#emily dickison

[just-an-ari]

"This is better than any poem."

[quaintrelledragicorn]

Bring me the sunset in a cup

Emily Dickinson 

[shaira-waters]

Hailee Steinfeld as Emily Dickinson in Dickinson

[mikeluciraphgabe]

Found it in one of my work books at school💀

[coralinaroca]

                                                                      Como una advertencia...

                                                                             Emily Dickinson

Nunca sabemos que avanzamos, --

        Cuando lo hacemos

    Reimos y cerramos la puerta;

El destino que camina atrás de nosotros

        de pronto

    Rompe a correr y no nos acosa más.

[aselectsociety]

Take Ten

My log with notes to myself, links, reminders, pics and more was getting quite full, so to clear some of it out, I’ve posted ten miscellaneous items below.

1.

Back at the end of February, I shared a post which included Michael Corballis’s 1999 article, “The Gestural Origins of Language: Human language may have evolved from manual gestures, which survive today as a ‘behavioral fossil’ coupled to speech.” Related to that, I came across a Reels the other day; though the conversation centers on dogs’ abilities related to inferential reasoning, the video also touches on how one-year old children “begin to understand pointing” – “when the foundations of language and culture begin to develop.” The video is HERE,

2.

Back in December, I published a post which included Ezra Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro,” thought to be the origin of imagism and verbless poetry. The other day I came across this Reels about the poem, HERE.

3.

The other day I saw a clip from an interview with Rita Dove where she was asked, “Are there any poets that come to mind where you think there’s not a syllable that could be changed?” When I did not hear her mention Emily Dickinson, I was about to post a comment. Then I saw this:

4.

For all of you logophiles out there, here’s a 2015 article from TheWeek.com entitled, “15 pairs of words that seem etymologically related but aren’t,” subtitled, “There’s no bomb in bombast”; HERE.

5.

Here’s another Reels, “50 poems no English Literature student can afford to ignore” – and yes, I watched to make sure Dickinson was represented – and yes, as expected – Dickinson was there. #9 was “Because I could not stop for Death” and #50 was “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.” So the only real surprise for me was that Dickinson was on the list just twice! LOL!

6.

Speaking of “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” check out this jewelry ad from the New York Times’ Styles section last December. I received from Nancy Friedman of wordworking.com (and on Substack too, HERE.

7.

I’ve been writing about Frost for the past several days – particularly about his first published poem, “My Butterfly,” a poem which Lawrence Thompson claimed was inspired “by a moment which had occurred late in the fall of his few months at Dartmouth, a moment when he had found a fragile butterfly wing lying among dead leaves.’”

An interesting article I found – from 1959, when Frost was 85 years old – recounts Frost’s “days of harum-scarum, collegiate activity” during his short time at Dartmouth. Interestingly, that line with “harum-scarum” called to mind Dickinson’s letter to her friend George Gould – written when she was 19 years old – which was ultimately published in the Amherst College student newspaper. The letter begins, “Magnum bonum, ‘harum scarum,’ zounds et zounds, et war alarum, man reformam, life perfectum, mundum changum, all things flarum?”

​Dickinson’s letter is HERE. The Dartmouth feature on Frost, “Freshman Days,” is HERE.

8.

I stumbled upon this poem the other day, HERE. It has nothing to do with Dickinson, except that it called to mind her quote, “We turn not older with years, but newer every day.”

9.

I found another article entitled “The Road Taken, Amherst College,” written by William Peverill (known as Pepa Bill), a graduate of Amherst College. Scroll down to page 9, and there’s a bit (entitled) “THE BELLE AND BARD OF AMHERST” – about Dickinson and Frost.

However, the article begins, “Emily Dickinson was one of the ‘indispensable’ poets in English, one of two great American poets of the nineteenth century and almost undisputedly America’s greatest female poet.”

ALMOST? Come on, Pepa Bill. ​The article is HERE.

10.

A fortune from a cookie I consumed recently:

In a letter to a friend, Dickinson wrote, “the strongest friends of the soul - BOOKS.”

[aselectsociety]

Inspirited Habiliments

Yesterday I provided links to one video and one site with lists of highfalutin words used by Moira Rose (played by Catherine O’Hara) on Schitt’s Creek.  I wondered if Dickinson had ever used any of the terms in any of her poetry.  Dickinson did not use any of the sixteen shared on the video; however I noted that she had, in fact, used three of the ten words from the site – well, at least related forms of three of the words.  I ended my post with this: “Take a guess as to which three, and then I’ll fill you in tomorrow.”

As Little Orphan Annie used to sing on Broadway, tomorrow is just a day away – and based on my previous post, that day is today (although the sun did not come out).  Here are the ten words from the site:

So which three words did Dickinson use?  I would have guessed capricious, vigor, and potable – and I would have been one-third right. 

The words that she did NOT use in any of her poems are ennui, encumbered, capricious, balatron, irksome, gutted and potable.

The words she did use – or at least some form of the words – were mercurial, vigor, and habiliment.

In “The sun retired to a cloud,” she used “mercury,” not the capital-M “Mercury" (i.e., the planet), but “mercury” as “red oxide color; blazing scarlet tincture” to describe a sunset – and what a colorful sunset it is!  I LOVE that image in line 6, “Home flew the loaded bees.”  (LOL – you think those bees were just “loaded” down with pollen from their day's work – or “loaded” in the sense of being drunk on pollen?)

Dickinson never used the word “vigor”; however, in “The truth is stirless” she used “vigorous.”  The word comes in the opening line of the final stanza, “How vigorous a force” is truth.

The surprise for me was Dickinson’s use of “habiliment” – and the fact that she used it in two different poems, “Before you thought of spring” and “The way to know the Bobolink.”

“Habiliment” is an out-of-fashion word for fashion, more precisely the clothing one dons.  Here’s an example from a dictionary that popped up on Google:  “You may want to get up extra early on the first day of school so you have time to choose the perfect habiliments to wear.”

Check out the OED’s examples below of the word in uses dating back to the 1400s.  My favories are the “meit, drynk, and abuilyement” from 1554, 1590’s “S[t]raunge Lady, in so straunge habiliment,” and “the costlie excessive of cleithing, and abulzament of mens boeides” from 1609.  (Click the images to enlarge.)

LOL - I’m at that age where my “abulzament” is rather “costlie.”  How is it for you ladies? ​ The two poems below are those by Dickinson with the word “habiliment.”   There are some lines and images in these two poems that leave me in awe.  Read through them, and then I’ll share what I love about them tomorrow.

[grandhotelabyss]

Jumping off your last post, and recognizing this may be too big of an undertaking for a Tumblr post, but how might you characterize the literary sensibilities associated with each Zodiac sign? Why are Joyce and Woolf so clearly Aquariuses?

I mainly posted it for a lark and don't know enough to assemble that kind of information. However, re: Joyce and Woolf, it's not just that Aquarius is visionary, creative, independent, innovative—an air sign appropriate for their modernist flights of the mind—but also the imagery of the water-bearer uniquely suits these innovators of stream-of-consciousness narration, these writers persistently attracted to beach, strand, river, and ocean imagery. Sagittarius, on the other hand, is said to be the sign of prophets and seers, perfect for gnomic poets like Blake and Dickinson who seem to be rewriting the scriptures for themselves. A proper astrologer would need to know these individual writers' whole birth charts before making judgments though. (Fun fact: in the 1970s, my late uncle was the head of the Pittsburgh Astrological Society.)