Home Page

Note on E and D

This is the first of three related pieces. I greatly admire Emily Dickinson and Dorothy Parker, though I discovered Dorothy’s poetry, very popular in its day, only after watching the movie Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle. The first two pieces are emulations, or loving pastiches if you will, of each of the authors, and the third is a fusion of my feelings about them and one of their themes.

An emulation of someone else’s poem is related to what I’ve called the essence of that text. Although I often use the word essence to mean the gist or thrust, I also use it for the power or potential of a poem to give rise to a mental state. If a work exists in more than one copy and as different versions, with perhaps a few or even many appraisals of it around, then all the copies, versions and critiques cohere to form the essence. This changes over time according to new insights and different fashions in reading.

An essence is therefore not totally accessible, being a dispersed medley. An emulation of another’s oeuvre as a whole adds something to the power of that whole, though the essence of an oeuvre is necessarily a vaguer and more diffuse power than that of a single work. More obviously, an emulated oeuvre bears down with silent judgment upon the tribute. Borrowed clothes disappoint if not worn with bravura.

(back to E and D)

Emily Dickinson

This uses Dickinson’s style to say something that’s closer to my own beliefs than to hers. She did indeed gently reprove the narrowness of some types of Puritan New England minds of the 1860s, with their ‘horror so refined’ that they were ashamed of God himself:

Such dimity convictions,

A horror so refined

Of freckled human nature,

Of deity ashamed.

But she was sincerely affected by church hymns and Christian imagery; she wondered in a happy, childlike manner at the splendour of life and the mystery of death. She had no doubts, for instance, about an afterlife. About the grave she wrote:

Ample make this bed;

Make this bed with awe.

In it wait till judgment break

Excellent and fair.

The expropriation of her language habits in the short piece above might read like a satire of her peculiar inventiveness, but that was not the intention. Intention did not come into the writing, this is one of those pieces that practically wrote itself. The following explanations come after the event. The words arrived, I could not reject them. I can, however, try to defend them. Blue is normally associated with serenity and peace. In most of the paintings of the Virgin Mary her mantle is the expensive ultramarine blue of the lapis lazuli pigment. See Assumption paintings alone, by El Greco, Rubens, Poussin. Attributing blue to Judas the betrayer might seem to the pious a touch wicked, but that’s the very point. After the shock might come the reflection that one interpretation of the story is that Judas was divinely ordained to betray Christ: he was doing a bitter duty. I take a faith that’s ‘tantamount to trees’ to be solid, and a faith that’s lopped (pollarded) to be deformed. If I had faith it would be informed by doubt, not hope. I take ‘unsanguined’ to mean ‘made unhopeful’ by the human condition.

(back to E and D)

Dorothy Parker

Parker (1893–1967, née Rothschild) was a true poet who chose not to write in new-fangled ways. Her volumes of poetry, Enough Rope (1926), Death and Taxes (1931) and Not So Deep As A Well (1936), show her writing mostly about love, its evanescence and deceptions, in a scratchy, sardonic and very amusing way. Her self-mocking style twists old-fashioned forms, with their allegorical landscapes of riders, lilacs, Death and broken hearts, to service her apparent longing for love in a sophisticated, catty world where one- night stands with any ‘likely lad in town’ are, in many a life, the norm. See for example Wail, which contains the lines ‘All my pretty hates are dead, / And what have I left?’

What do I think I’ve achieved? I look back and wonder. Just as I was using the Dickinson mode to express my own doubt about whether or not I had her sort of faith, perhaps here I’ve used the Parker mode to express feelings, real or imagined, of emotional withholding. More to the point, in these three pieces, is the music, imagery, wit even, and the question as to whether poems done in the style of others have any merit beyond competition pages and writing-class exercises. I think they do, and there’s probably a mass of amazingly good stuff out there which would fill many astute anthologies. This one plays an interesting game with auxiliary verbs, you may notice. Art may be a side-door into and out of the world, but it’s also a game, remember, like this sentence.

(back to E and D)

Dorothy’s Emily-Song

This is in the Dorothy Parker mode on behalf of Emily, whose lonely love for the married Rev. Charles Wadsworth got her to see herself as ‘The Queen of Calvary’ when he was appointed to the Calvary Church in San Francisco in 1862. She wrote:

I could not bear the bees should come;

I wished they’d stay away

In those dim countries where they go.

What word had they for me?

They’re here though; not a creature failed.

No blossom stayed away

In gentle deference to me,

The Queen of Calvary,

Each one salutes me as he goes,

And I my childish plumes

Lift, in bereaved acknowledgement

Of their unthinking drums.

Notes by Alan Marshfield

top of page E and D