A Little Madness in the Spring

A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown -
Who ponders this tremendous scene -
This whole Experiment of Green -
As if it were his own!  

~~Emily Dickinson

For several years now,every April during my spring vacation I visit Emily Dickinson's garden at The Homestead. Emily is my neighbor to the southeast, less than a half hour's drive from where I live. This is one of my top favorite places in Western Massachusetts.

 Since childhood I've been fascinated by The Belle of Amherst. Her reclusiveness has been speculated upon by all manner of scholars, some of whom have made it their entire life's work to study her poems and letters, in an effort to understand who she really was.

A very private person, obviously. By her own instructions, her letters were burned after her death by her younger sister Lavinia, who while doing so, came upon a box of 1700 of Emily's poems. During her lifetime, Emily Dickinson felt uneasy about publishing her very personal and highly passionate writing. Perhaps she felt secure that her tiny bundles of poems, sewed together into little books, would one day be discovered and found to have merit.

I've always entertained a suspicion that Emily's reclusiveness was not a result of serious mental illness as was once highly speculated. The old stereotype of her as a frail, perhaps frigid spinster have more recently given way to a view of Emily much more after my own heart!  In thinking of someone like Dickinson, we assume that she was like a little mouse, never speaking to anyone, holing up in her upstairs bedroom to write, paranoid that anyone was watching her. In fact, Emily interacted fully with her own family, having close relationships with both her siblings and an adoration of her nieces and nephews. She tended the family garden and baked the family bread daily. Eccentric, yes. Yet busy and productive, with a sharpness of mind that is one of the trademarks of her poetry.

That her poems reveal, at times, a smoldering physical passion is obvious. Her relationship with God and religion  tentative and questioning, she was most comfortable worshiping nature in her garden. Her father and brother Austin, prominent citizens of Amherst, helped to found the Congregational Church, just across the street from the Dickinson home. Emily never stepped foot inside of it.

"I feel that the world holds a predominant place in my affections. I do not feel that I could give up all for Christ, were I called to die" (L13)

 I have not gone into a full biography, as others have done a much better job of it than I could possibly. For everything that is known about Emily, please visit The Homestead website, linked above. For many things speculated and invented, read Jerome Charyn's delightful novel The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson.

Here some more photos of Emily's garden in April, 2011. If you visit last year's post on this subject, you will notice a difference in how the garden is blooming. Spring is here, albeit somewhat delayed.

Scilla

Spring comes on the World—
I sight the Aprils—
Hueless to me until thou come
As, till the Bee
Blossoms stand negative
Touched to Conditions
By a Hum. 

~~Emily Dickinson

 

A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown -
Who ponders this tremendous scene -
This whole Experiment of Green -
As if it were his own!

 The path from the Dickinson Homestead to The Evergreens, Austin and Susan Dickinson's home.

Magnolia

Hyacinth

 

 

Wild Nights - Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile - the Winds -
To a Heart in port -
Done with the Compass -
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden -
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor - Tonight -
In Thee!

Linking to That's My World

Sunday Snippet - Emily Dickinson

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside—

The Brain is deeper than the sea—
For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
The one the other will absorb—
As Sponges—Buckets—do—

The Brain is just the weight of God—
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
And they will differ—if they do—
As Syllable from Sound—

Emily Dickinson

Happy Birthday, Emily Dickinson

 

December 10, 1830-May 15, 1886

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts at the Homestead on December 10, 1830. Her quiet life was infused with a creative energy that produced almost 1800 poems and a profusion of vibrant letters.
Her lively Childhood and Youth were filled with schooling, reading, explorations of nature, religious activities, significant friendships, and several key encounters with poetry. Her most intense Writing Years consumed the decade of her late 20s and early 30s; during that time she composed almost 1100 poems. She made few attempts to publish her work, choosing instead to share them privately with family and friends. In her Later Years Dickinson increasingly withdrew from public life. Her garden, her family (especially her brother’s family at The Evergreens) and close friends, and health concerns occupied her.
With a few exceptions, her poetry remained virtually unpublished until after she died on May 15, 1886. After her death, her poems and life story were brought to the attention of the wider world through the competing efforts of family members and intimates.

To learn more about this iconic American poet, visit the website of The Emily Dickinson Museum. I live very close to Amherst and stop in to visit the garden in spring and summer every year. Here is a photo I took of the summer garden this year. It is pretty much kept the way Emily once kept it.

As an aside, I once read an article about Emily Dickinson entitled Emily Dickinson:  The Pagan Sphinx and borrowed the name (with credit to the writer which can be found just below the blog header, under Pages About the Pagan Sphinx Blog.) which is my blog and blog moniker.  TPS will be three years old in February and it has never regretted its name.  :-)

Happy Friday,

Pagan Sphinx

Pagan Sphinx Photo 2010 © All Rights Reserved

Shadow Shot Sunday and Today's Flowers

Poetic Shadows in Honor of National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month in the United States. An appreciator of poetry from a young age, I'm weaving the theme through several of my posts all month.

For the last couple of years, I've been making a pilgrimage to The Emily Dickinson Museum. The Homestead and The Evergreens is made up of two historic houses and their three-acre landscape on Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts. Here, the small sphere of existence is preserved  of one of America's most significant poets. The Homestead was the birthplace, in 1830, and home of the Emily Dickinson. The Evergreens, next door, was home to her beloved brother and sister-in-law, Austin and Susan Dickinson, and their three children.

Here are a few photos I took of The Dickinson Homestead and The Evergreens. 

The yellow brick house front door faces south.

If I'm not mistaken the window farthest to the right and the one around the corner are those of the poet's bedroom.

"Where thou art, that is home."

 ~ Emily Dickinson
 

 The sideyard

"My friends are my estate."

~ Emily Dickinson

 The stone path that leads East to Emily's Garden

"How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!"
Emily Dickinson

"The lovely flowers
embarrass me.
They make me regret
I am not a bee..."

"Forever is composed of now."

"Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough"

A path described by Emily Dickinson as “just wide enough for two who love” linked the two Dickinson houses, crossing the lawn from the back door of the Homestead to the east piazza of The Evergreens.
which lies west of the main house.

"The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience." 

side porch of The Evergreens

I'll be back in May or June to see how things are growing then, in Emily's garden.

Shadow Shot Sunday

Today's Flowers

National Poetry Month - Emily Dickinson

Pagan Sphinx Photo

WILL there really be a morning? Is there such a thing as day? Could I see it from the mountains If I were as tall as they?    Has it feet like water-lilies?         5 Has it feathers like a bird? Is it brought from famous countries Of which I have never heard?    Oh, some scholar! Oh, some sailor! Oh, some wise man from the skies!         10 Please to tell a little pilgrim Where the place called morning lies!

-Emily Dickinson

American Writer

Joyce Carol Oates

Celestial Timepiece: A Joyce Carol Oates Homepage

The most recent of Joyce Carol Oates' books I've read is Wild Nights: Stories about the last days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway. The title was borrowed by Oates from the famous Emily Dicksinson poem of desire:

Wild Nights—Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile—the Winds—
To a Heart in port—
Done with the Compass—
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden—
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor—Tonight—
In Thee!

Emily Dickinson (1861)

Joyce Carol Oates in full Emily Dickinson regalia. She's a bit of a character.

I read it in one sitting on a rainy but romantic Nova Scotia evening, perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean. After the dark, that was the only sound - the waves - and the occasional turning of book pages as WP and I devoured our respective book.

I read each of the short stories except the one about Henry James. The "last days" of the great American writers is fictionalized, of course, from the fertile imagination of Joyce Carol Oates and in that style that makes her arguably one of the best America writers of our time.

I inhaled the Poe story, the one I chose to read first; entitled Poe Posthumous; or, The Light-House.

Following is an excerpt from it:

1 March 1850. Cyclophagus, I have named it. A most original & striking creature, that would have astonished Homer, as my gothic forebears to a man. Initially, I did not comprehend that Cyclophagus was an amphibian, & have now discovered that this species dwells, by day at least, in watery burrows at the edge of the pebbled beach: to emerge, in the way of the Trojan invaders, at nightfall, & clamber about devouring what flesh its claws, snout, & tearing teeth can locate. & in this way, Mercury died.

This story is a slow, terrifying account of a descent into madness and hell. Very Poe yet with a distinctive Oates flavor. Which is to say that she can really go over the top at times; either sometimes on the brim of something very shocking and at other times directly and distinctly vulgar, as in a story of hers I read in The New Yorker called Zombie (not in this collection). It is with great imagination that Oates delves into the mind of one of our history's most iconic writers.

But nowhere is her hallmark genius more evident than in the story depicting the last days of the life of Emily Dickinson. EDickinsonRepliLuxe is a fantastical tale set in a future where robots are purchased for the home from a selection ranging from sports figures to, well, poets. In this suburban setting, the wife convinces her husband to buy the latest entertainment for the home in the form of Massachusetts poet Emily Dickinson. Emily comes into the home, creating a profound impact on the middle-class couple. Here, Oates does what she is best at: the underlying social themes, rape implications and female independence. It's an incredible story. The story draws heavily, of course, on Dickinson's poems and letters (since virtually everything that is known about her, can be found in those) and from photographs by Jerome Leibling in The Dickinsons of Amherst (2001).

The stories of Mark Twain and Hemingway didn't thrill me much. Having read my share of Hemingway, I can't argue his importance in the world of American fiction but I'm not a fan. I like Mark Twain as an American icon but honestly, I slept through the teaching of several of his novels in school.

The worthwhile reads for me in this collection were the Poe and Dickinson stories. Well worth a read, if you like American short fiction.

Scenic Sunday and Mellow Yellow Monday

A Tour of historic Amherst, Massachusetts

I'm linking to Brenda's Mellow Yellow Monday meme and linking my first entry to Aisha's Scenic Sunday meme, as well. Look for more information on these photo memes at the end of the post.

Downtown Amherst is a quintessential American college town. With one private college, Amherst College and a large state university, UMass Amherst, the downtown is bustling with students, professors, young families, artists and musicians. The atmosphere is busy but really friendly and peaceful. On this day, all types of people of all racial, religious and ethnic stripe, were going about their day. Some where relaxing and catching sun on the expansive town common, others sitting on the park benches that line North Pleasant Street.

Outside the center, lies the giant metropolis that is UMass, which is surrounded by rolling hills, farmland and woods. As I turned the corner from North Pleasant Street to Main, I stopped (finally) to take this photograph.

"First rate men and women will not and cannot work under conditions fixed by those who are afraid of ideas."

~American historian Henry Steele Commanger and life-long town resident of Amherst,
Massachusetts.

This ceramic plaque hands on the brick facade of a building at the top of Main Street, in Amherst. Would like to take a walk down Main Street with me on a sunny, spring day?

After the Chinese Restaurant, there is a little square with a fountain and stone benches. Adjacent to it is a small park with benches and space for residents to sit on the lawn and read or sunbathe and for children to run.

click on all photos to enlarge

Toward upper Main Street, another park: a sort of tribute to the American poets Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson. Here the poets sit among flowering trees and daffodil beds.
Just a little way down, there is the Emily Dickinson Homestead and Museum and The Evergreens, Emily's brother Austin's home. It looked like the photo above just last week when I visited but on this day...

the area was sectioned off with construction fencing and the front lawn was being dug up. I notice last week that many of the stately trees in front had been cut down. I'm not sure what's going on.

Here is the backyard of the Dickinson house, including a corner of the garden...

with these fantastically red tulips,
these beauties - are they a variety of tulip?

and of course Emily's garden would not be complete without a bumble bee or two.
click to enlarge

A Brief History of The Pagan Sphinx

It's been a year since I started The Pagan Sphinx and I've never truly discussed how I arrived at the name. So, what exactly, do Emily Dickinson and William Bouguereau have in common?

I've long thought of myself as a sort of pagan, in the sense that I tend by nature to be a person who doubts the existence of god but who does not discount it altogether. An agnostic you say? Perhaps. But that sounds sort of cold to me for some reason.

I have also long been a fan of Emily Dickinson. Not only of her poetry but of the woman herself; so much of whom is shrouded in mystery; with the exception of her poems and letters. One day, as I was doing a search on her poems and letters on the net, I came upon this article by Gary Sloan, from which I've copied the following passage:

Dickinson's enigmatic nature shrouds her evolution from Christian manqué to pagan. She had histrionic propensities that obscure the line between her true beliefs and those she feigned. Intermittently in her 1,775 poems and nearly 1,100 extant letters (many poems were incorporated into the letters), she struck poses and adopted personas. "When I state myself as the Representative of my verse," she told Higginson, "it does not mean me but a supposed person." In early professions of impiety, she had a penchant for hyperbole and self-dramatization that render her claims hard to evaluate. Later, an authentic infidel, she accommodated orthodox sensibilities. Long after she had chucked belief in a hereafter, she continued to quote promissory biblical verses to assure bereaved relatives and neighbors they would be reunited with their deceased loved ones. When she was herself bereaved, she accepted the ministrations of clergymen. She even solicited platitudes on immortality, plucking at a twig of evidence.

In essence, Emily doubted, as I do; as many of us do. And Professor Sloan: if you ever read this, I would like you to know how much I enjoyed your article and how what you wrote about Emily Dickinson has helped to enrich my appreciation of her. Because Emily Dickinson lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is practically my backyard, I have an even more special reverence for her persona(s), her work and her life. Visiting the Dickinson museum has become an annual Spring pilgrimage for me. I eargerly await April when the tulips in Emiy's garden (or so I like to pretend it's still her garden) are in full bloom.

That's the history of the title of The Pagan Sphinx. Then there is the matter of the blog header. I think of this painting by Beaugereau on several levels. Firstly, it's a beautiful painting. It's also playful, pagan-like and the all-time favorite of a once five year old SG1, who upon her second or so visit to its home, the Clark Art Institute, begged for the refrigerator magnet of the painting and insisted on taking it to school for show and tell one week. And that event, of course, was only slightly marred by the ridicicule of the other kindergartners. My very loving and lovely daughter recently said to me: "See, Mommy, I had a thing for curvy women, even back then!".


And this painting is huge. See the photo of the room where it hangs in the museaum; taken by yours truly. It is with regret that I never took pictures of my children on all the family visits we made there. But it's not too late. I am planning such a trip this summer, when both girls are done with school. In fact, SG1 will be a college graduate and spending time with her parents and sister before she heads off to Santa Barbara with her Beloved. Lots of pictures, I promise myself!

I've thought a few times of changing the blog header but I'm not ready. Just like SG1's inevitable moving on to a new life, I'm still hanging on. One day, when the time feels right, I may change it. Meanwhile, I'm still very much attached to it.

That, my friends, is a brief history of The Pagan Sphinx and those nude ladies dragging the naughty satyr into the pond. I swear, I could make up so many stories about that painting, were it not for the permanent writer's block...

The Daisy Follows Soft The Sun

(the photo is of a daisy in my garden)

THE DAISY FOLLOWS SOFT THE SUN

by: Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

HE daisy follows soft the sun,

And when his golden walk is done,

Sits shyly at his feet.

He, waking, finds the flower near.

"Wherefore, marauder, art thou here?"

"Because, sir, love is sweet!"




We are the flower, Thou the sun!

Forgive us, if as days decline,

We nearer steal to Thee,--

Enamoured of the parting west,

The peace, the flight, the amethyst,

Night's possibility!