Giles Watson's Blog, page 2

From Cocoon forth a Butterfly

From Cocoon forth a Butterfly

Emily Dickinson seems to have anticipated the American craze for butterflies which would develop in the second half of the nineteenth century, after the Civil War. There might have been, in that coming vogue, something of the old folk belief that butterflies were souls of the departed, but if the enthusiasts for Lepidoptera thought sentimentally about the insects, they had a funny way of showing it, since butterflies were avidly killed and collected. Perhaps the transience of butterflies helped people to make sense of those years of bereavement - butterfly symbols were certainly used as memento mori in jewellery and lace in Victorian England - or perhaps the mere frivolity of the pursuit and capture of beauty was what people felt they needed. It might also have been that the metamorphoses in the butterflies’ life-cycles were seen as something symbolic in a nation that desperately needed to emerge from the oppressive chrysalis of the Civil War and the evils that caused it. Between 1868 and 1897, William H Edwards would gradually publish his magnum opus, The Butterflies of North America, with 152 hand-coloured lithographic plates, bringing European classificatory approaches to species which had not been studied systematically before.

The passion for collecting butterflies survived well into the twentieth century. My own father, living in Staffordshire, England, collected them avidly as a boy in the 1940s and 1950s, and he did so with such scientific fervour that the national press, in the form of The Daily Mirror, once visited his home to publish a feature article about him. The butterflies and moths still exist, in exquisitely carpentered cabinets made by my grandfather, and have been used as a scientific resource. Amongst the Blues and Browns, Peacocks and Painted Ladies, there are others considered fantastically rare by today’s standards: velvet-winged Camberwell Beauties, Purple Emperors, named because their upper wings flash an iridescent violet colour when viewed at a certain angle. Now, the ethical zeitgeist has changed, and such collecting is a thing of the past. Catching and killing some of the rarer butterflies can lead to a prison sentence. But of course, children collecting butterflies did not make them rare; modern industrial farming, synthetic insecticides and habitat destruction did. We recoil with horror at the stories of nineteenth century naturalists like Audobon, who shot the birds he painted, but it is our combine harvesters and pesticides that are causing extinctions. We are sure that it is wrong to kill a butterfly and stick a pin through it, but we don’t so easily remember that it is wrong to eat bread made out of grain protected by insecticides which killed a field-full of butterflies.

Emily Dickinson’s own obsession with butterflies began early - she was already invoking surreal visions of them in ‘A Bird, came down the Walk’ in 1862 - but it was not their rarity, their decorative qualities, or their role in the symbolism of death and transience that fascinated her, so much as the fact of their otherness. Butterflies fly, but not with the heavy wingbeats of large birds, the flutterings of songbirds, or with the frenetic wing-beats, too fast for the human eye, of the hummingbirds that visited her garden. Their flight is seemingly effortless. Their movements often seem aimless to the human eye, and once they are out of the chrysalis, they appear to do very little that can be described as “work”. Dung beetles trundle dung - a sometimes Herculean task. Flies are ceaselessly, fastidiously, washing and preening themselves. Moths relentlessly bother themselves with lamps and well-lit windows. Earwig mothers fuss over their eggs. Even grasshoppers put considerable effort into the business of gnawing, stridulating and hopping - so much so that one wonders why Aesop did not write a fable called ‘The Ant and the Butterfly’ instead of ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’.

All of this fascinated Dickinson, but there was one other aspect of the butterflies’ natural history which made them the ideal subject for her verse. “My business is circumference”, she once wrote in a letter, implying that whilst she might write about homely, mundane things, the business of her poetry was to imbue these observations with universal significance. This is, in fact, a regular structural feature of her poems: she starts with an observation of something humble, at the centre - a bird coming down the walk, a bee visiting a flower, a spider with a ball of silk - and finishes on another plane altogether, out on the circumference. A butterfly embodies this process. It begins as an egg, and then becomes a caterpillar, restricted to a particular food-plant: a life rooted to a very particular centre. It pupates, forms a chrysalis, and all of its body parts liquefy inside the external shell, before re-coalescing in a staggeringly different form - one which, when it emerges, can reach the circumference with a few easy wing-beats. And that is what a poet does: makes an observation, melts the words for it into the chrysalis of poetic form, and then hopes against hope that it will fly. Dickinson made this analogy repeatedly; it thrilled her so much. We will explore three delightful examples.

*

The first might be a versified form of one of those fables by Aesop, since it has more than a touch of the cautionary tale, or the story of Icarus.

“Two Butterflies went out at Noon
And waltzed opon a Farm
And then espied Circumference
And caught a ride with him -
Then lost themselves and found themselves
In eddies of the sun
Till Gravitation missed them -
And Both were wrecked in Noon -”

Dickinson was well-read on the subject of maritime exploration, so she would have known that it was easy to determine one’s latitude at noon, but somewhat harder to be certain of one’s longitude. The failure to correctly discern the latter had famously wrecked Admiral Cloudesley Shovell’s fleet on the Isles of Scilly in 1707 when he had thought he was just off the coast of Brittany, and had done for many smaller enterprises before and since. This nautical idea, perhaps with particular reference to the disastrous Franklin Expedition, was more explicit in an earlier version of the poem, which has the butterflies lost “Opon a shining Sea/ Though never yet, in any Port/ Their coming mentioned - be”. But perhaps Dickinson knew that butterflies could navigate - especially if they were Milkweed (or Monarch) butterflies, native to America and capable of migrations covering thousands of miles. They do this - it was discovered in 2016 - by monitoring the position of the sun with their compound eyes, and calibrating this against an internal clock located in their antennae. The species survives, of course, through profligacy of numbers, and the mortality rate is high - a strategy which means that the Milkweed butterfly may not endure the twenty-first century. In any case, Dickinson’s verbs capture their descent into haplessness: they “waltzed” to begin with, then they “caught a ride”, then they “lost themselves and found themselves”, and last of all, they were “wrecked”, apparently by flying out of the Earth’s gravitational field and being swept up, with mythological haplessness, into the sun.

The fable even has a moral, somewhat mocking in tone:

“To all surviving Butterflies
Be this Fatuity
Example - and monition
To entomology -”

That was written in 1863. She would take the plight of butterflies more seriously in future.

*

Later in the same year, she developed these ideas further into one of her most beautiful poems, but now the butterflies have lost their foolishness, and instead their sunward questing throws into question our human sense of purpose:

“From Cocoon forth a Butterfly
As Lady from her Door
Emerged - a Summer Afternoon -
Repairing Everywhere -

Without Design - that I could trace
Except to stray abroad
On miscellaneous Enterprise
The Clovers - understood -”

At first we think that the butterfly’s drift from centre to circumference, personified as a Lady going out for a walk with her parasol on a summer’s day, is going to be interpreted once again as the behaviour of a fundamentally frivolous creature, but there are already hints that entice an alternative reading. “Repairing Everywhere” might suggest that the butterfly is going everywhere, flying aimlessly - but we could also take “Repairing” in its more modern sense: wherever the butterfly goes, it fixes things, repairs our perceptions by putting our inflated sense of importance into context, or gratuitously heals a bit of our melancholy with a flash of joy. “Design”, too, is a word with a double meaning. The butterfly might be simply flying without purpose. It might equally be flying without obedience to any particular divinely ordained plan. Its beauty has evolved, not been created ex nihilo. The words after the dash qualify this statement: “Without Design - that I could trace”. The human observer cannot see the butterfly’s sense of purpose in its apparently aimless flittings, but the clovers are the direct beneficiaries of its movement, since they are pollinated by its visits.

We should pause to mention, too, that notion which was such a favourite of Emily Dickinson’s time: the idea of the “miscellaneous”. Middle class nineteenth century Europeans and Americans alike loved dabbling in the miscellaneous: pressing miscellaneous wildflowers, collecting miscellaneous butterflies, moths, egg shells or bird-skins - even publishing their scientific discoveries in the form of quite random miscellanies, a fascicle at a time, eventually to be bound into books. This butterfly, on its “miscellaneous Enterprise” is not so far from the spirit of American aesthetics, or American capitalism, after all - it is just that the things it rates as capital are very different from the things we value.

“Her pretty Parasol be seen
Contracting in a Field
Where Men made Hay -
Then struggling hard
With an opposing Cloud -

Where Parties - Phantom as Herself -
To Nowhere - seemed to go
In purposeless Circumference -
As ‘twere a Tropic Show -”

The middle portion of the poem, with its extended third verse, seems to be back on the Aesopian theme of labour and idleness again - as human beings struggle to make hay, the butterfly is flashing its wings in the field, and then engaging in a gargantuan struggle with a cloud. Originally, it was repairing everywhere, but now it is effectively going “nowhere” in particular. We might be tempted to conclude that the butterfly is putting on a performance purely to please its human observer, but those carefully-chosen words, “As ‘twere”, remind us again that it only seems purposeless - in fact, it knows precisely what it is doing, and none of it is for the benefit of human beings.

“And notwithstanding Bee - that worked -
And Flower - that zealous blew -
This Audience of Idleness
Disdained them, from the Sky -”

Suddenly, butterflies, and not human beings, are the audience, looking down on the labours of bees and haymakers alike. As we have already seen her do in ‘A Bird, came down the Walk’, Dickinson is pulling off that brilliant trick once more: exploding the poem’s perspective outward, from centre to circumference, from human observer to butterfly - and ultimately to a view more universal:

“Till Sundown crept - a steady Tide -
And Men that made the Hay -
And Afternoon - and Butterfly -
Extinguished - in the Sea -”

If we thought that the butterfly’s movements were inconsequential, we now discover that our own are too. Everything is drowned in circumference.

*

In 1865, Dickinson herself is at the centre, yearning to find a way out of the cocoon and into the circumference.

“My Cocoon tightens - Colors teaze -
I’m feeling for the Air -
A dim capacity of Wings
Demeans the Dress I wear -”

Those colours which we see on the butterfly’s wings must coalesce at some particular moment, out of the soup of being that is the deliquesced body of the caterpillar inside the chrysalis, because when the butterfly emerges, every scale on its four wings is already in place, even though the wings themselves hang like damp autumn leaves. The poet, stuck at the centre with an idea or an observation, but with only a “dim capacity” for perceiving how the poem itself will take flight, is already aware of being “teazed” by these colours. There are often protracted periods in the making of a poem when everything seems dormant. The poet’s own mind is an amorphous soup of possible metaphors, images, sibilances and alliterations, contained inside the drab crisp of the chrysalis. Often, a person watching a poet seemingly in the act of creation is surprised by how quickly a poem may be written down. This is analogous to the butterfly inflating its wings whilst hanging from the ruptured chrysalis, and flying away. But the truth is that all of the work was already done, inside the chrysalis, as the poet walked, gardened, slept, worked at something else, or simply stared into space. A poem is an imago with a whole life-cycle behind it. It flits in seemingly effortless magnificence, but it grew out of hard intellectual work, hunkered down at the centre.

“A power of Butterfly must be
The Aptitude to fly
Meadows of Majesty concedes
And easy Sweeps of Sky -

So I must baffle at the Hint
And cipher at the Sign
And make such blunder, if at last
I take the clue divine -”

The “Aptitude to fly” is latent in the dissolved caterpillar inside the chrysalis, and Dickinson knows that it is latent in her, too, as the words of a poem begin to coalesce. It has always been a source of fascination to me that the adult form of most butterfly species seems to be embossed on the outside of the chrysalis, even whilst the animal itself is still just jollop, as if the chrysalis anticipates that aptitude. A chrysalis may already bear the marks of the folded wings, the eyes, the thorax and abdomen, even the antennae and the tongue. This is analogous to poetic form: the sonnet, heroic couplets, the ballad metre, the villanelle. Poetic form is both the prison inside which the poet “baffles” with a half-formed poem, and the external mould which gives it shape and purpose. Perhaps, as its nervous system reconstitutes, the insect inside the pupa comes to a point of consciousness that it is imprisoned, like a fly in a jar, baffling its head against the lid, desperate to be free. Poets, too, must batter themselves against the life-giving constrictions of poetic form itself, as Dickinson is doing here. They are, by definition, striving for perfection, seeking to release an exquisite imago in verse, with not a wing-scale out of place, but they have only human tools: language, words, ciphers and (notice how Dickinson suddenly sounds like a twentieth century expert in semiotics!) signs. Poets must “baffle” and “blunder”, or they too will never break out of the chrysalis which formed their poem, and fly out to the circumference, and the sun.

On the matter of Dickinson and butterflies, there is one more thing left to say. She did not yet live in an age of mass-extinction, but we do. The Passenger Pigeon, which once swept across North America in enormous flocks, was in decline, but not manifestly endangered. The last one would be shot in 1901: humanity’s shot across the bows of abundance in the natural world. In the mid twentieth century, we narrowly avoided an insect apocalypse - not one of the locust plagues described in the Bible, but mass die-offs of pollinators due to the abuse of DDT and other synthetic insecticides - and a strong case can be made that is was an author, Rachel Carson, who turned public opinion against the destruction just in time, with her book, Silent Spring. But modern neonicotinoids, whilst reportedly not so toxic to the rest of the food-chain, continue to ravage our insect fauna: the pollinators which keep us alive, the decomposers which keep us from drowning in carcasses, and the butterflies which help to make life worth living. Herbicides get into our watercourses, and denude arable land of weeds which feed the insects. The Milkweed butterfly may be on a collision course with extinction, because it is running out of its larval food-plant - milkweed. One day, if we continue in this way, the last Milkweed caterpillar will search ever more weakly for the leaves for which its specialised digestive system will be craving, and will find none of them. Our insect populations are now in catastrophic decline. T.S. Eliot once used the image of an “insect sprawling on a pin” as a modernist re-imagining of the cruelty of crucifixion, but our far more all-embracing, existentially dreadful cruelty usually comes in a bottle with the name of a multinational pesticide company on its label.

Dickinson’s poems inspired by butterflies remind us that the flight from centre to circumference ultimately means extinction for all of us: we will die, we will be consumed by something bigger, all of our struggles, miniscule or Herculean, will become inconsequential. She knew that everything was ephemeral, even as she was in the act of giving us all the faith that poetry could touch something that was eternal. But we can be certain that she would have recoiled in horror had she known that we would waltz so cavalierly towards causing the eradication of insect life entirely by ourselves - life which has graced this planet for 480 million years. The collapse of insect life would mean the collapse of ecosystems, the collapse of agriculture, and therefore the collapse of human civilisation - a culmination which Dickinson certainly envisaged, but not in this way, which points so clearly to the “Fatuity”, not of butterflies, but of human beings. “Entomology” does not need a moralistic Aesop’s fable to keep it from oblivion; “anthropology” does.

Dickinson may not have foreseen this, but she does exemplify something else which could be very useful to us in our time of crisis. It is delight. Few poets express delight in the natural world with quite the economy and insight that Dickinson does, as she bids us watch with her as a pair of butterflies spirals upwards into the sun. The threat to our existence does not seem to stop us from killing insects. Rekindling the delight in insect lives and beauty might provide us with more of a motivation.

*

Science, too, can help us with that delight. This meditation has included some scientific facts about butterflies which Dickinson did not know. The fact that a caterpillar completely liquefies inside its chrysalis, for example, might have delighted her still more, and would assuredly have resulted in a poem. Other great American poets, like Robert Frost, express their doubts about the ability of science to help us with our existential problems. We should note in concluding that Dickinson does not, and it resounds to her credit. There are people alive in the world today who will not wear masks in an epidemic, who will deny that we are on the edge of a mass-extinction event, who will resort to the language of faith whilst denying that the fact that our ice-caps are melting could be a problem. There is a poem by Dickinson for them, too. I quote it in full:

“ “Faith” is a fine invention
For Gentlemen who see!
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency!”

For William H. Edwards's illustration of the Milkweed Butterfly, see:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/interne...

A Certain Slant of Light

A Certain Slant of Light

Kaaterskill Clove, a deep gorge in the Catskill Mountains, New York, was a favourite walkers’ destination in the nineteenth century, and increasingly, as aspects of the Romantic sublime influenced American aesthetics, it was a subject for painters. One of the most arresting images of Kaaterskill Clove was painted by Harriet Cany Peale, of the Hudson River School, in 1858. It is in the style which has recently – not without controversy – been characterised as “Luminist” because of the Hudson River painters’ fascination with light, and the efforts they took to conceal their brush strokes, with results which to the modern eye seem photographic. Many of their paintings, ‘Kaaterskill Clove’ included, emphasise the tranquil and serene in nature, even when the landscapes they depict are the product of colossal ancient forces.

‘Kaaterskill Clove’ is a thrilling exploration of the effects of light on water, stone and trees, and of the subtle gradations in our perception of foreground and distance. Light plays on water which runs beyond where the easel was placed, except where the shadows of fallen boulders make the surface transparent, so that we can see the stones at the bottom of the stream. Light and shadow pick out the cracks and pits in the boulders themselves, and in places, the fruiting bodies on the mosses are backlit. Light reflects in white splashes on the broadleaf tree to the left of the composition, but suffuses the needles of the conifers, which dominate the middle distance, with a yellow glow. Two distant mountain-sides are graded into haze. The right hand side of the picture is dominated by solid stone, out of which opportunistic saplings are growing, all in shadow. But the eye is drawn inexorably to the top right hand corner of the picture, where the sun, the disk of which is wholly obscured, haloes the upper portion of the crag with golden light. One gets the impression that it is just about to emerge in all its dazzling intensity, but at this moment, it is the slant of the light which sets the picture shimmering.

*

Emily Dickinson, too, was fascinated by slanting light, as by slanting meaning and slanting rhyme. In 1861, she was fascinated by how “the Sun rose – /A ribbon at a time” so that “The Steeples swam in Amethyst”, and equally fascinated by the purple light of sunset cast upon a stile, over which children climbed into evening, or toward death. Slanting light reveals the transitoriness of things, and perhaps that is why we revel in its beauty. In 1865, it is the angle of sunlight in springtime which brings a sense of the numinous “That Science cannot overtake / But Human Nature feels” – an undefinable presence that eludes rationalisation, yet “almost speaks to you”. The coming of summer brings “A quality of loss” as this angled light is restricted to the mornings and the evenings, and that which was somehow unearthly is replaced by something more mundane, “As Trade had suddenly encroached / Opon a Sacrament”.

I have felt this sense of the sacramental in early spring many times, particularly in deciduous woodlands, where the slant of the light illuminates freshly-opened catkins and buds, and the lengthened shadows of tree boles cut across the swathe of dappled sunlight on last year’s leaf-mould. It is indeed something not susceptible to “Trade”: a value which cannot be calculated, a blessing which no bargaining or barter can procure. It encourages a recalibration of the senses – a fresh refusal to see everything as normal and unsurprising – a reinvigoration of the delight we experienced as children at the glints of sunlight on the edges of a pinnate leaf, the transient tilt of a butterfly’s wing, the shock of the visceral in a freshly-opened flower. It is better than any drug, because the mind remains lucid though transported, and the heightened vision is a product of nature itself, rather than a manipulation of it that mauls the chemistry of the body. In small children, it may manifest as the sighting of “fairies” at the bottom of the garden, an impulse to delight in life and light; if we can retain it into adulthood, we have recourse to a joy with a genuine basis in the real.

But as Harriet Cany Peale must have realised, we must seize these moments while we can, for they are transitory. Slanting light can also have the opposite effect. It can weigh down the spirit, especially if it is a waning rather than a waxing light:

“There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –”

That weight on the heart – which Dickinson might have felt when dogmas were dictated to the tune of a pipe organ, perhaps proclaiming that Jesus is the Light of the World when she had no inner compulsion to believe that this was true – can also slump hefty inside us for no other reason than that we know the light is dying and not arising.

“Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the Meanings, are –”

This sense of dislocation – of a radical mismatch somewhere within – is just as natural as that sense of joy. It is abjection – a certainty of impending darkness and of doom. But Dickinson was too sophisticated an observer to deal in simple dichotomies of darkness and light. Darkness can be an enfolding, nurturing womb. It is not the darkness itself which is the source of horror; it is the waning slant of light which announces its inevitable disappearance like a verse from the Book of Revelation:

“None may teach it – Any –
‘Tis the Seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –”

When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, ‘tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –"

Distance is, I think, the thing which horrifies us the most: distance from loved ones in this life, the unbridgeable distance between those who are still alive and those who are dead, and the distance which is perhaps the most insurmountable obstacle of all: the fact that we can never perceive as another perceives, can never experience what another experiences, can never know as another knows. The look of distance on a dead person’s face, just moments after death, is preceded, it seems, by a moment when everything listens – a stillness in which the distance demands to be accepted. Or try going to an airport departure lounge and looking at the faces of people who are soon to be parted: the way they hide their desolation at the moment when their former lives are fading away and about to become unreal. The slanting light of winter is our reminder that this always must be so: that we are subject to it, and must submit – that departures are our standard state of being.

*

Yet Emily Dickinson and Harriet Cany Peale both bothered to create, and especially to sustain the moment of illumination through poetry and art. Why? Because it is an impulse and a reason for being. For Dickinson, it is not just illumination; it is inebriation:

"I taste a liquor never brewed
From Tankards scooped in Pearl –
Not all the Frankfort Berries
Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of air – am I –
And Debauchee of Dew –
Reeling – thro’ endless summer days –
From inns of molten Blue –"

Another thing tends to intensify the intoxication of this slanting light in spring: the presence of insects and the flowers they visit: creatures apparently abandoned to the moment, powered entirely by sunlight.

"When “Landlords” turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove’s door –
When Butterflies – renounce their “drams” –
I shall but drink the more!"

The foxglove is structured in such a way as to entirely admit the body of a bumblebee into the tube of its calyx, a translucent, perfumed, nectar-filled chamber which beguiles the bee with hedonistic pleasure. When it emerges, sunlight glances off the minute panes of its wings. We don’t need magic mushrooms to participate in the pleasure of the bee. All we need is the ability to recalibrate our perceptions so that we are seeing things afresh. When I look at the way my baby grand-daughter stares with exquisite fascination at coloured objects, I know that in that moment, she is fulfilled in a way that touches eternity. This faculty is latent in all of us. It’s just that society and expedience teach us to switch it off. Poets and artists, though, can never quite do that, and that is why, in the age of digital media, we need them more desperately than we ever did. They show us life, instead of the pale, thin, flaccid thing we have come to assume life to be.

"Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats –
And Saints – to windows run –
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the – Sun!"

And suddenly, it is not the light that is slanting – it is Dickinson, leaning into it, not in submission, but in a joyful self-surrender that cries out to be expressed. Peale’s paint and Dickinson’s poetic form become the media of joy, transmuting the transitory into the eternal. Frivolity could not be more deeply serious. The only worthwhile answers are in bees emerging from foxgloves, and in the lucence of moss upon the stones. Try showing these to a growing baby, and her face will tell you this is true.

An Element of Blank: Emily Dickinson on Pain

An Element of Blank: Emily Dickinson on Pain

On the day when she was taken from me, it felt like an amputation. I could not see how the emotional bleeding could ever be staunched, and the truth is, it never really has been. Loss leaves you drained, exsanguinated. Separation is a haemorrhage, and the leaking out of the soul comes with a realisation that there is no permanent ligature – no healing – and there cannot be, because each one of us is ultimately alone. We are all left abject, bloodless, empty, staring into the void. For a while, nothing beautiful can touch us. I remember walking around Westminster Abbey, which ought to have sent me into raptures of delight, and feeling precisely nothing.

And yet the days go on. The impulsive, desperate gestures of the first wave of mourning gradually become ritualised: the kissed photograph, the desolate moments in the darkness before sleep, the obsessive repetition of the beloved name. Inexorably, they pass from ritual to formula, from formula to duty, from duty to silence. Catharsis is blunted by the necessity to eat, sleep and work. There are protocols to follow, functions to perform, duties to be carried out.

“After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –”

The bleeding continues, but we feel our hearts have turned to alabaster. The “formal feeling” gets us through, but it also shocks and nauseates us, because this will to survive the mental and emotional shredding we have just endured seems sacrilegious in comparison with the enormity of the loss, and how much we should be torn by it. Our Nerves, absorbed in the practicalities of keeping us alive, imitate the remorselessness of the marble slab.

"The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?"

An emotional distancing – against which our consciences kick and scream to no avail – is accompanied by a temporal distancing, so that we view the moment of separation as if from the wide end of a telescope. It might be yesterday, or it might be embedded far back in history. Remembering it becomes an act of blind faith – we labour to make it real in the same way that Dickinson no doubt laboured to find reality and immediacy in the idea that Christ bore her sins on the Cross, and found that she could not do so. For a long time, the whole of living becomes theoretical.

“The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –”

There is something utterly mortifying in Dickinson’s choice of abstract noun to denote this limbo-state: “contentment”. We accept our lot, and are content with it, when we feel we should be screeching until the sky bleeds. It is a “Quartz contentment” which descends on us: cold, white and hard – the equanimity of the tombstone. We become grief’s automatons, heedless not only to our surroundings, but also to the cause of our grief.

"This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –"

Dickinson mixes metaphors to triangulate the deadening process of outliving: Quartz, Lead, Snow – hardness, bloodlessness, heaviness, pallor, cold. The dash, it seems, changes everything. We are not letting go of the beloved and allowing her to slide into the abyss, so much as succumbing to the Stupor brought on by emotional hypothermia, and letting go of all that anchored us. We are the ones who fall into the indeterminate “ – ”

In life, we do it time and again. It is an ultimate condition of our being: falling into separation.

*

Death and loss, and the “formal feeling” that follows were constant features of Emily Dickinson’s life. She lost family members and close friends prematurely to disease. She lost other friends to the Civil War, and lived in a community which was riven by the collective loss caused by that conflict. Her early poems express yearnings for romantic love which were unfulfilled. She may or may not have been in love with her brother’s wife. She also experienced more than her fair share of pain: an eye disease which was both physically painful and a threat to her calling as a poet, the kidney disease which killed her, and possibly also, if we are to believe her biographers, a host of other nightmares, from epilepsy through Seasonal Affective Disorder to agoraphobia. These experiences, combined with a self-analytical stillness which lifted her above the emotional effusiveness of many of the poets of her time, made Emily Dickinson one of the most honest and incisive authors ever to write about the psychology and spirituality of pain. She did it by resolutely refusing to minimise its enormity or oversimplify its effects upon us.

"Pain – has an Element of Blank –
It cannot recollect
When it begun – or if there were
A time when it was not –"

It seems easier to interpret this poem as a meditation on physical pain than on grief or emotional separation, but we are back with that sense of temporal dislocation. Intense pain hijacks the memory, so that we cannot clearly recall a time when we were not in pain. Pain becomes fundamental to our being, and, perhaps, the onset of pain reminds us that it is ultimately the default setting for all of us. The “Element of Blank” is ironically the thing which blots out the memory of painlessness, but it is also the thing which equips us to endure pain. There is an element of detachment – of self-effacement – which, whilst we are suspended over the abyss of pain, enables us to look at it coldly and analytically. That is why Emily Dickinson can have the presence of mind, in the midst of pain, to write a poem about it.

"It has no Future – but itself –
It’s Infinite contain
It’s Past – enlightened to perceive
New Periods – Of Pain."

In some drafts, the second line of this stanza is the more grammatically standard “It’s Infinite realms contain”, but the sense of temporal dislocation is more powerfully represented by the inconsistency in verb and subject. Pain is an infinity into which we are plunged, engendering pains past and pains future. It cannot be that Dickinson’s phrase “Periods – of Pain” is not intended to invite a physiological meaning as well as a temporal one. My earliest memory of witnessing pain in another person was seeing my mother doubling up on the kitchen floor, amid a clatter of pots and pans spilling from the cupboard she had just opened, as she went into that unspeakable infinity of menstrual pain. Women tend to realise earlier than men do that pain is a cycle of interconnected moments, framing our experiences of non-pain, and like the back board of the frame, always lurking behind the picture. We are “enlightened” when at last we perceive this.

If you bookmark these references to the ubiquity and timelessness of pain in a volume of Dickinson’s complete poems, you will find that they are regular to the point of obsession, and evenly spread throughout her entire poetic career. “There is a pain – so utter – / It swallows substance up – /Then covers the Abyss with Trance –” – Trance: Element of Blank. It drops the sufferer “Bone by Bone”. “Pain’s Successor” is “a Languor of the Life” which comes “When the Soul / Has suffered all it can”. It is “Drowsiness”, “Dimness”, “Mists” which “obliterate a Crag.” The Surgeon is not dissuaded by pain from sticking the scalpel in, but if his “skill is late”, Death gets there before him. Pain puts us in touch with eternity: it both “expands” and “contracts” the Time, so that “Ages coil within / The minute Circumference / Of a single Brain.” And in a poem which must have been written when she knew that she was facing her own premature death, Death itself is pain’s “one Acquaintance”. Pain is merely Death’s “Junior Party”, doing the business of eternity so remorselessly that it is Death which “tenderly assists”.

Moreover, pain and Death can sometimes seem indistinguishable. “It was not Death, for I stood up, / And all the Dead, lie down –”, she quips, with withering self-irony. It feels “As if my life were shaven, / And fitted to a frame”, and “everything that ticked – has stopped –”. It is like being lost at sea, mastless, without “even a Report of Land – / To justify – Despair.” To be in pain is to be like Franklin, frozen into the Northwest Passage, held in sub-zero stasis, starving to death, or worse, perhaps, being cannibalised by those who have decided already that we are all ultimately separate – that there is no point in mutuality or care, because we are all going into the dark. Some decide that early. Indeed, there are contemporary political philosophies which are founded on that principle, summed up by the appropriately sexist slogan, “Every man for himself.” Dickinson never makes such a decision. Her analysis of pain never descends into self-pity, or into its polar complement – the determination to pursue a course of rapacious self-aggrandisement whilst one still can.

*

Instead, she puts us in touch with our humanity by dwelling with exquisitely beautiful sensibility on the pity and pathos of pain. We are never for a moment left in doubt that the Soul is worthy of the utmost love and care. Some of her tenderest words are reserved for the Soul which is crippled by pain.

“The Soul has Bandaged moments –
When too appalled to stir –
She feels some ghastly Fright come up
And stop to look at her –”

The language of the ghost story, of Edgar Allan Poe, personifies the Fright as something capable of staring us down when we are at our most vulnerable. Dickinson would have seen the maimed and wounded of the Civil War in their literal bandaged moments: bandages containing the slow leakage of body-fluids. We do what we can to wrap our bleeding souls, or to wrap those of others. We reach for fabrics which will staunch the flow towards mortality, and cover up the look of death (the adjective “appalled” contains the noun “pall”).

“Salute her, with long fingers –
Caress her freezing hair –
Sip, Goblin, from the very lips
The Lover – hovered – o'er –
Unworthy, that a thought so mean
Accost a Theme – so – fair –”

Pain is intimate, sensual in its assaults – a monstrous assault on beauty. These moments which Dickinson is describing are foretastes: sudden dips into pain’s eternity, but:

"The soul has moments of escape –
When bursting all the doors –
She dances like a Bomb, abroad,
And swings opon the Hours,

As do the Bee – delirious borne –
Long Dungeoned from his Rose –
Touch Liberty – then know no more –
But Noon, and Paradise"

The Civil War finds its way even into Dickinson’s celebration of joy. In those moments where we escape from pain, the soul skitters about like a thrown grenade, or batters itself about like a bee released from captivity – but these moments, too, put us in touch with eternity. Life is a battleground of skirmish and counter-attack, and we’re in the no-man’s land between the midnight and noon, pain and joy. Our acts of daring, however should be seen for what they are: frolicsome, death-defying moments of incandescence. We fly and sing and are recaptured.

“The Soul's retaken moments –
When, Felon led along,
With shackles on the plumed feet,
And staples, in the song,
The Horror welcomes her, again,
These, are not brayed of Tongue –”

Dickinson is right. Very few poets trumpet these moments of recapture. We focus on moments of illumination, transitory joys, our yearnings for eternity, our experiences of the sublime – even our fear of Death – but rarely are we entirely honest about the way we oscillate between pain and joy and back to pain again, or about the way it is always the pain that frames the moment, clips the plumes, shackles the feet, sticks staples through the song, so that it, too, can only bleed. Fate acts as though there is something felonious in our hope.

*

I used to feel a degree of guilt about the “Quartz Contentment” – the wilful forgetting, the realisation that the obsessive-compulsive nightly hundred kisses for the photograph had become something formal, the consignment of the image to the bottom drawer – until I realised that underneath the blank numbness and the apparent comfort, I was still bleeding. “Guilt” is, in fact, a word that is scarcely in Dickinson’s vocabulary at all. The Element of Blank fades too, after a while. We simply cannot sustain a state of constant abjection. We have to con ourselves into believing that we are, after all, the subject. Like Dickinson, we need to find ways to be inebriated by dew-drops and fresh air. We regain our assurance that time is moving forward – that there is a sequence which makes sense.

Sometimes, the effort of it does our heads in. I know there are cracks developing in my self-protective illusion when, often quite suddenly, a feeling of imminent doom creeps up on me, and there is an almost physical sense that my heart is chained to a heavy weight dangling down somewhere near to the centre of the earth, and simultaneously, as though I have been meticulously arranging the order of my life like a string of pearls, and someone has just taken a pair of scissors to the string. Dickinson wrote another poem which captures that feeling very precisely:

“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 – opon a Floor –”

This is a very different constituent of pain from the Element of Blank. The latter is a means of maintaining control. The Cleaving in the Mind grows out of a recognition of the infinite itself, and my smallness in its context – it is an acknowledgement of the loss of control. When I lose my marbles in this way, I am reminded that the planets of our solar system are themselves merely scattered balls. The Cleaving happens when I come to the realisation that it is fruitless to try to make sense of this random scattering, or to sublimate my feelings of helplessness.

Poetry is my means of picking up the pearls again. The perfect structure of Dickinson’s poem – the way its last line so deftly projects into the mind of a twenty-first century person the sound of marbles rolling on wood – shows that poetry itself bridges the gulf of separation. Poetry is also the place where I can honestly face the Quartz Contentment and realise that the sense of guilt it engenders is needless. Out of poetry grows a compassion that refuses to accept that every “man” is for “himself”. We may be ultimately alone, but poetry shows us our commonality of experience, and whilst the self is so often its subject, its unique way of searching the soul is a source of deep connection. In an age of opportunism, polarisation and political lies, when the social media encourage people to construct selective and sanitised versions of themselves, poetry gives us structured opportunities for emotional truth. Out of truths about pain and numbness, Dickinson constructed a beauty which has survived world wars, depressions, and Presidents: a beauty which – as others build their lives around ever more elaborate lies, never admitting to their pain, never acknowledging the Element of Blank – leans forward, and quietly binds our wounds.

Just a Sea - with a Stem -

Just a Sea – with a Stem –

She stands in the boxed recess of a window, her body leaning forward and slightly to the left, perhaps in order to train her gaze fractionally to the right, so that the view she sees out of it is framed differently from how we see it. She can see more than we can to the right of the tall mast which runs not quite parallel to the edge of the open shutter. The mast rises above a haze of distant trees – probably poplars – is bisected by the frame of the open shutter, and re-emerges in the bottom right-hand corner of the four-paned, unopenable window above it. The entirety of this upper window looks out upon a sky touched with wisps of cloud. We cannot see the rest of the ship, but she probably can. We call it a “ship”, with a “mast” and “yards”, because it orientates us comfortably if we do so, although as it is, it is little more than three compositional lines. In the moments while we are interpreting the image, we gradually apprehend its significance and construct in our minds a simple narrative: Caspar David Friedrich’s wife is gazing out from the window of their Dresden apartment over a body of water where ships are anchored, their sails taken in. The upright of the mast and the angles drawn by its yards suggest the shape of the conifer which perhaps supplied its wood.

Friedrich’s unnamed wife stands on bare floorboards, her skirt casting a rounded shadow over her feet. Her dress, like the panelled walls and frames around her, is a dull green. We can see none of the furnishings in the room, except for the wide windowsill on which she leans, and the two stoppered bottles which sit on it to her right. The sky through the window is pale blue. Friedrich is painting her in 1822. These things define her: she is the painter’s wife. She is boxed in, her head at the centre. The ships come from and go to places she will probably never see. She is the Object.

Friedrich, who enjoyed painting people from behind, is better known for a painting completed four years earlier, ‘Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog’: a painting so vaunted it scarcely requires description, since it encapsulates the very essence of the Romantic sublime. The mop-haired, velvet-jacketed, well-booted, walking-sticked male adventurer also has his head at the centre of the composition, but there is no window frame. He stands, one leg thrust forward, atop one of the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, gazing out across other crags half obscured by a cloud-inversion. He’s on top, and he’s going places. He is the Subject.

We see easily how to signify all of these things. We simply deploy our nouns: wife, window, ships, masts, man, mountains, clouds. Earth. Sky. Sea – used metaphorically.

*

Dickinson, even though her view is framed, refuses these seemingly inevitable significations.

“By my Window have I for Scenery
Just a Sea – with a Stem –
If the Bird and the Farmer – deem it a “Pine”
The Opinion will do – for them –”

When Dickinson looks out through her window, all of our frames of reference are thrown into question. Is it Scenery in the sense of Picturesque landscape, or does the window frame provide the borders for a stage on which our supposed realities are enacted? Is the tree itself the Sea, and its trunk the Stem, or is the tree an extension of the land, and its branches and leaves peninsulas jutting out into the Sky-Sea? The verb enables the Farmer to convince himself that he is taking linguistic possession of the object Dickinson observes through the window; his O-pine-ion is that it is a “Pine”. It is doubtless something quite different in the Bird’s language, whose view of Dickinson inside her house is framed by leaves and branches.

“It has no Port, nor a “Line” – but the Jays –
That split their route to the Sky –
Or a Squirrel, whose giddy Peninsula
May be easier reached – this way –”

Dickinson negates the attempt to describe or delineate the Pine through analogy or metaphor; the idea that this object is a Sea instantly refuses to fit the categories which nineteenth century human beings will instantly want to impose on it, but being human, and having nothing else at our disposal, we must try to do so anyway. In this Pine, there are none of the shipping Lines that so fascinated Dickinson as she read of distant adventurers’ horrifying disappearances in search of the Northwest Passage; instead, there are Jays, which do not migrate, resorting to the evergreen in the winter, launching out in voyages across the sky, and Squirrels which sometimes take the shorter route by leaping from branch to branch, as if rowing across a bay or fjord.

“For Inlands – the Earth is the under side –
And the upper side – is the Sun –”

If you are feeling disorientated, you are meant to be. The metaphor isn’t intended to be working, and Dickinson is not quite describing an undistorted reality in any case, since the tree is viewed through handmade glass which refracts light and twists objects. But as an analogy, it is still not quite exhausted.

“And it’s Commerce – if Commerce it have –
Of Spice – I infer from the Odors borne –”

The smell of the Pine’s resin is on the air, and we are in the age of the East India Companies. The Sea-Pine is the conduit of travel, transfer and trade; its branches, twigs and leaves and the spaces between them carry currents of exchange. The sounds which surround the Pine also help us with our deeming:

“Of it’s Voice – to affirm – when the Wind is within –
Can the Dumb – define the Divine?”

We need to watch our verbs. A way to get a grip on the object was to “deem” it a Pine. The smell of its resin helps us to “infer” that it is not a Maple or an Oak. The sound of the Wind within its leaves and branches helps us to “affirm” its identity, and keeps us secure in our frames of reference – our need to compare nature with human constructions – because trade by ship depends on Wind. We are on our way to “defining” this object, but there are two problems: first, the object itself is “Dumb” since it is the Wind that makes the noise, and second, we too are effectively also “Dumb” because our language is only capable of denoting “Pine”, not of actually being it. Perhaps the essence of Pine – the thing which we try to deem, infer, affirm and define by that word, but which slithers through our fingers as we try – is the thing which is Divine.

“The Definition of Melody – is –
That Definition is none –

It – suggests to our Faith –
They – suggest to our Sight –
When the latter – is put away
I shall meet with Conviction I somewhere met

Was the Pine at my Window a “Fellow
Of the Royal” Infinity?

The less definite we become about how to name or signify this object, the closer we come to “Conviction”. We should remind ourselves at this point that in addition to the meanings which we ascribe to that word, Dickinson’s Puritan upbringing meant that for her, it bristled with connotations. “Conviction” is the moment when “Faith” becomes certitude, and it is preceded, in Protestant theology, by conviction of sin and the consciousness of the necessity of salvation. We know we have “Conviction” when we can put away our Sight and still have Faith.

But we also know from her letters, and several of her poems, that try as she might to achieve this state, Dickinson remained unconvicted in the Christian sense. Perhaps that is why her syntax breaks down – or, at least, ambiguity breaks in – as her poem refuses to conclude itself. Is the phrase beginning “Was the Pine…” a new sentence, or does it flow directly as one question from the previous line: “Conviction I somewhere met was the Pine”? Is the Pine itself, in its own self-possession, the thing which gives Dickinson Conviction, with all of its connotations? Does it affirm her consciousness of an object of Faith precisely because it physically is, even though no human language can properly signify it, and no human metaphor is truly adequate for it?

If we are going to be good, obedient readers (does Dickinson even want our obedience?) we must follow instead the sense of the question: “Was the Pine at my Window a ‘Fellow of the Royal’ Infinity?” Repeat those words, “Fellow of the Royal”, to any middle or upper class person in the nineteenth century, and they would know instantly how to complete it: “Fellow of the Royal Society”: the greatest of scientific honours – proof that you are in the vanguard of the advancement and improvement of “Natural Knowledge”. A Fellow of the Royal Society would know, deem, infer, affirm, define the pine empirically: it is a Gymnosperm: a vascular plant whose seeds are not contained within an ovary, cone-bearing, with needles instead of leaves – and because it is not a Larch, it is evergreen. Nouns and adjectives denote and signify it effectively enough to categorise it with other pines. But this Pine, seen as Dickinson sees it, is a Fellow of the Royal Infinity. It is at once concrete object and liminal space.

“Apprehensions – are God’s introductions –
To be hallowed – accordingly –”

“Apprehensions” has multiple meanings. To feel apprehension is to be filled with awe, anxiety or fear – to experience the abject which lurks within our experience of the sublime. But the Latin root word means “to seize”: to “apprehend” is to put under arrest, to grasp, to understand. If a poet is to truly “apprehend” the Pine, she must do more than name its parts, call it “Pine” or find suitable metaphors and analogies to make it real for us. She must experience apprehension – awe. She must hallow the object in front of her in a way that refuses to objectify it. She must know, deem, infer, affirm, define, apprehend the Pine by acknowledging – as beautifully as she possibly can – her incapability of doing any of these things. For the object to be hallowed, the subject, denoted by the second word of the poem, “my”, must be humbled. She must admit that her power of naming does not put her in control. That way lies true ecstasy.

That is why I find more emotional truth in Friedrich’s painting of his wife in front of a window than I do in his painting of a man triumphant on a mountain-top. The Romantic sensibility, which still governs much of modern thinking, trains us to seek vastness, to adopt commanding postures, to view the vista, take up our paintbrush or our pen, and apprehend it – put it under arrest. This is, of course, impossible, but we can manage a fair impression of it. Dickinson offers the artist and the poet a very different project: start with your own apprehension. The window frame helps you to contain your apprehension within reasonable limits. When you stand behind the frame, you admit from the outset that your view is limited – that you are not the be-all and end-all of perception.

What is the word for what remains: the thing which lingers in the Pine after you admit that “Pine” cannot encompass it, and that your perspective is no more valid than the Jay’s or the Squirrel’s, who call it no such thing? What is the word for this thing which refuses to be object, and cannot be apprehended by the subject without an act of radical humility: an admission of linguistic incompetence? What is the word for this thing which eludes every metaphor and yet irresistibly requires them, no matter how inadequate - this thing which means that we are never quite in control of our own sentence?

Dickinson uses the word surprisingly rarely for a poet who wrestles constantly with Faith and naturally favours doubt, but this poem is an exception. She calls it: “God”. Seeing, smelling, hearing the Pine on its own terms, and then admitting that you have comprehended precisely nothing, is your “introduction”. You might need to lean on the windowsill for a while, to stop your knees from buckling under you, as signs and words drop out of your universe altogether.

Robins in the Trundle Bed

Robins in the Trundle Bed

John Anster Fitzgerald’s paintings of the 1860s may seem at a cursory glance to be typical Victorian representations of fairies. They glow with warm colours, and sometimes with starlight. Some of the fairies have wings of butterflies or damselflies, and they have built bowers for themselves, decorated with primroses and pinks, violets and Morning Glory. Their social order appears to be feudal, for they have richly-dressed kings and queens. They wear flowers for bonnets, and most of them have perfect, youthful complexions. In his illustration to the nursery rhyme, ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’, the shut-eyed robin, already deceased, lies breast up, attended by an intently-staring fairy with harebells growing out of her hair. A clearing behind her reveals more of her kin, their costumes scintillating in the moonlight. But then the eye roams to a very different sort of fairy, who seems to be composed partly of flowers, and partly of bits of insects, who stands at the robin’s tail, like St George surmounting the dragon, leaning on a twig which culminates in a thorn. In the nursery rhyme, there was never any doubt about who killed Cock Robin, because the Sparrow confessed to it in the first stanza: “I, said the Sparrow, / With my bow and arrow, I killed Cock Robin,” and we are reliably informed at the end of the poem that “The Sparrow’s for trial / At next bird assizes.”

Not so here. Look at those fairies’ faces again. They’re not smiling sweetly in their benevolence, conducting a funeral for a hapless avian murder-victim and then seeking justice for him. They killed Cock Robin. The motive is right there in the picture. They did it for the nest, and for the eggs inside it. Some of the more grotesque fairies lie sprawling at the bottom of the composition, apparently inebriated by the delicious cruelty of it all. Admittedly, one of the more humanoid fairy women appears to have fainted, and other fairies have rushed to her aid, but there stands, at the top left of the composition, another fairy with a thorn on the end of a stick, pointing it accusingly at this blatantly self-indulgent swoon of compassion. And now, as we look at Fitzgerald’s other paintings from this period, those thorns are everywhere. One thorn, in particular, is right at the centre of the composition of Fitzgerald’s painting of ‘Cock Robin Defending His Nest’. It is held like a halberd in the hands of a fairy the colour of a Brimstone butterfly, as the robin – or should I capitalise him, and call him Robin, invoking Robin Goodfellow, and summoning as his ally the flower (or weed, depending on your perspective) Herb Robert, which folklore insists, grows out of the Robin’s blood? – commands the desperate bird to surrender five beautiful eggs. Suddenly, we realise that the whole picture bristles with thorns, held by other fairies as staffs, pointing-sticks and appropriations of Elfland’s own version of the Second Amendment. The Robin doesn’t stand a chance, even though some of the fairies, like hapless insect larvae, seem to have had their bodies hijacked by fungi of the genus Cordyceps, and even though the paternal glint in his eye (Where is his wife? Have the fairies already done for her?) puts us entirely on his side.

I suppose that the eggs are eaten, or more accurately, sucked, but ‘Fairies in a Bird’s Nest’ reveals the ultimate objective: appropriation of the nest itself. Inside it, the fairy royal family imitate a Nativity scene, but outside it, the creatures’ true natures are revealed. One sprouts thorns from its arching back like a hedgehog. Another has got himself stuck inside a purloined eggshell, gratuitously referencing Hieronymus Bosch with his buttocks. One of them glides in from the moon, half-bat, half-mosquito. And out beyond the painting, the gilded frame is twigs and thorns: a rectangular version of the crown that pierced the brow of Christ. The Robin is nowhere to be seen.

*

The Robin which appears in multitudes of Emily Dickinson’s poems is not the same species as that depicted repeatedly by Fitzgerald; indeed, it is not in the same genus. It is a much larger bird – a handsome, black-headed, red-breasted sort of thrush – and its song is also completely different from the nightingale-like extemporisation of the European Robin. Its song is a complex musical phrase, but one which, like most thrushes, it repeats ad nauseam, and oddly enough, the first line of Emily Dickinson’s poem, ‘The Robin’s my Criterion for Tune’, can be chanted to fit it perfectly. It is migratory, following the 2° Celsius isotherm south from Alaska and Canada as spring comes to North America. The males precede the females, arriving in March, and wait for the females to join them in April before they begin to sing. Their voices are, for Dickinson, a quintessential New England sound which defines her identity, unlike the “Cuckoo born” European poets who influence her.

We should take a brief inventory of Dickinson’s references to Robins, before turning our attention to a poem which brings Robins and fairies together. The former are there in her twelfth surviving poem, ‘I had a guinea golden’. She remembers her first Robin, and how it migrated with the snow, “when the woods were painted”, and although “other Robins” sang the same “ballads”, she misses that first, original “Troubadour” in her life. In her one thousand, seven hundred and eighty-second poem, she is asking “How dare the robins sing?” when so many men and women in her life have migrated, not to Alaska, but into death. But the innocence of the Robin had always brought it into strange proximity with death as far as Dickinson was concerned, just as it did in the nursery rhymes. A poem she sent in 1859 to her beloved Sue – her brother’s wife – still has a string attached to it. Undoubtedly, it originally secured a flower which Dickinson had picked in the woods, and the poem was a riddle on the flower’s identity. Susan Kornfield has suggested a Flowering Dogwood, or the corpse-white parasitic Indian Pipe Plant. The latter seems more likely: “Robins, in the tradition / Did cover such with leaves”. It is a reference to another nursery rhyme or folk song, ‘Babes in the Wood’. The children run away from home, are lost in the woods, and this not being a modern sanitised version, they die there, “And when they were dead / The robins so red / Brought strawberry leaves / And over them spread”.

In 1860, we find Dickinson meditating on the ubiquity of death, which comes to everything: “Christ robs the nest – / Robin after Robin / Smuggled to Rest!” In 1861, she asks that if she is not alive by the time of the next seasonal arrival of the Robins, some relative should “Give the one in Red Cravat, / A Memorial crumb”, and promises that she will try to give thanks “With my Granite lip” – her tombstone. In 1862, she admits, “I dreaded that first Robin, so, / But he is mastered now”, because the Robin is a harbinger of a Spring she does not wish to come. Perhaps it is because her dear friend Fraser Stearns has died in the Civil War, and she must “master” the realisations that the seasons will march on without him. By 1863, she is reconciled with the Robin, whose nest stands for “Home – and Certainty / And Sanctity”. In 1865, she is testifying that “I shall not live in vain” if she can “help one fainting Robin / Unto his Nest again.” In 1871, the Robin’s breast is stained with the colour of the sunset. In 1880, he is a working-class angel, “a Gabriel / In humble circumstances”, dressed, perhaps for the occupation of digging. One thing that American and European Robins do have in common, aside from their red breasts, is their penchant for worms, whether dug up by gardeners – or by gravediggers. In 1884, Dickinson imagines the moment when the Robin flies for the north: “Quite empty, quite at rest / The Robin locks her nest, and tries her wings…” Robins come, but they also go, and every time we go, we are all a year closer to death. And when death comes, Robins will dig for worms. Perhaps, with their scratching, they will inadvertently cover us over with leaves.

We could try trusting the fairies to get us out of this obligation, since they are immortal. The fairies, after all, bring various robs and juleps – “Reprive of Roses!”, “Flasks of Air!”, “Even for Death – a Fairy medicine - / But, which is it – Sir?” Take your pick. Perhaps you’ll choose the elixir of life. Perhaps you’ll sip the Deadly Nightshade, and almost touch Paradise before you expire.

*

In 1862, the fairies and the Robin came together in one of Dickinson’s poems. It is a light-hearted piece with, I suspect, a serious intent, for it is ultimately about the calling of the poet.

“A Murmur in the Trees – to note –
Not loud enough – for Wind –
A star – not far enough to seek –
Nor near enough – to find –”

Dickinson notes this Murmur, which is itself, no doubt, a string of notes, like a Robin’s song, and like a migrating Robin, it is at once familiar and elusive – dependable, because it always returns, and ephemeral, because it always leaves.

“A long – long Yellow – on the Lawn
A Hubbub – as of feet –
Not audible – as Our’s – to us –
But dapperer – more sweet –”

Perhaps that “long Yellow” on the Lawn is lamplight – or perhaps it is the moonlight which sends its shaft into Fitzgerald’s fairy paintings. I have searched his works for fairies’ feet. Many of the more regal fairies seem to be inordinately modest about them, hiding them behind leaves or petals, but the ones which are visible are indeed dapper, or webbed, or elongated into a single toe like the midrib of a leaf. Dickinson hears them without hearing them, just as, in other poems, she sees ghosts without seeing them. Incredulous, are you?

“A Hurrying Home of little Men
To Houses unperceived –
All this – and more – if I should tell –
Would never be believed –”

We seem to be in the realm of the nursery rhyme here, although we now know that those Houses may be purloined Robins’ nests – but then Dickinson’s poem takes the strangest of turns:

“Of Robins in the Trundle bed
How many I espy
Whose Nightgowns could not hide the Wings –
Although I heard them try –”

Trundle-beds were, it seems, a mid-nineteenth century specialty: single beds which housed another beneath them, which could be trundled out across the floor when one had an unexpected guest. Have the fairies brought their captive Robins into Dickinson’s house?

Ah. We need to pause and look at Fitzgerald’s paintings again. There’s another one, called ‘The Captive Robin’. The bird is held captive by an impossibly flimsy leash of blackberries, and goaded, no doubt, by prickles. Fairies, both beautiful and grotesque, swarm around him, and he stands there impassive, perhaps enchanted. Reclining on a white mattress in front of him are the fairy royals, and before them is something which might be a gooseberry, or might be a stalked Robin’s egg. A vermillion, insect-like fairy offers them a globed rosehip, using a leaf for a platter. Look closely. Are those the forms of dragonfly wings, hidden beneath the royal fairies’ nightgowns?

I am not suggesting that Dickinson knew the fairy paintings of Fitzgerald, but their works are exactly contemporary expressions of the fascination with faerie from opposite sides of the world. They offer us privileged glimpses into the realm of the unseen, but they are not sanitised works of moral gossamer. Death and cruelty punctuate them like thorns. That trundle-bed: is it also a garden bed, pulsing with worms? Or is it the grave into which each one of us will be trundled?

But then I promised ne’er to tell –
How could I break My word?
So go your way – and I’ll go Mine –
No fear you’ll miss the Road.

The everyday folk of Amherst, Massachusetts will never see these fairies. Perhaps they never even notice the comings and goings of the Robin. For once, Dickinson’s capitalisation draws attention not to them, but to herself: “My… Mine”. There is self-fulfilment in this image which is not quite visible, this sound which is not quite audible: whilst others may choose the mundane Road of this world, which may lead to Heaven or to Hell, there is another way, the Fairy Rade, the road, in Scottish legend, to the home of the Queen of Elphame, whom Thomas the Rhymer sought and followed. Thomas, on seeing the secrets of the Queen of Elfland, was commanded, just like Dickinson “ne’er to tell” of his experience. Conformists never miss the road like he did, and they never write poetry like he did either.

The Robin whose song tells us we are home, the Robin who sits on the spade, waiting for worms in the garden bed, in the grave, the Robin who defends his nest with aggression and with subterfuge, the Robin whose voice echoes after his departure, is the bird, if we will only pause to notice, who stands in the liminal space between this world and the next, eternally innocent, eternally spiked by thorns, his breast the colour of drying blood. There he is on the milestone. Follow him off the path, if you dare. Ignore him, and sadly, there’s no fear you’ll miss the road.

Dickinson and the Death of Hope

Dickinson and the Death of Hope

In the poetry of Dickinson, as in most of our lives, Hope is an exceedingly delicate thing. Her capitalisation was idiosyncratic even for her time, but this abstract noun is an exception; most of her contemporaries would have capitalised it in order to acknowledge it as one of the triune virtues mentioned by the Apostle Paul, alongside Faith, and slightly subordinate to Love. As I am writing this, I am awaiting the results of an election, the consequences of which will be global, and may be catastrophic. I have spent the day beating down Hope, because if it lifts me high enough, the fall – which I fear may be inevitable – will crash me into the abject. My father has a saying which, much as I chafe against it – seems at times like these to be too full of psychological insight: “A pessimist is more often pleasantly surprised.”

I need to question something in my first sentence: “Hope is… a thing.” Is it?

“ “Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –”

How significant is it that Dickinson has not capitalised any of her nouns here, with the exception of “Hope” itself, which begins a line in any case, and is surrounded by two of the most ambiguously meaning-laden quotation marks in literary history? Hope is the “thing” which other people talk about. It is a name which we give to something intangible – something which motivates most religions, encourages most lovers, and which is currently attempting to distract me into toggling away from this meditation on my laptop in order to check that election result. It is the thing which demands an extended metaphor so elusive that we must wait for seven lines before it becomes concrete in the capitalised noun, “Bird”. At the moment, it is just an amorphous thing “with feathers”: structures which evolution has designed to be as airy as they are solid, as delicate as they are resilient, as vulnerable to fire, saturation with water or with oil, crushing or plucking and scattering as they are a source of warmth and protection. This light, semi-diaphonous, etherial “thing… perches” in the uncapitalized “soul”, perilous in its place of roosting, but dauntless:

“And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –”

It is ceaseless, self-perpetuating, because the refusal to stop is in its very nature. It might buoy up our spirits when we are receptive to song. It might equally be as importunate as doubt itself, with all its incessant positivity. Worst of all, perhaps – especially for a poet – it is wordless: an earworm tune of endless, tantalising possibility. When we just want silence, it sings on. Or is wordless song, impervious to external circumstance, exactly what we need?

“And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –”

Hope is warming music – the kind which sounds sweeter the more our external circumstances reach “Gale” force: and there is one noun which is capitalised. Dickinson has anticipated Thomas Hardy, whose “Darkling Thrush” sang with “blast-beruffled plume” on the eve of a century which would see two World Wars, the rise and fall of military dictatorships and – as we know now – the beginning of a plunge towards the mass-extinction of other species. In the midst of storms of our own making, the Bird sings on, kindling hearts. Whether it is cruel or kind to do so depends on the outcome. My finger itches to reveal the election count. What does Hope have in store for me? Elation or despair?

“I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.”

We will remember that in another poem, Dickinson offered a worm-eating bird such a crumb – a token of friendship which it refused. Hope, like the real Bird, and like the Love so vaunted by the Apostle Paul, is the more true the less it asks of us. It stays faithful to us, even when circumstances themselves betray us.

There is one other thing to notice: we have slipped into the past tense. It happened right at the centre of the poem, in the second stanza: “And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard /…/ That could abash the little Bird / That kept so many warm –” We have a way of remembering how hope warmed us in the past, how it offered its favours gratis, and this memory – no matter how many times we were let down by the actual consequences – keeps us faithful to it in the present. We believe it is “the Thing”, even if it is really only an abstract “thing”. Birds drop their feathers, and many of us have a peculiar fascination for them: one which we are less likely to have for sloughed skins, insect carapaces or scales of fish or reptiles. We drop a feather and watch it float, and it reminds us of flight. Our memories moult former hopes, and some instinct for emotional self-preservation keeps us tethered to the lightness of the Hope, even when the Bird itself crashed to ground.

*

Readers may feel that this was an unnecessarily negative reading of a poem which has, in fact, always been for them a source – of Hope. It is a comparatively early poem (1862). In 1877, “Hope” is for Dickinson “a strange invention” and an “electric adjunct”. She is still conscious of its “unremitting action”, but whilst she admits that it “Embellish[es] all we own”, it is a thing about which “Not anything is known”. By 1879, “Hope is a subtle Glutton / He feeds upon the Fair”, and no matter how much he eats, there is always more to consume, as though the soul were some sort of ghastly, regenerating Magic Pudding. But it is another poem from 1862 – one with a faltering and uncertain ending – which really points to the remorseless ambivalence of Hope.

When I hoped, I recollect
Just the place I stood –
At a Window facing West –
Roughest Air – was good –

Not a Sleet could bite me –
Not a frost could cool –
Hope it was that kept me warm –
Not Merino shawl –

Dickinson begins with the same notion that kindled her earlier poem: Hope is a plumage which keeps the soul warm, and its consolations are all the sweeter in rough weather, literal or metaphorical. There she is once more at a Window, facing the wind and the place where the sun sets. In her drafts, she toys with “November cool”: the leaves are gone from the trees, and there are invigorating gales, but the whole of winter is yet to come. There is a conventional ardour to these lines, of the kind which Admiral Nelson might have used long before Trafalgar.

When I feared – I recollect
Just the Day it was –
Worlds were lying out to Sun –
Yet how Nature froze –

Whilst Hope may leave feathery traces on the memory which enkindle us to future, equally idealistic hopes, fear sears itself on our recollection. Our memories of it are precise, and thrown into relief. We remember its extremes: how it contrasted with the way the rest of the world seemed to bask in sunlight. “Worlds were swimming in the sun” was Dickinson’s other option: that similar sense of dreamy weightlessness that we see in floating eiderdown.

Icicles opon my soul
Prickled Blue and cool –
Bird went praising everywhere –
Only Me – was still –

And there is that Hope-Bird again, a discordantly blithe spirit, strangely singular, along with a self-consciously wrong pronoun for Dickinson herself. There comes a point where the hopeful voice is just additional clamour which frosts the heart of the soul who is seeking stillness, silence. I have come home this evening, out of what T.S. Eliot called this “twittering world”, seeking it, too. Attempts at consolation are merely further aggravations; the rest, as Hamlet had to admit, “is silence”.

How does one finish such a poem? A lesser poet, or one with less integrity, would try to dredge Hope back up out of this catastrophic situation, no matter how bedraggled, desperately attempting to breathe life back into the sundered Lark, the shot albatross. One thing that helped Dickinson to maintain her integrity was that she was not subject to the fashionable whims of publishers, since she was scarcely being published; nor was she slave to the tyranny of completion. A thoroughly honest poem about Hope really cannot be finished – because we never really know what is round the corner, and we are all faced by the great unknown, Death – so Dickinson never attempted to “finish” this, at least in the conventional sense. Here is how it is actually written in her final version.

And the Day that I despaired –
This – if I forget
Nature will – that it be Night
+After Sun has set – +When the sun is set
+Darkness intersect her face +Dark shall overtake the hill
+And put out her eye – +Overtake the sky
Nature hesitate – before
Memory and I –

Dickinson used plus signs to indicate places where she was considering alternative words or lines. Sometimes, this was clearly part of her process, and she ultimately intended to choose. A handful of poems, however – notably those which start with a conventional idea and then smash it to pieces – seem to remain deliberately unresolved, rather than being poems which have been put away unfinished. This is one of the ways in which Dickinson’s whole project was uniquely modern: she knew when it was time to smash through the casement confining poetic form. This is one of those times.

It is not the only poem in which Dickinson conflates the setting sun with the coming of Death, or the descent of despair. It is the “eye” of this person, “I”, which looks upon the awful, blinding sunset. We know that both Hope and Fear live in memory: Hope like gossamer – sunlit, etherial, strangely ductile and enduring, but ultimately full of buoyant fluff – and Fear, or despair, sharp, monolithic, blinding. They are in eternal tension. What is left?

Nature. It hesitates. Perhaps it is simply waiting for the human species to pass from this earth so that it can restore what we have despoiled. Perhaps – although it currently seems less likely – human nature, since it is ultimately a part of nature, will find its own redeeming feature –

See how Hope broke in there? How incorrigible we are! I’m off to check the election results –

4th November, 2020, 7.00 PM, Western Australian time.

Imprisoned by Prose

Imprisoned by Prose
A meditation on Emily Dickinson's 'They shut me up in Prose –' and 'I dwell in Possibility –'
by Giles Watson

To make the decision not just to write poetry, but to be a poet, is a costly form of rebellion. Robert Graves famously observed at the beginning of The White Goddess that “Since the age of fifteen poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric.” Whatever else we may think of Graves as a poet, critic or person, there will be few deeply committed poets whose hearts do not leap in assent to that statement. My first memory of the inebriating exhilaration that poetry brings comes, I think, from a time before I could read. My father was reading me the traditional nursery rhyme, ‘The Fox’s Foray’, as I sat up in bed, sick with a cold:

“Old Mother Slipper Slopper jumped out of bed,
And out of the window she popped her head:
Oh, John, John, the grey goose is gone,
And the fox is off to his den O!
Den O! Den O!
Oh, John, John, the grey goose is gone,
And the fox is off to his den O!”

I was thrilled by the rollicking rhythm, the cramming of syllables, the tongue-twisting sibilance, the way Old Mother Slipper Slopper’s name seemed expressive of her whole character as well as of her current desperation, the image of her startled head appearing out of a first floor cottage window, the sudden eruption of dialogue into the narrative, and the implied brutality of what was happening to the goose. I think it was then that I began to understand what poetry was: an intensification of real life, concentrating it into cadence, a window on the world, the meticulous framing or encapsulation of which was precisely what brought on that sense of joyful inebriation, causing the soul to exclaim, “Yes, that is precisely it, in a nutshell!”

Our first recorded poem by Emily Dickinson was a rather self-consciously erudite inscription for a Valentine, written in 1850 when she was twenty years old. Her writing reached crescendo pitch in 1861 and 1862, when she wrote 522 poems. By then, she had chosen what most people would assume was the most prosaic of lives, confined almost entirely to her family home and its immediate environs, rarely accepting visitors outside her family circle, and even then, often entertaining them from an elaborate distance, hardly ever travelling, and eschewing even visits to church, happy in the knowledge that in her own garden, where Bobolinks were Choristers, “God preaches, a noted Clergyman - / And the sermon is never long”. Perhaps, some biographers and racy film-makers think, on the basis of some admittedly worshipfully sensual letters, she was in a passionate relationship with her brother’s wife, and she certainly enjoyed a healthy, intellectual correspondence with some of the leading literary thinkers of her time, but there was another relationship which was elevating her life from the prosaic: her relationship with poetry itself, which taught her how to find the fantastic and miraculous in the seemingly-mundane.

Being an “Inebriate of air” and a “Debauchee of Dew” is unlikely to bring one much social capital – at least not in one’s own lifetime. Recreational drugs which induce artificial inebriation or encourage socially vaunted forms of debauchery have always been in fashion, but a person who can be transfixed by a sunbeam or mesmerised by a beetle at the apex of a stem of grass will always be accounted strange. If nature itself is your hallucinogen, and you find yourself “Leaning against the – Sun!”, you are likely to only ever attract a handful of friends, and some will be openly hostile, but this strangely isolating sensitivity is a prime prerequisite for being a poet.

“They shut me up in Prose –
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet
Because they liked me “still” –”

Dickinson, too, was already marked out as a poet when she was a little girl, it seems, because she did not have the requisite stillness and social deportment. We will meet this noun, “Prose”, used negatively, again: Prose as prison or straitjacket, hemming in the ways of a poet. The principal thing about the Closet is that it only has one door, which can be locked, and no windows or skylights; phobias surrounding being shut up in the dark or buried alive are, as we have seen before, a feature of Dickinson’s work. But this is not just a childhood memory, because lines two to four are subordinate to the sentence. There has been an attempt to shut the adult poet “up in Prose”, but it has been as ineffectual as the attempt to impose stillness on the child:

“Still! Could themselves have peeped –
And seen my Brain – go round –
They might as wise have lodged a Bird
For Treason – in the Pound –”

Totalitarian regimes have tried to imprison poets – to keep them “still” – and found the same thing: their Brains “go round” regardless of the shackles, resonant with treasonous birdsong. Sometimes, incarceration actually sharpens a poet’s focus: witness the luminosity of John Clare’s asylum poems, or Irina Ratushinskaya's verse smuggled out of a Soviet prison camp, or the intensity which Dickinson herself achieved through her self-imposed isolation.

“Himself has but to will
And easy as a Star
Look down opon Captivity –
And laugh – No more have I –”

The bird himself invites comparison with a multitude of other poems by Dickinson. He is the Lark whose music is hidden from science. He is Hope, perching in the soul. He is a multitude of Bobolinks, hummingbirds, and most of all, Robins. Now, he is also the poet’s “will”, which cannot be constrained. He laughs at all the nineteenth century’s stock responses to the bird: the shotgun, the cage, the taxidermist’s bell of glass. Poets are like that, too: incorrigible little Houdinis, always escaping into the infinite realms of their own minds, and nothing pisses off some other types more than this: to see the slippery miraculousness with which the creative mind can escape the prison of prose.

*

Dickinson wrote that poem in 1862. She returned to the theme later in the same year.

“I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose”

Poetry, therefore, must be synonymous with “Possibility”: a paradoxical freedom imposed by the walls and boundaries of poetic form, which confine the poet to certain rhythms and, in Dickinson’s case, largely to the ballad metre and to a pattern of slant-rhyming. “Tell all the truth,” she wrote much later, “but tell it slant”: take circuitous routes, ricochet within a verse from centre to circumference, imply multiple meanings which scatter like spilt mercury, make it slippery just as you are pinning it down. That way lies truth, because truth is complex, multifaceted, subject to the discipline of rationalisation, the rules of communication, or the dictates of rhyme and metre, but not imprisoned by them. Poetry, more than any other form of language, opens up the possibilities inherent in truth. There are, for a start, at least two possibilities in that adjective, “fairer”: poetry is a more beautiful House than prose, but it is also a more just, egalitarian or ethical one, and in order to “dwell” in it – to inhabit it, to make it our haunt – we must maintain it: clear its gutters, fix its leaking pipes, weed and tend its garden. Compared with Prose – that darkened closet – it is:

“More numerous for Windows –
Superior – for Doors –”

Dickinson had her own personal window, out of which many of her poems were observed. She would later write about the subtle variations to the scene outside this upstairs window, which always framed “The Pattern of a Chimney – / The Forehead of a Hill –”, but which sometimes also included “a Vane’s Forefinger – / But that’s – Occasional –”, dependent on the direction of the wind. A window on the regular, humdrum circuit of her days: Dickinson was somehow able to launch her consciousness from it and soar to the circumference. The casement – the frame of reference – the self-imposed rules of the stanza – these bring access to a newer, more universal kind of freedom and truth. Windows and doors are also thresholds, liminal spaces, through which we can pass at any moment to seek our liberation. They are borders between domesticity and nature, body and spirit, life and death. Closed, they bring a solitude necessary for the poet. Opened, they liberate us from the closet. Standing in front of the window, our bodies may be static, but our minds are never still.

“Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –”

There is the paradox. A forest full of conifer trees is more space than wood, but look at it head-on as you approach it on foot, and you will see only trunks and foliage. The House of Possibility is like that: it is simultaneously all walls, yet full of windows and doors. It gives the poet a vantage point, a place of retreat, a safe haven, hidden from prying eyes, but it is open to the sky. A poem is built of rhythmical units, of syllables, of iambs, but there are spaces between these trees which disappear when you view the poem obliquely. It becomes impenetrable, unassailable. Dickinson fills her poems with liminal spaces – dashes – which let in the air and light but retain the form. Through these, truth and possibility can breathe.

“And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –”

The language of the eternal is creeping in, and the sky, which has no limits, still has structure. Those patterns of discipline and behaviour which become second nature to the poet are the architecture of her liberation.

“Of Visitors – the fairest –
Of Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –”

These Visitors – birds, insects, fairies, angels, ghosts, spirits – inhabit the superstructure of Dickinson’s poems, flitting in and out of it with a disciplined freedom. Once again, “Occupation” offers more than one Possibility: there sits Dickinson, supposedly “introverted” occupant of her House of Possibility, at her tiny writing desk in front of that single window, inviting all the little denizens of her verse to keep her occupied with praise. And then there is her Occupation – her calling to be a poet – which makes exacting claims on her, and almost guarantees that she will be long-misunderstood, neglected, viewed as obsessive or harmlessly insane. Being a chestnut redhead (we know because a lock of her hair has been preserved), her skin, like mine, scorches easily in the sun. She longs for summer but seeks the shade. Her fingers are slender, her hands “narrow”. Everyone says she is frail. She flexes those fingers, dips her pen, and in less space than a sonnet, gathers Paradise: a Herculean feat.

Of Stopped Clocks and Narcissistic Frogs

Of Stopped Clocks and Narcissistic Frogs
A Meditation on two of Emily Dickinson's poems, by Giles Watson

If the chronology of R.W. Franklin’s complete collection of The Poetry of Emily Dickinson is to be believed, at some time in the middle of 1861, the poet wrote two poems, one after the other, which hinged on negation – or more specifically, the word “No”. When I was learning to become a teacher, my mentor advised me, only half-jokingly, that it was good for all prospective pedagogues to sit before a mirror every morning and practise mouthing that word, a word which is contained within its own homonym: the verb “to know”. Children won’t end up knowing much if we don’t learn to say it to them sometimes, and sometimes, “No” is the profoundest and the most honest thing to say. Cordelia said it more than once to her father King Lear, with ample justification and complete integrity, but she compounded it into a word which caused a snicker on the faces of the lovers of Shakespearean word-play, because “Nothing” was also a euphemism for “vagina”. Her honesty (another word with a double meaning in that misogynistic time) led to tragedy; she and her father became No-thing at all: dead. “No” is arguably the most ethically serious, and ultimately truest, word in the language, because we all come from there, and we all end up there.

Traditional chronometers eschew the zero as if the original clock-face was designed by a person terrified of – nought. A clock which stops merely records the time of its stopping, as the pocket watch of a much later poet, Edward Thomas, did when a five-nine shell whipped past his ear, and stopped the ticking of both his heart and chronometer at precisely twenty-four minutes to eight and twelve seconds. If a clock’s hands go flaccid, it is eternally half-past six: time to get up on a weekday, or time to have dinner. Clocks are, in fact, an apt symbol of our tendency to deny the inevitable – to assume that we can control time, rather than it controlling us. Ultimately, the more religiously we wind the clock, the more rapidly time wears out the cogs and spring inside it. Then, the clock stops, and time, triumphant over technology, marches on.

“A Clock stopped –
Not the Mantel’s –”

There is our first negation, at the beginning of Line 2. A Clock – capitalised, as powerful things usually are in Dickinson’s poetry – has just clogged up in a blot of assonance. It is “Not the Mantel’s”: not a clock like the multiple beautiful antiques in my parents’ house which my father has maintained in glorious ticking condition ever since I was a child, winding and correcting them every few days, and occasionally disassembling them to wash away any clogged old oil with lighter fluid. Some people say that Dickinson’s must be a grandfather clock, with its arm-length pendulum inside a tall cupboard beneath it. Others, going by what comes next, think it is something akin to a cuckoo clock. I have long thought it might be more like the Munich Glockenspiel, which unleashes a parade of mechanical puppets at appointed hours. The other type of clock which is most decidedly “Not the Mantel’s” is the type designed a bit more than a century before Dickinson’s time by John Harrison: a ship’s chronometer, intended to keep as near to perfect time as possible, so that it could be used for estimating longitude. Few clocks have been so vital to the (temporary) preservation of human life as these. But this one has stopped.

“Geneva’s farthest skill
Cant put the puppet bowing
That just now dangled still –”

So, this clock either has real mechanical puppets, or its long pendulum is its puppet, or the puppets are in its insides. If it is a ship’s chronometer which has stopped, then perhaps the ship has run aground on the Gilstone Rock, west of the Isles of Scilly, its seamen hanging like rag dolls off the sharp pinnacles of the Western Isles. No matter what we decide, all the clockmakers of Geneva cannot re-animate the puppet; it hangs on a cant, and no amount of cant or excuses will suffice. It is dead and dangling because the spring is broken, or the cog-teeth worn away. The heart has given out; no surgeon can jump-start it.

“An awe came on the Trinket!”

“Awe”, I suspect, here means an overwhelming sense of the abject, not of the sublime. Dickinson plays a wonderful trick here, because she does in her poem what life cannot do; she gives us an action-replay of the moment of death:

“The Figures hunched – with pain –
Then quivered out the Decimals
Into Degreeless noon –”

What are these “Figures” which are subjected to the tyranny of such horrible verbs: “hunched”, and “quivered”? Perhaps they are the puppets, or the dying human beings that by now they surely symbolise, in their death-throes, or worse, perhaps, quaking with fear at the thought of the pain that will wrack them before the moment of death. But the clock-face itself is inscribed with “Figures”, too. Perhaps we are now confronted with a Daliesque melting clock. It is certainly a very confused and confusing clock, if it operates on the Decimal system, and it has perhaps become conflated with that other navigational preserver of human life, the compass, or with that other instrument used to calculate the moment of noon at sea, the sextant. Everything has collapsed; according to this clock, it is now the zeroth hour, the nadir, noon on the far side of the world, but never here again. “Noon”, too, contains the word, “no”. This is irrevocable:

“It will not stir for Doctor’s –
This pendulum of snow –”

“Snow” contains the word “no”, too, and we have already seen in a previous meditation that we are all ultimately “Soundless as Dots/ On a Disc of Snow”. There cannot possibly be any tock left in this clock, not even for Doctors, plural or possessive. The whole structure will liquefy.

“The Shopman importunes it –
While cool – concernless No –

Nods from the Gilded pointers –
Nods from the Seconds slim –”

“No… Nods… Nods…” Dying is inexorable as sleep – a final nodding and cooling off. No amount of gold leaf on the ends of the hands can prevent the clock’s failure to help us conquer time. Its unfixable doom merely sets us nodding into unconsciousness as the clock-face turns blankly towards those

“Decades of Arrogance between
The Dial life –
And Him –”

*

And although it is a separate poem, with a very different mood, it is as though Dickinson took another tack that night, and kept writing:

“I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!”

Here’s a way, perhaps, to choose something less pitiful than those “Decades of Arrogance” between birth and that masculine pronoun cut off so agnostically with a dash. You may be more fulfilled if you are no longer the ob-ject of the sentence. Admit that you are No-body, seek another No-body, and find some fellowship in it. Beware of blowing your bugle even about this:

“Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!”

What would Dickinson make, I wonder, of the vainglorious, narcissistic self-advertisement which so many of our modern cultural, technological and political institutions encourage in us, and those social media which prod some to strut their arrogance, and others to trumpet their humility to the world? Try reading that last line of hers aloud. There’s that helpful homophone: “Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you – no!”

“How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!”

Because it is really really really really really really boring, after all, this chorus of self-announcement during the brief, spasmodic breeding-season of our lives, “livelong” until suddenly it stops. I note in passing that hardly any of Dickinson’s poems became “public” in her lifetime. Some were published under pseudonyms, and all were maimed by male editors who pointedly put paid to her dashes as if they were too much of nothing.

By way of postscript, I can’t help wondering whether Emily Dickinson ever heard versions of an old British comic folk tale about foolish, untechnological local yokels, called ‘The Ticktoad’. It usually goes something like this. A group of gormless idiots are out in the fields one day, and they find a new kind of toad or frog sitting in the grass. It is metallic in colour, and it makes a strange ticking noise. It seems rather too newfangled a sort of species for these guys’ conservative tastes, so they take their hoes and mattocks and bash it to pieces before it can hop off and breed with another one, and then walk off none the wiser.

The Ticktoad is a pocket-watch, of course. Perhaps those yokels were right to smash it on the spot.

The Lip of the Flamingo: A Meditation on Emily Dickinson's 'How the Old Mountains...'

The Lip of the Flamingo
A Meditation by Giles Watson

John James Audobon, in his enormous, lavishly illustrated folio, The Birds of America, wrote the following description of the bill of the American Flamingo, which is uniquely adapted for straining diatoms, algae and invertebrates out of muddy water, no doubt after dissecting a bird that he had shot:

“Bill more than double the length of the head, straight and higher than broad for half its length, then deflected and tapering to an obtuse point. Upper mandible with its dorsal line straight, convex at the curve, and again straight nearly to the end, when it becomes convex at the tip; the ridge broad and convex, on the deflected part expanded into a lanceolate plate, having a shallow groove in the middle, and separated from the edges by a narrow groove; its extremity narrow, and thin-edged, but obtuse, this part being analogous to the unguis of Ducks and other birds of that tribe. Lower mandible narrower than the upper at its base, but much broader in the rest of its extent; its angle rather long, wide, and filled with bare skin; its dorsal line concave, but at the tip convex, the ridge deeply depressed, there being a wide channel in its place, the sides nearly erect and a little convex, with six ridges on each side toward the tip. The edges of the upper mandible are furnished with about 150 oblique lamellae, of which the external part is perpendicular, tapering, pointed, and tooth-like. The edge of the lower mandible is incurved in an extraordinary degree, leaving a convex upper surface about 1/4 inch in breadth, covered in its whole extent with transverse very delicate lamellae, with an external series of larger lamellae. The whole surface of the bill is covered with a thickened leathery skin, which becomes horny toward the end. The nostrils are linear, direct, sub-basal, nearer the margin than the ridge, operculate, 1 1/4 inches long.”

The lip of the flamingo is, in other words, an extraordinarily complex and sensitive – not to mention inordinately strange – organ, adapted to a highly specialised lifestyle. It is not an obvious symbol for a reclusive, untravelled mid-nineteenth century New England poet to use.

Audobon first saw a flock of American Flamingoes off “the south-eastern coast of the Peninsula of Florida” in 1832. The atmospheric conditions at the time were, it seems, more than ideal for an encounter with birds of their size, grace and colour:

“It was on the afternoon of one of those sultry days which, in that portion of the country, exhibit towards evening the most glorious effulgence that can be conceived. The sun, now far advanced toward the horizon, still shone with full splendour, the ocean around glittered in its quiet beauty, and the light fleecy clouds that here and there spotted the heavens, seemed flakes of snow margined with gold… Far away to seaward we spied a flock of Flamingoes advancing in "Indian line," with well-spread wings, outstretched necks, and long legs directed backwards. Ah! reader, could you but know the emotions that then agitated my breast!”

Fast-forward thirty years, and Emily Dickinson is also staggered by the sublime in a sunset:

“How the old Mountains drip with Sunset
How the Hemlocks burn –”

She is certainly telling how the Sunset seems to spill its molten colour across the landscape and the conifers, but we feel that she is building up to a coming question mark – that she is also asking how – how this impression of moltenness can be quite such a “glorious effulgence”, to repeat Audobon’s words.

“How the Dun Brake is draped in Cinder
By the Wizard Sun –"

It must be winter, because the bracken is “Dun”, not green, but the magic of sunlight has set it aglow, and the spreading pinkness is so easily absorbed into the fabric of things that it appears to Dickinson that the steeples of the churches in the town of Amherst are feeding redness back up to the sun, swelling it with liquid fire as it descends:

“How the old Steeples hand the Scarlet
Till the Ball is full –”

But it’s not just that Dickinson is presenting us with a land-locked, Romantic-influenced vision that coincides in some of its details with Audobon’s description. It’s that she has clearly read Audobon’s description, not just of the sunset, but also of the flamingo, and seen his stunning, large-scale illustration of it. She knows that the glory of this sunset defies her own capacity as a poet; she cannot communicate it in words. But there is another thing she can do. She can ask an absolutely astounding question that directly confronts her – and every other poet and artist’s – inability to adequately describe or depict the beauty of the natural world in its full extent:

“Have I the lip of the Flamingo
That I dare to tell?”

Just like that, Dickinson has turned the whole enterprise on its head. She is not describing the sunset; she is marvelling at the human arrogance which thinks it can approach the sublime in nature through comparison, analogy, metaphor or simile. She stands flabbergasted at our own lack of humility, and surely, she has read Audobon’s scientific description of the bird’s bill – which necessitated the Flamingo’s shooting and dissection, with its enumerations of grooves, ridges and lamellae – and looked at the plate which, magnificent as it is, shows the bird in a pale reflection of its glory, without its three dimensions, without its movement, without its call, without its odour or its antics. The whole enterprise of description or representation is patently absurd.

It is absurd, but once we have been humbled by this realisation, it is also necessary, if we are going to communicate in any meaningful way about the world around us. We can only speak of the natural world by making representations of it, by using figurative language to describe it; we must offer pale imitations of it in order to make sense of it, or to learn from it, or even to praise it. Perhaps this is why Dickinson’s poem is not killed stone dead by the question she has asked.

“Then, how the Fire ebbs like Billows –
Touching all the Grass
With a departing – Sapphire – feature –
As a Duchess passed –”

The sun is sinking, and we seem to be back with Audobon’s seaborne quest for the Flamingoes again, for its “Fire ebbs like Billows”. The image is suddenly self-consciously conventional, and also rather far-fetched: the landscape has turned blue, as if from light filtered through the sapphire jewellery of a passing Duchess.

“How a small Dusk crawls on the Village
Till the Houses blot
And the odd Flambeau, no men carry
Glimmer on the Street –”

Dickinson lets the darkness creep into her poem through its verbs: “Dusk crawls”, “Houses blot” into indistinctness, and the stars, the Flambeaus not carried by men, “Glimmer”. The word choice itself recalls “Flamingo.”

“Now it is Night – in Nest and Kennel –
And where was a Wood –
Just a Dome of Abyss is Bowing
Into Solitude –”

Her metre is faltering as the night sky closes in – on human homes in the village, yes, but Dickinson chooses to draw our attention instead to the way darkness engulfs the homes of birds and dogs, and how it obscures the Hemlocks themselves. The sublime moment has passed, although its memory lingers, but its changing and transitory nature is yet another thing which enhances its beauty and defeats the poet and the artist:

“These are the Visions flitted Guido –
Titian – never told –
Domenichino dropped his pencil –
Paralyzed, with Gold –

Who were these people? Guido Reni painted religious and mythical subjects, often with a slanting light, in the Classical style during the Baroque period, but I can’t help thinking that even though the others in the list are certainly painters, Dickinson had a dual purpose in using that name. Perhaps she had Guido Fawkes in mind, too, who intended to cause a conflagration in the Houses of Parliament in London. In any case, Guido is “flitted” by these undepictable Visions of natural splendour: nothing he ignites with paintbrush or bomb is going to equal them. To flit was to move house – to quit, perhaps. So much for Guido. Titian gave his name so a sunset hue of hair, thanks to a certain painting of a reclining nude, but he “never told” the illimitable narrative of this sunset. Audobon, we will remember, remarked that the clouds on the evening when he saw the Flamingoes were like “flakes of snow margined with gold” – a somewhat difficult description to visualise. Domenichino, who was fond of painting annunciations by angels – but was perhaps a little less overconfident than Audobon was, standing there with his gun barrel broken over his arm – plunges into a state of paralysis at the thought of even attempting this depiction. His pencil clatters on the stone. Inside it, the graphite breaks, to his frustration the next time he tries to sharpen it.

Dickinson deftly sidesteps them all. She never really did try to “tell” us about the sunset. She told us instead about our fundamental powerlessness to represent the natural world with anything approaching justice or even understanding. And with that question about – of all things – a Flamingo’s lip, she snatched a quite different kind of paralysing beauty out of the jaws of failure.

Dickinson on Death

Dickinson on Death

I remember vividly the first time I became fully cognisant of the fact that I would die. Prior to that time, I had known of death in animals – a pet Siamese cat had been run over on the road outside our house; a rabbit had died of Myxomatosis – and I knew that my maternal grandfather had died before I was born. This intellectual understanding of the fact of death became concrete and emotional one day when I was opening the side drawer of an inlaid antique Davenport desk which my parents had bought for me when I was still very small. I realised with a rush of plummeting horror that the person who had made the desk was now dead, that Buddy Holly – whose music was playing on a cassette recorder at that same moment – was dead in a plane crash, that they would not be coming back, and that one day, the same thing would happen to me. I became abject. The bottom fell out of my world of childhood security.

Most of us hope that when we die, there will be at least one beloved person beside us in our final moments. One of the most terrifying things about the current epidemic has been the fact that fear of infection dictates that people in intensive care are denied close contact with their loved ones. Deathbeds in Dickinson’s time, by contrast, were often busy places, and the “art of dying” itself was the subject of poems and spiritual treatises; there were right and wrong ways of doing it, but in middle class New England, death was rarely faced alone.

That did not mean, however, that death would not be a lonely experience. The speaker in a poem written by Dickinson in 1863 dies in a room full of people, but nevertheless, it is not a loving caress or embrace, or some calming , pious words that usher her soul out of this world:

“I heard a Fly buzz - when I died –”

The speaker remembers, in past tense, the moment when she teetered on the threshold between worlds, her vision dying, and her hearing is filled with the sound made by her decomposer: an insect which regards her as carrion almost ready for the deposition of eggs which will hatch into maggots. Her human companions are in the lull between the distress of knowing that she will die, and the catharsis of her having done so:

“The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air -
Between the Heaves of Storm –”

Moments of stillness so often become moments of annoyance when a fly interrupts them. Is it just annoyance, or is there something more abject in that urge to slap with a rolled up newspaper? That frenetic buzzing, just as we settle down to enjoy a good book, or lie down to sleep, or sit to write a poem, is a harbinger of eventual death. But this moment of stillness is one which everyone in the room already recognises is laden with death:

“The Eyes around - had wrung them dry -
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset - when the King
Be witnessed - in the Room –”

Perhaps that “formal feeling”, mentioned in another of Dickinson’s poems, has already come upon these potential mourners. Grief will come later, but there will be practicalities: the death certificate, the funeral arrangements, the necessity of notifying the relevant authorities. And the King, whether Death or God, will be entering shortly, when the death-throes come. Breaths are held – breaths that one day, in their turn, will also be stilled forever. Other formalities have already been concluded:

“I willed all my Keepsakes - Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable –”

Her flesh, of course, is not assignable, for it will rot, but her audience are aware of what is in the will, and have watched her sign away her earthly possessions -

“and then it was
There interposed a Fly –”

It interposes - comes between her and whatever words of comfort, love or faith may be whispered - not God, or some angel, waiting to convey her to paradise on wings of prayer, but a buzz-winged Fly:

“With Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz
Between the light - and me –”

There is a flash of synaesthesia at the moment of death: the Fly’s “Buzz” is “Blue”. Most likely, it is not a small housefly, but a fat, substantial blowfly, or bluefly as they were often known. It occludes the light, with all the practical and Biblical connotations of that word, becoming the all-consuming Thing in the dying person’s world – her eschaton – her Last Thing. Her life is thrown into eternal eclipse by the insect which will claim her flesh.

“And then the Windows failed - and then
I could not see to see –”

I imagine the fly bashing its compound eyes against that window, as they do, with that distinctive clicking sound at every desperate, chitinous impact - this unconscious messenger of God or Death or Beelzebub.

*
The previous year, Dickinson had written an extraordinary poem which, on a literal reading, imagines that the narrator has regained consciousness after death, or was never actually dead, and is being carried in a funeral procession inside a coffin. The same emphasis on deprivation of the sense of sight gives us an opening which irresistibly seems to recall Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and ‘A Cask of Amontillado’, all of which play on the fear of being buried alive:

“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,”

The sense of touch, the feeling of vibrations, and the hearing of muffled sounds are heightened in what follows, much as when Poe’s obsessive murderer compares the beating heart of his victim to the sound “a watch makes when enveloped in cotton”, and there is a similarity, too, in the confusion as to whether this tumult is external, or merely “in [the] Brain”. ‘I felt a Funeral’ could be a supernatural narrative, an account of a nightmare or a representation of depression, but it certainly captures that sense of abject, impending doom which comes when the idea of mortality hits us. It may play on a fantasy, too, though: that we could be conscious after death, so that we can hear what our mourners say about us, or somehow participate in their expressions of grief. If so, then just like the dying narrator whose last perceptions of human fellowship are blotted out by a blowfly, this narrator’s desire to hear the words of her mourners is thwarted. She does not hear them speak, or weep.

“And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –”

She is being lugged along in a cortege, and the rhythm of their trudging has entered the poem as the dead narrator comes to some kind of consciousness. Once again, there is an emphasis on the routine rituals of the living, which throb like a heartbeat at the very moment when Death is centre-stage:

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

Numbness – ambivalence – an uncanny detachment at the moment most stereotypically associated with high emotion: these are favourite preoccupations of Dickinson’s as she contemplates the horrible procession of premature deaths amongst her real family and friends, or, indeed, when she observes in another poem the arrival of death in a household across the road, which gives the house itself a “numb look” as a procession of survivors – neighbours, children, the Doctor, the Minister, that “Man/ Of the Appalling Trade” (the Undertaker) and even the Milliner “rustle in and out”. But here, it is the narrator’s abject participation in her own mortality which produces the numbness; we are inside the Box of negation itself.

“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,”

Space, too, is a fascination for Dickinson; we will encounter it again later. Its vastness is at once a cause for wonder and for a radical sense of insignificance. Our reactions to it may encompass the sublime and the abject in a single instant. Space, in the astronomical sense, is endless; it puts us in our place. Empty space, confined in a Box, reverberates. The Soul itself is a paradox, seemingly unconfined, yet in this life at least, entirely contained by the integrity of the skull – Hamlet’s ultimate “distracted globe”. And then we have the treading of the Boots of Lead: the inexorable dead march that takes its toll on all of us.

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

In the words of John Clare, a near-contemporary of hers, equally as ahead of – and equally misunderstood by – his own time as Dickinson, her narrator contemplates the “vast shipwreck of [her] life’s esteems”, engulfed in darkness, silence, alienation, anonymity, and as in Clare’s famous sonnet, the horror lies precisely in the fact that “I [still] Am”. In death, or in this nightmare, or in this depressive state, she continues to be, listening to the tolling of her own knell.

Shipwrecks and their aftermath were in the news at the time. Franklin had failed to find the Northwest Passage, and unknown to Dickinson, his crewmates had resorted to cannibalism after their ships were crushed in the ice. The planks aboard those decks lay fathoms deep, not to be rediscovered until our own century. Ships have bells, of course, too, ringing out the watches, and chronometers – a particular fascination for Dickinson, as we shall discover in another of these meditations – the accuracy of which was absolutely essential to the determination of longitude, and therefore, to survival. But Dickinson’s speaker is totally, irretrievably disorientated.

“And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –”

There is no Reason in a nightmare. Reasoning cannot pull us out of depression, either. No amount of Reason can save us from Death. Yet, here, the process seems to be reversed. She is falling, but is she falling into the grave – into Death itself – or is she falling back to Earth, back into life? Is that still more horrific?

"And hit a World, at every plunge,
And finished Knowing – then –"

In some of her drafts, it is “at every crash”, and “got through Knowing”. I’m reminded again of a memory from early childhood. I had a severe fever, and for a while, I was delirious. Like Dickinson’s speaker, I was falling to Earth, all reason shattered, destitute of all knowledge. Suddenly, I hit the soil, and a shadowy figure was standing over me, telling me that I had just been made President of the United States. I “woke” in horror at that point, burdened for a few seconds by the sense of total abjection at the thought of the weight of that hideous responsibility, and then terrified by the fact that the hallucination had been cut off part-way through – that I had no idea how I went on to face up to that responsibility. Dickinson’s refusal to conclude the poem means that through it, we not only confront the horrible reality of Death, but also the horrible possibility of continuing to know –

*

But let us assume that we do eventually get chance to “Rest In Peace”, and that those of us who can afford it have our mortal remains interred in a marble mausoleum,

“Safe in their Alabaster Chambers –”

Who is safe, and from what? Is it the dead who are safe from all those “natural shocks that flesh is heir to”, as Hamlet so devoutly hoped? Are they safe from divine judgement? Or is it, perhaps, the living who are safe from them, given that they are entombed in Alabaster, and given that this was the age of spiritualism and the apogee of the ghost story? How dreamless is that sleep?

“Untouched by Morning
And untouched by noon
Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection,
Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone –”

It’s utterly dark in there, just as it was in the Box. They were rich enough to be able to afford Alabaster, but interment renders them “meek”, and this is “Resurrection” without the fringe benefits: no choirs of angels, no glittering prize, no Heavenly reward, just an eternity in the tomb. They really have inherited the Earth, and nothing more.

“Grand go the Years,
In the Crescent above them –
Worlds scoop their Arcs –
And Firmaments – row –
Diadems – drop –
And Doges – surrender –
Soundless as Dots,
On a Disc of Snow.”

Another thing that fascinates Dickinson is the circle, the dial, the arc. It speaks of clocks, compasses, pupils, worlds, orbits, galaxies, the universe. The glass through which astronomers view these latter things, like the glass used by microbiologists, is also circular. Everything is encompassed. Every circle is dwarfed by a far vaster one which contains it, and paradoxically, we can also hold a whole constellation within the eyepiece of a telescope. But Death is the biggest circle of all. Everything falls into its orbit and is eventually sucked into its silence: riches, earthly power, even worlds, even the universe. We are mere dots “On a Disc of Snow.” The beauty of my antique Davenport desk, the exquisite perfection of Dickinson’s poems: all are destined for that black hole – or to be seared into nothing by infinite whiteness. The dead in their Chambers lie waiting, mortally terrifying in their utter insignificance. No wonder we need to keep them Safe.

For once, there is a full stop. Snow melts, eventually.