About: Every Monday, I’ll post a poem and a paragraph describing something I noticed about the poem. Anyone can add a comment describing something that they noticed about the poem. If enough people take part, then everyone can collectively notice—and appreciate—more about the poem. I’ll post a summary and synthesis of our collective comments on Friday, listing some of the most exciting things we all noticed about the poem. For more information, click here.

H.D., “Sheltered Garden”

I have had enough.
I gasp for breath.

Every way ends, every road,
every foot-path leads at last
to the hill-crest—
then you retrace your steps,
or find the same slope on the other side,
precipitate.

I have had enough—
border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies,
herbs, sweet-cress.

O for some sharp swish of a branch—
there is no scent of resin
in this place,
no taste of bark, of coarse weeds,
aromatic, astringent—
only border on border of scented pinks.

Have you seen fruit under cover
that wanted light—
pears wadded in cloth,
protected from the frost,
melons, almost ripe,
smothered in straw?

Why not let the pears cling
to the empty branch?
All your coaxing will only make
a bitter fruit—
let them cling, ripen of themselves,
test their own worth,
nipped, shrivelled by the frost,
to fall at last but fair
with a russet coat.

Or the melon—
let it bleach yellow
in the winter light,
even tart to the taste—
it is better to taste of frost—
the exquisite frost—
than of wadding and of dead grass.

For this beauty,
beauty without strength,
chokes out life.
I want wind to break,
scatter these pink-stalks,
snap off their spiced heads,
fling them about with dead leaves—
spread the paths with twigs,
limbs broken off,
trail great pine branches,
hurled from some far wood
right across the melon-patch,
break pear and quince—
leave half-trees, torn, twisted
but showing the fight was valiant.

O to blot out this garden
to forget, to find a new beauty
in some terrible
wind-tortured place.

What I noticed was this little triptych of lines:

“Every way ends, every road,
every foot-path leads at last
to the hill-crest
then you retrace your steps,
or find the same slope on the other side,
precipitate.”

Even before the pinks—which seem like the most offensive part of the garden, being so inoffensive—the sense of beauty that the poem despises is suffocating and trapping. It’s quite a claustrophobic poem, which is why the idea of a strong wind coming through, cold and clear and cleansing, feels so refreshing when, in the penultimate stanza, it blows through the garden.

It’s hard, for me, to read this as anything other than an ars poetica, although I haven’t read the story of the poem and haven’t any idea if that was H.D.’s intention. If this is an ars poetica, and the garden therefore a metaphor for poetry, what does this second stanza argue for? I see it as arguing for ambiguity: if there is only one way to interpret a poem, then the reader is trapped in it: no matter what interpretive route they take through it, they are trapped by the finality and solidity of the poem’s meaning, rotely ascending to a certain view, which is elevated but stale.

About: Every Monday, I’ll post a poem and a paragraph describing something I noticed about the poem. Anyone can add a comment describing something that they noticed about the poem. If enough people take part, then everyone can collectively notice—and appreciate—more about the poem. I’ll post a summary and synthesis of our collective comments on Friday, listing some of the most exciting things we all noticed about the poem. For more information, click here.

e.e. cummings, “i thank You God for most this amazing”

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

We were divided on this one: some of us loved it, and it left others of us cold. wrote the most detailed critique. I want to focus on one part of that critique:

The breathlessness feels a little forced, the images a little cliche. It compares unfavorably to other writing on the same theme. When C.S. Lewis praises Nature in Miracles, he praises a flood of specifics: Nature is “this astonishing cataract of bears, babies, and bananas: this immoderate deluge of atoms, orchids, oranges, cancers, canaries, fleas, gases, tornadoes and toads.” When Gerard Manley Hopkins praises Nature in “Pied Beauty”, he praises “skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow”. No matter how well he phrases it, in this poem cummings praises blue sky and green trees.

e.e. cummings was a Modernist poet, and Modernists, as we all know, are supposed to follow Ezra Pound’s call: “Make it New!” I’m not supposed to capitalize e.e. cummings’ name, which is unusual, and his poetry often made innovative use of visual design, punctuation, etc. He was clearly trying to “make it new” in some sense. And yet in this poem we have a set of what can only be called poetic clichés: green trees and “blue true dream of sky”; “life and..love and wings.” For some of us, it felt like cummings is going to start going on about living, laughing, and loving.

One problem with cliché, of course, is that it is stale. Anything that is sufficiently familiar is hard to notice—hard to really take in—because your brain feels like it already understands what you’re looking at. So, if a poem is filled with predictable phrases, it’s hard to take it in as something new, or even to really pay attention to it. For many readers, poetry can “defamiliarize” the world—make it new to us, and therefore vivid—and cliché does the opposite: it makes the world fit as neatly as it can into our existing language, and therefore our existing thinking and perception.

But does a poet’s use of cliché always signify artistic weakness? I think that, for most readers, it doesn’t, as long as there is some irony in there: if they are using cliché to comment on cliché, it’s usually better than if they are using cliché to describe the world. Self-aware, distanced cliché—cliché that knows it is cliché—may be a little unfashionable in our irony-poisoned era, but it’s at least not simply unoriginal.

But, in this poem, cummings may be using clichéd ideas, but he has messed with the language. If you read aloud the lines: “for the leaping greenly spirits of trees / and a blue true dream of sky,” you may find yourself accidentally saying “true blue dream of sky” instead of “blue true dream of sky”—you may have to double back and re-read. (I did.) enjoyed the slant little phrase “human merely being,” for example, and looking through these lines, we see that none of the language is exactly cliché. It’s all a little slant, whether through changing the normal order of words, or through enjambment, or through cummings’ stubborn refusal to capitalize. For some of us, this worked. wrote, “Works for me. The word order short circuits me out of my side-minds into a spacious centre.” For others, the changes left us cold. The poem “seems to be performing oddness at me from a box of standard tricks, telling me what to feel,” wrote .

I’d like to make the case that cummings is performing cliché with a slant in an attempt to write a poem that uses cliché self-consciously but not ironically. Not all of us will find it in our hearts to say, with and , “Yes! Let us celebrate the joy of being alive! What exquisite awe!” But I think this is just what cummings is trying to evoke from us: a sincere assent to a joy that is hard to experience because it’s been so often expressed. He’s saying to us, “yes, it is a cliché to praise green trees and blue sky. But! You guys! Green trees!! Blue sky!! These things are amazing!” When writes of “the miracle of being alive,” it’s easy to be like, OK, sure, the miracle of being alive, whatever, heard that before. But!! The miracle of being alive! To pile cliché on top of cliché, I look down at my baby and see how precious and exciting life is, and looking at the world from her perspective makes everything feel new. Which, from one perspective, is the dullest thing I could possibly say. And, from another perspective, is the most urgent truth. You should live, laugh, and love. You really should!

I think the defamiliarizing language is trying to give us clichés with cracks in them, and through these cracks we can (hopefully) catch a glimpse of whatever reality the cliché was originally meant to describe. noticed that, in this poem, perception—feeling, seeing, etc.—happens early in the poem, but it isn’t until the end that “the eyes of my eyes are opened” and “the ears of my ears are awake.” I’ll venture to contradict John’s wife in suggesting that perhaps the resurrection in this poem is not literal, but, when cummings writes, “i who have died am alive again today,” he might be discussing the way that the dead language of cliché might, viewed the right way, come alive again. Maybe. (Or maybe the poem is from the perspective of Lazarus or something similar—who knows?)

Have a great week, everyone, and I’m so glad you’re all taking the time to read poems together. It’s the start of a new semester, so I’ll be skipping next week, and I’ll see you all the week after that.

About: Every Monday, I’ll post a poem and a paragraph describing something I noticed about the poem. Anyone can add a comment describing something that they noticed about the poem. If enough people take part, then everyone can collectively notice—and appreciate—more about the poem. I’ll post a summary and synthesis of our collective comments on Friday, listing some of the most exciting things we all noticed about the poem. For more information, click here.

e.e. cummings, “i thank You God for most this amazing”

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

When we talked about Blake’s Songs of Innocence, we talked a little bit about whether happy poetry could be as challenging as sad poetry. Is there something about happiness that is less conducive to analysis? I thought so. But this poem, as well as the Gerard Manley Hopkins we looked at before, seem to push back against that a bit. There’s definitely some oddness here, and I think I have a fair idea of what the poem mostly means. (Although why does cummings flirt with kitsch with the “life and love and wings” line?) But I want to leave most of the sense-making and parsing to others, and simply point out that the closing line of each stanza gestures toward something that is beyond description: “infinite which is yes,” “happening illimitably earth,” “unimaginable You.” So the poem seems to be about perceiving the sacredness of the world, which seems ineffable: cummings runs up against the limits of language at the end of each stanza, then, as if giving up on the errand of communicating sublimity to his reader, tells us, “trust me; I’ve seen it.”

Note: Apologies that this is late—I blame the baby—and I’ll be skipping next week, since it’s the first week of a new semester and I’ll be quite busy. I’ll see you the week after!

About: Every Monday, I’ll post a poem and a paragraph describing something I noticed about the poem. Anyone can add a comment describing something that they noticed about the poem. If enough people take part, then everyone can collectively notice—and appreciate—more about the poem. I’ll post a summary and synthesis of our collective comments on Friday, listing some of the most exciting things we all noticed about the poem. For more information, click here.

Wallace Stevens, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Starting with the basic meaning of the poem—we seem to agree that this depicts a wake. laid this out first: as with the first Emily Dickinson poem that we read, this is about an older woman (“horny feet”) who has died, while the living (the muscular man, the flowers in the newspaper) prepare to mourn her. Lisa’s comment laid the groundwork for most of the rest of us. notes that the environment of the wake seems to be in a poorer household—old newspaper, a dresser missing three knobs, an ill-fitting, hand-embroidered sheet, a man employed as a cigar-roller. In its most literal meanings, the poem gets at the weirdness of a funeral wake or service: on the one hand, the event is all about death, and on the other hand, they’re full of people, eating and drinking and carrying on—living, in other words. This weird juxtaposition—between what identifies as the movement, drama, and visual nature of the first stanza and the more somber send—leads people to talk about funerals in paradoxical ways, for example by calling an event at which people mourn a death a “celebration of life.” They’re both at the same time.

Once this meaning is arrived at, the poem gives us plenty of little puzzles to chew on, as tells us.1 One puzzle, as writes, is that the poem is in the imperative case: it’s commanding the reader, or some other listener, to do a set of things (take the sheet from the drawer) but more often to not do anything (let the wenches dawdle, let be be finale of seem, let the lamp affix its beam). So, on the one hand, the narrator of this poem seems to be something of a control freak—telling us what to do—but the content of these instructions is most frequently, as writes, to let things be.

Which brings us to the strangest and most wonderful line of the poem, “an intellectual puzzle of many possible meanings,” as writes: “Let be be finale of seem,” which appears to Christine, and me, as the core of the poem, and which calls “sort of playful, but also existentially chilling.” My initial translation of the line was something like: “Let appearances reveal reality.” Denise suggested “Be okay with the beingness of the end of illusion.” (Or its opposite: “Let the illusion be.”) To Sharon’s point, I don’t know that we can call any of these lines the definitively correct reading. What we can observe, I think, is that the poem offers a distinction between illusion and reality, and that the dead body, with the lamp fixed unblinkingly upon it, seems to be the most real thing here. Ice-cream melts away, as Andrew, Christine, and all note; melting ice-cream is the sweetness and the evanescence of life.

So, one more big question: what does it mean to be the emperor of ice-cream? I can think of two things: one, the emperor of ice-cream is the personification or embodiment of evanescent life and enjoyment. (I kind of imagine him as a guy wearing white and pastel-colored robes, with a crown that looks like a scoop of ice-cream.) On the other hand, the “emperor” could mean the conqueror of something—so the emperor of ice-cream could be the one who has defeated ice-cream, life, movement, and sweetness: that is to say, the emperor could be either life or death. The poem leaves its reader able to interpret who the true emperor is. Is life reality, and death an illusion? Or is life an illusion and death the final reality? Maybe this is why Don argues that “The emperor of ice cream is the imagination of poet, speaker and reader,” our ability to “make meanings of seeming.”

I want to close this out with a big portion of John’s comment, which I cheerfully copy because I think it’s good:

“The early part of the poem is, as Don says, ‘deliberately obscure’. We read slowly, trying to parse the difficult syntax. It gives us images but without a narrative to connect them. Then, in the latter half of the latter stanza, just as the narrative is finally coming into focus, just as we are finally getting evidence that this is really about death, the poem rhymes. The rhyme (come/dumb) is as basic as can be, and all of a sudden the meaning becomes clearer, the syntax becomes easier to parse. These structural choices are phonically sweet and narratively satisfying even as the poem’s explicit meaning grows darker and more solemn. And by making it easier to read, this structure also sort of hurries us along. All too soon, the poem is over. Ice cream melts so fast, as you say. “

Last night, we walked to get ice-cream, and the shop (shout out to Lake Effect Ice Cream, Buffalo, NY) gave me two gigantic scoops—far more than I paid for. By the end of it, I felt as full as if I had just eaten a satisfying meal. I hope you’re all able to get some ice-cream of your own as summer begins to dwindle into autumn. See you next week.

About: Every Monday, I’ll post a poem and a paragraph describing something I noticed about the poem. Anyone can add a comment describing something that they noticed about the poem. If enough people take part, then everyone can collectively notice—and appreciate—more about the poem. I’ll post a summary and synthesis of our collective comments on Friday, listing some of the most exciting things we all noticed about the poem. For more information, click here.

Wallace Stevens, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

This is another one of those super-famous poems, one which I’ve never studied and which I feel, somehow, that I ought to clearly understand by now. I notice a few things to start us off: first, that “The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream” is the only repeated phrase, and that this repetition is leading me to ask how the meaning of the phrase is similar or different from passage to passage—and, implicitly, how the stanzas differ and what effect the poem makes by contrasting the two stanzas. Second, the first stanza is filled with pleasant sensuous things (cigars, muscular fellows, wenches, “concupiscent curds,” flowers) while the second stanza is filled with unpleasant sensuous things (corpse, horny feet, perhaps a morgue lamp shining on the corpse?). The emperor of ice-cream, whoever that may be, seems to lord it over both of these scenes. Who can it be?

P.S. Plenty of people keep signing up to receive these emails, but few of them have joined the conversations! You are all welcome to write what you notice!

About: Every Monday, I’ll post a poem and a paragraph describing something I noticed about the poem. Anyone can add a comment describing something that they noticed about the poem. If enough people take part, then everyone can collectively notice—and appreciate—more about the poem. I’ll post a summary and synthesis of our collective comments on Friday, listing some of the most exciting things we all noticed about the poem. For more information, click here.

John Donne, “The Flea”

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,   
How little that which thou deniest me is;   
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;   
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,
    Yet this enjoys before it woo,
    And pampered swells with one blood made of two,
    And this, alas, is more than we would do.

Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, nay more than married are.   
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;   
Though parents grudge, and you, w’are met,   
And cloistered in these living walls of jet.
    Though use make you apt to kill me,
    Let not to that, self-murder added be,
    And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?   
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?   
Yet thou triumph’st, and say’st that thou   
Find’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now;
    ’Tis true; then learn how false, fears be:
    Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me,
    Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.

I’m feeling a little silly this week, so I hope you don’t mind if this one’s a little sillier than usual. I wanted to compare our reading of the poem with some other takes to answer the most important question in poetry this week: “‘The Flea’: Hot or Not?”

Our view

In my initial post on Donne’s “The Flea,” I wrote: “A ménage à trois with a bloodsucking vermin? This is the least appealing way to seduce someone I can imagine!” But, as it turns out, I am in the minority here! responded that “The speaker is appealing is his clever use of the flea as a metaphor for sex. I find his wit and intelligence very sexy.” Maybe fleas themselves aren’t sexy—but the “boldness” of the metaphor, as put it in a comment on Notes, is appealing, even if “the correct response to the poem is still ‘no.’” Although I would be more apt to suggest that the addressee’s lack of interest in the bug guy, suggests that her refusal is related to religious guilt, which the poet tries to assuage by assuring her that the flea is a temple. (Is everything holy here? Is Donne, in his daring, Whitmanian? Ginsbergian?) Anyway, inspired by Sharon’s initial comment, I decided to run a scientific poll on Notes. The results:

With 33 votes, a resounding 70% regard “The Flea” as sexy! And my sense is that it’s the intellectual dalliance—the poet’s agility, as put it—rather than the insect itself that’s appealing. While and I may disagree with this verdict (while admiring the poem’s cleverness and strangeness), it seems like the verdict among my Substack acquaintainces is in. Verdict: hot.

Other views

This is not, of course, an exhaustive list. It is three sources that I happened to find this week. This is, after all, a weekly blog I do for fun and not a term paper.

In criticizing the “metaphysical poets,” among whom he named John Donne, Samuel Johnson wrote that, instead of real wit, which is, as Pope writes, “that which has been often thought, but was never before so well expressed,” the metaphysical poets tried to appear witty and clever by expressing ideas in a way that would never occur to anyone. They sought “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike…Their courtship was void of fondness, and their lamentation of sorrow. Their wish was only to say what they hoped had never been said before.” For Johnson, then, the cleverness or bizarreness of Donne’s image—linking together lovers through a flea—served mostly to show off Donne’s imaginative capability, but it left Johnson emotionally cold. The very thing that some of us found sexy—the bold cleverness—for Johnson is evidence that the poet relies too much on wit and not enough on feeling. Verdict: not hot.

One great reading that I looked at this week was Camille Paglia’s reading of the poem in her book Break, Blow, Burn. The writing here is splendid. She notes something that none of us did: that, in the spaces between the stanzas, things seem to happen. Most significantly, in the space between the second and third stanzas, the beloved kills the flea, and the poet more and more desperately begs for what he’s after, insisting (to respond to ’s perplexity) that the beloved’s loss of her virginity will not harm her any more than the flea’s taking of her blood did. “Though Donne’s fiancée says little, the poem’s precosity is a tribute to her intelligence. He will jump through hoops to win her admiration…Donne portrays himself, like Dalí, as a showy phallic swordsman baffled and bemused by a forceful, alluring woman, who brushes him away like a pesky fly.” This is certainly reductive of Paglia’s take, but I’ll say, Verdict: hot.

A final, lovely reading that I found on Substack is this one, from . It’s so lovingly written—I encourage you to go read it! What Pollard notices (“marks,” as Donne would put it) is “how unembarrassed [the poet] is.” notes that, in invoking the flea, Donne is also possibly evoking disease. Pollard argues that Donne points our attention toward those things in life that are gross and upsetting, insisting, against all odds, that “ALL THIS can be sexy.” Pollard loves how daring and clever it is. “It’s icky, it’s sexy, it’s intimate, it’s clever, it’s complicated. Like the central image itself, it can be seen as both trivial, and a matter of life and death.” Verdict: hot.

About: Every Monday, I’ll post a poem and a paragraph describing something I noticed about the poem. Anyone can add a comment describing something that they noticed about the poem. If enough people take part, then everyone can collectively notice—and appreciate—more about the poem. I’ll post a summary and synthesis of our collective comments on Friday, listing some of the most exciting things we all noticed about the poem. For more information, click here.

John Donne, “The Flea”

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,   
How little that which thou deniest me is;   
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;   
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,
    Yet this enjoys before it woo,
    And pampered swells with one blood made of two,
    And this, alas, is more than we would do.

Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, nay more than married are.   
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;   
Though parents grudge, and you, w’are met,   
And cloistered in these living walls of jet.
    Though use make you apt to kill me,
    Let not to that, self-murder added be,
    And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?   
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?   
Yet thou triumph’st, and say’st that thou   
Find’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now;
    ’Tis true; then learn how false, fears be:
    Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me,
    Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.

I know that this is a very famous and frequently-interpreted poem, and I’ve seen it many times before, but I’ve never read any sort of analysis of it. So I’m curious to look at our analyses (please write yours without consulting anyone else!) and to see how they differ from some other readings of this poem by professional Donne critics.

Anyway, what I notice about this poem is how hard it is to pin down the tone. It’s tongue in cheek—the argument that “well, you got bitten by a flea, so we might as well…” is so feeble that to advance it must be a joke. But then there’s the bizarre and unsettling passages—“w’are met/And cloistered in these living walls of jet” seems kind of repellent to me, as is the inclusion of not just an animal but a blood-sucking insect in the dalliance being described here, for example when the speaker calls the pest a “marriage bed.” A ménage à trois with a bloodsucking vermin? This is the least appealing way to seduce someone I can imagine! And yet the speaker seems assured of his success: “when thou yield’st to me,” he writes in closing. And there’s no doubt in my mind that the speaker is sincere in his seductive goal. So we have a joke, a horror show, and a wheedling flirtation, all wrapped into one.

About: Every Monday, I’ll post a poem and a paragraph describing something I noticed about the poem. Anyone can add a comment describing something that they noticed about the poem. If enough people take part, then everyone can collectively notice—and appreciate—more about the poem. I’ll post a summary and synthesis of our collective comments on Friday, listing some of the most exciting things we all noticed about the poem. For more information, click here.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; 
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; 
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is — 
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

The first thing we noticed is the rhythm: as writes, Hopkins marks out the stressed syllables, spelling out for us how he wants the poem to be read aloud, reminding us that he wants the poem to be read aloud, to “find tongue.” followed this instruction, reading the poem aloud and finding some enjoyment from the incantatory rhythm of the beautiful internal rhymes—“ring/string,” “hung/swung/tongue,” “tells/bells.” This is a poem about the beauty of the word, and it possesses that beauty in no small supply.

In its focus on the word, I can’t help but connect this poem to the capital-W Word—the logos that, in Christian belief, is both Christ and the medium of creation. In Genesis, God creates the world by speaking it into being and, importantly, declaring the world to be good; the Gospel of John starts with this strange, incantatory reflection on the Word:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”

A few verses later, the Gospel reveals that the Word is Christ: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

Here, then, we have some clues as to the inspiration of this poem. When Hopkins writes that “Christ plays in ten thousand places,/Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/To the Father through the features of men’s faces,” we have a beautiful restatement of the idea from John that Christ’s “life was the light of men.”

writes that the poem tells us that “each being—living and not—express[es] itself in some singular way, the inside spoken externally in whatever the manner of expression.” This “speaking” can be visual (the kingfisher catching fire) or aural (the rocks tumbling, the bells’ tongues speaking). But, although each thing speaks its unique name, as Lisa suggests, there seems to be a common basis or foundation for all of this speaking, as writes—”each creature [is] a reflection of one thing saying the same thing.” As much as each thing shouts, “What I do is me,” they are also all an expression of the Word, Christ, the medium of creation, “for Christ plays in ten thousand places.” Each thing has an essence, and it speaks that essence out into a grand symphony of being, which is at its basis an expression of the sacred Word, which itself sings out in this startling and compact poem.

This brings us back to the sound of the poem, Hopkins’ own singing out. writes: “The images of well, bell, and stringed instrument feel to me as if they were overlayed with one another, as if there were some single thing containing and exceeding them all.”

It’s a beautiful idea, beautifully put. See you next week.

About: Every Monday, I’ll post a poem and a paragraph describing something I noticed about the poem. Anyone can add a comment describing something that they noticed about the poem. If enough people take part, then everyone can collectively notice—and appreciate—more about the poem. I’ll post a summary and synthesis of our collective comments on Friday, listing some of the most exciting things we all noticed about the poem. For more information, click here.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; 
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; 
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is — 
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Like the Emily Dickinson poem we looked at a few weeks ago, I immediately notice that this poem has a kind of resistant quality to it from the first line. It’s asking for our effort. “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame.” Well, I know that male kingfishers often have beautiful bright orange breasts, and so I think I know what it means for a kingfisher to catch fire: a sudden burst of movement, like the kingfisher taking flight, might look like a sudden lick of flame. (To read this line as literal would be wildly out of step with the tone of the poem, ha ha.) Then again, kingfishers are, well, fishers, so when they pluck a fish up out of the water, perhaps the shining scales of the fish on sunlight are a way that the kingfisher “catches” “fire” in another sense. But the second part of the line kind of loses me. Dragonflies draw flame? Well, they’re incapable of illustrating anything, so I imagine that dragonflies “drawing” flame means that they are drawing the flame toward themselves, attracting it. And the only thing I can think of here is, again, sunlight—the way a dragonfly’s transparent wings might catch sunlight and appear to be illuminated—they might “draw fire” to themselves as they are illuminated by the sun. The word “As” at the beginning of the line suggests that there is a similarity between the way a kingfisher might appear to catch fire and the way that a dragonfly might draw the sun’s flame to itself. So what is the similarity? By making me ask the question, the poem seems to be telling me what to continue to look for as I continue; it’s setting the stage for the way I’ll interpret the following lines.

About: Every Monday, I’ll post a poem and a paragraph describing something I noticed about the poem. Anyone can add a comment describing something that they noticed about the poem. If enough people take part, then everyone can collectively notice—and appreciate—more about the poem. I’ll post a summary and synthesis of our collective comments on Friday, listing some of the most exciting things we all noticed about the poem. For more information, click here.

William Blake, “The Echoing Green,” from Songs of Innocence and Experience

The sun does arise,
And make happy the skies;
The merry bells ring
To welcome the Spring;
The skylark and thrush,
The birds of the bush,
Sing louder around
To the bells’ cheerful sound;
While our sports shall be seen
On the echoing green.

Old John, with white hair,
Does laugh away care,
Sitting under the oak,
Among the old folk.
They laugh at our play,
And soon they all say,
‘Such, such were the joys
When we all—girls and boys—
In our youth-time were seen
On the echoing green.’

Till the little ones, weary,
No more can be merry:
The sun does descend,
And our sports have an end.
Round the laps of their mothers
Many sisters and brothers,
Like birds in their nest,
Are ready for rest,
And sport no more seen
On the darkening green.

I came across this poem while flipping through a pretty little Modern Library collection of Blake’s poetry that I found in a free little library. For some reason, I liked it better than I liked the other selections from the “innocence” section of Songs of Innocence and Experience, but I couldn’t exactly put my finger on why. And the longer I looked at the poem, the more I thought, “is it possible to do anything with this?” The poem is pleasing, but there doesn’t seem to be as much to dissect here. The longer you look at it, the more it seems to give you the same thing it gave you the first time you looked at it. Poems from, like, Emily Dickinson seem to expand forever: the more you look at them, the more shades of meaning emerge. But this poem doesn’t do that so much.

This is especially true when we read the poem as happy. offers the true, but faint, praise that the poem’s “simplicity and sing-songiness” are “rather pleasant.” observes the poem’s charm, its sense of movement and change, from echoing, noisy morning to quiet night, but concludes: “its pastoral harmony feels so complete that I find it quite bland. I kept looking for an unsettling dimension in Old John—some friction or shadow somewhere.” notes the “quick” and relatively simple rhyme-scheme, which makes the poem feel “jejune and cheerful.” concurs: “Are we just too cynical these days? Perhaps it’s just me, but I want some jolt from what I read.”

This doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to notice here—only that the poem seemed to really come alive for us only insofar as we detected some lurking darkness to it. The poem begins with brightness, movement, noise, and youth; in the second stanza, the idea of old age is introduced into the poem; and in the closing stanza, the sun has set, the world has quieted, and the day is over. Metaphorically, this seems to evoke death and aging, and this is where the poem seemed to become, well, better. “‘Our sports’ jarred a little bit in the first stanza until they ‘have an end,’ in the third,” wrote , summing up the general sentiment.

The poem does not explicitly mention death, but it does offer a kind of synesthetic darkening, as notes: Blake presents “darkening” and “echoing” as opposites, which ties together light and noise, darkness and quiet. Perhaps this is why the last stanza struck us as melancholy: it seems to be discussing a void rather than just a sunset. Hence, was moved by the closing lines’ musical evocation of “a broad expanse of greenness darkening into that great dark nothingness beyond,” and the poem therefore as a meditation on life’s brevity. also notices the poem’s growing quiet, and asks one of the best close-reading questions—“who speaks?”—about the last stanza. Irene speculates that it might be the elderly watchers from the second stanza. After all, the poem seems to suggest that its reader, too, is one of those watchers. So are “our sports” childhood play? Or is it life itself? ’s note—that the poem’s birds are literal in the first two stanzas, then metaphorical in the last stanza—seems to suggest another movement: from literal to figurative. I think this serves as evidence that we can read the darkening green as figurative, as the arena of life itself, not just the literal field.

But all of this is to make a larger point: regardless of whether we believe that this poem has some darkness to it, we seem agreed on the idea that darkness makes it better. The use of poetic language to communicate unbridled enjoyment or happiness seems, to us, less valuable as art. It’s interesting: conceptually, I want to reject this. I’d like to believe that contentment, like anything else in the universe, can become more fascinating the more it is observed. But there are certain forms of joy—perhaps the play of these children on the green—that are wonderful but that don’t, in the end, bear analysis quite as well when it is unmixed with darkness.

Close reading, like any other way of looking at the world, prizes certain things—complexity and ambiguity chief among them. And in doing so, I think that it discounts certain things—simple, unanalyzed joy among them. This is to say that meditative, appreciative looking can be lovely but isn’t always the best way to really get at the goodness of life.

noticed one little piece of structural intricacy that I thought it would be nice to conclude on. The central stanza of the poem describes the old people watching the young ones and saying, “that was us.” The present of the young is the past of the old; the present of the old is the future of the young; the remembrance of the old is, in some sense, an echo of the present of the young. If the first stanza describes youth and the last describes aging and death, the central stanza overlaps past and present, young and old, and reminds us that our lives are not a linear story (sun was high in sky, sun goes down) but part of a great cycle (sun sets and rises, over and over).

So I suggest you go listen to “The Circle Game” and have a great weekend. See you all on Monday.

About: Every Monday, I’ll post a poem and a paragraph describing something I noticed about the poem. Anyone can add a comment describing something that they noticed about the poem. If enough people take part, then everyone can collectively notice—and appreciate—more about the poem. I’ll post a summary and synthesis of our collective comments on Friday, listing some of the most exciting things we all noticed about the poem. For more information, click here.

William Blake, “The Echoing Green,” from Songs of Innocence and Experience

The sun does arise,
And make happy the skies;
The merry bells ring
To welcome the Spring;
The skylark and thrush,
The birds of the bush,
Sing louder around
To the bells’ cheerful sound;
While our sports shall be seen
On the echoing green.

Old John, with white hair,
Does laugh away care,
Sitting under the oak,
Among the old folk.
They laugh at our play,
And soon they all say,
‘Such, such were the joys
When we all—girls and boys—
In our youth-time were seen
On the echoing green.’

Till the little ones, weary,
No more can be merry:
The sun does descend,
And our sports have an end.
Round the laps of their mothers
Many sisters and brothers,
Like birds in their nest,
Are ready for rest,
And sport no more seen
On the darkening green.

The first time I read this poem, I felt a pleasurable change or shift in the last stanza. Something—it’s hard to tell exactly what—transforms in that last stanza, adding this little sense of melancholy to the poem that makes the earlier part come out in stark relief, like the shaded leaves close to a tree’s trunk make the outside leaves stand out even more brightly. I was sitting trying to figure out what makes it shift in that way, so I started trying to think of differences between the third stanza and the first two stanzas.

What I noticed is that the first two stanzas are spoken by a child: “our sports shall be seen” and “They laugh at our play.” But in the third stanza’s first line, we get “Till the little ones, weary,” and “Round the laps of their mothers.” Yes, there’s the line that says, “our sports have an end”—but then why, in those other two lines, does the narrator seem to be no longer young? (“Sport” can mean “amusing oneself,” so this final stanza could have been written by Old John.) There seems to be some distinction or difference that the narrator is trying to make between themselves and the other children—the narrator does not nestle in with its mother or seem to be weary. I’m not sure, but I think that subtle shift might help to cause this shift in tone that I noticed at the end. Perhaps the narrator is aging as the poem continues, which would account for the shade of nostalgic melancholy I feel at the end.

About: Every Monday, I post a poem and a something I noticed about it. Anyone can add a comment describing something that they noticed about the poem. Each Friday, I’ll write a short essay that attempts to synthesize all of the things we noticed into a relatively coherent interpretation of the poem. For more information, click here.

Marianne Moore, “The Fish”

wade
through black jade.
        Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
        adjusting the ash-heaps;
                opening and shutting itself like

an
injured fan.
        The barnacles which encrust the side
        of the wave, cannot hide
                there for the submerged shafts of the

sun,
split like spun
        glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
        into the crevices—
                in and out, illuminating

the
turquoise sea
        of bodies. The water drives a wedge
        of iron through the iron edge
                of the cliff; whereupon the stars,

pink
rice-grains, ink-
        bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green
        lilies, and submarine
                toadstools, slide each on the other.

All
external
        marks of abuse are present on this
        defiant edifice—
                all the physical features of

ac-
cident—lack
        of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
        hatchet strokes, these things stand
                out on it; the chasm-side is

dead.
Repeated
        evidence has proved that it can live
        on what can not revive
                its youth. The sea grows old in it.

This poem is difficult from the first line. notes that the title makes him think we’re about to get a description of a fish, but this doesn’t quite happen. suggests that the title begins the first line, and so we have a descriptive, declarative sentence that is at least grammatical: “The fish wade through black jade.” To which the critical reader must reply: uh, Marianne, fish don’t wade. They don’t have legs.

The frustrations continue. notes that many of the physical descriptions, which are so beautiful to read, are also illogical, paradoxical, and confusing. Jade is green, not black, even if the startling blending of the two beautifully represents what seaweed looks like viewed through clear seawater. “Moore is deliberately trying to puzzle us,” John writes. was annoyed by this. “The thing that gets me is that the barnacles are encrusting the side of the wave. On my first three or four reads, I found that very annoying and could not get past it.” also noticed that the poem did not make her feel swept up or transported; she kept having to stop, ask herself if she were on the right track, and go back again, a stop-and-start or slowed-down rhythm that , , and all noted, with varying degrees of enjoyment.

So, from the first lines alone, we can conclude two things: first, that Moore is depicting nature in startling and beautiful ways; second, that Moore appears to be trying to puzzle and annoy us, or at the very least to slow us down, to leave us confused.

The puzzlement continues as the poem goes on, leaving us collectively unsure about what, beyond an underwater scene, the poem intends to depict. notes the poem’s use of “physical, violent language: split, drives (a wedge), marks of abuse, burns, hatchet strokes, dead, evidence (as of a crime?).” interprets the violent language as evidence that there has been a car crash; sees a shipwreck.

Why would Moore puzzle and frustrate us in this way? Why would she create a poem that is, on the one hand, so beautifully descriptive and, on the other hand, so inscrutable? You get the sense that she’s describing something with perfect aptitude, but the object of her description is left indeterminate.

I think that we can feel our way toward an answer here by taking a cue from , who notes two dichotomies we can find in the poem: between natural and unnatural, and between living and dead. Michael reads the poem as describing a more general ecological disaster: “[The mussel] is alive, but living in a damaged world. This idea is reinforced later with a series of references to damage and destruction on one side, contrasted with the vibrant sea life…for me the whole poem is a metaphor for what we have done to the natural world. We swim through it, damaged yet still beautiful, yet ignoring the part that is already dead.”

Descriptive nature poetry has always had a kind of tension to it: on the one hand, what many nature poem most wants to give to the reader is a sense of wildness—the way that the natural world seems to operate according to uncivilized, non-human principles that might seem alien to human readers. But it has to communicate this sense of wildness through language, a medium that tends to name things, to make them feel comprehensible and human, to pin them down and make them feel familiar. To name something is to know it and to gain some sort of power over it—when Adam names all of the animals in the Bible, it seems as though he is being given providence over them. If a poet were to try to represent nature in poetry while maintaining that sense that it is alien and other—inaccessible to us in some way, not fully knowable—they might try to do something quite like what Moore does in this poem: frustrate our attempts to understand, to make the poem immediately sensible. She presents, as writes, “the way the eye tries to catch the entirety,” but not the entirety.

Our old friend Emily Dickinson once wrote:

The Brain is deeper than the sea— 
For—hold them—Blue to Blue— 
The one the other will absorb— 
As sponges—Buckets—do—

But I think our frustration with Moore suggests that she’s thinking along very different lines than the pro-Brain message of Dickinson’s stanza: a representation of the sea that is emphatically not absorbable by the Brain, or at least not very easily. This way of looking is not the frictionless absorption imagined by Dickinson, but, as Gemma puts it, using language to create “the grit around which an oyster constructs a pearl.” Mimesis through irritation. focuses on Moore’s description of the cliffside as “defiant.” It’s survived more years of being beaten by the sea than I can truly cognize; and perhaps, with its dynamite scars, it’s survived some manmade destruction as well. The poem itself, I think, mirrors this defiance. It presents us not with a model of the sea that we can easily imagine; instead, it presents us with our own incapacity to understand the ancient, “cosmic” () sea.

Marianne Moore, “The Fish”

wade
through black jade.
        Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
        adjusting the ash-heaps;
                opening and shutting itself like

an
injured fan.
        The barnacles which encrust the side
        of the wave, cannot hide
                there for the submerged shafts of the

sun,
split like spun
        glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
        into the crevices—
                in and out, illuminating

the
turquoise sea
        of bodies. The water drives a wedge
        of iron through the iron edge
                of the cliff; whereupon the stars,

pink
rice-grains, ink-
        bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green
        lilies, and submarine
                toadstools, slide each on the other.

All
external
        marks of abuse are present on this
        defiant edifice—
                all the physical features of

ac-
cident—lack
        of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
        hatchet strokes, these things stand
                out on it; the chasm-side is

dead.
Repeated
        evidence has proved that it can live
        on what can not revive
                its youth. The sea grows old in it.

I notice in this poem two kinds of language. First, descriptive language—where Moore is giving the reader visual information that can be imagined quite vividly. “wade/through black jade,” that is to say, seaweed, and see “crow-blue mussel-shells,” “the submerged shafts of the//sun,” and so on. The other kind of language I observe is less literal and harder to parse: “The water drives a wedge/of iron through the iron edge/of the cliff.” Well, of course cliffs aren’t iron, and the sea does not drive wedges of iron into cliffs, so what gives? There’s the straightforward pleasure of the descriptions here peppered by these thorny little puzzles of confusion. It’s almost as if Moore is luring us into the poem through the pleasure of the imagist language, then springing upon us, puzzling us by claiming: “Repeated/evidence has proved that it can live/on what can not revive/its youth. The sea grows old in it.” The fact that she ends on such a mysterious line suggests to me that whatever those difficult moments are meant to do to us as readers—confuse, communicate something complicated, whatever—is, for Moore, the most important thing about the poem.

For me, the most immediate pleasure came from “the stars,//pink/rice-grains, ink-/bespattered jellyfish,” where through the magic of metaphor, the pink spots on the dome of a jellyfish mirror, and become somehow the same as, the stars themselves. Poetic metaphor, especially in moments like this one, seems to suggest the oneness of everything.

I’ll see you all on Monday with another poem!

Emily Dickinson, Poem 1100, c. 1866

The last Night that She lived
It was a Common Night
Except the Dying—this to Us
Made Nature different

We noticed smallest things—
Things overlooked before
By this great light upon our Minds
Italicized—as ‘twere.

As We went out and in
Between Her final Room
And Rooms where Those to be alive
Tomorrow were, a Blame

That Others could exist
While She must finish quite
A Jealousy for Her arose
So nearly infinite—

We waited while She passed—
It was a narrow time—
Too jostled were Our Souls to speak
At length the notice came.

She mentioned, and forgot—
Then lightly as a Reed
Bent to the Water, struggled scarce—
Consented, and was dead—

And We—We placed the Hair—
And drew the Head erect—
And then an awful leisure was
Belief to regulate—

The poem is about watching someone die, an experience that is rendered strange and hyperreal through the poem’s form and ambiguity. As and noticed, the poem’s speaker is not a single person but a “We”—the poem offers us the collective sense of what it’s like to be one of multiple mourners awaiting, and then experiencing, the death of a loved one. (Isn’t it cool that a poem can make us imagine what it’s like to be more than one person at the same time?)

The strangeness of the poem appears in its unusual use of meter, as writes. This poem is composed of iambic feet, which are a combination of an unstressed and stressed syllable. (Think of how you might pronounce, say, “ahead”—the “uh” sound is more relaxed, or unstressed, and the “head” part usually gets more emphasis—it’s stressed. This combo of two syllables = an iambic foot.) Each stanza has two lines of 3 iambic feet, one line of 4, and another line of three:

The last Night that She lived (3 iambic feet)
It was a Common Night (3 iambic feet)
Except the Dying—this to Us (4 iambic feet)
Made Nature different (3 iambic feet)

There’s so much to discuss even here! Notice, in this stanza, how the first two lines use the same number of syllables to describe a “Common Night,” and as soon as “Dying” is mentioned, Dickinson switches to a 4-foot line, lending a sense of lopsidedness and rhythmic emphasis to that line. Gemma also noted how the 3-foot lines feel “halting.” If you read them aloud, they almost invite you to pause or breathe at the end:

The last Night that She lived (breath)
It was a Common Night (breath)
Except the Dying—this to Us (no breath, rush right into the next line)
Made Nature different (breath)

So each stanza begins with a halt, then tumbles forward with more speed and fluent rhythm—mimicking, as notes, the breathing of someone approaching death.

The sense of strangeness is further accentuated, as observes, in the slant rhymes (before/‘twere, quite/infinite, Reed/dead) and, I would add, in the poem’s inconsistent use of rhyme. The first, third, and final stanzas don’t rhyme at all, further increasing the sense of lopsidedness or arrested rhythm. The poem’s use of enjambment—where Dickinson decided to end lines—also adds to this effect, as lethe notes, especially in the third and fourth stanzas.

So, formally, we already have a poem that is both highly structured and highly unusual and lopsided-feeling—both elegant and unsettling to read, making human death, as says, seem both natural and unnatural, and as writes, throwing its reader “into the very disequilibrium that [Dickinson] describes.” I think these formal elements, whether or not one consciously notices them, contribute to what calls the “tremendous atmosphere,” and what writes is the sense that the poem takes us to “the rooms of death.”

The poem’s ambiguous and mysterious language compounds the strange effect of its form, as md and many other readers noted. notes that the poem seems to suggest, oddly, that the dying woman “consents” to death and that she “mentioned” and “forgot” something that the poem never names—adding to the sense, as belisaurus536 puts it, of the poem’s “squirming incompleteness,” or perhaps to a persistent sense of mystery, appropriate for a poem that narrates contact with the great mystery of death.

But is the poem ultimately unsettling or incomplete? Or does it offer reassurance of eternal life in the face of earthly death? We were more divided on this topic. A few ambiguous lines in the poem lead to this disagreement: the final two lines of the poem, “And then an awful leisure was / Belief to regulate—”. What’s going on here?

On the one hand, there are those who see this line as meaning that the speaker must accustom themselves to the reality that she—the dying woman—is gone. writes that, for the collective watchers, “it is an ‘awful leisure’ to reconcile and regulate their minds to a new reality”—that the woman is truly dead. concurred, writing that the poem’s final lines suggest how difficult it can be to accept the “absoluteness of death,” especially of a loved one. even compared the poem’s final lines to Robert Browning’s disturbing “Porphyria’s Lover,” which ends with the claim that “God has not said a word!” Perhaps the “awful leisure” implies a silence from God, the lack of a reassuring spiritual voice that helps the speaker make sense of their loss.

On the other hand, there are those who read the poem, especially its final lines, as offering a kind of succor or reassurance, offering a focus on healing “belief” rather than silent, “awful leisure.” “Death is a peculiar light,” writes Don Brandis, “suggesting that what all human finites want—infinity—we always already are.” Similarly, writes that Dickinson portrays the dying one as “almost infinite because [the speaker] never comprehended the woman’s ability to cease to exist.” For these readers, including , belief cannot regulate itself to include the “absoluteness of death.”

As a side note, I think the poem’s publication date—1866—is important for thinking about how beliefs about death might have been changing. After the overwhelming death and destruction caused by the Civil War, many Americans were changing the way they thought about the afterlife. In her bestselling 1868 novel The Gates Ajar, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, imagined that Heaven was a homelike realm, a place where people would once again see their loved ones. For many readers of the time, this was a novel idea. In her more indeterminate rendering of the process of death, Dickinson does not offer such easy consolation as Phelps Ward; to believe that this poem suggests everlasting life is something of an act of faith. Perhaps the differences in interpretations reflect the diversity of interpreters more than any stable meaning that’s intrinsic to the poem.

What we do know is that, as , , and wrote, the poem describes how intense or extreme experiences change the way we perceive the world—add a strange clarity to it, the sort of thing that Dickinson suggests when she says that death makes everything “Italicized,” as if the world were a gigantic book, and its author wanted to emphasize certain passages, leading us to notice and perhaps appreciated “Things overlooked before”—such as the small gesture of fixing a dead loved one’s hair, as writes. Simon wrote, wonderfully, about another intense experience, but one of life rather than death: “The day my youngest was born I waited at a crossing and watched a bus to Marley Road go past, and thought ‘I’ll remember that bus for the rest of my life.’ ‘By this great light upon our minds Italicised’ is exactly right.”

So I thought it might be fun, as an experiment, to use the Substack platform to do some close readings with other people and to see what we can notice together. The goal is to get a group of people to collectively enjoy some good poetry.

Every Friday, I’ll post a poem and a paragraph describing something I noticed about the poem. Anyone can add a comment describing something that they noticed about the poem. The point is not to say something smart or dazzling, but just to point out what you noticed. If enough people take part, then everyone can collectively notice—and appreciate—more about the poem than they would if they were simply reading the poem alone, and I’ll post a summary on Monday afternoon, listing some of the most exciting things we all noticed about the poem.

So… let’s give it a shot!

Emily Dickinson, Poem 1100, c. 1866

The last Night that She lived
It was a Common Night
Except the Dying—this to Us
Made Nature different

We noticed smallest things—
Things overlooked before
By this great light upon our Minds
Italicized—as ‘twere.

As We went out and in
Between Her final Room
And Rooms where Those to be alive
Tomorrow were, a Blame

That Others could exist
While She must finish quite
A Jealousy for Her arose
So nearly infinite—

We waited while She passed—
It was a narrow time—
Too jostled were Our Souls to speak
At length the notice came.

She mentioned, and forgot—
Then lightly as a Reed
Bent to the Water, struggled scarce—
Consented, and was dead—

And We—We placed the Hair—
And drew the Head erect—
And then an awful leisure was
Belief to regulate—

I noticed two things. The first is simply a lovely effect: the repetition of “we” in the final stanza (“And We—We placed the Hair—”) sounds like someone struggling to speak through emotion, especially if you read it out loud and pause at the dash. The line itself isn’t saying anything overtly emotional, but that little pause makes it feel terribly sad. And this emotional moment is paired with “placed the Hair”—an intimate, understated, practical, loving thing to do to someone who has just died—reflects how strange this scenario can feel. Even in moments of profound mystery and sorrow, like a death, the everyday necessities of life go on. It’s bathos, but good.

The other thing I noticed is the thing I feel like I always notice with Emily Dickinson poems: the final line or two is often so strange and hard to parse. “And then an awful leisure was / Belief to regulate—” is hard to understand, but evocative enough (to me) that I want to go back through the rest of the poem and figure out what the words mean. My first guess is that “awful leisure” is death, or perhaps the sight of the corpse reclined, and that “Belief to regulate” suggests that this is the moment when religious belief swoops in to regulate “Our” grief or horror and make it manageable, to provide some sort of framework for understanding the terrible thing that’s just happened. But the initial effect of this sort of line, for me, is first to baffle me a little bit, then to make me curious, then to make me go back.

Now, please write to me: what did you notice?