# 1051 (c. 1865) by Emily Dickinson

I cannot meet the Spring unmoved --
I feel the old desire --
A Hurry with a lingering, mixed,
A Warrant to be fair --

A Competition in my sense
With something hid in Her --
And as she vanishes, Remorse
I saw no more of Her.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Mary Ann

Dickinson's syntax can be tricky: it's those last two lines that put the devil (or more correctly,the angel) in the works here.Like much of Dickinson this seems like a tiny beautiful box that an old ring might come in; you open it to find it empty and yet somehow bottomless .

So let's see, we've got the Spring arriving stirring the old desire (love???) which is described as a mix of lingering and hurrying. There is a sanction or authorization (warrant) to be fair. This sounds like a battle between the heart and the head, desire and restraint.

This is a "competition in my sense" a most plainspoken line, but then we get that pronoun introduced. Is "Her" desire or does her refer to the competition?

Now we've got those last two lines....I've written and deleted my comments about a dozen times...I'm in Denver on business, trying to get out of town before the madness of the DNC starts and now I'm running around packing my suitcase and thinking about who vanishes what and where remorse fits in as a cause or as the vanishing thing and where did I leave my toothbrush.

Here's the best I can do for the moment: restraint balances desire. A nice little package that makes a presentable person out of someone wild with desire, scribbling away in her room. But the package is not that neat nor that easy to contain. The balance is false and it's creation leaves one filled with remorse.

Sorry, MA, this isn't very good nor I'm afraid very helpful....the road to Fray hell is paved with good intentions.

I must admit that I have always found something erotic about the work of Emily Dickenson. I once thought it the perversion of a college kid with no money for porn mags, but have since refined it a bit, as I am much beyond that and simply unwilling to buy porn.

Still, I find her erotic in quite a bit of what I read, and so I do in this one as well.

It's probably me.

The first three lines seem fairly obvious to me, at least on the surface, something like waiting for Christmas morning (if you were raised in that tradition). You hurry up and wait, and there is something sweet and exciting in the waiting, but something also excruciatingly painful (but, dare I say it, in a sensuous way?).

Emily loves Spring, and can't wait for it to get here, but anticipates it with delight, as well. The waiting, the anticipation, is part of the enjoyment of it when it finally arrives.

I am curious about how she might have written these lines today, with so much more license available, particularly to women writers, as I wonder if the word orgasm might have found its way inside.

The second verse makes me think that she is envious of this season, wants to be like this season, perhaps because of its temperant beauty, or its fickle ways. Who knows? It is something hid in Her.

And Emily does not reveal exactly what it is, althought the entirety of the poem suggests it is Spring's wantonness, its fertility, its sexuality, its warmth and light, its butterflies and daisies.

This verse also reveals the conflict, the Competition, and, finally, the Remorse at Her leaving. I think again of eroticism, and this time of a secret female lover who has abandoned Emily or been abandoned by Emily, I don't know exactly why or which.

But I do.

Her Spring is a reckless lover, a female one at that.

No help, I know, but I used to have a thing for Emily :).

Take care.

Dumb question #1: Why the Spring? Why not just Spring? Hurry, Warrant and Competition are actions. So is Spring. (Spring is also water flowing out of the ground). But maybe it’s the season, after all.

not my favorite, but in goodwill, i attempt to pull the sword out of the stone: (and wish like crazy i would be in your poetry/ seasons series of classes....)

I cannot meet the Spring unmoved --
I feel the old desire --
A Hurry with a lingering, mixed,
A Warrant to be fair --

A Competition in my sense
With something hid in Her --
And as she vanishes, Remorse
I saw no more of Her.

spring awakens internal stirrings. the old desire produces a quickening, an urgency, but a lingering, too, together. a good description of sensual/ sexual stirrings.

a warrant to be fair-- i read can also mean fair as lovely. permission to be womanly-- of the fairer sex.

and the competition really begins-- to allow this fairer self, the womanhood sway? with something hidden-- ulterior motives of specific desire?

I feel certain Her is Competition as the caps indicate.

and then the Competition vanishes. remorse ensues because once Competition is gone, the struggle is over, the more sensible self has won: (because it is ED, and without any disrespect, it can be argued that the return of sensible self is a return to a vague sort of androgyny.)

Interesting response. I note that we both pick up on the perhaps obvious evidence of Eros, but that your answer, hurried as it is, allows for a problem I have with my own: there is nothing cyclical about the loss of a lover (as there most assuredly is with seasons).

Still, something about this makes me think of a lady friend.

Take care.

I am a man for all seasons, however: (assuming “the” implies a noun) Spring: 1 a: a source of supply; especially: a source of water issuing from the ground b: an ultimate source especially of action or motion.

Any takers?

Excellent call, waltz!

Take care.

Can you imagine an internet porn site based on the verse of Dickinson? I think you are on the mark that D is a very senuous and even erotic writer, the lingering hurry is as good a description of the journey towards orgasm that you are likely to find, but I don't know that I'd move this particular piece out of the realm of the emotional and into the physical world: i.e. it represents a lost female lover. Though I think it possible that the desire may be female oriented.

I'm not sure why, but it seems important to me that this is an internal emotional struggle: almost a sense of different selves. I keep getting stuck on that hidden thing, I'm wondering if it's the idea that it is hidden and not it's actual qualities that make it significant. This could swing back into the idea of the "love that dare not speak it's name." but it could also be a sense that the remorse is over not getting to that hidden thing. Again I get the sense that Dickinson is trying to squeeze something unruly and a bit wild into a an emotional equation, but it just can't be contained and the act of containment (and this is where the PAP stuff could come in) fills one with remorse.

Like SF I have always felt or imagined a sexual tension in Dickinson’s poetry. But I took my first read literally, as if she were discussing the season. I got the ‘hurry with a lingering.’ I have felt that in early Spring. That rush of muffled adrenalin anticipating the warm summer days to come but the obstinate desire to hold the blossoming moments for as long as possible. The warrant I decide is an explicit approval to linger, that is, to be fair, whereas she could have disdained the impulse because reading literally I see ‘the old desire’ as being this mixture of hurrying the season tinged with a look back at the comfort and routine of quiet, fire-lit evenings of winter. I thought perhaps that she wished the season had waited till she was more prepared for it. Somehow the thought of ‘now is the winter of our discontent’ popped into my mind, and the inability of facing the Spring unmoved made sense.

The second stanza is difficult to read literally as totally connected to the first. But in the spirit of trying to take the words at face value, let’s say the competition is the battle to obey the urge to linger. Let us further say that ‘her’ is the lost comfort and unhurried wait of the short dark days just passed full of quiet solitude and certain conclusions, the something hid. Where ‘she’ is the Spring soon to vanish along with all those conclusions made dozing by the fireplace that will now fade into the hurry of the new season. Hence the remorse.

Of course, this is the queen of the enigmatic, and there are reasons to believe that many of Emily’s poems are ciphers in which she poured out her love and passion and or sexual frustration, but died leaving no Rosetta Stone. It is what is so sexy about her. And in that vein I am with SF. To try to make sense of it literally as I have just attempted, is dry. But to imagine it is coded and not the season that she sees no more of, but a lover, and oh my, perhaps a lesbian lover. Perhaps a man of the cloth, perhaps incest! What type of agoraphobic reclusion kept her scribbling on those little scraps. Was she afraid to go out or did she know a contentment fed by an incredible intellect instead of a feeble spirit. She was brilliant, but totally isolated from normal social interaction or ambition. And as such she is totally fascinating because she might have deliberately kept her secrets woven in the cloth of her poetry knowing that she would eventually be understood. How hot is that! SF, I got a thing for her too.

Wowee, it’s fascinating that so many of you have read all sorts of suppressed sexual stuff here. Maybe because it’s late Friday afternoon and everyone’s got the weekend on the brain? As I remember, when Miz Emily wanted to write about sex, she just DID IT (“Wild nights! Wild nights!”)

Here’s what I’m thinking right now, but I may change my mind in 10 minutes. In fact, I’ve had several eureka moments since I started writing this post and am now writing a new post. My first post was along the lines of NuPlanetOne’s take reading the poem literally as being about Spring, but then I got stuck on Remorse.

I agree with everyone that the first line/first sentence sets up her premise about the Spring evoking strong contradictory emotions in her. I read the basic elements of the second sentence to be “I feel the old desire…. and as she (Spring) vanishes, [I feel] Remorse [that] I saw no more of Her.” Why would she feel remorse (guilt or self-reproach) at the leaving of Spring? What did Miz Emily do or not do?

The difficult part, as all the posts attest to, is what the “old desire” is. If it’s old, it must be something she’s felt for several years, and Spring does come every year. I agree with OneArt that the desire consists of “A hurry with a lingering, mixed,” but according to my latest take on # 1051 (can you imagine -- she was on her 1,051st poem at age 35?), the old desire is a conflict between the traditional religious belief that Spring “proves” human re-birth is possible and the Emersonian belief that we can find Heaven on earth (Nature). Only trouble is, I don’t know how that relates to “A hurry with a lingering.” Perhaps “a hurry” is wanting to die and go (perhaps) to heaven, while “a lingering” is wanting to stay alive and enjoy nature.

But ignoring that “minor” problem in stanza one, perhaps the remorse she feels when Spring leaves in stanza two is that once again she hasn’t figured out Spring’s secret of re-birth and it must be her own failing as a Christian that she was unsuccessful. OR she feels remorseful because she hasn’t resolved her mixed feelings. OR she feels remorseful because her mixed feelings meant she wasn’t really paying attention to Spring like she felt she should have been…..

As you can see, when I started typing this, I thought I had the damned thing figured out, and now, at the end of the post, I’m foundering again……

So carry on with your posts, folks, ‘cause I still need help.

HAP asks, why THE spring?
I say, maybe it’s just to complete the four iambs in that line.

Here’s a repeat of something I put in my Dickinson intro when I taught some of her poems (not this one) last year –

A critic has said, “Emily Dickinson’s burden was to be a Romantic poet with a Calvinist’s sense of things, to know transitory ecstasy in a fallen and doomed world.” The Romantic poet knew that “the sweetness of life” consists of our knowing “that it will never come again.” The Calvinist knew that this awareness is the source of the bitterness, the Despair, of life.

MA,

I think the whole poem is a long, complex sentence in which everything from “the old desire” on is governed by the verb “feel.” The poem is still difficult, but a rough paraphrase might run something like this:

I cannot meet the spring without emotion, because I feel the old desire, which is a hurry mixed with lingering, and also [feel] a warrant [i.e.,justification, as in saying something is “warranted,” but also a summons or demand, as in a warrant issued by a court] to be beautiful [=fair] as spring is, and thus [feel that] I am in competition with something that is within spring and withheld from me; yet as spring passes, [I also feel] remorse for not having seen more of her.

Those 8 lines are quite a workout!

King of Clowns, leave the stage at once…

Poor daft Emily, the double entendre is beyond her.

Then who, pray tell, is HER

I end the refrain and thrust home