holiday

Thanksgivings

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

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 17th 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-19th 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.

Thanksgivings with ghosts
“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.

One day there is of the series: Emily Dickinson’s Thanksgiving, sort of

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Did you know that Emily Dickinson wrote a Thanksgiving poem? It’s not one of her “Greatest Hits” or anything, but it does represent a couple of Dickinsonian traits: skeptical humor and puzzling philosophical concision. You can read the text of it here as I discuss my encounter with it.

Dickinson didn’t use titles, and the first line, our entry into the poem, starts off with a strange tentativeness. What’s the series? All the days of our lives, of history? Or a series of holidays? I suspect the last, in that the next line throws up the American holiday inside quotes. It’s hard not to read “Thanksgiving Day” in Dickinson’s text without intonating the words with “air quotes,” that at least slightly dismissive way of saying “Well, you can call it that  if you want.”

I’m not a Dickinson scholar but I get the impression that Dickinson uses quotes literally—that is, when she’s quoting someone*—but there is a sense here of our modern manner in the poems first half. And as the poem continues, its opening comments could be written this week by someone musing on the holiday. Yup, Thanksgiving is a strange mix: part a big meal, a gluttonous celebration; and part memories of worshiping dissenter pilgrims and family. And Dickinson, in her thirties as she wrote her poem, notes she’s not sitting at the kids table nor is she some honored elder closer to the pilgrims than the present. So, outsider in a middle place, she says she’ll post a review, from her “Hooded thinking.”

Maybe you’re visualizing The Handmaids Tale  when you read “Hooded.” I think Dickinson is taking a bit of a religious acolyte’s stance in her review, even if playfully. Her two-word review: “Reflex Holiday.” You’re just going through the motions she seems to be saying.

Emily Dickinson family portrait

One won’t get a turkey drumstick: Emily Dickinson on the left with her siblings.

 

The poem could end there, but Dickinson takes off in the second half in gnomic concision. This is often beautiful as word music, but it’s hard to follow her mind.

What’s the sharp subtraction for the early sum? A falling away from religious immediacy? Mankind’s fall from grace? Forgetting the history or piety of the holiday? The next two lines are even more weird. What the heck does “Not an acre or a Caption/Where was once a Room” mean? This is Dickinson the hermetic riddler. I’ve rolled that couplet around in my head for a week and it always slips from my grasp.

The tossed pebble wrinkling the sea lines have a Blakean tone. Here the mystic Dickinson is plain as any mystic can be in words: our lives, our actions, are small against creation—just visible, just for so long. Her final couplet seems to say that our thanks, our Reflex Holiday, is insufficient to the gift. This realization combined with the reflex action is, in a way, a more sublime and awe-some thanks.

What an odd poem! It starts out witty and lightly skeptical and (as best as I can figure it) closes on a humble mysticism.

Musically, I tried to hew to the mystery, if a strange resonant piano and wavery synth can portray that. The player is below. Thanks for reading and listening!

 

 

 

 

*If she is quoting a person, it may well be Sarah Hale, a New England journalist who campaigned for the importance of a Thanksgiving holiday during Dickinson’s day.