| In yesterday's post, I compared Dickinson’s spiritual reverence of nature to that of Frank Lloyd Wright’s deep connection to the natural world (Wright famously said, “I believe in God, only I spell it N-A-T-U-R-E”). I concluded the post with Dickinson’s “‘Nature’ is what we see,” and I then posed the question, “how often did Dickinson use the word ‘nature’ in her poetry?” I searched “nature” on the Dickinson archive, and 237 entries popped up representing 92 poems. The poem that first jumped out at me was “Purple.” That was it – the archive displayed the first line as just one word, “Purple” – highly unusual for a poem by Dickinson to begin with a single word. I looked into this poem, and discovered that the poem is actually, “The Color of a Queen, is this,” and it turned out to be one of the few poems where Dickinson actually provided a title, “Purple.” Interestingly, the poem describes the varied colors of a “Queen,” Mother Nature as represented by the sun, and it mentions amber, beryl, “Auroran widths,” and Iodine (from the Dickinson lexicon for Iodine: “violet; vibrant purple; coloring of the sunset”). |  |
 |  I love that image in lines 5 and 6 when “Auroran widths / Fling suddenly on men,” and the fact that nature “keeps a Rank,” a proper position in the social hierarchy, for purple, a symbol of royalty – circling back to nature’s designation as “Queen” in the opening line. |
By the way, I looked up info on purple and its tie to royalty, and I found this: “Purple became a symbol of royalty due to the extreme rarity and expense of Tyrian purple dye from ancient Phoenicia, making it accessible only to the wealthy elite, particularly emperors and nobles in the Roman and Byzantine empires.”
| What if Mother Nature were not a queen but a mere mortal? Check out “Were natural mortal lady” where Dickinson imagines an earthly being having to bring about the rapid and momentous changes of the seasons, and she questions if such a one would have enough time to complete all the natural cycles before it was time to pack up and move on to a new clime. Dickinson concludes, though, that nature, unlike a mortal lady, is always ready for these changes – and would even have "an hour to spare.” And check out that final stanza: Not only would Mother Nature complete the task with time to kill (LOL – that’s a bit prognostic with regard to other poems by Dickinson on nature), but it would do so by making “some trifle fairer / That was too fair before.” What a wonderful and whimsical image, no? |  |
I’ll share another “nature” poem tomorrow, one of my favorites – and by the way – at the start of this post, I mentioned that 92 of Dickinson’s poems use the word “nature.” There are many others, too, about nature, but they don’t use the word. I’ll share one or two of those as well in future posts.
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