Rethink.

So has a Daisy van­ished…
Emily Dick­in­son

So has a Daisy van­ished
From the fields today –
So tip­toed many a slip­per
To Par­adise away –

Oozed so in crim­son bub­bles
Day’s depart­ing tide –
Bloom­ing — trip­ping — flow­ing
Are ye then with God?

Com­men­tary:

The daisy van­ishes by mov­ing into the ground; the slip­per tip­toes across; “day’s depart­ing tide,” of course, is an upward motion –

Or is it? The ques­tions with this poem begin in earnest with the sec­ond stanza. “Day’s depart­ing tide” sounds a lot like us bleed­ing, and since we’re all going to die, the impli­ca­tion of “crim­son bub­bles” ooz­ing in a “tide” is that the entire world, despite its ephemeral par­tic­u­lars, is blood. Fur­ther, “tide” is not an upward motion unless “day’s depart­ing” is added as a pred­i­cate. The tide moves much like we do, hor­i­zon­tally. It may reach upward, but it doesn’t dis­solve into heaven completely.

We reach the third line of that sec­ond stanza and we find one word edi­to­ri­als on what has tran­spired in the rest of the poem. The oppo­site of the flower van­ish­ing — the rea­son why it was noticed — is that it bloomed. “Trip­ping” is more accu­rate in terms of describ­ing how we move through life: we don’t exactly “tiptoe.”

Well, per­haps when all is said and done, per­haps from a cos­mic view, we move qui­etly from life into death. But from another point of view, we bleed. The moments of pain are/were/will be real. Those moments are not quiet. For some of us, they might be worse than death.

The fact we die so qui­etly in the grand scheme of things is a truth that is a lie — it cov­ers up all the things that make human exis­tence both dif­fi­cult and mean­ing­ful. It cov­ers up our blossoming.

And so one won­ders about the “flow­ing,” when all is said and done. What does it mean to be with God — what does God do that affirms our life? When do we blos­som, and why?

You might want to note the par­al­lel between “field” and “Par­adise.” Com­bined with the empha­sis on motion, where is Paradise?

• Emily Dick­in­son, “Absence dis­em­bod­ies — so does Death” (860)
• Emily Dick­in­son, “Love — is that later thing than Death” (924)
• Emily Dick­in­son, “Good to hide, and hear ‘em hunt!” (842)
• A Per­sonal Reac­tion to “These are the days when Birds come back,” poem #130 by Emily Dickinson
• Wis­dom and Rule: On Poem 343 of Emily Dick­in­son, “My Reward for Being”

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