Further in Summer than the Birds -- Emily Dickinson

Guest poem submitted by Mac Robb:

(Poem #1761) Further in Summer than the Birds Further in Summer than the Birds Pathetic from the Grass A minor Nation celebrates Its unobtrusive Mass. No Ordinance be seen So gradual the Grace A pensive Custom it becomes Enlarging Loneliness. Antiquest felt at Noon When August burning low Arise this spectral Canticle Repose to typify Remit as yet no Grace No Furrow on the Glow Yet a Druidic Difference Enhances Nature now -- Emily Dickinson

It is a compliment to the Wondering Minstrels when a standard of the canon
has not yet appeared, but so it is and I here remedy the default, provoked
by the recent other Dickinson offerings.

It is easy to patronise "Emily," as her academic critics invariably rather
astonishingly call her - not "Dickinson"; not even "Miss Dickinson" or
"Emily Dickinson" - does one ever hear of "Twain" or "Whitman"? Nope: they
are always "Mark Twain" and "Walt Whitman"; fair enough, but why is Emily
Dickinson always "Emily"? Well, she had a rather sheltered sequestered small
town Old Maid Yankee existence. And her poems are all in 86 86 Common Metre,
like the 19th century hymns that would have been familiar to her at Sunday
Congregational church meetings. One wonders just how wide her reading could
have been, not to speak of her acquaintance: she might, after all, be simply
an astonishingly sensitive and acute original. Certainly her real life
experience was extremely straitened; she took her reclusiveness very
seriously - her poetry was mostly found after her death sewn up in
"fascicles," as she called them; in 20th century terms she would doubtless
be regarded as a pathological case and have been locked up like Robert
Lowell; and in, say, 4th century terms she would undoubtedly be in the canon
of saints.

But in her poetry - it is most certainly not mere "verse" - she pushes CM to
its outermost limits: she makes me think of William Cowper and John Newton
with their very fine CM hymns a hundred years earlier ("God moves in a
mysterious way/his wonders to perform"; "Glorious things of thee are
spoken/Zion, city of our God"; "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound/that
saved a wretch like me"), and Wordsworth's reverie on the disciplining
confines of the sonnet form in "Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow
room."

The thing that's so amazing about her poetry is, continuingly, "How did she
know?! How COULD she know?!" A queer old maid Yankee just couldn't have
known about Catholic liturgical and exegetical niceties but yet,
astonishingly, she did. (T.S. Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins, with
backgrounds not wholly dissimilar to hers, went whole hog into small- and
large-C catholicism, respectively, but Emily Dickinson seems to have grasped
everything they did and found that route unnecessary.)

And so the hum of grasshoppers on a hot, dry August afternoon is the
celebration both of insubstantial quiddity and a sacramental rite. The
"Grace" that is imparted to faithful (well, say, to Boston Irish Catholics
in Emily Dickinson's world) in the Mass, some time after the "gradual" (ie
not just slowly-slowly, but also the scriptural tract recited or sung
between the epistle and the gospel) - in the case of the August insect
liturgies isolates and excludes rather than gathering and including. But HOW
did she know all this? An "antiquest"? It's perhaps an antiphon - the
responsory chanted by a monastic choir, but it's also a vain endeavour to
find involvement in nature and obviate loneliness and isolation. A
"canticle"? It's the liturgical term for the biblical hymns chanted in the
monastic office - magnificat, nunc dimitis, benedictus, benedicite and so
on; but again, how did she know? And they typify repose: they represent
rest; but "typology" is the hermeneutical term for supposed Old Testament
anticipations of New Testament fulfilments, such as the rod carried aloft
before the Israelites in the wilderness and the cross of Jesus. And yet
again, how DID she know? But clearly she did, for her closing reference to a
"Druidic difference" means, certainly, that she has considered all these
liturgical resonances before rejecting them as the appropriate metaphor;
nature is certainly sacramental, but the appropriate sacerdotalism is pagan.
And exclusionary.

"Further in summer than the birds," it seems to me, is a companion to, an
amplification of, that splendid other nature poem of hers, "A narrow fellow
in the grass," and its arresting concluding image of feeling "zero at the
bone" comes to mind here - as Wordsworth (to return to the opening of this
little discussion) with his sentimentality about nature most certainly does
not.

Mac Robb.
Brisbane, Australia.