Thank you for this beautiful reading of Dickinson, Patti. This is a wonderful choice of poem for this season, and really any season. That you have a letter in her hand is amazing. From what I can make out, it says:
The power to
console is not
within corporeal
reach - though
it’s’ attempt, is
precious -
to die before
it learned to
It’s so interesting because one feels as if there might be another beat - maybe something that rhymes with “reach”. The truncation of it almost makes manifest the incompleteness; the dying before it learns to console, and so the poem (or note) ends before it accomplishes a corporeal consolation. It also seems as if it could have been written either as a condolence letter to Mrs Henry Hills, or in response to a condolence letter that Mrs Henry Hills sent to Dickinson. It works either way. If you know anything about the provenance of this, I would be grateful to hear of it.
Her handwriting in some ways reminds me of yours, not so much because it is exactly the same, but for its distinctiveness, the spareness of it despite it possessing so much power.
A note about the poem as it is printed: the five stanzas is how it was published in the 1955 Thomas H. Johnson edition, “The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Including Variant Readings Critically Compared with All known Manuscripts.” At the time, this was the first respectful collection of Dickinson’s work: keeping her dashes instead of substituting them for commas or semi-colons, as if Dickinson didn’t know how to punctuate. However, Johnson took as his copy-text the earliest fair copy of a poem. In 1998, Ralph W. Franklin edited the three volume “The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition,” and in 1999 produced “The Poems of Emily Dickinson, The Reading Edition” which, if one doesn’t want to invest in a three volume set (though I recommend it as it’s fascinating, including, as it does, detailed notes and commentary) is the one volume to get.
When one googles a Dickinson poem, what’s likely to turn up, as it does in “A Light exists in Spring” is the Johnson version. The difference is that Franklin, in contrast to Johnson, took as his copy-text the last fair copy. As the poetry critic Helen Vendler says, either position can be defended, but I’m compelled by the position that the last fair copy represents that the poet has, to her satisfaction, “hammered her thoughts into unity” (Yeats’s phrase, though he used “he”).
In Franklin’s Edition, instead of this poem being five regular quatrains, it is four stanzas, the first being what Vendler characterizes as “[t]he gorgeous opening eight-line double-stanza” which she notes is impersonally related “but the second stanza admits the second-person pronoun, ‘you.’ It seems convincing to me that Dickinson would have broken the stanza when she changed the voice, to the impersonal to the second person you; in the third and fourth stanzas, she shifts to “we” and its adjectival form “our.” Vendler notes that “the transition from the “no one” of impersonal statement to the ‘we’ of common experience via the ‘you’ of singular intimacy is original, representing as it does an exquisite moment of natural being which occurs only independently (‘A Light exists’) but also intimately (‘It almost speaks to you’) and collectively (‘It passes and we stay -“).” “How could any instruments of Science,” Vendler asks, “quantify such delicate registers of feeling? Yet if science cannot do it, poetry can, the poet insists.”
The last thing I want to relate that Vendler says regarding the light “almost speaking to you,” is that with her “almost,” Dickinson repudiates (as she insistently did) “the religious belief that God can speak from Nature (as from Abraham’s burning bush). Yet the poet cannot help hearing “tongues in trees, sermons in stones, books in the running brooks” (from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” Act 2, scene 2).
But just as the Light “speaks to you,” it recedes, “reports away,” like a soldier being called to duty. Vendler notes that “such a moment, in the military, would be a ceremonial one, marked by ‘the Formula of sound,’ but Nature makes no such bugled announcement of her changes. The simplest moment in the poem comes in Dickinson’s plangent summary: ‘It passes and we stay.’” Vendler reminds us that we are “not without Contentment — Summer, too, is beautiful. But it is not paradisal, and so we feel ‘A quality of loss / Affecting our Content’ — one of those nameless mixed states of human feeling that Dickinson is so adept at evoking.”
With all of that said, here is the poem as it appears in both Franklin’s Reading and Variorum Edition. I hope that the stanzas can be distinguished herein: if not, just read it as if the first two quatrains were one eight-line double-stanza followed by three regular quatrains (stanzas of four lines):
Repeat Emily's ode to sping light, changing just one line for a less humanist view, 'All of Nature feels' ....as spring light awakens the earth 🌎 ✨️ &"thank-you.
What a lovely way to welcome Spring, thank you Patti. In London the birds are singing their morning medleys and buds and flowers are blooming in the beautiful sunshine 🌞
this reminds me of when Jesse and you did the evening of poetry and music inspired by Emily..at the Morgan..that was a great night...so as always Thank you!!!
Thank you for reading us Emily’s lovely poem. I live just across the river from where she lived and wrote. When I first moved to Amherst I lived just a block away from her home.
The coming of Spring is a slow stately process here. I watch the buds fatten as I walk the streets of Northampton.
Thank you for touching my heart with this poem. It is unusually cold here in Tel Aviv but the early morning birds know to sing us the right tune for this change of season. Happy Spring🌺🌼!
Emily Dickinson is one of my favourite writers with Virginia Woolf. Thank you for reading these two great artists.
Thank you! Are you a Wallace Stevens fan…. Very interesting man, and excellent poet.
Thank you for this beautiful reading of Dickinson, Patti. This is a wonderful choice of poem for this season, and really any season. That you have a letter in her hand is amazing. From what I can make out, it says:
The power to
console is not
within corporeal
reach - though
it’s’ attempt, is
precious -
to die before
it learned to
It’s so interesting because one feels as if there might be another beat - maybe something that rhymes with “reach”. The truncation of it almost makes manifest the incompleteness; the dying before it learns to console, and so the poem (or note) ends before it accomplishes a corporeal consolation. It also seems as if it could have been written either as a condolence letter to Mrs Henry Hills, or in response to a condolence letter that Mrs Henry Hills sent to Dickinson. It works either way. If you know anything about the provenance of this, I would be grateful to hear of it.
Her handwriting in some ways reminds me of yours, not so much because it is exactly the same, but for its distinctiveness, the spareness of it despite it possessing so much power.
A note about the poem as it is printed: the five stanzas is how it was published in the 1955 Thomas H. Johnson edition, “The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Including Variant Readings Critically Compared with All known Manuscripts.” At the time, this was the first respectful collection of Dickinson’s work: keeping her dashes instead of substituting them for commas or semi-colons, as if Dickinson didn’t know how to punctuate. However, Johnson took as his copy-text the earliest fair copy of a poem. In 1998, Ralph W. Franklin edited the three volume “The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition,” and in 1999 produced “The Poems of Emily Dickinson, The Reading Edition” which, if one doesn’t want to invest in a three volume set (though I recommend it as it’s fascinating, including, as it does, detailed notes and commentary) is the one volume to get.
When one googles a Dickinson poem, what’s likely to turn up, as it does in “A Light exists in Spring” is the Johnson version. The difference is that Franklin, in contrast to Johnson, took as his copy-text the last fair copy. As the poetry critic Helen Vendler says, either position can be defended, but I’m compelled by the position that the last fair copy represents that the poet has, to her satisfaction, “hammered her thoughts into unity” (Yeats’s phrase, though he used “he”).
In Franklin’s Edition, instead of this poem being five regular quatrains, it is four stanzas, the first being what Vendler characterizes as “[t]he gorgeous opening eight-line double-stanza” which she notes is impersonally related “but the second stanza admits the second-person pronoun, ‘you.’ It seems convincing to me that Dickinson would have broken the stanza when she changed the voice, to the impersonal to the second person you; in the third and fourth stanzas, she shifts to “we” and its adjectival form “our.” Vendler notes that “the transition from the “no one” of impersonal statement to the ‘we’ of common experience via the ‘you’ of singular intimacy is original, representing as it does an exquisite moment of natural being which occurs only independently (‘A Light exists’) but also intimately (‘It almost speaks to you’) and collectively (‘It passes and we stay -“).” “How could any instruments of Science,” Vendler asks, “quantify such delicate registers of feeling? Yet if science cannot do it, poetry can, the poet insists.”
The last thing I want to relate that Vendler says regarding the light “almost speaking to you,” is that with her “almost,” Dickinson repudiates (as she insistently did) “the religious belief that God can speak from Nature (as from Abraham’s burning bush). Yet the poet cannot help hearing “tongues in trees, sermons in stones, books in the running brooks” (from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” Act 2, scene 2).
But just as the Light “speaks to you,” it recedes, “reports away,” like a soldier being called to duty. Vendler notes that “such a moment, in the military, would be a ceremonial one, marked by ‘the Formula of sound,’ but Nature makes no such bugled announcement of her changes. The simplest moment in the poem comes in Dickinson’s plangent summary: ‘It passes and we stay.’” Vendler reminds us that we are “not without Contentment — Summer, too, is beautiful. But it is not paradisal, and so we feel ‘A quality of loss / Affecting our Content’ — one of those nameless mixed states of human feeling that Dickinson is so adept at evoking.”
With all of that said, here is the poem as it appears in both Franklin’s Reading and Variorum Edition. I hope that the stanzas can be distinguished herein: if not, just read it as if the first two quatrains were one eight-line double-stanza followed by three regular quatrains (stanzas of four lines):
#962
A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period -
When March is scarcely here
A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.
It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.
Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay -
A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament -
Repeat Emily's ode to sping light, changing just one line for a less humanist view, 'All of Nature feels' ....as spring light awakens the earth 🌎 ✨️ &"thank-you.
Happu spring, Patti!
I was just watching "Fearfully in Danger" for Nico….very cool….your daughter seems to have all the talents of her parents and then some! Amazing!
What a lovely way to welcome Spring, thank you Patti. In London the birds are singing their morning medleys and buds and flowers are blooming in the beautiful sunshine 🌞
this reminds me of when Jesse and you did the evening of poetry and music inspired by Emily..at the Morgan..that was a great night...so as always Thank you!!!
Thank you for reading us Emily’s lovely poem. I live just across the river from where she lived and wrote. When I first moved to Amherst I lived just a block away from her home.
The coming of Spring is a slow stately process here. I watch the buds fatten as I walk the streets of Northampton.
Happy Spring to you dear Patti.
Or as they used to say in China, one yang rises
Thank you for touching my heart with this poem. It is unusually cold here in Tel Aviv but the early morning birds know to sing us the right tune for this change of season. Happy Spring🌺🌼!
Thank you Patti. My world is better with you in it.
Thank you for all your messages. I enjoy reading for you at night.
This is the step, thank you
Thank you, Patti. I always love Emily. That was so beautiful I teared up. (:
Emily❤️ How awesome to own one of her letters! Thanks for sharing