I’m planning a National Day of Protest – probably in August? – if the Poetry Foundation in Chicago does not change the incorrect number listed on Emily Dickinson’s poem “It sifts from Leaden Sieves.” You can read all about my vital – and most certainly nugatory – endeavor HERE.
I have reached out to a contact at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst to see if she can help, but I have not heard back from her yet.
In the meantime, let me leave these two poems – pictured below – about “possibility.”
What do you think of the two poems? In some odd way, are they saying the same thing? OR – are they more contradictory? (I gotta say -- those last two lines of the shorter poem are confounding me! LOL!)
I’ll discuss them tomorrow.
Yesterday I posted two poems about “possibility" (see above). I posed the questions, “What do you think of these two poems? In some odd way, are they saying the same thing? OR – are they more contradictory? (I gotta say – those last two lines of the shorter poem are confounding me!)”
The first line of the first poem, “I dwell in possibility,” is certainly an optimistic and positive opening line – but then there’s that second line: “A fairer House than Prose.” Sooo…the realm of “possibility” is a “fairer House than Prose,” as in – the heights of “possibility” are reached through poetry? Is this poem autobiographical? It sure seems so, and therefore the speaker in the poem Emily Dickinson – and it is her “narrow Hands” that are able to “gather Paradise” through her “occupation” of writing poetry.
The speaker in the second poem seems a bit more limited – that the far reaches of possibility are not within that person’s grasp (or ability?).
I will say, though, that I have to think hard about those final two lines since it seems akin to a double negative: “That I cannot (i.e, that which I cannot do) – must be / Unknown to possibility.”
So who is the speaker of the poem? Someone who knows their own limitations? After all, the poem opens with, “What I can do – I will.”
Or, as I suggested with the first poem, is this poem autobiographical too? Is the speaker in this poem Emily Dickinson? And what she can do with her poetry, she will?
Take a look at the analysis of this poem on this blog site -- click HERE.
BTW: I’ll have more info on this blog site tomorrow (SEE BELOW).
OH – and speaking of tomorrow, that will be my last post until Monday, April 8. I’ll be traveling to Denver and then my next adventure will be an Amtrak train through the Rockies to visit Salt Lake City. Choo choo! ;-)
Same’s true for another site I have where I used to post short reviews of “new” pieces of classical music (i.e., “new” to me). Life just got busy, and I moved on to other things.
So back to this Dickinson blog, “The Prowling Bee.”
Yesterday, I linked that very blog in my post about Dickinson’s poem “What I can do – I will” and something caught my eye: The site was active again. As a matter of fact, so far in 2024 there have been 22 new posts (more posts than the past three years combined).
I searched back to the first post for 2024, and I found this: Click HERE.
Sooo...there you have it!