By my Window have I for Scenery

Just a Sea — with a Stem —

If the Bird and the Farmer — deem it a “Pine” —

The Opinion will serve — for them —

It has no Port, nor a “Line” — but the Jays —

That split their route to the Sky —

Or a Squirrel, whose giddy Peninsula

May be easier reached — this way —

For Inlands — the Earth is the under side —

And the upper side — is the Sun —

And its Commerce — if Commerce it have —

Of Spice — I infer from the Odors borne —

Of its Voice — to affirm — when the Wind is within —

Can the Dumb — define the Divine?

The Definition of Melody — is —

That Definition is none —

It — suggests to our Faith —

They — suggest to our Sight —

When the latter — is put away

I shall meet with Conviction I somewhere met

That Immortality —

Was the Pine at my Window a “Fellow

Of the Royal“ Infinity?

Apprehensions — are God’s introductions —

To be hallowed — accordingly —

-Fr449, J797, Fascicle 38, 1864

Nate B Hardy and Connor O’neill contacted me to let us know that they had referenced the Prowling Bee in their podcast, “Old Songs For New People.” I listened to that podcast, which was on poem Fr654, and loved it and wrote them back to tell them so. The podcast was funny, insightful, and it featured a terrific song treatment of the poem by Nate. We corresponded and they asked me if I wanted to be on the podcast. I suggested we do it as a crossover with a Prowling Bee post. They would interview me to discuss a poem, and I would use a transcript of the interview as the commentary for the poem on Prowling Bee. I told them to pick out a poem and they chose the one at hand. We set a Zoom date to record the podcast.

Then something strange happened. About a half hour after we set the date I got a text from Susan Kornfeld telling me she had just heard a podcast on her car radio as she was driving through a rural part of Northern California, near Ukiah. She said she had hit scan on her car radio and it had landed at the beginning of the podcast. She got pulled in and listened to the whole thing. Then she went into great detail about the podcast, and how much she enjoyed it. The podcast she heard was Nate and Connor’s.

I thought that was a pretty strange coincidence, but it got stranger. Nate had mentioned to me that their podcast was very small, mostly just listened to by their friends and family. Were they being modest? It turns out, they were telling the truth. When I told them it was on the radio they were flabbergasted. They said there was no way it could be on the radio.

We figured some rogue college radio DJ must have heard the podcast, liked it, and decided to air it. That’s odd enough, but the fact that Susan just happened to hear it on her rental car radio while driving through rural California, dig it, and text me about it a few minutes after I had set a date to be on their podcast seemed beyond. I told Susan about it and she said it must have been “the long white fingers of Emily Dickinson.”

We talked a little about that in the interview after we talked about the poem. It was a lot of fun to try to unpack the poem with those guys and I think we got somewhere pretty interesting with it.

I cleaned up some of the “ums” and “you knows” and “likes” when I transcribed it, but I left some of it too, because it’s natural speech and I like the rhythms it creates. I didn’t include laughter in the transcript, but there was a lot of it. Here is a link to the podcast containing fragments of the interview and Nate’s song version of the poem. And here is the transcript of the interview:

Nate: Shall we jump into the poem?

Adam: Yeah, sure. Okay. It’s not that easy actually to enter into that poem.

Nate: No, it’s easy to enter. I think the entry point is the easy act.

Adam: I guess so. But it took me a while to just figure out that the tree was supposed to be a sea with a stem. Then I was like, what does that mean? A sea with a stem? At first I thought she was looking out the window and seeing the ocean in the background and the tree itself was the stem in the foreground. But it took me a while to figure out that the tree is the sea.

Nate: The tree is the sea.

Adam: The tree is, yeah.

Nate: What do you mean? So what do you mean the tree is a sea? You mean it’s just this embodiment of the infinite and it just branches off into everything.

Adam: Yeah, that’d be one way of seeing it. I think the Sea is meant to be a representation of the infinite, deep and mysterious. And the stem is interesting because the stem actually grounds it, grounds the infinite, you know?

Nate: Hold on. Let’s slow down, Adam. Yeah. Okay. Let’s have somebody read the first stanza.

Adam: All right.

Nate: Connor, do you have the poem in front of you?

Connor: I do.

Nate: Connor, would you please read us the first stanza of this poem?

Connor: All right.

*By my window, have I for scenery just a Sea with a stem. If the bird and the farmer deem it a pine, the opinion will serve for them. *

Nate: So Adam, you’re telling us the tree is a sea.

Adam: Yeah. With a stem.

Nate: Right. With a stem. Mm-hmm. And so it’s kind of localized, but from that location, you can access pretty much anything you wanna access.

Adam: Yeah.

Nate: One thing I picked up on too, after like a million readings, is that I think, at least at this stage of the poem, it’s pretty light.

Adam: Mm-hmm.

Nate: Like, she was just kinda like, oh, that old thing. You know, like, it’s silly. Like my silly neighbors, the bird and the farmer, which are silly neighbors to have, right? Like if you’re watching some kids show, you know, you’re neighbors with the bird and the farmer.

Adam: Mm-hmm.

Nate: But I think it, like at this stage the stakes are pretty low.

Connor: Well, I don’t know.

Nate: You don’t think so?

Connor: Maybe it’s not quite a provocation, but she’s saying like, yeah, call it a pine tree if you want. And be blind to the world.

Nate: You know, she’s, yeah, well, fine. Yeah. But still, it’s kind of like, alright.

Connor: She’s talking about the naming of things. She says, so if you do that, you won’t see it for what it is.

Nate: So you read this stanza and you guys are thinking we’re already heavy ass.

Adam: Yeah. I mean, I think you can go there. Like one question is, why does a bird call it a pine? You wouldn’t think a bird would name the tree.

Nate: Yeah, because it’s silly, because it’s a kid show. It’s like, “Hey Biiird! Hey, bird, hey farmer.“

Adam: I think it’s meant to be light and fun, but I think she’s going deeper too, in the sense that a farmer calls it a pine because we tend to want to name and categorize everything, which is part of what this poem is getting at. But the bird is interesting because for a bird it’s all about the practicality of the tree. The pine is a home. It’s the thing to perch on. It’s a practical thing, but the bird doesn’t quite have the imagination Emily does to turn it into a Sea, right? I’ve just noticed that with Dickinson every detail stands for some deeper idea, so I question the bird.

But I like what you’re saying too about the childlike aspect of it. I can see that in there.

Nate: Fine, every detail is laden with decision and possibility, but another thing that happens in a lot of Emily Dickinson poems is this kind of like a bigger through-the-stanzas arc. Right? She kind of sets you up sometimes.

Adam: For sure.

Nate: Just to really get you at the end.

Adam: Yeah!

Nate: My read is, okay, we’re kind of beginning to broach, approach, questions about categories or who’s got a bigger imagination, but at this point I’m not troubled.

Adam: Gotcha.

Nate: Not anything that’s happening in the poem at this point.

Adam: Yeah. It’s light, and there’s some nice word play in here between Sea and scenery and pine and opinion. So there is something pretty playful about that first scene.

Nate: Yeah. Yeah. I missed the pine and opinion thing. That’s good. Okay. Second stanza. We ready for the second stanza?

Connor: *It has no port nor a line, but the Jays that split their route to the Sky or squirrel whose Giddy Peninsula may be easier reached this way. * Adam: So the jays are splitting their route to the sky. Why does she use that word “split?”

Nate: The sentiment to me seems like, my take, right? for the first stanza. Uh huh, it’s just a tree, huh? Like, you call this thing a pine tree, right? Like, is that what we call the pit stop of sky travelers? Or so many dizzying peninsulas for squirrels. Like a tree. Like that’s all you got. Is there more to it than that?

Adam: You mean like you’re talking about splitting, like there are different routes you can take?

Nate: I mean the Jays are splitting their route, right?

Adam: Yeah.

Nate: And so you can imagine dividing point A to point B in these segments. They’re breaking the trip up.

Adam: Through landing on the tree.

Nate: Yeah. Landing on the tree.

Adam: Landing on the tree. Split’s a heavy word. It’s got an almost violent sound to it. The idea of violently splitting the sky is in there.

Nate: mm-hmm. Sure.

Adam: These word choices are so interesting. I really like that idea of the split being part of what this poem is about, looking at things a couple different ways, or going different directions, or on the way to the sky, on the way to the sun, the sky on the way up to some kind of transcendence or something.

Like, we all have different routes. We all have different ways of getting there or something along those lines. It’s evocative of that for me.

Nate: So you say split is this a violent word?

Adam: Yeah.

Nate: Is there a word you would drop in there if you were trying to not make it seem like you’re smashing the sky into pieces? If I was thinking, all right, split’s too hard. Like, are you gonna “break” your route through the sky? Like, is that any easier? Are you gonna like “chop” your route through the sky?

Adam: You could certainly go a lot softer with your word choice, in a number of ways. But split is so good because you get the idea of splitting something apart, but also splitting off in a different direction.

There’s a poem she has that starts off with a line, “Split the lark and you’ll find the music.”

Nate: Yikes.

Adam: You know, you’re actually cutting the lark open to find the music inside. And it’s an angry poem in a way, but it’s beautiful. Oh my God. It’s a great poem. But you see that she starts with that word and it’s very violent. It’s a bloody poem. And it is trochaic, starting on the down beat, so it’s like “SPLIT the lark” so it’s like she’s spitting out the word almost. So I think that’s why I’m tuned into that word having that kind of quality, because of that particular poem.

Nate: Yeah. That’s pretty interesting. It’s so compact, right? It’s just miniaturized ideas. And it seems like you often are able to kind of prize out some meaning through the context, basically, like referring to the poems that it’s surrounded by. We’ve already split the lark, right? So if now we’re splitting the sky, like there’s no ambiguity here.

Adam: I wouldn’t see it as negative here necessarily though. I would just see it as…forceful. But the multiplicity of meanings between splitting something apart but also splitting off in different directions, to me that’s just awesome because it fits the meaning of this poem in a couple different ways. But the context, that’s one of the cool things about writing about the poems in order, especially when you look at the fascicles, because in the fascicles I personally think that she ordered the poems like they’re little books. I think that they’ve got purposeful order to them sometimes, like she arranged them. And so then, yeah, you start seeing a greater context. Like the poem that I’m actually writing about now. [Fr844] Oh my gosh, I don’t even really want to get into this on the podcast because it’s disturbing. But you’ll see it if you do. It’s like this poem hits me in a whole crazy different way because it follows from another poem that disturbed me. It’s only when you put them together that you really understand what the second poem is about, which turns out to be something very intense. So yeah, the context helps. Also, when you know her lexicon that helps too. You guys know about that, that online site called, uh, the Dickinson Lexicon?

Connor: No,

Adam: It’s a really helpful resource because they go through nearly every word she uses in her poems and tell you what the words would’ve meant in the 1800s. Sometimes those definitions are very different from the definitions we have today.

How about this word, “Giddy.” There’s your back to the fun.

Nate: Yeah. Giddy.

Adam: A squirrel. Giddy.

Nate: See, I read giddy as just kind of ecstatic vertigo, right? Like squirrel life. Uh huh. What do you do besides just get really excited about being high up in a tree.

Adam: Yeah. And it also makes the poem a little bit giddy. It’s a little drunken.

Nate: Yeah. Should we do the next stanza?

Adam: Yeah.

Connor: *For Inlands, the earth is the underside and the upper side is the sun and that commerce it has of spice I infer from the odors born. *

Nate: This one rips.

Adam: Why, what is it about this stanza?

Nate: This one is where I was like, this poem is the best poem.

Adam: Why?

Nate: I mean, well, so no, the first couple of stanzas I thought yeah, this is silly. She’s kind of playing around, like, obviously there’s a lot more to a pine tree right? Now, I feel like we’re entering into this kind of edgy delirium, right?

Adam: Hmm.

Connor: Mm-hmm. Well, if she splits the sky in the last stanza. She turns the world upside down in this one.

Nate: It’s like a pine, right, like a territory so vast it’s got the whole world, everything underneath and nothing but the sun on top, right?

Adam: That’s cool.

Nate: An economy so enigmatic that even if it exists at all, it’s the spice trade, which we can only guess at because it smells so good. Oh yeah. I just feel like this is like one of these, I don’t know, my poetic space is pretty small, but I’m thinking, oh, this is a Dylanesque kind of silly moment. Like this could have been a scene from Isis.

Connor: Oh, nice. Yeah.

Nate: I just love the whole spice trade thing.

Adam: Yeah. And that’s fun too, right? It’s cute.

Nate: I don’t know if it’s cute anymore. I think right now it’s starting to get like more than cute.

Adam: Yeah, I see what you mean. I meant that it’s kind of cute to think of a spice trade happening inside of a tree. I’m not gonna say it doesn’t have extra portent, but it’s fun.

Connor: Yeah. At the same time. You can almost see it like, well, all right, I’m playing out this conceit. Like, what else? What else? Oh, well, I guess, you know, what does a pine do? I guess there’s a trade, you know, let’s see how far we can push this.

Nate: I think right now she’s starting to kind of push it to the point where it’s extra fun, right? It was one thing when we were talking about birds flying from pine tree to pine tree. Or you could start off with a heavy barrage of metaphor, like the pine tree is this metaphor for everything. And actually not just the metaphor. You could pretty much access a huge part of the universe just by contemplating this pine tree. It’s kind of like, alright, like fine. Well, yeah, but once you start trading spices, right? Mm-hmm. Then I’m invested in a way that I might not have been before.

Adam: Yeah. And then thinking of that as commerce, to think about it like the thing that it has to offer you or offer the world, you know, is this spice, the smell that’s so amazing. That deep fragrant smell. Spicy.

But also, I like what you said about the whole earth being the underside and the sun being the upper side as somehow the tree, the living thing is like us, we stand between the earth and sun, we have our stems too, in a way, we’re a mediary between the heavens and the earth. The tree is a living being. I get a little bit of that vibe too from that, which takes it into more serious, existential territory.

Nate: I get that. Like, it’s big. It’s big in a lot of ways, right? And either we’re just talking about the vastness of earth, or we’re talking about the vastness of just trying to understand your space on earth and, you know, between God and whatever is on the other side of that.

Adam: Yeah. I think what you said about it when we started, the arc, it’s starting to open up into a different territory, because when you look at the next stanza, which maybe we should read now, it definitely goes somewhere deeper. It departs a bit from the playful in the next stanza.

Nate: Connor.

Connor: That’s my cue.

To affirm when the wind is within, can the dumb define the divine? The definition of melody is that definition is none.

Nate: Yeah. So now, now I think she’s got a kind of crazy look in her eyes. Yeah. Like, you know, pine trees, like do pine trees speak? Right. ’cause now, when wind is blowing through its branches, it is whispering the name of the divine, right? It is speaking the unpronounceable words that capture melody, and then make melody crumple up and fall into the void.

Adam: Well said! And it’s great. The word affirm. It affirms, right? It’s like a beautiful word right there.

Nate: Yeah. So now I think it’s not like she’s just playing around, she’s saying bullshit. Like pines don’t do that. Like pines don’t speak revelations.

Adam: Well, the wind within, to me, I think of it as breath. It’s like somehow now the pine has become Emily. The wind within is the poem being spoken, the song being sung, That’s what’s affirming. It ties in like that for me, but then I don’t know. What’s your thought about that line, Could the dumb define the divine?

Nate: Well, because, so the pine is supposed to be this inert thing, right?

Adam: Yeah.

Nate: Like you were talking about like, who’s got more imagination, right? Like a bird or a farmer, right?

Adam: Yeah.

Nate: And so I think that she’s kind of playing with that. You know, not necessarily. That was something that I’ve been asking myself. A pine tree, it’s not supposed to converse, right? It’s certainly not supposed to dish in the way that this pine tree is dishing, right? It’s not supposed to tell you the secrets of divinity or of melody. And yet, you hear that wind through the branches of a pine tree, it’s doing it. And you’re there. Yeah. You’re there.

Connor: I like the word you used a minute ago, Adam, of being a mediary, like the tree is a medium for breath and breath that has these connotations of the divine, of life, of the spirit. It’s like the divine, it’s ineffable, but as it moves through the tree you can’t see it, but you can see the branches move. You can’t hear it, but you can hear it sort of move through the tree. It becomes the tree. The tree is the mediary for our ability to discern or affirm, I guess, the divine.

Nate: Divine.

Adam: Yeah. That’s beautiful.

Nate: You know what’s crazy, Adam, is that you’re saying that at this point, maybe the pine’s voice is Emily’s voice.

Connor: Yeah.

Nate: Like my notes, like for the next stanza, are Emily is now speaking in pine voice.

Adam: She smells like pine too. She’s pining.

I wonder too about that “Can the dumb define the divine” line. On one hand she’s saying the dumb can’t define the divine, unless it has the inspiration of wind going through it. But I actually wonder if she’s maybe also saying that only the dumb can define the divine, ’cause as soon as you speak and start naming things, you lose definition.

Connor: Sure. Right.

Adam: Which is why I think that the definition of melody is that definition is none.

Only the dumb tree can define the divine.

Connor: yeah.

Adam: I think this poem is also playing with the idea that you have to be dumb to definition to speak divinely, and blind to normal sight to truly to see with the imagination.

Nate: Yeah. This is where we’re headed, right? Resolution is like, just stop playing. Just be like a dumb pine tree.

Adam: It’s funny ’cause how do you define a good melody? It is pretty hard to do.

Connor: Well, it’s become a mantra of mine. This has a flavor of the chase it not and it abides, you know. [Fr654] Yeah. Just kind of let the stuff act on you. If the dumb defines the divine, you know, don’t chase it...

Nate: It’s not going to be there, it’s gonna happen. Right. As soon as you try and define it, it’s gonna,

Connor: it’s gonna vanish.

Adam: Chase what?

Connor: Oh, maybe I’m getting the line wrong.

Nate: Uh, yeah, we’re referring back to…

Adam: oh, that awesome poem where it’s like the wind going through…

Nate: yeah, through

Adam: the grass. And you’re trying to chase the creases...

Nate: Uh huh.

Adam: Oh yeah, yeah. God, that poem is so good.

Nate: Oh, beauty. Beauty is not caused. It is.

Adam: Yes. That poem. Yeah.

Nate: Yeah.

Adam: Oh yeah. You guys, you did a podcast about that one, right?

Nate: Yeah, we did.

Adam: Okay. That’s right. Yeah. Oh God. You know, and she’s got another poem where she uses this exact construction, but instead of melody, it’s beauty. “The definition of beauty is, the definition is none.” [Fr797] Yeah. And that’s just a four liner. I have it here. The definition of beauty is, the definition is none.“ That’s word for word what we’ve just heard with the melody line. We’ve just switched the word melody out with beauty, as if they were one in the same. What I like about this earlier poem is that since there is no definition of beauty, it “eases analysis since heaven and He are one.” So at one level it’s about getting beyond analysis, about, like you said, being the tree. Heaven and tree are one.

Being the pine. She sets you up for a definition, but then negates definition, right? The definition is that there is no definition. And then you get that sense of, well okay, if the definition of beauty is the definition is none, then if you can get rid of definition altogether, are you always in beauty?

Nate: Do we like that? Come on.

Adam: Uh, I mean, I don’t know, as a human, I mean, it’s pretty hard to do, but I know that there are times when I can get outside of thought, and when I do things are pretty blissful there, you know? And music can do that. When you’re in Melody, sometimes you’re doing that.

You’re just like, I’m in this melody and it’s so good. I’m not analyzing, I’m not defining anything. I’m just in it. I’m inside.

Nate: But it’s so weird though, because it seems like it’s not that the definition is none, it’s the definition is easy. It’s like what you enjoy about it, you know.

Adam: For what? Is it melody you’re talking about?

Nate: Well, for the melody or for beauty, it sounds like any kind of good feeling, you’re not having to think too hard about it.

Adam: Yeah.

Nate: And I guess that what you’re saying is that since you didn’t have to think too hard about it, there was no definition, but it seems like you could observe somebody else’s happiness. And you could just decide, okay, I’m not feeling happy, but I recognize that what’s so happy about this person is that they’re in this effortless stream where pleasant things are just washing over them, right? And I think you could define it. It’s just there’s just this very cheerful resonance, like what’s happening in the world, it’s very agreeable to them because they’re not working too hard at it. It doesn’t mean you can’t define it. It just means that you don’t want to be defining it when it’s happening to you,

Connor: Or that it resists a final definition. Or a tidy definition.

Nate: Well, yeah, without resorting to all kinds of evolutionary psychology, which is not very poetic.

Connor: Well, let me ask you guys this. ’cause now I’ve noticed something, In the transcription of this poem, it has the definition of melody dash is dash that definition is none Dash. Melody - is - none -. I just pulled it up on the Amherst site and there are no dashes.

Adam: You mean the original manuscript?

Connor: Well, the metadata says this is a transcription, but it’s handwritten.

Adam: Oh. That transcription was done after Emily died by Mabel Loomis Todd. Do you know her? Her story’s crazy too. She was the one who was having an affair with Austin and she was obsessed with Emily. But anyway, her whole story is interesting. I love her too. She and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who both worked on her first posthumous book of poems both thought that the poems needed more conventional punctuation. They wanted to get rid of the dashes.

Connor: Oh, interesting.

Adam: Just because they wanted ’em to get published, I think. They thought with the dashes it made the poems too far out there. So they put periods and commas, and they put titles on the poems too, which is totally, totally wrong.

Connor: Yeah. There it is. I see at the bottom, they put a title in brackets. The Pine.

Adam: See, yeah. Mabel put a title on it.

Connor: For this? Come on.

Nate: Totally missed the point.

Connor: Yeah.

Nate: She was like looking at a tree. Okay. So the official version has the dashes here.

Adam: Yeah. I mean, it is cool that that “is” is like just sitting there by itself between those dashes.

Connor: It’s almost like a pictogram, you know, like the definition of melody is just like a dash, like a line, you know?

Connor: Yeah. Blank Space might do a similar thing, but just to kind of, you know, it “is.”

Nate: I was just reading a bunch of Roberto Bolano books.

Adam: Love Him. Which one?

Nate: Uh, well I read Savage Detectives and then that one, 2666. Yeah. Anyway, but you know what I’m talking about, like the one poem of the poet they’re seeking in Savage Detectives. It’s like a flat line.

Adam: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that. So that’s getting into letting go of definition. I think it is interesting because a definition does come out of order. There is something hierarchical about it. It sets up comparison.

I think that that’s the whole point of this poem in some ways. It’s like the tree can be a Sea. Don’t get caught up in defining it. It can be free of definition, because there’s more, there’s more there.

Connor: Right. It’s limited, you call it a pine and it sort of foreshortens the depth of what you can see in it.

Adam: Well put. Yeah. She can see so much more in that dang pine.

Nate: I don’t know. I still keep, and maybe it’s because I’m into this arc from the start to the finish where it’s not just like she is elaborating on all the ways this pine is more than, you know, what it seems.

It feels to me like there’s this transition from playful, like, Hey, this pine is extra, and it’s escalating, right? Like, you thought she was joking, right? Or she was just having some fun, and then you look over at her and she’s like, shaking, right?

Apprehensions. At the end of it, all right, it’s getting heavier. We’re not even at the heaviest part yet. Right. I don’t know if it’s just that categories are heuristics, which inevitably separate us from the nuance and depth of life. I think we use heuristics so that we can kind of like move on to the next topic, right? And we’re not just stuck on this time, not for the rest of our days.

Adam: Yeah. But could you?

Nate: I think that she’s basically saying, look, I think there’s some kind of, well, there’s like a dark kind of anti here, right? Where it’s like, no, you’re gonna look at this pine, right? Like, you need to look at this pine. And she’s right about the pine and it’s kind of scary that she’s right about the pine, right? Like, so I think she goes from silly to delirious, to crazy, to like, scary. Like she’s gonna break your world in half and oh, split the sky and you’re gonna be left with pretty epic doubt. And I’m kind of spilling the beans here. But she’s basically saying the doubts that you’re gonna be left with, that’s as close to God as you’re ever gonna get.

Adam: I don’t see the doubt. Where do you see it?

Nate: Apprehension.

Adam: Apprehension, yeah, maybe. But apprehension also can just mean to understand something. Right. You’re afraid though maybe, because it can be scary.

Nate: So you know the lexicon. Is apprehension synonymous with understanding?

Adam: It can mean both. Yeah. So it can merely mean understanding, but it can also mean being anxious. It’s interesting the tie-in between those two definitions though, like to truly understand God’s voice could be pretty terrifying for sure. But I don’t get much doubt in this. The pine is a living part of infinity. It’s pretty comforting.

I’m not saying it’s not in there. I’m just saying I don’t see it that much.

Nate: I think I inadvertently teleported us past the whole stanza. I think it’ll help. Let’s keep going.

Connor: All right.

“It suggests to our faith. They suggest to our sight. When the latter is put away, I shall meet with conviction I somewhere met that immortality.”

Nate: This one she’s speaking in pine-voice for me. Okay, so the first line, that’s easy, right? That’s the pine. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It’s like activating some kind of latent faith now that we are appreciating its depth. Then the “they” in the second line is also the pine because we’ve undergone this kind of like multiplicative deepening process. We’re appreciating the pine in new ways and I think this whole kind of suggesting to our sight thing, I read that just as a parallel to like activation of latent faith. Here we’re getting this kind of activation of some more rational understanding of how the world works or how, like it’s all put together.

Adam: Is that how you see it, Connor?

Connor: Yeah, somewhat. Say the last part that you said again, Nate.

Nate: Well, so first is that we’ve gotta agree that “they” is still the same pine.

Adam: I don’t think so. I think the “they” is all the people that are just seeing with their eye sight. They’re not seeing with their inner sight, their faith. They’re just seeing the tree as a pine.

Nate: but then, so how do they “suggest to our sight.” If it’s all vapid, like bungled dinguses out there, who can’t appreciate the depth of a pine. How do “they” have any sway whatsoever over what our sight does?

Like, we’ve already dismissed them.

Connor: But she’s coming back to it, right? Like if the top of this stanza picks up on the last part of the last stanza. Speaking of definitions, it’s taking us back to the top of the poem then too, by extension.

Adam: Yeah. It’s coming back to the top.

Nate: Oh back to the bird of the farmer.

Adam: I think so. Or just to everybody who defines, like the royal society below. The poem talks about the fellow of the royal Infinity, but she’s making a joke on the acclaimed scientists, the esteemed fellows of the royal society.

Nate: Right. But you’re jumping ahead.

Adam: I am, I am. Yeah. But that’s the “they” I think, the farmers and the scientists.

Nate: You guys are both with the “they” are the dinguses who don’t see the pine for what it is?

Adam: Well look at the next line, when the latter is put away. So the former is faith. That’s what the tree suggests. Now we’re gonna put the latter, what sight suggests, away, And once we put that away, then, once we get rid of ordinary sight, once we can get rid of the definition, then you can more easily feel the conviction that there’s Immortality there, You can feel it inside. You can’t see it with your eyes.

Nate: So my read is almost completely compatible. It’s just that, that second line to me, we’re acknowledging the multi, like the whole poem has basically developed the fact that this pine is more than is seen.

Adam: I see it, yeah. It suggests something more.

Nate: But the only way we get back to that kind of immortality that we had met with and then lost is to basically get rid of our sight. Right? Like, we’ve done the work, we’ve unpacked pineness and this new way, but now that we’ve unpacked it, we’ve gotta forget about it, if we’re actually gonna get back to some kind of authentic and satisfying faith in the universe. See?

Connor: Well, I think it’s proof, it’s like proof of concept in a way. If you don’t call it a pine and you just look at it in, even in just, its material forms or, I know it’s also metaphorical, but just based on what you can see.

If you don’t call it a pine, you start to see birds differently. You start to hear the wind differently. You start to think about melody differently, but it’s all terrestrial still. But now she says okay, if you’re with me, if you can blow up your definition for a second, or you can forget about categories for a second and just look and listen.

Now let what you’re looking at and what you’re hearing, it’s sort of a loaded word to use, I guess, but to transcend that and get to immortality. Yeah. It’s a patient sort of development of the idea, I guess.

Adam: When you put away sight, you’re actually closer to faith, right?

Connor: Absolutely. You’re closer to something that you feel inside, that you apprehend from inside.

Nate: I’m with you with that. I think, I guess, and maybe our points of departure are trivial, right? It’s just, it’s the same, it’s almost irrelevant.

Adam: Yeah. I mean, I, I see what you’re saying and it’s pretty interesting because it’s like the tree is suggesting something to your sight as well, you know? That works just as well.

Nate: It was also a very intellectual kind of exercise, right? You encountered the pine, you considered the pine, and as part of your deep consideration, you dispensed with all the ideas, right? Like the kind of easy ways to dismiss the pine and to pretend like you understand the pine, you kind of go back to zero and well, I think zero is this very potent place, right?

And so, I don’t know. I guess whether the “they” is some other or not, I think it’s still this kind of conflict between faith and rational understanding, right? Or kind of like the need to explain, right, and unpack or justify whatever it is that you might have otherwise been faithful in.

I don’t know if it matters if it’s the pine or the other things that interact with the pine. It’s just that there is some other, right? And so maybe the “they” in a generic kind of way just establishes otherness.

Connor: Yeah, yeah. Or if your faith is immortality, it’s a mysterious thing and resistant to definition. It’s almost like your eyes are too literal. It is too literal a thing because you’ll see it and you’ll name it.

Nate: Or, or is “they” your eyeballs? Like, “These dumb eyeballs!” With every object, my mind’s eye is clouded by my eyeballs.

Adam: And there’s that word dumb again. Because I do think that there’s a tie in between blindness and dumbness in this poem. So “These dumb eyeballs!” is perfect.

Nate: But it’s like both ways though. The pine is dumb, but you know, it somehow knows the divine.

Adam: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Nate: And then there’s the dumbness of thinking that you know better, that you could define.

Adam: Yeah. Right, right. It’s hard to know where she’s going with that particular line. Read that last stanza.

Connor: All right. Was the pine at my window a fellow of the Royal Infinity? Apprehensions are God’s introductions, to be hallowed accordingly.

Nate: So Adam, you were getting us at this whole Royal Society Fellow thing, like she’s taking the piss out of like some kind of, you know, intellectual brotherhood.

Adam: Yeah. ’cause it was famous at that time. If you were a fellow of the Royal Society in England, you know, that’s an elite brotherhood of scientists. So then she makes a pun out of it and she switches up society for infinity.

Nate: But so without making the connection to the royal society, to intellectuals, I thought it was just a super fun way of saying like, oh shit, the pine is an angel.

Adam: Yeah. No, I think that’s there too.

Nate: And like, you know, just thinking about like the whole big arc of what Dickinson is exploring with her poetry. That seems like a kind of a panicky thought, right? It seems like she’s gone so far to try to connect with heaven, looking out your window and being like, oh shit. Like it’s right the fuck there?

Adam: Yeah. Do you guys know that band The Silver Jews?

Connor: Yeah, David Berman’s band.

Adam: Yeah. He’s a great poet, David Berman. There’s one song where he talks about how he was hospitalized for approaching perfection.

Adam: So I get what you mean there. She has suddenly left the planet. The tree has taken her to this place of infinity and immortality. And I think you are right, there is meant to be some fear in the word apprehensions there. It’s like holy moly. It’s like you’re on acid trip, or whatever, and you’re just like, whoa, this tree is Infinite. Like this is part of infinity. Like we’re in infinity, we’re somehow alive inside infinity. So yeah, there is something a little terrifying about it.

Nate: Well also, one of the things that we were touching on earlier was this whole definition problem, right? Where the way that you get to divinity or the way you get to some kind of happy place is to not just not try, but to somehow undefine it, right?

And so I think that this is just a kind of reformulation of that, right? Where the way that you do that is to like pause, right? I still wanna read apprehensions as not just a hesitation.

Like in the learning process leaves you with profound doubt, right? As like panicky levels of the undoing of whatever framework that you’ve built to try to make sense of life in a productive way. I mean, how else, how else do you get introduced to God? I don’t think you get introduced by God by understanding what the pine tree’s all about.

I think the only way you meet God is through panic.. It’s through burning the framework and being left without definitions.

Adam: Yeah, you’re unmoored.

Connor: Yeah. And it’s an exhausting to apprehend, you know, apprehension. To understand something suggests the end of a process. But if the apprehension is only an introduction, it’s like, whoa, you know, it’s vertigo.

Nate: That’s true. That’s true. Right? ’cause it’s three stages. Number one, before the poet was ready to give up everything they understood about a pine tree, they had to understand that pine tree in a pretty deep way, right?

So first they have to define it, basically as richly as possible, pineness, right? And then they had to give up on their rich definition of pines. And then that’s God’s introduction, right? It’s like, oh crap. Like now what?

Adam: Yeah, stage three. Even though there may be a little bit of that sense of fear or, you know, being apprehensive, the poem maintains its lightness. Even in that clever line, “Can the dumb define the devine,” in its sound, there is something fun. Can the dumb define the divine? And then the joke about the fellow of the royal society is in there at the end. So that’s funny, to turn society into Infinity. It upends all the science. And then, I don’t know if you guys will go for this, this may be a stretch, but I think that hallowed at the end is like the introduction. Apprehensions are God’s introductions, to be hallowed, or helloed, accordingly.

Nate: Oh, see, I didn’t, I didn’t, that almost seems corny.

Adam: It does, but it’s funny in the seriousness of the poem. And I love the link between helloed and hallowed, the hallowedness of the hello, of the introduction.

Nate: See, I don’t know. I get, so I get that corny. You know how, I think a lot of people do this, I certainly do this, you respond to like a raw deal by making a dumb joke, right? You know, she’s feeling big feelings here, right? And maybe is a little panicky, but you know, she’s not a jerk. She doesn’t wanna ruin your day.

Adam: She’s still gonna give you some light. She’s still gonna give you some fun.

Nate: It’s like, no, it’s cool. Like, I’m struggling here, but it’s just about like this fellow, this royal society of infinity stuff. Like what do I know?

Adam: Yeah. I do get often with her a sense of a trembling, a quivering, but I don’t feel it as much in this poem, except for that word apprehension there. I mostly feel just delight, and a message of getting beyond definition and sight and what we think we know about things so that we can apprehend them with our imagination and actually enter into something deeper, which is hallowed ground.

Which is what it’s like at the end. It’s like when you truly apprehend something from inside, when you really feel that tree, when you’re hugging that tree. That’s hallowed, that’s real. That’s a real thing. We’re not

Nate: We’re not hugging the tree anymore. Like we are in the tree.

Adam: The tree, yeah.

Nate: More than hugging. Yeah. Like a little bit more intense than a hug.

Adam: Yeah. I mean you’re feeling the tree. I guess that’s what I mean. You’re not just seeing it. You’re apprehending it from inside. I was being cute with the hugging.

Nate: You’re doubting it, you’re not just feeling it. You’re not just taking a beat, kind of questioning what kind of relationship you have with the tree. I think if you wanna be introduced to God, you have to acknowledge your doubt. You don’t just acknowledge your doubts, you hallow those doubts. Like the worship of your doubt. That’s your access point to divinity.

Adam: That’s perfect for Emily Dickinson. I just have a hard time seeing that in this particular poem.

Nate: Yeah.

Adam: Except for that word apprehension. And maybe that word Split.

Nate: I will acknowledge that I might be imposing something here because on my first read I was definitely thinking, oh, this is just a fun poem. I like it.

Adam: Right.

Nate: I like the spice trade. I like this whole dumb defining divine stuff. I like how it kind of gets a little bit denser and knottier at the end. But definitely, when I was first reading the poem, I wasn’t troubled by anything in those knots. I was just like, okay.

I don’t know what’s happening at the end of the poem. Right? That was my resolution and I was very happy with it. There’s fun stuff here. It gets dense at the end. I don’t know what, what, what’s happening. And I was kind of like sold on that. That’s kind of everything I want out of an Emily Dickinson poem.

Adam: Yeah. I mean, it’s enough, but it’s pretty rare that that’s where it stops. There’s usually a whole philosophical thing going on and there’s often psychological stuff that’s happening. And I think you’re getting at that a little bit with the apprehension, because if you’re apprehensive, and that’s God’s introduction, then you’re right to call out the hint of menace in that. I do think you can read fear there, and fear that points, perhaps, to doubt. Like, you can’t quite, you’re freaking out a little bit. I can see how doubt enters into the poem through that word apprehension.

Nate: Well, you know what, I think. Go ahead, Connor.

Connor: I was gonna say, you know, one might want to be able to look out the window and not see God.

Nate: Yeah, for real.

Connor: I mean, how amazing to be able to look out the window and see God.

Nate: Yeah. But then you come back tomorrow, God’s still there.

Connor: Like, come on, I’m just trying to, you know, zone out.

Nate: Get lost dude.

Adam: Yeah.

Connor: A lot of this poem reminds me of this idea of defamiliarization. Do you guys know this? It’s was was coined by a Russian, a literary critic, Victor Shklovsky.

Nate: Mm-hmm.

Connor: I’m just mentioning it, because I wanted to say the name Shklovsky. But he has this idea that this is, this what, what Dickinson is doing here.

He identifies, I think he does, this is like the early 1900s, it’s a little bit after Dickinson, but maybe it’s informed by it. Um, but he has this theory that the role of art is to defamiliarize the world.

Adam: Sure.

Connor: He says “Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war…

Nate: laughs

Connor: …Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life. It exists to make one feel things to make this stone stony.

Nate: Are you reading this Connor. Do you have this in your head?

Connor: No, no, I’m reading it. Okay. “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they’re known. The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar.”

Adam: Mm.

Connor: And so you know, I think that that’s very much the same project here, but the thing is, we need to defamiliarize ourselves, because almost as just a biological necessity, we have to be able to look out, just to get through our day. We have to be able to look out the window and not see God, you know?

So I feel like the more I look at this poem, the more sympathy I feel for Dickinson to just be like, well, no, I can’t. It’s not a tree, it’s not a pine. It’s the medium.

I need to make myself and the tree into these vessels of mediums by which, you know, the divine might flow through. It’s like, well, you know, but you also gotta go make breakfast.

Adam: Yeah, yeah. You’re stuck. That’s what I mean by like the drug trip thing, right? You’re like, I’m caught in this. I’m ready for infinity to go away now for, for a little while. I’m gonna come back to it. But the poem is rooted with that “stem.” It does have that grounding with the stem. I love that stem, you know.

Nate: Well, we forget about the stem, the stems where we start.

Adam: Yeah, we started there, but it’s still there. It’s still holding the whole thing down, the whole poem.

Nate: Yeah. You know, but you gotta go back to the start. You gotta like, you know, go reverse right back to the stem.

Adam: Yeah. But you always do that with Emily Dickinson poems, don’t you? You gotta go backwards. You gotta go back to the beginning.

Nate: Go backwards? I, I didn’t even know you were supposed to go backwards.

Adam: Yeah.

Nate: So this is funny. Like, it’s so dense, right? Miniature.

Adam: Mm-hmm.

Nate: I was like thinking about poetry and viral genomes. Like, so you’ve got so little space that every gene is basically transcribed in both directions. And then every gene product’s spliced in a million different ways. You’ve basically fit it all into a few words. Right? And so, of course you’ve gotta read a poem backwards. I’ve been missing it the whole time.

Adam: Oh, she’s got a poem that she wrote, which is, I should find it. It’s an awesome poem. She’s says in the poem, have you ever read a poem and you get to the end and you’re so overturned by it that you have to go back and read the poem backwards?

(Here’s that poem, which was found written on the back of a piece of wallpaper:

“Did you ever read one of her Poems back — ward, because the plunge from the front over — turned you? I sometimes often have many times have — A something overtakes the Mind”)

Nate: So she knows exactly what she’s doing.

Adam: Well, I mean, it’s interesting because who knows what poem she’s talking about? I mean, she loved Elizabeth Barrett Browning. That was her favorite poet, so maybe it’s her. But you know, I don’t know too many poets that do that to me except for Emily Dickinson. So it’s almost like she’s writing about herself. Yeah, sometimes you’re just like, I gotta, I gotta go backwards on this one.

Nate: Like, this is like freak... I mean, this is blowing my mind.

Adam: And then you go backwards and you end up with a stem, you know, it’s great. You’re grounded again. You are like okay, I’ve had enough of infinity now I want to be grounded. I want this Sea to be ground. And it is grounded. That tree is grounded. You know, take it on backwards. The squirrels and the birds, and yeah, it’s all good. You had your little trip, you had your trip out and you got to the defamiliarization thing. I think that’s a good way to do it.

[This pretty much ends the discussion of Fr849. We do touch on it a few times in the rest of the conversation, but mostly we veer off into other realms of Dickinsonia.]

When you originally proposed talking about this poem in your e-mail, you were talking about comparing this poem to the one about bulletins from immortality. (Fr820)

Nate: Yeah. You wanna do it?

Adam: It might be a bit much to go through it now, but I like the comparison because if you’re talking about bulletins from immortality all day, that could be a bit much! But that’s what she was interested in. She was go