It seems much of what I’ve written lately follows the theme of both random and not so random worrisome thoughts swirling through my mind at inopportune times. Times when I need to clear my head, relax, or sleep peacefully. I could try to assign it to Pandemic Brain, but this phenomenon is not at all unusual for me. I tend to plan in my mind for the worst case scenarios so I will be relieved when anything less than that happens. As a mother, I still irrationally question what part I have in any unfortunate situations my adult child gets into. That mother guilt. Those what ifs. Those if onlys. Those would have, should have, could haves.
In her poem #701, Emily wrote of having a thought reoccur Deja vu-like (my interpretation), but being unable to determine from where it came. I’m sure many of us can relate to both of these instances.
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.”
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!
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. PerhapsI’veprompted you to do the same.
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!
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 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.
Unless you’re new to Emily Dickinson, you know that Death was never far away in her thoughts and poetry. In #1646 she speaks of being “molested by immortality” and seems to say that we’re being tricked into thinking it will all last, when nothing actually will, because everything ends, so why hurry ourselves to that dark night.
The case against hurrying is not new. The irony is that we’ve been telling ourselves to slow down since the invention of everything humans have designed to help us do more faster. The reality is that we miss so much when we hurry. Most of all we miss the opportunity for genuine connection with others, nature, and our own inner selves. And the ramifications of all of that? Staggering, massive, and negatively consequential. So let’s take a moment whenever we can and focus on living our lives a little slower, because being more mindful can only make things better for all of us.
Some say Emily Dickinson had a morbid fascination with death. Others see the fact that approximately 1/6th of all her poems and letters were about death as something not unusual for one who lived next to a cemetery and during a time when folks died of illnesses at a much younger age than we do today. Her poem #614 speaks of diggers attempting to find a man buried in rubble. Too late, the saving grace is Death, in that he is no longer suffering.
I saw the setting of the first line of #614 as a place where dreams die, aspirations are quashed and we sometimes don’t even understand that we have made ourselves prisoners. I imagined a frolic of mythical forest fairies engaging in a battle with death, attempting to coax it into and ward it off with their fairy ring of mushrooms, a place of legendary doom for non-fairy folk.
In researching fairy rings, I learned quite a bit and will definitely be on the lookout for them in the future. If there’s a full moon and you see me running around one nine times, from east to west (the direction of the sun), it will be in hopes of hearing the fairies dancing and frolicking underground. Please just watch from afar and don’t make me lose count, for legend has it if I run around a tenth time I will meet ill fate and be made to run to the point of exhaustion and death and/or perhaps become invisible.
According to some scholars, Dickinson’s poem #613 is quite the exercise in feminism. In it, she masterfully uses the imagery of a captive bird and speaks in a defiant voice about the struggles of being a female, expected to be silent and kept locked up by societal expectations of the mid 1800’s.
Although she never engaged in any public romantic relationships, researchers have long questioned the many cryptic references to “loves” in her poetry and posed questions about her private life and potential relationships with several men and also with her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson. In my version of this poem I imagine the coded language she used to send messages that would not be deemed appropriate during her time. Over a century and a half later, fans of her work are still looking for the meanings between her lines.
Note on “fascicles:
*During Dickinson’s intense writing period (1858-1864), she copied more than 800 of her poems into small booklets, forty in all, now called “fascicles.” She made the small volumes herself from folded sheets of paper that she stacked and then bound by stabbing two holes on the left side of the paper and tying the stacked sheets with string. She shared these with no one. They were discovered by her sister Lavinia after Emily’s death.
The kindness of strangers, the devotion of one who loves or simply cares. Emily most certainly knew and exercised both herself, as have you and I. Unable to sleep any later this morning, I rose early and flipped through my catalog of first lines and chose this one. I immediately thought of all of the times others have gifted me with exactly what I was unknowingly in need of and also of those times when strangers or kind hearts have seen an obvious need and spontaneously reached out to take my hand, light my way or lighten my load. Their kindnesses served to increase the want in me to do the same.
A moment in time that would register insignificant in the chronicles of world history could be a catalyst, a lifeboat, or a key to a long locked door. We often have no idea or at least not the full extent of the impact of a small act of kindness. That’s the key to it all though, to the world being a gentler place. If we are living and breathing, if we have eyes to see or ears to detect a need, we have it in us to inspire, to educate, and to influence and affect others in a positive way. May we all rise to the occasion.
The Carol and Emily Project 