Lockdown Poetry

Today I’m thinking about Emily Dickinson. A stalwart in her own right, a sort of progenitor of American poetry of the modern day. Her poems are mostly without titles, and named after their respective first lines. Introduced to one of her poems in an English course in school, I, as a restless teenager, was completely underwhelmed. I can picture myself now, a rather self-conscious schoolgirl in awe of the Romantic poets, still a little in love with John Keats whose wrote odes to Grecian urns and melancholy and nightingales, and titled poems with fancy French words that I was proud to be able to pronounce. If there was indeed any space for an American poet in that teenager’s heart, it belonged to T.S.Eliot, a genius who could gather fragments of the Upanishads and weave them into The Waste Land, replete with incomprehensible and lofty words and ending with a shanti mantra.

What place was there for a poetess writing about offering a crumb to a bird (A Bird, came down the Walk) in that world? It was much later in my adulthood that I rediscovered Dickinson, with her stunning short poems with slant rhyme and layered metaphors. I was exhilarated when I managed to truly appreciate her oddly structured short lines, with strange patterns of spaces and punctuation, that I understood to be her way of nudging her readers into pausing and reflecting over certain phrases in her writing.

For a woman of her times, going to one of the newly established ladies’ academies was a privilege that gave unheard-of freedom to young girls. But life afterwards was expected to settle into a pattern involving paying calls, marrying and furthering the career of one’s husband. ln all, a life of dreary domesticity and of subsuming the woman’s identity into her family’s. All of which was anathema to her. The idea of a buzzing social life did not sit well with her either, and she was to remain a recluse for most of her life.

As a caregiver to her ailing mother, her withdrawal from the outside world turned near-complete by her 40s. She surrounded herself with her beloved plants and the world of her poetry. This self-imposed period of isolation proved to be a prolific writing spell.

An ability to draw startling insights from the least noticeable of creatures and the merest of things combines with her preoccupation with mortality & escape with dramatic results: her poems have a way of sudden shifting gears, the mundane turning into the sublime, or acquiring hidden depths or taking an unexpected turn. An imaginary outing to walk her dog by the sea turns into an event with misleadingly menacing undertones (I started early – Took my Dog). A simple piece of advice to tell the truth ends with an insightful reminder that the truth can be a dangerous instrument, to be used with due care (Tell All the Truth- But tell it Slant). An ode to reading ends with an insight into the human soul (There is no Frigate like a Book). And so on and on.

Many of her poems use metaphors involving the rooms or parts of a house to describe the outside world or even abstract ideas. Mermaids, in her imagination, come from the ‘basement’ of the ocean and war ships move along the ‘Upper Floor’. (I started early- Took my Dog). The world of poetry is a ‘House’ fairer than that of Prose, with the limitless sky as its ‘roof’ (I dwell in Possibility). Character is built with external support, but once formed has to function independently, just like a house stands on its own after the scaffolding and carpenter are long gone (The Props assist the House). Did she like being isolated in her house? Perhaps. Sometimes she seems to have found it suffocating. But then she was, in spirit, always far away. Even though her immediate space features often in her flights of fancy and wild poetic escapades.

But the poem that is closest to my heart today, as we all live in lockdown is “I taste a liquor never brewed”. And not for the reasons you are plausibly and (quite understandably) imagining. For a well-born woman of her times, to get drunk would have been quite a scandalous event: I suppose this only serves to underline her rebellious streak.

For those of you expecting a poetic outburst induced by sherry or claret (or whatever tipple folks took a fancy to in those times), the facts of the poem are delightfully and unexpectedly different.

To Emily Dickinson, the greatest intoxicant is Nature itself. In this cheerful poem, she imagines being inebriated on air (yes, precious…fresh…outdoor…sigh! air) and debauching on dew. And spending her summer days reeling under the blue summer skies. And now you know why I’m thinking of Emily today. The skies have never been clearer or brighter, and I have never wanted to be drunk on nature and the outdoors more than now, two (almost) months into lockdown.

All I can do is read this Dickinson gem and imagine myself slumped incoherent over fresh air, gentle sea breeze and swaying boughs. And then rising to walk...or stagger...over a carpet of crunchy leaves. Hic.

Here's Emily Dickinson herself:

I taste a liquor never brewed –
From Tankards scooped in Pearl –
Not all the Frankfort Berries
Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of air – am I –
And Debauchee of Dew –
Reeling – thro' endless summer days –
From inns of molten Blue –

When "Landlords" turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove's door –
When Butterflies – renounce their "drams" –
I shall but drink the more!

Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats –
And Saints – to windows run –
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the – Sun!

Source: https://poets.org/poem/i-taste-liquor-never-brewed-214

When I’ve had my fill, I shall, just like her, ‘but drink the more’. I can see Emily leaning against the sun, nodding approvingly at my plan.