dawn

A Something in a summer’s Day

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

A wonderful something about Emily Dickinson’s large body of poetry is that there are always “new” poems to discover just by paying attention to them. Take this one for example. It’s not one of the Greatest Hits, yet despite being an early poem – the estimated date of its manuscript is 1859, a few years before Dickinson’s most productive years in the 1860s – it already demonstrates her poetic strengths. Today I’m going to catalog some things I note in it, but if you’re not into such details, feel free to skip down the page to the performance.

Let’s start with some Dickinsonian unusual word choices, since she hits us with a couple right off. Uncountable poets have described the light of sunrise, but her choice of “flambeaux” to describe it seems novel. What’s a flambeaux?* It’s a big torch, often with a rank of multiple flames. To Dickinson it’d be a feature of a parade. Did she see or read of such? In her day, marches were a significant part of political campaigning. Her father was a politician, did his Whigs or the more raucous Democrats march with such torchlight? There are other parades that might feature flambeaux. Far from her largely Protestant Massachusetts, flambeaux were (and still are) part of New Orleans Mardi Gras. That’s something she wouldn’t have seen, but her poems sometimes gather exotica taken from her reading – perhaps this is one?

And “solemnizes me.” As a choice, a more active way to describe a change in outlook or mood. A reaction of mine here is a stretch, but my looking for connection ear also hears “Solomon-izing me.” Would the famously herbaceous Emily recall the line about the nature of field lilies from the Gospel of Matthew: “…not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed like one of these.”

Something in a Summers Day

A chord sheet for today’s musical performance, included because I believe there are others out there who might like to sing this poem.

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Word sound-music is rich in the poem. Besides this poem’s rhyme — none of her slant or off rhymes here, though I love the sound of that apostasy elsewhere in her poetry — but the sounds of inline words are constantly resonating and chiming with each other, a “shimmering grace” in sound.

Her famous 4-foot/3-foot hymn or ballad meter is present here, but with a twist: all save the last stanza have two 4-foot lines and then a concluding 3, which gives them a feeling of conclusion, much like the line/repeat/different sequence of the classic 3-line Blues stanza.

The plot of the poem is the procession of a day from dawn through day, then night, then the next dawn, but the middle of poem explicitly promises ecstasy.**  The episodes contained there, I experience as such. There’s a nighttime wash of bright stars or moonlight.***  Dickinson’s voice here turns transported acolyte, clapping in my mind, dancing as well, like some Amherst Sufi.

What does she see, and want us to see, in the 4th stanza? Its transport is somewhat mysterious. It could be something like wispy clouds drifting over the stars and moon, but as a fellow northern-parts American with Dickinson, I suspect that “fluttering,” subtle–shimmering” grace is the Northern Lights.

And what’s being described in the 5th stanza? On the face of it, a little brook in nighttime – but I see something else in metaphor being developed here: the constrained “purple brook” seems to me to be veins. Veins in plants, veins in animals, coursing blood-vessels in ourselves. And the red, the next dawn’s red, that follows is as if the blood life-force within all of Gaia is bursting forth in this ecstatic vision beyond venous constraints.

And finally, there’s another switch-up: we get a concluding 4-line stanza, this time in the conventional hymn/ballad quatrain. And what does it present after this mystical vision? That vision’s mundane container: (just) another day. Is Dickinson trying to conventionalize herself here? Calm a possible reader that she’s not a wild-night, wild-eyed mystic, but just another twenty-something 19th century upper middle-class young woman who indulges herself in some daily nature thoughts in verse? Could it be a smile at a sense of contrast: that we attend to and then not attend to the great eternities of things throughout our lives? Or is she in addition reminding us that ordinary, ongoing, oh-so-daily, life is the stage, the ground, the staff upon which any visionary song of experience is scored?

I chose to stay calm in my solemnized performance of Dickinson. I used a small half-broken parlor guitar (the size of guitar Dickinson would have known) and also played a restrained upright bass part. In the background I allowed a shimmering modulated electric piano which I’m playing with one or two fingers to flutter for the fathomless stars. You can hear the sum of all this with the audio player below. If that’s not there, it’s only veiled by some ways of reading this blog – and you can click on this grace-granting highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player gadget.

 

 

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*It’s not a term relating to your friend who’s dating a drummer. Sorry. Not sorry. The mystic has written that the road of puns leads to the palace of wisdom.

**Earlier this summer I read Wild Poets of Ecstasy  compiled by D. J. Moore, a near-400-page anthology collecting poems of erotic and spiritual passion. Capsule review: it promised more than it consistently delivered, but I appreciated the attempt, and it probably put me in the mood for this understanding of Dickinson’s poem today.

***An overwhelming wash of starlight would have been mundane to Dickinson in her time and place, as it still was for me in the tiny rural town I grew up in a century later. Whenever I return on some clear night to such skies over and outside of dense collections of lighted buildings and roads, I am star-drenched.

I’ll Tell You How the Sun Rose

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

After our short trip to Chinese translation, let’s return again to Emily Dickinson, who is observing another morning.

This LYL Band performance of “I’ll Tell You How the Sun Rose”  is a bit imperfect. Alternative Parlando Project reader Dave Moore takes the lead here, but he and I are singing instead of our usual recitative, and we’re caught at the top of our singing range as well. Dave even bobbles a word in the line “The hills untied their bonnets.” So, yes, this leads to some imperfection—but this lyric is so perfect that perhaps it can carry us along anyway.

I suggest you listen to this piece now and then read my discussion of what I see in it afterward. Dickinson, like a good melody, doesn’t require understanding before enjoyment. The player to hear it is at the bottom of this post.

“I’ll Tell You How the Sun Rose”  begins with a homespun 19th century village dawn, and the singer starts right off almost bragging that they can tell us how the sun comes up. As proof, Dickinson unleashes a string of lovely, singing metaphors for sunrise, looking down from the dawn only once to let us see the squirrels running about as if with the news of the day. She concludes this section with finest simplicity: “That must have been the sun!”

Isn’t that a strange way to sum up dawn? It comes up and it’s already past tense, like Meng Haoran’s morning in the last post, and Dickinson comments on this common splendor as if she’s a surprised alien from another planet who has never seen the sun. Her boast that she can tell us “how the sun rose”—something she and all of us should already know, set in nothing more special than a prosaic town—becomes instead a small, whispered, apprehended wonder.

In the second section, Dickinson shifts gears so smoothly that no matter how many times you read or hear this poem you will never notice. There is a little engagement of the gears as she says of sunset “I know not,” unlike our first gear’s “I’ll tell you;” but we’re soon on to a rural scene with the sun rays like children climbing up and then down a stairway over a hedge or fence row (a stile).  At that point, there’s a bustle in your hedgerow as the dusk becomes a grey robed “dominie,” a strange and archaic word perhaps even in Dickinson’s 19th century, and a sure stumper for any modern English speaker.

A dominie is a Latin word meaning the leader of a congregation, a minister, a pastor—and ‘pastor” is derived from the word for shepherd—and that’s just what our grey dusk becomes as it leads the children of the dawn, now dusk, away like a flock, closing the bars, closing the gate, so that they cannot return.

Some readers are so charmed by Dickinson’s first section that they feel it is pedantic to think that this sunset section is describing a passage to death, “The undiscovered country from whose bourn, no traveler returns,” so no wonder that Dickinson moved from “I’ll tell you” to “I know not.”

That dominie seems so removed from the pleasant village of the first section, so foreign. Another subtle word choice contrasts the two sections. There’s only 88 words in this piece, and five of them are colors. “Rose” puns for dawn pink in the first line and then dawn is “amethyst,” a word for both purple and a semi-precious stone. The sunray children are “yellow”, and our strange dominie is dusky “gray.” The stile sunset stairway that the sunray children are climbing is “purple.” So out of our five colors, one of them is roughly the same color. In the first section, it’s semi-precious and wondrous, but in the second it’s just purple—a ruling, royal color perhaps—but those sunset ray children’s steps are ruled over not ruling, not shining like the amethyst steeples of the dawn.

stile sunset

Putting on the stile

 

Did you listen to the performance of “I’ll Tell You How the Sun Rose”  before reading all this? I feel a bit here as if I’m acting  like that dominie myself, leading you past the plain and beautiful dawn, over the stile, and closing the gate to simply hearing the sound and the manner of expression of Dickinson. Too often we make too much of the meaning of poetry, and particular the deeper meaning of poems. Just as Meng Haoran’s poem from last time can be understood well enough to be enjoyed by children, this poem too can be enjoyed as compressed observation. Perhaps it’s because I am an old man, one who has tried to write and make music for many years, that I care to see what is underneath the sun rays, to look over the stile, and to find what is inside Emily Dickinson’s expression.

To hear the LYL Band perform “I’ll Tell You How the Sun Rose,”  use the player below.