i can't take this anymore. this guilt.
you see, an indecent percentage of my blog'’s page hits lately could be traced to my overweening literary pretensions. i started blogging, slipshoddily i’'d say, last year. and back then i had this presumptuously arrogant tick of posting favorite poems and tacking to them my lame stills.
a pet poem by the belle of amherst - there’'s a certain slant of light - filtered through my roll of blog posts. and lately, many visitors were waylaid by the web’'s various undiscerning search engines to my niche all because they were looking for one of the most lyrical and not so typically confounding poem by emily dickinson.
i imagine most of these hapless visitors to be unforbearing middle school kids, too restive to finish an english assignment and wanting to just gloss over some sort of cliff notes on the poem so that they could go back at once to their spanking portable sony playstations.
well, kids, let me do my good deed for this week. to atone for this guilt. hold on, i’'m not going to "“explain"” the poem for you. for really, how can you "“explain"” a poem? it’'s like asking a half crazed ornithologist why he breaks out in sobs everytime he claims he had a confirmed sighting of the extinct ivory billed woodpecker. or asking your still love crazed mom why she married your not so cool dad.
so, what is this good deed i am contemplating? i'’m really not cozy with discursive stuff. that’'s why, let me just tell you why i was first and continually seduced since then by this formidable performance of a poem in a length, i would hope, that you could possibly allow to pore over in a given impatient night of homework.
i was in high school then and this rather patient english teacher was reeling us into the poem by its beautiful sound (heavenly hurt) and striking imagery (weight of cathedral tunes). that didn'’t work for me. what worked was, for the first time, there was a poem short enough to be memorized for extra points. which i gladly did.
yet as i memorized it over and over, the poem completely resisted definition in terms of a logical, comprehensive statement.
but i can still remember how impossible it was to recite the lines without feeling this sense of tragedy, this deep rooted but hard to trace sense of melancholy. and for a moody teener, poetry, and dickinson specifically, suddenly seemed irrevocably hip and cool.
i was born and raised in a winterless island. hence, my complete bewilderment in the poetess'’ profound affliction in something normally regarded as, well, sunny - a ray of light. but i totally got the image of the light slanted as appropriately explained by afternoons despite the poem’'s insistence on winter afternoons which were totally absent from my then palette of experiences.
but try as my english teacher to let us soak in the poem’'s striking images, i could not. in fact, the poem came to me initially as visually vague.
sure, she was pointing us to an outward natural scene. but exactly what it was, she was typically coy. was I supposed to be looking at a ridge of a blue mountain or the lip of a dark chocolate forest? was i to gambol on a thin sheet of snow on the ground? or was it snowing to begin with? it was winter, after all. and did the sun break through the clouds in one piercingly poignant slant?
but strangely, the poem insisted on appearing painterly to my then young system. my attention was riveted outward and not through the inner landscape of the poetess who adamantly refused to refer to herself as taking action.
the poetess, unlike julie andrews, rollicked not in the hills. nor did she climb -heavens no- out of the window just to soak in the slanted light. she did not even sigh. all she did was simply look.
and for someone entertaining vague ideas of leading a life giving birth to things, that was more than enough. to look is everything.