “I died for beauty”. That, at least, is not speculation. Further, based on the fact that Keats was first on her reading list, we can guess that she was particularly engaged with Keats around this time. Is it possible that she read the memoir in Mocton’s publication? I don’t know, but the parallels in imagery are striking. Keats’ tomb is covered by vegetation and so are the tombs in Dickinson’s poem. The name of Keats disappears in water and in Dickinson the names disappear beneath moss. If she read the memoir, she surely would have remembered what was written on Keats’ tomb; and it would have been a short step for all those thoughts and images to combine into Dickinson’s now famous poem.

But, getting back to the poem, what does she mean by truth?—beauty?—and failure? Are these nebulous romantic gestures or might she be referring to something more specific? Keats tells us what they are: Each is Each. In Vendler’s interpretation, Dickinson, Selected Poems and Commentaries, they are separate but eventually ‘all distinctions are resolved’ by their mutual decay. Vendler treats the deceased as Beauty/Feminine and Truth/Masculine. That’s perfectly reasonable, and requires the reader to identify the character with their types (like a short morality play):

“When we use an expression such as “He died for God and Country,” we envisage a battle; when we say, “She died for her faith,” we envisage a martyrdom. Apparently, Beauty and Truth have died in affirmation of the values they endorse; society will not permit their continued existence. Yet there is no recrimination in these two who have been so steadfast, not any indictment of the values opposed to their own. They were not executed: they merely “died” or “failed” for Beauty or Truth.”

But strictly speaking, Dickinson never states that the deceased are actually Truth and Beauty, only that each “died” for truth and beauty. Also, stating that “society [would] not permit their continued existence” is probably overstating the case. There’s nothing in the poem to suggest that society was responsible for their deaths (as gratifying as that assertion might be). But is debating who is in the grave like driving a pin through the butterfly’s heart? Maybe. I’m fine reading it both ways. The poem is a sort of set piece symbolizing a recurring tragedy: We know that truth and beauty haven’t really died, and yet truth and beauty dies with each of us. Life is doomed to failure. (I interpret the question: “Why I failed”? or Why did you fail? not as meaning — Why did you fail in your pursuit? — but as ­— For what did you die?”) While we live though, we can decide what to live and die for. In the case of Dickinson’s denizens, one has decided to die for beauty and the other truth—ultimately for the same things. They are “bretheren” and “kinsmen”. They both pursued truth and beauty, and became Truth and Beauty in the pursuit. Dickinson drives this home by eventually making them the same, erasing not just their identities but their names. In this sense, the poem doesn’t end in tragedy, but evinces a sort of satisfied resignation—each his lived and died for something noble. Each had their turn. And that is the best any of us can hope for. Eventually, the moss, like the grasses and flowers above Keats’s grave, erase all.

• February 26th I wanted to add a further interpretation to the post based on the comments section (for those readers who don’t read comments). If we read a touch of autobiography in the poem, then Dickinson might be metaphorically placing herself next to Keats. They were brethren and kinsmen in the sense that they were both poets and therefore seekers of truth and beauty. They both wrote magnificent poetry but, perhaps in EDs judgement, failed to obtain the support and recognition they deserved. (In this sense, ‘failed’ means ‘failed’.) Their poetry went unrecognized and unappreciated. That is their failure, but also society’s. That is, society failed and will fail them by allowing the moss to cover up their names (and any memory of them or their works). Read this way, the poem is especially powerful and poignant. It’s also arguably untrue, because Dickinson was reading Keats’s poetry. He was emphatically not forgotten, and yet what did that posthumous success mean to Keats? The pain of the living poet, her pain at being overlooked and unrecognized, would be what she’s expressing here. And yet as with the earlier interpretation, the “triumph” of the poem itself, the truth and beauty of poetry remains—just as it did with Keats.

And yet, in that very erasure—the entirety of the poem enacts anew—within us—both truth and beauty. Dickinson’s poem plays the same trick on us that Keats’s poem plays. By observing the tragic evanescence of truth and beauty, they renew them both. “Here is my poem,” says Dickinson, “behold the death of Truth and Beauty. Isn’t it tragic? Oh, grieve for them! Grieve! Isn’t it truthful? Isn’t it beautiful?” The poem sneakily confirms Keats’s final lines: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

This somewhat contradicts the interpretation (worth reading) made at the following website:

“In other words, this parable about idealists ends on a note of sobering realism. No matter what people “die for,” the poem suggests, death is death. Even the highest ideals, such as beauty and truth, become irrelevant in the grave, along with any work we’ve produced or sacrifices we’ve made in their name.”

Simply by virtue of the poem itself. Truth and beauty are not irrelevant because the poetry is not irrelevant. The ideals, in other words, exist within the framework of the poem and are renewed (brought to life) by those who read the poem. Truth and beauty are not in any real grave. Those are just the masks worn by the players. The poem itself is a sly part of the morality play—is truth and beauty—and lives on.

Finally, I’ve linked an interesting article (see below) that I came across while researching this post, on the rivalry between Amherst and Harvard as concerns Dickinson’s estate. The author writes:

“Dickinson sent many manuscripts off to friends in the mail, and the enormous remainder-well over a thousand manuscripts and other items-were divided after Dickinson’s death between her sister-in-law and childhood friend, Susan, and a neighbor, Mabel Loomis Todd. There was one large complication: Mabel was deep in an affair with Austin, Emily’s brother and Susan’s husband. Ever since then, the majority of Dickinson’s manuscripts and possessions have been stuck in the middle of a war between two houses. Eventually, the manuscripts residing with Mabel were donated to Amherst College, while those in Susan’s possession ended up at Harvard. The rivalry was bequeathed with the manuscripts.”

Good grief.

• For more on Keats’s Tomb.
• On the banal rivalry of egos between Amherst and Harvard

And this post was for Gabrielle.

Raggedy

I’ve gotten so that I can’t see.
If you could thread the needle—
Who’d think that I could be
So old, she said, so feeble,
So full of holes and raggedy.

Yet also I am told, the sun
Grows old, the button moon,
And every shining pin. Each one,
She said, grows old. Too soon
The world itself will come undone.

Here and there the tattered string
And here and there the thread.
I bought this old dress traveling.
Unforgettable, she said.
She said before unraveling.


February 17 2024
by me, Patrick Gillespie