Emily Dickinson's 'Split the Lark': a meditation

‘Split the Lark - and you’ll find the Music –’
A Meditation
Giles Watson

‘Split the Lark - and you’ll find the Music –’ is a poem which calls me back time and time again, because like its ostensible subject, its multiple layers of meaning defy dissection.

Many readers are familiar with the interpretation which is based on the most overt meaning of the poem: you can’t use empirical science as a means of getting to the bottom of natural beauty; all you will succeed in doing is killing the beauty at its source. Thomas the Apostle, doubting that Jesus was resurrected, would only believe what he had been told when he was able to stick his fingers into the gash in his teacher’s chest where the spear had pierced it. We, in our arrogance, run the risk of flooding the world in the blood of our scarlet experiments if we seek to explain everything that seems miraculous.

It should be pointed out straight away that Emily Dickinson was not an enemy of science. Other poems of hers point to the fact that sometimes it is the only thing that can be trusted. She was also an agnostic. So, the poem cannot really be read - if we are to read it on her terms - as a defence of faith against reason, but it certainly can be read in the following ways.

It can be read as a defence of nature against exploitation and cruelty. It advocates the impulsive reading of art and literature against a dissecting criticism. It is an exhortation to revel in immediate, transitory joys that cannot be preserved in aspic or kept in formaldehyde inside a museum. And, perhaps, it is a celebration of the organic in birds, in women, and in all of nature.

Let’s enjoy it line by line:

“Split the Lark - and you’ll find the Music”

Of course, you won’t. You’ll find its trachaea, its gizzard, its breastbone, its liver and intestines. You’ll even uncover its larynx, but you won’t tease out the music that whistled through it. You’ll find its brain, but not the thought or impulse that drove the bird to sing. And yes, we’re dealing with an empirical lark on a marble slab, but we are also dealing with a universal one, because Dickinson has capitalised it and its Music. You won’t explain the impulse to song or joy or creativity by killing and dissecting anything, although you may learn many other things about how a body works. Nor will you find the answer to any other question about beauty or art. You can dissect a poem, as I am doing now, and the time spent reflecting and understanding may increase your appreciation, but the impulse - the spark that drove the poet and delights the reader - is in something else. It fled the room the moment you sunk in the scalpel.

“Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled –”

I think of the bird’s organs in those “bulbs”, but also the bulbs of daffodils, and because I am a post-twentieth century reader, I think of light-bulbs. They are repositories of something - life, growth, light - but disconnect them and they die instantly. Dissected organs really can gleam like silver, and I can certainly read it on that level. Or perhaps the “silver” is the memory of the bird’s voice. There’s another more horrific interpretation, too. It’s not just a couple of bulbs that are revealed when the Lark is split. It’s “Bulb after Bulb”. They spill out in a chain, or on a string, like the proventriculus, oesophagus, gizzard and intestines of a real bird, along with all the other organs that are attached to these by ducts. Once you are through the feathers and the skin, you become committed to the entire process of spilling. It’s a bloodbath, punctuated by the bulges of half-submerged organs.

“Scantily dealt to the Summer Morning
Saved for your Ear, when Lutes be old -”

It’s going to be a lot scanter now, because the bird is necessarily dead, and the melody can only be “saved” in the memory - at least until Edison appears on the scene. And speaking of Edison, Dickinson is living in the age of invention - a little earlier than the gramophone or the light bulb, but not too early to see what the inventions of the Civil War did to human bodies.

“Loose the Flood - you shall find it patent -”

Patent means “obvious, undeniable”, of course, but there is also still the rush, to this day, to patent inventions and scientific discoveries, so much so that governments are now falling over backwards to invest in whichever company is most likely to discover a vaccine for the Coronavirus. But we are also back there with Noah and his Flood, trying to stave off the whole deluge of human perfidy and presumption. Our impulse to enquire and to explore leads to great discoveries, but it is also helping us to unleash a deluge of destruction.

“Gush after Gush, reserved for you -”

Nineteenth century poets were fond of extolling the beauties of the songs of nightingales, thrushes, skylarks and other songbirds, but it isn’t the song that is gushing here - it is the bird’s blood. Or perhaps it’s the other juices that are necessary components and by-products of life: the bodily fluids which trigger abject responses in some, but without which we cannot have life, reproduction or creativity. Why “reserved”? Perhaps because these juices are really sacred, as even the Christian tradition concedes when it reserves the sacrament - and Catholics genuflect out of respect for the body and blood. Dickinson was brought up in Puritan Protestant traditions, which spiritualised these ideas rather than enacting them literally, but she would have heard, at any communion service she attended, the Biblical affirmation that Christ’s body was broken, and his blood spilt for her. Why, I wonder, does the Christian tradition zero in on that particular gush of blood and water from the side of Christ, rather than his mother’s menstrual blood and amniotic fluid? I wonder, too, whether Dickinson wondered the same thing. Isn’t it strange how the word “gushing”, used as a participle, has a slightly misogynistic tinge? Does a man ever “gush”? What causes this bird to gush blood as it once gushed song? Penetration by a scalpel. This gouges down to the soggy components which culminated in song, but the song is long gone. By this stage, I don’t like the second person in this poem. I can guess that his gender is male, and that as a person who, in the words of another poet, feels he must “murder to dissect”, he does not deserve to have the bird’s song, secrets or sacraments reserved for him.

“Scarlet Experiment! Sceptic Thomas!”

And like all such arrogant experiments, the result is a gruesome bloodbath. Thomas has dipped his hand in, and it re-emerges dripping with gore. The bird which sang so gloriously is left a bloody pulp. Or, perhaps, in dissecting to find the source of beauty, the purist is shocked to discover that creativity springs unbidden out of the sloppy, organic soup that has always elicited that abject response. The bird’s song arises out of blood and guts and gristle. Human life, and the love and creativity that grows out of it, is blood, mucus, saliva, semen, lymph. But it is something more.

“Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?”

And the thing is that the Bird was always true. Truth is a rare commodity these days, and it is often openly mocked. “True” has all sorts of connotations, stretching back to the days of chivalry: faithfulness, integrity, an unswerving devotion. It also means that the bird used to sing in tune, in contrast with the radical discordance of its dissection. Like Jesus, it seems to acquiesce in its own betrayal and mutilation, and in doing so, it defeats the whole process. It has been dismantled, and the post-mortem never explained its song. The man with the scalpel stands bloodied, guilty and none the wiser. He hasn’t plumbed the depths of anything, except his own inadequacy.

Why, every time I read this poem, do I end by envisaging the pulp coalescing back into a Lark, Phoenix-like in its resurrection, and flying in the dissector’s face? I think it’s because that last question is rhetorical, and because, unlike many of Dickinson’s poems which end deliberately unresolved in a dash, this one pointedly gives us a question mark. It is the dissector who now has to answer for his actions.

Or perhaps it’s because the whole thing was hypothetical anyway. You’ll never catch a lark in the act of song; it’s up there - a tiny, bobbing speck in an endless sky. It wasn’t, “You have split the Lark, so you’ll find the Music”. The whole thing was a sarcastic taunt from the beginning. You can maim nature, but you will never truly triumph over it. You will never triumph over your own organic status. You can’t kill a poem by doing what I have just done to this one. You can’t find the music and bottle it, any more than you can kill God. It flew before you even touched it with the blade.