The responses on this thread confirm my hunch that syntax is the neglected element of poetry. MA asked for help in parsing the grammar of the poem and got instead a number of interpretations. Some of them are very good interpretations, but the question was not about interpretation, it was about boring old syntax ("the grammatical arrangement of words in a sentence," The Cambridge Dictionary).

I'm reposting, with some clean-up of tangled phrases, my attempt at a paraphrase that makes Dickinson's implied grammar more explicit.

I think the whole poem is one sentence with some elided connectives (words like "also," "because" "thus," and "but") that have to be inferred from context. The verb "feel" in line two governs the rest of the sentence from that point onward, which is in effect an implied subordinate clause.

A rough paraphrase might go something like this:

Stanza 1

I cannot meet the spring without emotion, [because] I feel the old desire, which is a hurry [i.e., to get to the later, fuller parts of spring] mixed with lingering [i.e., wishing spring would not pass], [and I also feel] a warrant [i.e.,justification, but also a summons or demand] to be beautiful [=fair] as spring is,

Stanza 2

and [thus feel that] I am in competition with something within spring that is withheld from me; [yet] also, as spring passes, [I feel] remorse for not having seen more of her.

MA asked for help in parsing the grammar of the poem and got instead a number of interpretations. Some of them are very good interpretations, but the question was not about interpretation, it was about boring old syntax

in fact, Paul, MA 's title was "I need some help with a Dickenson poem" and the request within the post was this: Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

no mention of syntax. MA's response would confirm our attempts to interpret the poem were appropriate, as she countered with yet, another interpretation

You're absolutely right! I must've blurred together MA's original post and OneArt's response, which did talk about syntax.

So I'm sorry--my mistake.

from a gal who's raised blurring together to an art form, i commiserate.

syntax is the neglected element of poetry

I agree that syntax is extremely important in understanding poetry. When I taught high school, I would ask students to look at a whole sentence in a poem and tell me what the subject and verb were. I think knowing those helps tremendously with realizing that a poem isn't just a mass of assorted words on various lines.

Knowing how a particular poet uses syntax is also important. For example, Dickinson's # 1051 is a good example of her compressed phrases, where the reader has to add the left-out words. And once those words are added, it's much easier to understand what the poem is about.

I could understand the beginning and end of the poem, but because I didn't add the right words (or any words) to the middle lines, I didn't understand them.

Thanks for your help.

Mary Ann

I can go along with your paraphrase as examining the poem as one long sentence, but there is no denying Emily's penchant for full stops within a stream of consciousness, even if one could describe her thought process in such a way. I also don't feel that 'warrant' connotes a double usage here. I think it is stating explicitly that she expressly concurs with her inner feeling that she is once again experiencing the mixed emotion of the 'hurry with a lingering.' And 'to be fair,' that is, fair to herself and fair to her assessment and self reproach at once again feeling 'the old desire.' I don't link the use of 'fair' here with a physical description in any sense.

It is also interesting that the only line that does not contain a capitalized word aside from the initial word is 'I feel the old desire.' I don't know if the whole poem revolves around 'feel' or not, but I'm thinking she could have capitalized desire to round out the trend. Of course, this also plays into my cipher theory.

The above re is directed toward Paul........obviously, i hope.

NuPlanetOne,

I wouldn't claim that my paraphrase is accurate in all particulars, or that no other glosses could be "right" either instead or as well. Or that any adequate gloss is necessarily possible. This poem, like many others by Dickinson, is situated at the boundary where discursive sense begins to dissolve into association and suggestion. You have offered a thoughtful alternative gloss that I'll have to mull over for a while--thank you.

It doesn't matter much for my reading whether the dash at the end of line 1 is read as a full stop or the equivalent of a semi-colon. The important thing is the grammatical cohesion of the remaining seven lines as a single unit.

I considered the reading of fair that you suggest but then doubted it because lines three through five are parallel, which made me read them as appositives, a series of other names for "the old desire." I suppose the desire could be, among other things, a wish to be fair in judging the "competition" mentioned in line 5, but it seemed to me that she was not so much a judge of that competition as a divided participant playing for both sides.

From long experience in reading and teaching Dickinson I have concluded that it won't do to put too much weight on her capitalization, which seems to be fairly arbitrary and is also used unconventionally in her letters and even, say those who have examined them, in her recipes! The dashes, however, are always important, and it is not always possible to say with any confidence how they might be translated into conventional punctuation. Sometimes they seem to be indications to pause momentarily in reading aloud, but at others they do the work that commas, colons, semicolons, periods, and ellipses do in more orthodox writing.

I have never felt comfortable calling Dickinson "Emily." Walt Whitman invites you to think of him Walt, and it would sound very stuffy to call him "Walter Whitman." But Dickinson seems so reserved, so intensely private, that referring to her by her first name feels overfamiliar to me. I think she resembles the well-water in this poem of hers ( #1400 in Johnson's edition--I haven't shelled out for Franklin's yet):

What mystery pervades a well!
That water lives so far—
A neighbor from another world
Residing in a jar

Whose limit none have ever seen,
But just his lid of glass—
Like looking every time you please
In an abyss's face!

The grass does not appear afraid,
I often wonder he
Can stand so close and look so bold
At what is awe to me.

Related somehow they may be,
The sedge stands next the sea—
Where he is floorless
And does no timidity betray

But nature is a stranger yet;
The ones that cite her most
Have never passed her haunted house,
Nor simplified her ghost.

To pity those that know her not
Is helped by the regret
That those who know her, know her less
The nearer her they get.

So. I sit down at the children’s table with this poem in front of me on a platter. In one hand, Occam’s razor as my knife; in the other a fork called parsimony. When I encounter Spring, the first thing that springs to mind is the season. I move past a cast of actors which I read in much the same fashion as the talk I hear over at the grown-up’s table.

When I encounter Her, I stick her with the fork, cut off a piece with the knife and it tastes like Spring. I hear talk, over at the grown-up’s table, about trysts off the coast of the Isle of Lesbos (or some such) and I smile. Someone is eating salacious salads with their hands, I think to myself.

Then I return to Spring. I stick her with the fork, apply the knife, take a bite...it honestly tastes like more than the season. (And I have applied no seasonings). I consult Mr. Dictionary, as children are wont to do, and my eyes open wide with I wonder; the non-season taste just gets stronger.

So. Since us children have such vivid imaginations I pretend: Spring=Poesy=Her; and I read the poem again. Spring, the season, is a wonderful thing. So is the Poesy, and she seems to leave so soon.

Mr. Dictionary says: 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.

(Then Mr. Dictionary goes on to mention “spring” as a season).

…and “the” (the Spring) is what caught my attention to look closer at Spring. But, perhaps Ms. Dickinson just needed some filler for she had missed her mark by a foot.

Syntax is key in getting to the things Dickinson mused and murmured over, but I'm not inclined to think of a many of her poems as single sentences with the connecting articles and transitional qualifiers removed . I'd think that hers would be a poetry of longer sentences that had been scissored and had their parts arranged in abrupt, quizzical verbal eruptions. Her dependent clauses sometimes hit you in the head like a flying rock you didn't see coming, that shingle that conks you on the noggin when you're trying to repair the rain gutter.

The actually poetry for much of her work would be the unwritten empathy between her lines and cohering strategy a reader creates on the spot to translate, literally, her language into a diction that a contemporary fan can understand.

We have a situation that might not be dissimilar than that of Ezra Pound's translations of Chinese poetry, where he was not translating directly from the original language but rather modernizing, re-writing another translation. He had , in essence, not done a translation as much as written another, unique poem altogether, in pursuit of a verbal ideal.

Eliot, aware of Pound's habit of remaking literary ideas in his own image, referred to his editor as the creator of Chinese Poetry; it isn't a bad thing, of course, but the results are brilliant other than what's been claimed by Pound or his early champions. For Dickinson, her intriguing impressions, her conflated monologues, her faint but evocative traces of interior complexity, often times results in a brilliance that is exterior to her own writing, that is, the genius of the reader responding earnestly.

Hi Paul,

Dickinson organized and bound her poems into small sets. Is there a record of which of her poems she grouped with this one?

Thanks in advance, V.

PB...

You are of course correct in pointing out that, after all, these are at best, educated and uneducated guesses, and as you aptly described them, 'glossings,' of what Miss Dickinson might have intended. And I will defer in the end more toward what you and MA might decipher as I place you both in the camp of the educated. This is fun for me, not having studied Dickinson as an occupation. More fun still, having never had to collect a consensus of 'glossings' by which to judge amateurish or clever readings of well analyzed poems. So in that sense, bear with me. I can be that Devil's Advocate of a freshman who holds fervently to a decidedly refuted interpretation who is hell bent on one or two new or clever insights that disallow an immediate dismissal out of hand. And where a devoted educator might refrain from stating with any confidence an unsupported definitive assumption, to this casual reader, such confidence pours forth unrestrained.

It is probably fair to address our lady as Dickinson. I suppose she is an entity, sometimes an adjective and always teetering on a wire somewhere between immortality and abstruseness. I dated a girl named Emily from Amherst; they were nothing alike, yet that is another story. I think you are right there, my familiarity can only breed contempt, her inaccessible and shadowed persona would hardly invite any stranger to call out her first name while standing on the stoop, even if she would have answered the door!

That said, I admit that I would never go at an understanding of the poem from a grammatical angle. Untrained as I am, I listen more for pitch and look for thought ends, rather than express punctuation. I can't deny that lines 3, 4, and 5 appear to modify line 2. Read that way, I can see your point that 'Warrant' can have dual connotations. But in my first literal read in MA's top-post I had a hard time connecting the information directly as a distinct flow between the two stanzas. But studying the appositive flow, as you suggested, compels me to accept a direct connection between the two. Which makes 'to be fair, again, not refer specifically to a desire to be pretty, but more likely to a desire 'to be fair' in general. That is, toward any self reproach she might have for again suffering any sense of failure in experiencing that 'old desire.' Which might allow for a reading of 'sense' in line 5 as actually being used as a singular connotation, and not as her senses combined. Or in other words, 'A Competition in my mind,' where there might be some other greater sense to Spring, in which is hid something of promise that she cannot quite grasp mixing into perpetual failing. Which is why, for me, being of sight and sound and ignorant grammatically, and although there is no comma after 'Warrant,' I imagined one and heard 'A Warrant, to be fair.' And yes, that would play her on both teams, but I think, at the end of the game, she is going to assess and 'judge' both outcomes.

I may have altered my alternative gloss a bit, but that is the fun of it for me. It is tough to find holes in an informed analyses, like yours, of the subject, but in the spirit of learning, which is what MA intends to initiate, I hope from my friendly prodding that you do find more in this lesser piece. Especially where one could harvest a dissertation from the #1400 you included. That she could write that accessibly and hit it out of the park, as it were, only makes her more of an enigma. She's hot!

The dashes, however, are always important, and it is not always possible to say with any confidence how they might be translated into conventional punctuation. Sometimes they seem to be indications to pause momentarily in reading aloud, but at others they do the work that commas, colons, semicolons, periods, and ellipses do in more orthodox writing.

I read somewhere, Paul, that in her own handwriting, Dickinson used different slants for her dashes – some slanting up, some slanting down, etc. And the question was whether or not her directions had any significance.

I considered the reading of fair that you suggest but then doubted it because lines three through five are parallel, which made me read them as appositives, a series of other names for "the old desire."

Isn’t this slightly different from what you said in your toppost, that all the nouns were ideas that followed the verb “feel”? If so, the nouns in l. 3 – 5 wouldn’t necessarily be appositives. Line 3 could be the appositive, and the rest could be other things she feels as a result of that “old desire.” I think that could add weight to NuPlanetOne’s interpretation of lines 4 – 6 (which I prefer, as much on emotional grounds as on grammatical grounds).

I also note that # 1400 seems to confirm Dickinson’s need to study nature (in all 4 seasons) closely –

But nature is a stranger yet;
…..
To pity those that know her not
Is helped by the regret
That those who know her, know her less
The nearer her they get. ­­

For what it’s worth, I think the “Hurry” part could be a wish to get past Spring to Summer. As I remember my past years in New England, Spring is often just a time of melting snow and black flies. And it’s Summer that’s the best time of year. When I was scouring Johnson’s subject index for poems on the 4 seasons, I noticed that Summer seemed to have the most poems.
(And Winter the fewest, since her “seasons” poems were about the outdoors, not being snug in her house next to a roaring fire.)

Franklin's facsimile edition tells you which poems were in which fascicles. Whether all the poems in each fascicle were written at roughly the same time or not is another question. My academic field is 20th century and Caribbean, so I'm not up on the latest thinking about that.

NuPlanetOne,

About education: the first principle of my education at the University of Chicago Lab School, influenced by John Dewey's progressivism, and at Haverford College, influenced by the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light, was this: never take anything on authority--question and verify, figure it out for yourself. Or as the poet Charles Olson (who, like Dickinson, put little stock in grammatical orthodoxy) put it: "There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, / there are only / eyes in all heads / to be looked out of."

About approaching poetry "from a grammatical angle": I don't. The first reading, maybe the first two or three readings, are as receptive and non-directed as I can manage without my will to figure things out getting in the way. With most poems, I don't feel a need to think consciously about the grammar, though if I'm using the poem as an example in a creative writing class, I'll ask the students to look at the grammar to see how the thing is put together, just as I'd ask them to look at metaphor, meter, rhyme and rhythm, and everything else. If the poem is grammatically unusual, or if it can't be parsed as a grammatical utterance, that's something to be noticed: why is the poem like that and what aesthetic work is done by the bending or breaking of grammatical conventions?