I’ve told some folks that I’m working on Emily Dickinson’s “No Kings” piece this week. Now, that’s hardly true. There is a king in this poem and he doesn’t come off so well in its telling; but there’s a naïve maiden too, and Emily’s going to paint her as much a fool as the pompous potentate.

If much has been made about the use of hymn meter in Dickinson’s verse and connections there to her skeptical view of conventional religion, plot-wise this poem takes its tale from an extremely common folk and folk-broadside trope: the foolish maiden. In countless variations some man of high-degree dallies with a young woman of the common folk, and it usually doesn’t turn out well for the girl.*  In the best of it, he’s a cad and leaves her; in the worst, there’s murder most foul in the offing. Many folk songs, including those in this grouping, open with it being a Spring morning. Springtime promises, it seems, aren’t to be trusted the voice of folk music says.

I’m not scholar enough to tell how many such songs Emily Dickinson knew, but they were highly common in her time, and I suspect she was using that folk-music plot here to make her point about what life promises us, and about trusting kings.

Here’s a chord sheet to assist if you’d like to sing this in your parlor. I like the sound of 9th chords, but they were chosen here to ease my fingering on guitar and can likely be simplified if that suits other players.

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In “The Sun – just touched the Morning”  we have the morning herself playing the foolish maiden and the sun is the sun king who likely believes that when you’re a king they just let you grab it. The sun, as we might guess, soon has to be moving on doing important stuff like making dew into a passing mock-up of glittering jewels, but Morning thinks she is to be his queen. Dickinson reports Morning trying to act like the imperial Sun, crowned with a dew-drop diadem: “She felt herself supremer – A Raised – Ethereal Thing!”

Dickinson knows how this comes out: there’s no crown on offer, no coronation. Some divine right will not tell us who is right, honorable, reciprocal, or trustworthy – that will be up to our “unanointed foreheads.”

So it is: hymns generally tell us how to live right, how to praise a beyond-human perspective, while folk songs take on the task of telling us not to be a fool.

As I composed this, I tried to use a 19^th century popular song kind of feel, but ended up being enticed by rock quartet instrumentation with a chiming electric guitar element. If I was to do another version, I might lean more into parlor instruments – but this’ll have to do for now, for we have present business with kings we refuse to allow.

You can hear this song version of Emily Dickinson’s “The Sun – just touched the Morning”  with the audio player below. What? Has the king refused to fund any such audio player? No, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog won’t show the player, and I offer this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player so you can hear it.

 

 

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*There are exceptions. Every so often the young woman susses out or tells off the cad; and though told in a different plot-order, in one of my favorite British Isles folk-songs “Willie of Winsbury”  the young girl’s suspicious father is the fool.