Linda's Literary Home

Tag: fascicles

  • Emily Dickinson’s “By such and such an offering”

    Image: Emily Dickinson - Amherst College - Daguerrotype of the poet at age 17, circa 1847 - likely the only authentic, extant likeness of the poet
    Image: Emily Dickinson – Amherst College – Daguerrotype of the poet at age 17, circa 1847 – likely the only authentic, extant likeness of the poet https://www.amherst.edu/library/archives/holdings/edickinson

    Emily Dickinson’s “By such and such an offering”

    The speaker in Emily Dickinson’s “By such and such an offering” is exploring the nature of duplicity by those who feign elevated status through appropriating experience that they have not in fact endured.

    Introduction and Text of “By such and such an offering”

    The speaker in Emily Dickinson’s four-line verse begins mysteriously but then suggests a remarkable indictment of those who feign martyrdom.  Those who exaggerate their suffering in life but have little to show for it are often those who put on display their complaints.  

    The phony religious who amble about with colorless, sad expressions, those who suffer from physical ailments but exaggerate for attention, those who remain boastful of their contributions to society that anyone paying attention will realize are meagre—these supposed “martyrs” remain so only to their own confused thinking.

    The speaker is calling attention to such bombastic displays.  As the “web of life” is woven, it does remain salient that it “takes all kinds.”  This speaker offers no remedy—just an insightful observation that such ilk exists, and perhaps a warning to watch out for them and not be fooled by insincerity and lack of clarity.

    By such and such an offering

    By such and such an offering
    To Mr. So and So,
    The web of life woven –
    So martyrs albums show!

    Commentary on “By such and such an offering”

    The speaker is offering an observation of a certain segment of the social order whose exaggerated rhetoric attempts to hoist their pettiness to the exalted status of martyrdom.

    First Movement:  The Undeclared

    By such and such an offering
    To Mr. So and So,

    The speaker begins with two prepositional phrases that point to some activity being directed to an unknown entity: specifically something is being given to someone.  The phrases “such and such” and “So and So” indicate that the speaker is not identifying the gift nor is she naming to whom the gift is given.  

    The speaker does, however, qualify the receiver of the gift as a masculine human being, signaled by “Mr.”; thus, the terms of the phrase “So and So” stand for a name and are capitalized.

    The speaker has thus set up a puzzling dynamic by essentially reporting somewhat mysteriously that something was given, or perhaps will be given, to someone (some man).  She allows her audience to remain puzzled by not only what the gift may be, or will be, but also by who will be, or has been, the receiver of that gift.

    At this point, the speaker has simply claimed that what was given was an “offering.”  She does not say that what was given was a “present” or a “gift”; instead she uses the more weighty term “offering,” which differs from other items given through its special status: an offering connotes something given for religious or worship purposes, or some other universally relevant purpose. An ordinary gift is usually something presented to an individual or small group of individuals.

    Thus this gift retains a different status from an ordinary gift, in that it must have some purpose other than the mere giving of a gift for Christmas or birthday or other culturally personalized holiday.  Thus instead of a personal gift, this offering will retain a wider, more inclusive purpose.

    Second Movement:  Completed Mystery

    The web of life woven –
    So martyrs albums show!

    The speaker then completes the thought begun in the first movement, but she still remains quite mysterious because she does not actually offer a complete sentence or statement.  Her musing thus remains fragmented, as if she were merely jotting down a note for later employment in a larger context.

    The speaker then makes the lofty claim about life: life’s “web” has been woven.  While only life’s Creator can be credited with weaving the “web of life,” the speaker again indicates that she will remain mysterious in her remarks by not elaborating her claim but by diverting the direction of her report to individuals who have experienced extreme suffering perhaps even death (“martyrs”), who then display their suffering through a series of blank pages (“albums”) filled with images from their history.

    The speaker has thus suggested her own puzzlement that life can be filled with so many perplexing events.  But she seizes upon the one turn of events that has impressed her mightily in likely a negative or perhaps even a humorous way:  that the sufferers who offer their oblations at the feet materiality and yet portend to suffer as martyrs nevertheless gather their badges and demonstrate them to an unsuspecting world.

    The true martyr to the spiritual cause may be celebrated by others down through the centuries.  Their adherence to truth is to be emulated, but it will be hoped that their being martyred unto death may be avoided.  

    But those who put on display their suffering through flagitiousness or deleterious behavior will be adjudicated duplicitous as they “show” their “albums” instead allowing them to work through the mystery of silent, masterful ascendance.

    Thus the vaunted “offering” is revealed as a profligate collection garnered by the supposed “martyrs” and bestowed on “Mr. So and So,” who has remained merely a nebulous, unsuspecting target of the feigning, exaggerating sufferers. 

    That unknown citizen—representing the conglomerate of the world’s citizens—remains an amorphous being to whom the would-be martyrs may put on display their imperfections and bleared commodities.

  • Emily Dickinson’s “Distrustful of the Gentian”

    Image: Emily Dickinson – Amherst College – Daguerrotype of the poet at age 17, circa 1847 – likely the only authentic, extant likeness of the poet

    Emily Dickinson’s “Distrustful of the Gentian”

    In Emily Dickinson’s “Distrustful of the Gentian,” the speaker creates a fascinating little drama to explore the melancholy the erupts in her heart at the closing of summer.

    Introduction and Text of “Distrustful of the Gentian”

    Although it seems that a very important word has been omitted from the poem, the drama continues unabated.  It would make an interesting study to add a guessed-at word and then see how it might change the outcome of the poem’s force.  I will venture the guess that the word she meant to supply referred to her mood.  

    Likely she thought, “Weary for my mood,” sounded too ordinary, too mundane, so she meant to come back and add a more dramatic term.  But then alas! she either never found the time nor the term, so it gets left double dashed, imposing a quizzical conundrum on her future audience.

    Distrustful of the Gentian

    Distrustful of the Gentian –
    And just to turn away,
    The fluttering of her fringes
    Chid my perfidy –
    Weary for my –––
    I will singing go –
    I shall not feel the sleet – then –
    I shall not fear the snow.

    Flees so the phantom meadow
    Before the breathless Bee –
    So bubble brooks in deserts
    On Ears that dying lie –
    Burn so the Evening Spires
    To Eyes that Closing go –
    Hangs so distant Heaven –
    To a hand below.

    Commentary on “Distrustful of the Gentian”

    The speaker in Dickinson’s “Distrustful of the Gentian” is lamenting the end of summer—a theme that the poet returns to again and again.  Her love of each season motivated her to address the phenomena in poem after poem.

    First Stanza:  A Mysterious Weariness

    Distrustful of the Gentian –
    And just to turn away,
    The fluttering of her fringes
    Chid my perfidy –
    Weary for my –––
    I will singing go –
    I shall not feel the sleet – then –
    I shall not fear the snow.

    The first issue that accosts a reader of this poem is that it appears the poet failed to supply the object in the prepositional phrase “for my –––” in the fifth line but instead had simply placed a longer dash placeholder.  It does seem that she intended to come back and add a word but perhaps never got around to it.  

    On her handwritten version appear along side the place-holding long dash what appear to  be the letters “a n o w,” but those letters could have been placed there by an editor.  The handwriting does not seem to be that of the poet.

    The speaker begins by professing her distrust of the gentian flower; her distrust causes her to turn from the flower.  And she says that those fluttering fringes of the gentian rebuked her own untrustworthiness, likely for her admission of distrust of the flower.  

    This mutual lack of trust between the speaker and the flower causes the speaker to become “weary,” but because she did not state the object other weariness, the reader must guess what is specifically causing the weariness.

    The speaker with this unspecified weariness claims that she will continue on, and she will do so “singing.”  This singing indicates that she will enliven her mood and keep it high through this cheerful act.  

    She then asserts that through this act of singing she will not experience the negativity of “sleet,” indicating the season of winter.  To further the winter implication, she adds that she will “not fear the snow.”

    The speaker in this little drama is fashioning her preparation for the end of nice, warm summer weather as she tries to ease herself into readying her mind and heart for the onset of a cold, hard winter.

    Second Stanza:  Losing a Favored Season

    Flees so the phantom meadow
    Before the breathless Bee –
    So bubble brooks in deserts
    On Ears that dying lie –
    Burn so the Evening Spires
    To Eyes that Closing go –
    Hangs so distant Heaven –
    To a hand below.

    The second stanza continues to find the speaker painting the end of summer with masterful strokes.  She reports that the meadow is “flee[ing],” and the bee has become “breathless” at the event.  Of course, the meadow is a simple metonymy for all that the the meadow holds in terms of green grasses, colorful flowers, and wild-life such as bees and birds.  

    All those fresh, summer colors will soon turn to a winter brown, and essentially be gone because it will have changed so much.  The meadow is thus phantom-like because its qualities will seem to become mere ghosts of themselves as they can no longer remain full-bodied as in her beloved summer.

    The speaker finds her happy summer-self dying like one who is thirsting in a desert while phantom brooks seem to bubble nearby.  The desert mirage has presented itself, and the poor traveler lies dying with the sound of a babbling water stream flowing through her field of hearing.  

    And for the eyes, those eyes that are “closing,” the spires of evening seem to burn all the more bright.  That time of day when shadows loom becomes more engulfed in darkness as those shadows loom larger in fall and winter.

    The speaker then avers that to those on earth “Heaven” seems so distant, too distant for the hand to grasp. As summer continues to fade, the speaker becomes painfully aware that the next summer is quite far off.  Indeed, it is another fall, winter, and spring away.

    The speaker has focused heavily on the sense of sight in this little drama, but she has also included the sense of sound with the image of the bee and the brook.  She also includes the act of grasping with a hand.  

    As she reaches out her hand to touch the beauty of the seasons, she finds the dying of summer a particularly poignant event; thus she has again created her little drama to play out her melancholy of losing that favored season.