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description=Brief essays on each poem of Emily Dickinson, written in chronological order on a daily basis. An ongoing project!;

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Text of the page (random words):
you please just ask again and i ll come running i can relate to this scenario dickinson puts it into epic poetic terms the land is ebbing away from the ocean reversing the usual perspective of the ocean ebbing from the land and the ocean is now losing the land if i can t hear you call again says the poet would st thou seek so just say that i the answer may pursue unto the lips it eddied through the shore is now pursuing the receding ocean so it can hear what it has to say but look at the way it happens if we are following the metaphor then the water of the ocean even as it is ebbing away eddies back to shore calling back to it eddied is a great verb here an eddy is a current of water running contrary to the main current this counter current creates a circular motion like a tide pool whitman dickinson s contemporary uses the metaphor of words eddying too he also has the great line about the crooked inviting fingers of the sea that i was reminded of here the poet says she will follow the eddying pleas of the receding ocean straight to its lips the lip of the ocean one pictures the edge of the wave is not just the place from which speech comes but also where the kiss happens the lips of the shore who tells me to the ocean meets the lips of the ocean who tells me to the shore they meet in the middle expressed as a kiss there the ear becomes the mouth the mouth the ear the me becomes an us so overtaking thee the ocean is being overtaken by the land the tide has risen the wave has come back to shore or rather to follow the weird inversion of the metaphor the shore has come back to the wave the two are drawn together in a kiss when the me overtakes the thee then both are gone there is only us left it s possible to think of going out to kiss the ocean as meaning death by drowning the me is overtaken in the overtaking of thee finally one last formal thing note the way that extra line of tetrameter in the second stanza the final 4 of the 4434443 suspends the final rhyme this makes the poem feel subtly breathless which gives the sense of the effort in the overtaking the undertaking of the overtaking this poem overtakes me why because i can relate i understand the feeling of finding someone who really understands you and the frustration of losing that it s human it understands me dam wade l egraff p s i have seen it what eternity it is the sun matched by the sea arthur rimbaud posted by d scribe at 5 12 pm 3 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest 13 july 2026 the bird must sing to earn the crumb the bird must sing to earn the crumb what merit have the tune no breakfast if it guaranty the rose content may bloom to gain renown of lady s drawer but if the lady come but once a century the rose superfluous become f928 j880 sheet 14 1865 was emily writing these poems for just anyone what was the crumb this poet earned with her song what breakfast did these poems guaranty her these poems this drawer of roses an astonishing number of them mean so much to us but what do we in turn matter to emily s day to day life or did dickinson s poems have a more pointed audience well we do know that many of dickinson s poems were given often with a flower attached to her friends and we also know know that the largest majority were given to emily s sister in law susan dickinson so i think it s fair to say that some if not all did have specific personal intentions but the ambiguity remains nevertheless is sue the lady in this poem then or is this lady here meant to be something or someone more divinely ethereal the poem works either way and sometimes i think emily did too but mostly i think this was for sue i bet this song was delivered to her with a red rose to underscore its message it s implicitly asking will this rose be shoved into a drawer with the rest will you finally come and visit me if you read this poem after f925 the lady feeds her little bird which was written on the sheet before this one sheet 13 you begin to see a pattern these poems were meant for a single lady one who lived right next door to emily this lady wasn t like emily who preferred to stay in the confines of her own garden for interminable weeks on end sue would get caught up in her own family and social life ignoring her faithful friend not to mention one of the world s greatest poets after all sue could just look out of her window toward emily s now and then just offer the merest crumb and the bird would be fed breakfast i can feel the deep sigh in these poems the pathos another poem in this lady robin series is f810 the robin for the crumb returns no syllable but long records the lady s name in silver chronicle the wonder is that dickinson did just that she records in her poetry the silver chronicle of her adoration for sue this chronicle was beautifully enough rendered that it would last long past the lifetimes of the friends but the irony is that dickinson doesn t record the lady s name we just know her has the lady in these poems what makes the poetry last perhaps is in the way it is so deeply personal and yet transcends the personal at once would we remember these poems if they all said susan instead of lady by making it anonymous it includes the general reader we are all the bird looking for crumbs from the lady s hand we are all hoping for breakfast for a break in our fast and if we are the bird we are also the lady if these poems are generalized to include us too then what are the crumbs we may give to the hungry ghost of the poet we may give her our attention she kept the roses for us by imbuing them with us much beauty and love as her genius could muster the bird must sing to earn the crumb does this line reveal the secret of emily s dickinson s vocation it s like the kid who learns to play guitar to impress the girl would emily ever have become a poet if she hadn t had sue to show her what a true feast is like and then terribly if she hadn t been strung along by her for the rest of her life with nothing but a crumb here and there another irony to this poem is that the majority of the poems we have from emily dickinson come from her drawer not sue s she kept a copy for herself why because they existed for her as objects of attention and beauty beyond their intended use these roses in song kept for us in her own drawer remain fresh and fragrant and far from superfluous dam wade l egraff vincent keeling p s one thing about this poem worth considering is where dickinson places the stanza break she lets it follow sense rather than form she could have easily followed traditional form by putting the break after the first verse but instead she uses the break to split up the ideas of bird and flower in other words it functions more like the end of a paragraph than a stanza i won t go so far as to say that this is a crack of reality in lyric s fault line but it may be seen from a certain position as seismic because if this is a song then the melody would be broken the song bird is reduced to prose the melody is presumed missing posted by d scribe at 1 44 pm 12 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest 12 july 2026 each second is the last each second is the last perhaps recalls the man just measuring unconsciousness the sea and spar between to fail within a chance how terribler a thing than perish from the chance s list before the perishing f927 j879 sheet 14 1865 in the first stanza i see a man who is in a shipwreck and is holding onto the spar the mast about to go under this might be the end he thinks he s measuring how long it will be until he loses consciousness each second could perhaps be his last but maybe there s still hope the second stanza is where the philosophical heft of the poem comes in to fail within a chance how terribler a thing to die while there is still a chance of survival is more terrible than perish from the chance s list before the perishing to be on chance s list means you re still among those who might survive so to perish from chance s list means possibility has ended in other words it is worse to die while still having a chance to live than to be doomed from the start to return to the metaphor of the sailor drowning if he is going to die anyway it would ve been easier to go down with the ship than to stay alive a little longer struggling to live dying of thirst or exposure which are fates worse than drowning this metaphor could apply to love or even faith i think this poem can be seen as an examination of hope the cruelty lies in being suspended between hope and loss hope is terribler because possibility intensifies suffering abandon all hope ye who enter here it says on the doorway to hell in dante s inferno but dickinson might hang her sign on hell s exit abandon all hope ye who exit here be mine the doom she says in f919 i think if you read the poem backwards you arrive again at that first line each second is the last that line by itself is powerful there is no hope for the future in this line but there is great emphasis on the present dam wade l egraff alfred guillou adieu 1892 p s in a letter to her niece emily asked her to keep an apartment for aunt in her heart call it endor s closet this must i think refer to the witch of endor why does emily refer to herself the witch of endor in the bible the witch of endor is a necromancer whom king saul consults in 1 samuel 28 saul the king of israel seeks wisdom from god in choosing a course of action against the assembled forces of the philistines he receives no answer from yahweh having driven out all necromancers from israel saul searches for a medium anonymously and in disguise his search leads him to a woman of endor who claims that she can see the ghost of samuel rising from the abode of the dead the voice of the prophet s ghost after complaining of being disturbed berates saul for disobeying god and predicts that saul will perish with his whole army in battle the next day saul is terrified the witch of endor comforts saul when she sees his distress and insists on feeding him before he leaves the next day his army is defeated as prophesied and saul commits suicide if i m getting this reference right emily is identifying here with the witch of endor a medium who reveals the future saul s doom no matter how uncomfortable this truth may be the witch is working in opposition to yahweh but not we note without compassion for saul she feeds and comforts him p p s i m not sure i agree that hope is terribler hope may intensify the pain but it also motivates the struggle for survival it can keep you alive things do often get better posted by d scribe at 9 56 am 2 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest 10 july 2026 i stepped from plank to plank i stepped from plank to plank a slow and cautious way the stars about my head i felt about my feet the sea i knew not but the next would be my final inch this gave me that precarious gait some call experience f926 j875 sheet 13 1865 stepping into an emily dickinson poem often feels like walking onto a precarious plank you go slowly and cautiously when i get to the line in this poem the stars about my head i felt i am suddenly immersed in the immensity of the poem i feel myself under the dizzying expanse of the night time sky then there s a line break and i look down at the equally dizzying expanse of the sea vertigo sets in i am suspended there between these two giants dwarfed i had a dream once i was riding on a cloud over the ocean and was suddenly freaked out by the precariousness of my position how am i being held up by a cloud it was a metaphor for the seemingly impossible buoyancy of life this poem feels a little like that how do we stay suspended between these twin abysses any wrong move and we may fall there is an earlier poem f340 i felt a funeral in my brain dated 1862 that could stand as a sequel and then a plank in reason broke and i dropped down and down and hit a world at every plunge and finished knowing then i felt a funeral in my brain andrew bird phoebe bridgers is it okay to fall is it a good thing to be finished knowing in the poem that was written down by emily s hand directly above this one on the same sheet of paper sheet 13 there is a bird that falls slowly tom c pointed out in the comments see f925 that the word fall is worth considering tom s astute comment reminded me of other uses of the word fall in dickinson s oeuvre especially the lines from f754 still at the egg life chafing the shell when you troubled the ellipse and the bird fell does fell mean the bird died or flew i m now thinking of the famous poem f372 after great pain a formal feeling comes where the feet mechanically go around in the air the feet mechanical go round a wooden way of ground or air or ought this further reminds me that any time dickinson uses the word feet in a poem which is often she seems to simultaneously mean metrical feet metrical feet are the rhythmic units in poetry it s self referential dickinson s actual feet become synonymous with her poetic feet so then step by step can also mean something like beat by beat try re reading the poem with this idea in mind reading these poems may feel precarious but writing them must have felt even more so along these lines the last couplet of this poem is worth thinking about this gave me that precarious gait some call experience if we think of the feet in this poem as metrical feet then the precarious gait of the rhythm in dickinson s poetry suddenly appears to be an effect of heart break i d never thought of the word choice and and clipped conciseness both of which change up the gait of dickinson s poems as a product of pain and survival s subsequent fears but in this poem for the first time i do however the gait of this poem isn t precarious the metrical feet in the earlier poem after great pain a formal feeling comes f372 go all awry but the gait in this poem stays in perfect iambic 4 3 march step and unlike in the earlier poem i felt a funeral in my brain f340 where she falls from the plank here she doesn t she s learned a slow and cautious way this poem is the sequel dam wade l egraff p s my dream of riding clouds sea of books i tell myself before going to bed that i want to have a good dream and remember it and i do this morning i had a dream where eve and i were in an old victorian house on an island belonging to her family while exploring the house i found an old book in the bookshelf that explained how to ride clouds i showed the instructions to eve and we decided to follow them first we took a boat out to sea when we reached the right spot a cloud came down and we got on the cloud took us a mile or so up in the sky and we just floated there it was so comforting to the eye to see so much water around us like the eye was seeing itself but then the rational fears kicked in fear of falling how could we be supported by a cloud fear of being lost what if the cloud just keeps drifting and we don t c...