As promised yesterday, I’ve been thinking about this Emily Dickinson poem, about how it handles the unsayable, implies the unsaid:
Emily Dickinson – 978 (1864)
It bloomed and dropt, a Single Noon-
The Flower-distinct and Red-
I, passing, thought another Noon
Another in its stead
Will equal glow, and thought no More
But came another Day
To find the Species disappeared-
The Same Locality-
The Sun in place-no other fraud
On Nature's perfect Sum-
Had I but lingered Yesterday-
Was my retrieveless blame-
Much Flowers of this and further Zones
Have perished in my Hands
For seeking its Resemblance-
But unapproached it stands-
The single Flower of the Earth
That I, in passing by
Unconscious was-Great Nature's Face
Passed infinite by Me-
After posting the poem on my Facebook page, Ira Sadoff (the brilliant Ira Sadoff) and I have had a bit of an exchange about it:
Ira.
I hadn't remembered this, but I know she has written so many beautiful and secret poems waiting to be discovered. All that ambiguity in the syntax here, and sadness of course, in the temporal and loneliness:
Much Flowers of this and further Zones
Have perished in my Hands
For seeking its Resemblance-
…. and so much to make of that last line.
JL.
Thanks, Ira. It's dazzling, this poem. There is such a beautiful, and such a gradual, increase of degree in intensity in the poem. It begins in such human depths and dimensions, and line by line, stanza by stanza, as if the voice has infused itself with the manifold intensity of the storm, reaches heights of some spiritual nature, all of which crescendo into whatever it is that last line almost but not quite reveals, the only thing that can envelope the whole vision—one in which the voice refuses the notion that some things are beyond or above the human.
Ira.
Agree. The syntax of the last line makes that happen. So often when you hear people talk about Dickinson as a nature poet, I think Dickinson uses nature as a metaphor for some human angst. Here she tries to clear out a missed opportunity of grand proportions in the flower as an image that signals "further zones…." So moving!
Some, I’ve noticed, look to nail down what the flower “means,” noting especially the force and effect of that dramatic “perished in my hands.” Flowers as emblems of her passions and thoughts, some say. The poem itself as a playing out of “the invisibility and fragility of women in the partriarchal society.” Surely that, too.
But for my reading, it seems to me truest that those extraordinary discoveries expressing themselves in startling verbs and nouns signal the best a poet can do in working out – in approaching – what’s not only unsayable, but largely unknowable.
The passing infinite by of great nature’s face. That nearly mystical moment curates it’s own components by means of the fragment “Much Flowers of this and Further Zones.”
Further Zones, indeed. Those fragments descend to us like solitary outriders haunted by communion. Shimmering and brief, "eviscerated," as Emerson said, "of care," vulnerability is the mark of their existence. If they are the nuclei of a poem offered up in a state of pure potentiality and in search of conditions yet to be defined, they are like souls, neither touching nor mingling, never composing a full set.
We’re deposited inside the beauties of transition and isolation at once, and in her hands, we’re made to belong to a chronology of the instant, defined more by a passing infinite silence than by a need to define or express. What, after all, is more transient than the unsayable?
What’s unsaid scatters in all directions. What we don’t, or cannot say, or cannot fathom to say, to our mothers and fathers, our sons and daughters, our wives and husbands, our friends and colleagues, lingers just out of range, at it must be.
We live, after all, inside a dream, inexpressible as an indrawn breath.