In yesterday’s post I shared poems of the sun and moon by Dickinson. I ended with “I watched the Moon around the House,” an account of the moon’s “stop for rest” as it travelled across the night sky, until “She vaulted out of Gaze.”
There’s a fun twist at the end, for the speaker espies the moon again at some point thereafter, this time during the day; however, being grounded “too far below,” she is unable to determine the heavenly body’s precise path.
Hmm…perhaps I should have referred to the moon as a “heavenly head” on account of Dickinson’s incredibly clever comparison of the satellite to a disembodied head sustained in the sky (stanza 4).
In either case, body or head, the speaker concludes by conceding that, additionally, she cannot understand “its advantage – Blue.”
I love that abrupt ending, the full stop “Blue” – and it is an advantageous, positive blue, not at all connected to the melancholy usually associated with “blue.” Take it one step further, and is this blue, the great expanse of sky, an infinite ethereal region beyond the stretch of air, a location of transcendent happiness – and the speaker is “too far below” to understand? #justasking
In just six syllables at the end of that poem, Dickinson has ripped my head off thinking about all of this.
LOL – in a recent post, I referenced a letter sent to Mabel Loomis Todd by someone who noted that another poet of their time, J. Whitcomb Riley, “merely helps us see the things without doing much to help us see into them.” That is not the case with Miss. Dickinson.
Now bear with me for a minute. In some dialogue from the sitcom “Frasier,” radio psychologist Frasier Crane explains to a listener, “at Cornell University, they have an incredible piece of scientific equipment known as the tunneling electron microscope. Now, this microscope is so powerful that by firing electrons you can actually see images of the atom, the infinitesimally minute building blocks of our universe.”
I think that’s what Dickinson does with her poetry. As professor and author Julia Hejduk put it, Dickinson is “a poet of incarnation—of the small, concrete, and quotidian becoming a vessel for the infinite.”
Okay, so let me get back to the word, “Blue.” In how many poems did Dickinson use the word, and what did she mean by it? I’ll get to that tomorrow with my blue – uncertain – stumbling buzz.
Hmm…perhaps I should have referred to the moon as a “heavenly head” on account of Dickinson’s incredibly clever comparison of the satellite to a disembodied head sustained in the sky (stanza 4).
In either case, body or head, the speaker concludes by conceding that, additionally, she cannot understand “its advantage – Blue.”
I love that abrupt ending, the full stop “Blue” – and it is an advantageous, positive blue, not at all connected to the melancholy usually associated with “blue.” Take it one step further, and is this blue, the great expanse of sky, an infinite ethereal region beyond the stretch of air, a location of transcendent happiness – and the speaker is “too far below” to understand? #justasking
In just six syllables at the end of that poem, Dickinson has ripped my head off thinking about all of this.
LOL – in a recent post, I referenced a letter sent to Mabel Loomis Todd by someone who noted that another poet of their time, J. Whitcomb Riley, “merely helps us see the things without doing much to help us see into them.” That is not the case with Miss. Dickinson.
Now bear with me for a minute. In some dialogue from the sitcom “Frasier,” radio psychologist Frasier Crane explains to a listener, “at Cornell University, they have an incredible piece of scientific equipment known as the tunneling electron microscope. Now, this microscope is so powerful that by firing electrons you can actually see images of the atom, the infinitesimally minute building blocks of our universe.”
I think that’s what Dickinson does with her poetry. As professor and author Julia Hejduk put it, Dickinson is “a poet of incarnation—of the small, concrete, and quotidian becoming a vessel for the infinite.”
Okay, so let me get back to the word, “Blue.” In how many poems did Dickinson use the word, and what did she mean by it? I’ll get to that tomorrow with my blue – uncertain – stumbling buzz.
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