Month: August 2021

“I Meant To Have But Modest Needs”

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The themes of death and prayer come up often in Emily Dickinson’s work. Her #476 recounts praying to God only that she might be content and also go to Heaven. She then experiences a feeling of doubt about the Bible verse ,”Whatsoever you asketh, that shall be given you,” renders herself fooled like a child and moves on. Many of her poems reflect the conflicts and doubts she experienced when it came to committing herself to the organized Christian church. Unlike the rest of her devout family who went to church each Sunday, Emily preferred to keep the Sabbath at home.

According to The Emily Dickinson Museum, “Emily Dickinson lived in an age defined by the struggle to reconcile traditional Christian beliefs with newly emerging scientific concepts, the most influential being Darwinism. Dickinson’s struggles with faith and doubt reflect her society’s diverse perceptions of God, nature, and humankind.”

https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/emily-dickinson/biography/special-topics/emily-dickinson-and-the-church/

My poem #476 is quite different from Emily’s. It deals with a “first world problem”, the issue of having experienced a higher standard of living and later not feeling inclined to settle for anything less!

“They Ask But Our Delight-“

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The collage background I chose for this poem is just a fun little thing I did with leftover scraps from another decoupage project. I delighted in making it, so I guess that’s its connection to today’s poem #868. Emily’s poem was about flowers and all the other “darlings of the soil”. Mine recounts the first 5 things that came to mind as I pondered delight. Perhaps I’ve prompted you to do the same.

“The Future Never Spoke”

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My process for writing these Carol and Emily poems is to try NOT to read Emily’s before I write mine. Although I’ve read much of her work at one time or another in the past, for the purposes of this project, I tried to only read the first lines and wrote each one of those on the top of a page in a huge stack of journals. During each writing session, I randomly choose one and flip through it, until I come upon a first line that strikes me, and I go to work on that. After I’ve written my poem, I go back and read Emily’s as well as any analysis of it.

Her work is more often than not, generally associated with the words cryptic, enigmatic and mysterious. Poem #672 is unlike the larger body of Emily Dickinson’s poems, in that it’s more straightforward than most. She rather simply personifies “Future” and explains how it never lets on what is going to happen. I personified Past, Present, and Future in mine, as I waxed poetic about the evolution of time as it affects humankind in a myriad of ways. Hope you can relate and enjoy!

“I Had Been Hungry All The Years”

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It is widely accepted that in poem #579 Emily uses food and hunger as metaphors for life. As humans we hunger for much more than food, and certainly Emily felt those same hungers. We find and try things, people, jobs, and places we think we want and later find them not to be the case. At times we can’t identify the thing that would gratify the hunger we feel, but we know what the emptiness of its absence feels like.

My journey to satiate that unidentified want ended in 2003 when I met my best friend and love in the face of a man I never would have chosen before. He wasn’t an outlaw, a (public) bad boy, or a rebel. He was everything I never knew I wanted and everything I had always needed to compliment the person I am. I literally saw myself sparkling in his azure eyes and the rest is 18 beautiful years of history. He’s my third and last husband and he loves and puts up with all of me, (even when I flip him a bird). This one’s for him. ❤

“We See Comparatively”

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“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.” Anais Nin

“What we see depends mainly on what we look for.” John Lubbock

The two quotes above illustrate the same idea that Emily proposed in poem #534, that we see things through our personal lenses of likeness and contrast. Not unlike now, but certainly more during her time, the opportunity to travel far was limited to those wealthy enough to do so. Today we have the whole world at our fingertips, literally, through our devices. If unable to travel, we can virtually experience a trip anywhere around the planet to view the many wonders of people, places and lifestyles foreign to us. No matter how we connect with others, we still perceive them through the lens of who we are. I wrote this because I think we all (including me) need to be reminded of that fact, and to appreciate the differences that exist in our human family without comparing them to ourselves.