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Category Archives: Emily Dickinson

There’s a certain Slant of light

26 Sunday Jan 2020

Posted by victoriaperpetua in Emily Dickinson, Photography, Poetry, Television, Uncategorized, Winter

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Emily Dickinson, photography, Poetry, Winter

Dickinson

Emily Dickinson (Hailee Steinfeld) writing poetry at her desk.

We are currently watching, with much enjoyment, the AppleTV series on American poet, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). The series is based on Dickinson’s life but uses modern language (and some modern sensibilities) to treat viewers to a glimpse inside the life of this quirky poet.

Therefore, it seemed apropos to post one of her many poems:

WinterJekyll

A winter’s afternoon on Jekyll Island.

There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons – 
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes – 

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us – 
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are – 

None may teach it – Any – 
‘Tis the Seal Despair – 
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air – 

When it comes, the Landscape listens – 
Shadows – hold their breath – 
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death – 

dickinson-series

The cast of Dickinson having fun during The Shakespeare Club. Can you guess the play;-)

A Narrow Fellow in the Grass

10 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by victoriaperpetua in Emily Dickinson, Photography, Poetry, rattlesnakes, snakes

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photography, Poetry

Hopi and Black-tailed rattlesnakes

A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him,–did you not,
His notice sudden is.

The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,
A floor to cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,

Have passed, I thought, a whiplash
Unbraiding in the sun, —
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.

Several of nature’s people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;

But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.

~~Emily Dickinson

I Felt a Funeral in my Brain

13 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by victoriaperpetua in Emily Dickinson, Photography, Poetry

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photography, Poetry

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My mind was going numb –

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space – began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here –

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –

~~Emily Dickinson

corinneflowers

Hope

15 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by victoriaperpetua in Emily Dickinson, Hope, Nevermore, Photography, Poetry

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Emily Dickinson, photography, Poetry

Angel at Laurel Grove, Savannah

Angel and Nevermore at Laurel Grove, Savannah

XIX

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul.
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

~~Emily Dickinson

Hamlet

26 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by victoriaperpetua in Don Quixote, Emily Dickinson, Hamlet, Lao-tse, Leo Tolstoy, Paradox, R.H. Blyth, Robert A. Johnson, Self-actualization, Shakespeare, Three-Dimensional Man, Two-Dimensional Man, Zen

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Hamlet

Johnson calls Hamlet the darkest chapter in his book. “Don Quixote,” he says, “with his roots deep in instinct and faith, is the man of courage who redeems anything that befalls him. In Hamlet, we find a man of tragedy, he who makes chaos and failure of everything he touches.”

The opposite of Don Quixote in nearly every respect, Johnson says Hamlet is the “most  profound example in all of literature of the divided man.”

To understand Hamlet, Johnson explains, is to gain insight into the emptiness and loneliness of modern existential life. As a three-dimensional man, Hamlet has neither roots in the instinctive world nor is his head yet in the heavens where he might gain enlightenment.

Modern man, in general, is at a point where he must heal the paradox of masculine and feminine,doing and being.

As Lao-tse said, “He who understand the masculine and keeps to the feminine shall become the whole world’s channel. Eternal virtue shall not part from him and he shall return to the state of an infant.”

Johnson says that Hamlet only touches this design state before making division and tragedy, rather than paradox and synthesis, of it. Because time and again, in refusing to act and make a choice, Hamlet loses the value of both.

Hamlet’s troubles begin with the murder of his father by his uncle who then marries Hamlet’s mother. The ghost of Hamlet’s father tells him to take revenge and thus begins the internal debate–to kill the uncle and take his rightful place as king or decide that enough blood has been shed and be at peace with what has happened.

Instead he does as Emily Dickinson put it,”wavered for us all.” Vacillation in one of the characteristics of the three-dimensional man.

“A thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom and ever three parts coward,” Hamlet thinks. He can see that together the four parts make for wholeness, but only three parts function for him. He cannot listen to his internal wisdom.

“There is no peace in such a man,” Johnson says. “He knows too much to be simple, but not enough to be whole.”

Because Hamlet’s need to act and his abhorrence of violence are in conflict, he descends into depression and madness, and out of this comes the most famous soliloquy in literature:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep–
No more–and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh in heir to; ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep–
To sleep–perchance to dream–ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.

Johnson explains that this is the despair that causes conflict in every three-dimensional man–while he cannot live, he dare not die. He then begins to torture everyone around him, especially those who love him, and he makes life unbearable for himself.

As Tolstoy wrote, “He was suffering the anguish men suffer when they persist in undertaking a task impossible for them–not from inherent difficulties, but from its incompatibility with their own nature.”

When challenged about what he is doing, Hamlet cries, “Words, words, words.” It is the cry of the three-dimensional man who is so caught up in words he cannot act.

Literary critic R.H. Blyth describes it this way: “This ‘words, words, words’ has a deeply tragic meaning in the play. It is, in fact, the secret of Hamlet’s character, the cause of the tragedy. Hamlet is the Zen-less man, whose energy, like a mouse in a wheel, goes round and round inside him and issues, not in action, but in talking.”

As Johnson says, “It is a characteristic of complex man, caught between functioning by instinct and acting by enlightenment, that he often destroys everything feminine within his grasp. . . . All feminine elements wither in the face of the three-dimensional consciousness.”

Next Week: The Poisoned Rapier

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