Rethink.

5 Comments

• ty_010 wrote:

  May 28, 2008 at 1:27 am

  I think you are say­ing in part that the nar­ra­tor is talk­ing about vis­ceral, for­bid­den ‘night’ love and a sort of cyclic jour­ney. I would have to agree.

  Inter­est­ing asides are:
  The pos­si­bil­ity that “Our share of morn­ing,” was meant to sound sim­i­larly to ‘our share of mourning’

  And of course the idea of blank to me brings up the tab­ula rasa. What a par­tic­u­lar and strange idea that you would have two sep­a­rate ‘blanks’ one for your neg­a­tive and one for your positive.
• Matt D. Barnes wrote:

  July 10, 2008 at 6:46 pm

  I must con­fess I was sucked in here. Hav­ing read the first para­graph I was ready to protest that it was all wrong.

  I should have known bet­ter, excel­lent analy­sis as always.
• isabella mori wrote:

  July 21, 2008 at 9:32 am

  i have to con­fess that as a poet, i find this inter­pre­ta­tion thought­ful (if there any­thing that you do that is NOT thought­ful?) — and also a bit heavy.

  emily dick­in­son always feels light to me, even when what she writes is more melan­choly than this poem. that’s to a large degree, of course, because of her short lines, stan­zas and poems, and because of her pecu­liar use of punctuation.

  but in poetry there is almost always a strong ele­ment of the mys­te­ri­ous. a poem is not a story that hap­pens to be told in stan­zas, rhymes and rhythm. most poems well up from a place we don’t know, or at least don’t know very well.

  so i always feel a lit­tle strange when a poem is dis­cussed from a very ratio­nal place. it feels a bit like talk­ing about an exquis­ite meal by ana­lyz­ing its vit­a­min and trace min­eral contents.

  on the other hand (there’s always an other hand, actu­ally many hands — are we talk­ing about octopi now?) it is impor­tant that we each think about these poems in our own way. the beauty of poems and so many other works of art is that the cre­ative moment never stops. the artist cre­ates, brings it to the light of the audi­ence, and then the audi­ence takes it and cre­ates their own ideas, their own inter­pre­ta­tions, and some­times entirely new worlds from it.
• genebrooklyn@live.com wrote:

  February 11, 2009 at 11:22 am

  Great post.
  Here are some notes I wrote down a while back after read­ing this poem. I have to admit I didn’t inter­pret the poem in any sex­ual way.
  I don’t say that my read­ing is any more valid than yours or any­one else’s. I may in fact be way off base. But it is my own per­sonal response to what Dick­in­son has writ­ten. Hope you enjoy read­ing it.

  …

  Night and day as things to be ‘borne’. Life itself a thing to be borne?
  We do not call our­selves into existence…we find our­selves in the world…thus we have placed upon us the bur­den (though I would like to think equally the priv­i­lege) of fill­ing our days in some way or another.
  “Our blank…”…I have noticed in the past, and I have seen it pointed out by oth­ers, that Dick­in­son fre­quently com­mu­ni­cates in a kind of short­hand, or ‘tele­graph­i­cally’. By giv­ing one sug­ges­tive word and allow­ing (I should say forc­ing) the reader (the ‘unknown hands’) to fill in the blank. And here, quite lit­er­ally, the ‘blank’…
  “Our blank in bliss to fill/Our blank in scorn­ing…“
  I take ‘blank’ here to indi­cate blank slate, or blank day.…or some­thing of the kind. Mean­ing that our days are a blank­ness which we fill in the way we choose to fill them.
  (Or per­haps, like the mod­ern exis­ten­tial­ists, the poet regards our very selves and natures as ‘blanks’, which we define by the qual­ity of our rela­tion­ship to life).
  “Our blank in bliss to fill,
  Our blank in scorn­ing.“
  Here I think is the poet’s true genius at work: in the selec­tion of words.
  Most of us, in com­ing up with pairs of oppo­sites or alter­na­tives might come up with some­thing like, “to fill our days with joy/To fill our days with sorrow…hope/despair…etc…
  But Dick­in­son chooses bliss/scorn…this seems just about per­fect to me. Either life fills us with bliss or it is a thing to be mocked, scorned, stoned.
  It is our response to life, the qual­ity of our response to life, that Dick­in­son is inter­ested in here. This is our bur­den (or, as I say, our privilege)…that in our moments of soli­tude and alone­ness (night, morn­ing), we must, in effect, adjust our atti­tudes, decide what we truly believe about life…decide who we truly are in life. We must respond to life, either in total accep­tance and embrace (bliss), or else life is our enemy and a thing to be rejected (scorned).
  The two words Emily Dick­in­son chooses—bliss and scorn—admit of no mid­dle ground (it seems to me).A tepid response is no response at all. One either embraces life whole­heart­edly or one rejects it come­pletely.
  The final qua­tri­ain asserts that night and morn­ing alone pro­vide the hours for such reflection…they are soon fol­lowed by…“Afterwards—day!”…
  I am think­ing that what she means here is that in the ‘busy-ness’ of day, we are kept occu­pied with our duties and respon­si­bil­i­ties to oth­ers (soci­ety, fam­ily), and thus have no time for such intro­spec­tion.
  But why is there an excla­ma­tion point after ‘day’…‘day!’…Is it that the poet wel­comes the dis­trac­tions and safe rou­tines of daily activ­ity as relief from the bur­dens of fill­ing ‘the blank’?
  Perhaps.
• Mitchell Allen wrote:

  July 17, 2010 at 11:10 am

  This stum­b­li­cious for the sparkling con­ver­sa­tion, alone! You have a way of elic­it­ing some really lively dis­cus­sion.
  Throw­ing my hat into the ring, I think this poem is about lust.

  I think the first two lines are an exec­u­tive sum­mary of a night of pas­sion fad­ing into the harsh real­ity of day.
  Whether this socially reclu­sive author wrote from expe­ri­ence or vic­ar­i­ously, she seems to under­stand the com­pul­sive nature of wan­ton­ness:
  by shar­ing both ends of the expe­ri­ence, one doesn’t feel so ostra­cized as to never repeat the deed.

  @genebrooklyn rightly points out the piv­otal words: bliss and scorn. With­out be judg­men­tal, I would assert that a sex­ual encounter that is based on lust, rather than love, usu­ally cre­ates a dichotomy of feel­ings: one pos­i­tive, one negative.

  Now, for the graphic por­tion:
  Here a star, and there a star (reach­ing orgasm)
  Some lose their way. (aban­don one­self to the car­nal cli­max)
  Here a mist, and there a mist, (after­glow, com­ing down from the high)
  Afterwards—day! (return to reality)

  The excla­ma­tion point seems sig­nif­i­cant, as if to say, “What have we done?”

  Cheers,

  Mitch
  Mitchell Allen´s last blog ..Seven Hyper Links

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