Wednesday, December 21, 2016

N. Scott Momaday and Emily Dickinson

The following excerpt comes from N. Scott Momaday's The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages.   The chapter title is "A Divine Blindness:  The Place of Words in a State of Grace."   I have often found Dickinson's poetry to be puzzling and enigmatic, but this poem confounds me completely.

I am publishing this excerpt because of Momaday's first comment on the poem:  "This poem, written about 1866 by a then obscure woman poet in the Connecticut Valley of western Massachusetts, is one of the great moments in American literature."  I know what that means, but I can't relate it to Dickinson's poem.  Perhaps you will do better.

The excerpt--poem and commentary:

     "When the subtitle "The Place of Words in a State of Grace" occurred to me, in the back of my mind was this poem by Emily Dickinson.

                            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   
                          


    This poem, written about 1866 by a then obscure woman poet in the Connecticut Valley of western Massachusetts, is one of the great moments in American literature.  The statement of the poem is profound;  it remarks the absolute separation between man and nature at a precise moment in time.   The poet looks as far as she can into the natural world, but what she sees at last is her isolation from that world.  She perceives, that is, the limits of her own perception.  But that, we reason, is enough.  This poem of just more than sixty words comprehends the human condition in relation to the universe:

                              So gradual the Grace  
                             A pensive Custom it becomes
                             Enlarging Loneliness. .


But this is a divine loneliness, the loneliness of a species evolved far beyond all others.  The poem bespeaks a state of grace.  In its precision, perception, and eloquence it establishes the place of words within that state.  Words are indivisible with the highest realization of the human being."



As I wrote above, I recognize that Momaday considers Dickinson's poem to be of supreme significance, but I cannot relate his words to the poem.

Any thoughts?


Poem 1068
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
edited by Thomas H. Johnson

22 comments:

  1. brother, he said... i wonder what RT would have to say about it... all i can get is it's about something spiritual... i sense a large gap between Emily's culture and my own, like speaking different languages... intriguing, though, that SM could extract a theme from it...

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    1. Mudpuddle,

      I also wonder what RT would make of it.

      Chapter title: divine blindness--perhaps blind to the natural world? But Grace?--Momaday in other places has said that words are sacred and only humans have words, perhaps as a substitute or solace for evolving out of the natural world.

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  2. Mudpuddle,

    A thought. Adam and Eve were ejected from Eden (the natural world) when they tasted of the knowledge of good and evil. They lost their primal natural innocence.

    Unfortunately this doesn't help me with the poem.

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    1. trying to think about it i run into my own prejudices: meaning whatever interpretation i foist upon it is from my experience, not ED's... i guess i wouldn't feel comfortable saying much about the poem without studying ED and Momaday both a lot more than i have... or am likely to... still, it's interesting in the way that ED is interesting, with her sensibility poised between heaven and earth....

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    2. Mudpuddle,

      Don't all of us use our backgrounds and experiences whenever we comment on something, anything? To remove ourselves from our comments would leave us with what--silence.

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    3. you're right; i guess it was a kind of retrograde comment...

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    4. after studying it some more, i'm beginning to think it's about a flock of birds landing in a tree... dividing the verses into two sentences each, it seems to describe them hovering above the meadow, then goes on to speculate about consciousness and Grace and contrasting the two with so called unconscious wildlife and then stating that Grace exists by itself in nature with no necessity for the presence of human awareness and then resolves by the flock (no furrow on the glow) resting in the tree... i'm by no means convinced that this is what she's saying, but it could be... couldn't it?? or not...

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    5. i should have mentioned, "no furrow on the glow" might refer to the dark line a traveling flock makes on the sunset glow, following one another, that is... it's not there because the birds have alighted in a tree... the poem is kind of like a short film...

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  3. Though I have read this poem before. It has puzzled me. I agree that something spiritual is going on.

    I will monitor the comments section in the hoes that more light can be shed on the mystery.

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  4. Brian Joseph,

    Yes, there is a spiritual element here, but just what is not clear. I also am hoping to gain insights from comments made here.

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  5. Mudpuddle,

    You have more of an idea than I do.

    The second stanza seems to suggest that Grace, whatever it may be, has something to do with thinking (a pensive Custom) but it makes loneliness (a separation) worse. And this isn't because of any law or edict, therefore a choice, perhaps one in which the effects are not foreseen?

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  6. i see what you're saying and you may well be right; in the mean time, somewhere, the search goes on... it's been a treat, the last half year or whatever it's been, having these on line conversations; i sincerely hope they continue in the new year... meanwhile, MERRY XMAS and HAPPY NEW YEAR to you and yours...

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    1. Mudpuddle,

      Yes, the search goes on. I've enjoyed our online chats also and hope they continue.

      MERRY CHRISTMAS and HAPPY NEW YEAR to you and yours also.

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  7. Fred, I return to your challenge after a few days in my mental wilderness. I read Dickinson's poem, and I remain baffled, so I turn to an expert explicator, Cynthia Griffin Wolff (author of a superb critical biography of Dickinson). She wrote: the "minor Nation" refers to creatures sounds (e.g., insects) that are "Pathetic" rather than joyous or sensuous; in the first stanza also the poet alludes to the sacrifice ritualized in a Catholic Mass (confirming Christ's pledge of a rebirth from the grave); then the speaker moves away from Christian language to the Old Testament (e.g., Canticle = the Songs of Solomon), representing not new life to come but -- in the last stanza -- the long sleep of winter and uninterrupted death, especially as further underscored by "Druidic Difference" (i.e., life is unending but there can be no rebirth from the grave). So, according to Wolff, the verse that begins with symbolic sacrifice of the Mass concludes with the primitive religion in which any human being may be sacrificed to unappeased deities. Well, such is Wolff's explication. I don't know about you, but my hat is off to Wolff. She sees things I never saw. Sometimes other explicators can be enormous helpers. Such is Wolff. Well, what do you think now about Dickinson's poem?

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  8. R.T.,

    I will have to think more on Wolff's interpretation. There is much there that I can't connect to the poem, which is possibly the result of not being able to make sense of many of the stanzas.

    What does ED mean by the Druidic Difference? How does it, whatever it is, enhance nature now. Knowledge of druidic beliefs won't help, unless that is how ED saw the Druids. I wonder what her concept of the Druids was.

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  9. Fred, let me share Wolff's commentary regarding ED and Druids:
    "The long, graceful drop of the poem -- away from faith, away from even present safety -- concludes in the last two lines: 'Yet a Druidic Difference / Enhances Nature now.' A pre-Celtic, pre-Christian sect of priests and magicians, the Druids celebrated successive transformations of an eternal matter: vitality flowed indiscriminately through humans, animals, fire, water, trees, and other parts of nature; life was unending, but there could be no 'rebirth' from the grave, for any particular consciousness was violated by the endless transformations. Dickinson may or may not have been familiar with these Druidic theories of 'immortality.' However, she certainly knew one thing, because Caesar and many of the Latin authors with whom she was familiar had commented upon it at length: the Druids were most remarkable for their pagan superstitions, their bloodthirstiness, and their cruelty; they routinely engaged in human sacrifice. Thus the verse that began with the symbolic sacrifice of the Mass concludes with a primitive religion where any human may be literally sacrificed to unappeased deities."
    Well, there you have Wolff's explication. I hope that helps you more than it helps me. There are some "meanings" in Dickinson's poems that can never be "decoded." They remain forever within Dickinson's singular imagination. My cynical view goes a step further: I suspect Dickinson did not know the "meanings" because she was more infatuated with words' sounds and appearances than with words' meanings. Does that make any sense?

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  10. R.T.,

    Strange--Wolff's explication goes backward from a symbolic human sacrifice to a physical human sacrifice. Is no progress possible?


    Aside from that I can see no flow or unified theme in her explication, so it doesn't help that much. Thanks, though, for taking the time and effort to post it as it provides an example of another POV on what is a very perplexing poem.

    As for your comment on "words' sounds," I found this comment in the Introduction to Momaday's _The Man Made of Words_, the same book from where the above post was excerpted.

    Momaday writes, "I have come to know that much of the power and magic and beauty of words consist not in meaning but in sound."

    It seems as though you may have tapped into something about Dickinson that Momaday also recognized and it is as important to him as it was to ED.

    Thanks. It was your comment that made me go back and reread the Intro.

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    1. I think words' meanings are complicated, culturally agreed upon factors, but their sights and sounds are ineffably aesthetic creations. Does that make sense?

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    2. R.T^.,

      Yes, it makes sense. And, the sound itself may have some sort of physical resonance for us that we experience but not at a conscious level. Long ago I read some research that suggested that certain types of sounds produce a response in many mammals, including humans. The sound of a infant across mammalian species is quite similar which may help explain the interest that many pets have in human newborns, aside from simple curiosity.

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  11. R.T.,

    Just thought of something. The library has audio books which include reading of various poets. I wonder if there's one on ED. It might prove interesting to hear her poetry read out loud by someone else.

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    1. Fred, anyone who reads her poems out loud faces huge challenges. What does a reader do with those dashes and capitalizations? And there are many more challenges! Yes, to hear the poems would be interesting. Let me know what you discover.

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    2. R.T.,

      That's why I would like to hear someone else tackle those problems.

      Will let you know if I find anything interesting.

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