cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6915311
I have a hard time understanding the earlier poems though.
I understand the mental imagery, but the meaning behind it all, I can’t discern that well.
Here’s such an example:
"I can’t tell you - but you feel it -
Nor can you tell me-
Saints, with ravished slate and pencil
Solve our April Day!
Sweeter than a vanished frolic
From a vanished green!
Swifter than the hoofs of Horsemen
Round a Ledge of dream!
Modest, let us walk among it
With our faces veiled -
As they say polite Archangels
Do in meeting God!
Not for me - to prate about it!
Not for you - to say
To some fashionable Lady
“Charming April Day”!
Rather - Heaven’s “Peter Parley”!
By which Children slow
To sublime Recitation
Are prepared to go!"
Another one:
"So from the mould
Scarlet and Gold
Many a Bulb will Rise -
Hidden away, cunningly,
From sagacious eyes.
So from Cocoon
Many a Worm
Leap so Highland gay,
Peasants like me
Peasants like Thee
Gaze perplexedly!"
That last one I understood, but the first example?
Not so much.
Do people often need a guide when reading poetry?
I’ve started reading poetry and missing the meaning of multiple poems always leaves me feeling almost ashamed that I can’t get it. Maybe I’m just not used to poetry… Never have I read poetry till recently, of course. So that may have something to do with it.
Ah well…
Emily Dickinson is one of the harder to decipher poets when she wants to be. Poetry nerds love her because there is lots of room for debate on what she meant. Its like Picaso, people like it because its hard work to understand what’s going on, they love that you need to know all the deep lore to make any sense of it.
My opinion is that its not “good” precisely because art is supposed to be communication and needing such a deep level of context to be understood is the opposite of how art is supposed to transcend time/space/language to communicate feelings.
That’s all fair, but Emily Dickinson was a good Autistic and queer rep so I like her.
I also don’t mind deciphering art; I prefer art that makes you “think,” so to speak.