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

Joni Mitchell Meets William Butler Yeats

Note: I revised and corrected (so many embarrassing mistakes!) this post from 2008 a bit and I'm republishing it for National Poetry Month.

sketch by John Singer Sargent

 I'm a huge Joni Mitchell fan. Being a teen in the mid-seventies, my favorite of Joni's music is not what was once categorized as folk, but her recordings since the mid-70's beginning with Hejira. From there I worked my way back to her folk beginnings. Even early on, Joni created a genre all of her own and remains to date an influence on countless songwriters, singers and musicians.

In this song, Mitchell takes the classic Yeats poem The Second Coming, slightly alters the words and writes a musical composition to it. My only complaint about Joni's version is that although she stayed fairly true to the original, she should have left it entirely as it was written. Others believe she shouldn't have touched it all. I'll let you decide.

(On a side note: Am I the only poetry nerd who thinks that Yeats was hot?  ;-)

 Slouching Toward Bethlehem from the CD Night Ride Home, 1991

Joni Mitchell

based on the poem by W.B. Yeats

 The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre*

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming!

Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats

*gyre -Yeats called each cycle of history a "gyre"--literally a circular or spiral turn. (He pronounced it with a hard "g.") He had a complicated system detailed in his book A Vision that proposed history as a series of 2,000 year eras, each of which begins and ends with some apocalyptic event in which the divine (in a Christian or some other form) inserts itself into human history resulting in cataclysmic historical and mythological consequences.

Sunday Snipppet

It's National Poetry Month in the United States. I try throughout the year to post a few poems on The Pagan Sphinx. And when April rolls around, I kick it up a notch. I'm experimenting with posting poems  (or snippets of) by poets that I'm not familiar with. Previously I've gone with trusted favorites such as Emily Dickinson, Yeats, William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings and Anne Sexton.

The poem for this Sunday is by Charles Bukowski. I've read him in quick spurts in the past. Usually while dusting my bookshelves! It always takes me all day to dust because I pull out a book and start reading. Before I'm aware of it, I've picked up and leafed through a dozen. Reading, dreaming, reminiscing...and sneezing from the dust!

When I went to dust the stacks this time, though, I was missing my one collection of Bukowski so I took myself over to Raven Books in Greenfield (electric kool-aid moment) and browsed the poetry and fiction sections. I came home with Charles Bukowski's Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way and Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.

Perhaps in another installment of Sunday Snippet, I will take a passage from the latter. I've been on a Vonnegut kick recently, when I was really never a huge fan of his in the past. I did meet Kurt Vonnegut once and shook his hand but it was so uneventful in terms of actual details, that I won't get into it.  Well, I did get into it. That was it!

And now without further gibber, is the Charles Bukowski poem:

about competition

the higher you climb

     the greater the pressure

those who manage to

                                                                  endure

                                                                  learn

                                                                  that the distance

                                                                  between the

                                                                  top and the

                                                                  bottom

                                                                  is

                                                                  obscenely

                                                                  great.

                                                                 and those who

                                                                 succeed

                                                                 know

                                                                 this secret:

                                                                 there isn't

                                                                 one.

~Charles Bukowski

National Poetry Month - e.e. cummings

"Poetry and every other art was and is and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality."    
~ e.e. cummings

e.e. cummings biography

Self-portrait by e.e. cummings

The Paintings of e.e. cummings

All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn. 

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the merry deer ran before. 

Fleeter be they than dappled dreams
the swift sweet deer
the red rare deer. 

Four red roebuck at a white water
the cruel bugle sang before. 

Horn at hip went my love riding
riding the echo down
into the silver dawn. 

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the level meadows ran before. 

Softer be they than slippered sleep
the lean lithe deer
the fleet flown deer. 

Four fleet does at a gold valley
the famished arrow sang before. 

Bow at belt went my love riding
riding the mountain down
into the silver dawn. 

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the sheer peaks ran before. 

Paler be they than daunting death
the sleek slim deer
the tall tense deer. 

Four tell stags at a green mountain
the lucky hunter sang before. 

All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn. 

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
my heart fell dead before.

National Poetry Month - Mary Oliver

 Lilies

I have been thinking

about living

like the lilies 

that blow in the fields.

They rise and fall

in the wedge of the wind,

and have no shelter

from the tongues of the cattle,

and have no closets or cupboards,

and have no legs.

Still I would like to be

as wonderful

as that old idea.

But if I were a lily

I think I would wait all day

for the green face

of the hummingbird

to touch me.

What I mean is,

could I forget myself

even in those feathery fields?

When van Gogh

preached to the poor

of course he wanted to save someone -

most of all himself.

He wasn't a lily,

and wandering through the bright fields

only gave him more ideas

it would take his life to solve.

I think I will always be lonely

in this world, where the cattle

graze like a black and white river -

where the ravishing lilies 

melt, without protest, on their tongues -

where the hummingbird, whenever there is a fuss,

just rises and floats away.

~ Mary Oliver

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