I’d hoped to have some more new musical pieces ready this month, but as I’ve reached the eve of the American Thanksgiving holiday I thought I’d mention a previous Parlando Project piece that has gotten attention this month as people on the Internet look for poetry about that holiday.

The post, the one people seek, presents this little marvel from Emily Dickinson:

One day is there of the series
Termed “Thanksgiving Day”
Celebrated part at table
Part in memory —
Neither Ancestor nor Urchin
I review the Play —
Seems it to my Hooded thinking
Reflex Holiday
Had There been no sharp subtraction
From the early Sum —
Not an acre or a Caption
Where was once a Room
Not a mention whose small Pebble
Wrinkled any Sea,
Unto such, were such Assembly,
‘Twere “Thanksgiving day” —

Though silent on the page, I can hear Dickinson’s voice start out examining this holiday at arm’s length. It has claims to be a historical commemoration (the landing of English colonialists in her home state of Massachusetts in 1620) but its observance, then as well as now, is basically a big meal, often with extended family in attendance. Many folks reading this today recognize or remember being in that in-between state of age at a Thanksgiving gathering, no longer a child, but not one of the family elders — neither urchin nor ancestor. Similarly, the Thanksgiving holiday in Dickinson’s time was of unclear seniority: it claimed to represent those 17^th century English settlers and their harvest feast, yet the promotion of a U.S. holiday that became the one we celebrate now was a new movement of the mid-19^th century.

Dickinson at first reviews it as if a pageant, and then as she starts to become a little harder to follow, with “Hooded thinking.” My guess is she’s meditating on it as if a monk or a nun wearing a habit. Her resulting take: “Reflex Holiday.” Fair — most holidays, most of the time, have elements of reflex: they are set celebrations, dates on a calendar. Sincere thanks-giving requires no excuse or appointment. If Dickinson had ended there, we’d have a poem in a predominate style of our age: a sharing of an observation from one sensibility to any and all, not unlike an Internet post.

“Celebrated part at table/Part in memory —”

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Dickinson however also has an abstract mode where our less agile minds may not follow as rapidly as her poem jumps away in the next lines. Have we subtracted from the piety of the Pilgrim settlers? And then the most obscure set of lines in the poem: “Not an acre or a Caption/Where was once a Room.” Huh?

I may not understand those lines. I certainly didn’t when I performed the poem a few years back, but this occurs to me: talk of acres as if in a deed, and the use of the curious word “Caption,” reminds me that she was a smart woman in a family where the men were lawyers. Caption is a legal term, it means, I find out, “that part of a legal instrument such as indictment, commission etc., which shows where, when and by what authority that legal instrument is taken, found, or executed.” Understanding that usage I think it highly likely she’s saying that the holiday celebration may not be on firm legal standing. Is she just commenting on the holiday not yet being a national holiday as it eventually became in the U.S.? Or does she have — or do we, her readers today, have — a reading outside the borders and celebration of the poem drawn by a culture of colonizers whose small settlement was under the forbearance of those already there?*

Dickinson closes by saying the original Thanksgiving assembly was like the proverbial pebble that spreads ever widening ripples in the water. Yes, big circles long past the pebbles. History is an unending cycle of theft and accumulation, deliverance and conquest. Kindness and fellowship are short in comparison. Oh, so short. And so sweet. Thanks for the sweetness is what I’ll celebrate.

Here’s an audio player below to the musical piece I performed using Dickinson’s words. Don’t see it? This highlighted link is a backup.

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*A native American summary statement on this Thanksgiving matter comes to mind, considering the indigenous population brought food to that first harvest feast: “We did the giving. We got no thanks.” Could these matters have been on Dickinson’s mind? I don’t have the scholarship to support that. Should that injustice be our only thought as we celebrate our families and give thanks? No, I’m not saying that, but even as a “reflex,” a required simple thought and remembrance, that thought seems due on this day.