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  • Emily Dickinson’s “I can’t tell you – but you feel it”

    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

    Emily Dickinson’s “I can’t tell you – but you feel it”

    Emily Dickinson’s “I can’t tell you – but you feel it” dramatizes a spiritual experience that resists explanation but becomes unmistakably real through inward perception. The speaker suggests that some truths are too sublime for ordinary language and must instead be quietly and intuitively felt.

    Introduction and Text of “I can’t tell you – but you feel it”

    In Emily Dickinson’s “I can’t tell you – but you feel it,” the speaker presents April as something more profound than a change in weather or season. April becomes an experience that cannot be adequately explained through ordinary language.

    The speaker immediately establishes a peculiar agreement between two people: neither can explain the experience to the other, yet both apparently recognize it. The poem then moves from April’s sweetness and swiftness toward angels, Heaven, and a childlike preparation for a “sublimer Recitation.”

    The speaker’s reluctance to “prate” about the experience is especially significant. She does not want to reduce something sacred to fashionable conversation or ordinary social language. Instead, she recommends quiet participation in the experience itself.

    In my earlier essays on Dickinsonian poems, I have discussed the speaker’s mystical intuition and her habit of discovering spiritual meaning through ordinary experiences of nature. Her poetry repeatedly transforms the familiar world into a doorway toward questions of immortality, God, consciousness, and the soul.

    I can’t tell you – but you feel it 

    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 sublimer Recitation
    Are prepared to go!

    Commentary on “I can’t tell you – but you feel it”

    The speaker creates a world in which an experience may be known without being explained. April becomes an occasion for spiritual recognition, and ordinary language proves inadequate. The poem gradually moves from seasonal delight toward a reverent awareness of something beyond ordinary human understanding.

    First Stanza: “I can’t tell you – but you feel it”

    I can’t tell you – but you feel it –
    Nor can you tell me –
    Saints, with ravished slate and pencil
    Solve our April Day!

    The speaker begins with an admission that sounds almost conversational: “I can’t tell you.” Yet the admission is immediately balanced by the assurance that the other person “feel[s] it.” The experience therefore does not depend upon verbal explanation.

    The second line completes the mutual arrangement: “Nor can you tell me.” Neither participant possesses language sufficient to communicate the experience fully. Both know something, but neither can convert that knowledge into a conventional explanation.

    The word “feel” becomes important because the speaker is shifting attention away from intellectual analysis toward direct inward experience. What cannot be stated can nevertheless become real through perception. The poem therefore begins with an experience that belongs more to consciousness than to ordinary description.

    The reference to “Saints” introduces a spiritual dimension. Even saints, armed metaphorically with “slate and pencil,” cannot easily solve the mystery of “our April Day.” The image is humorous because the tools seem almost childlike when confronted with something spiritually immense.

    The expression “ravished slate and pencil” suggests that the attempt to record the experience is itself overwhelmed by delight. The speaker does not reject thought or writing; rather, she recognizes that certain experiences exceed the capacity of either.

    Paramahansa Yogananda similarly distinguishes intellectual understanding from direct intuitive perception. He explains that intuition is soul guidance, arising when the mind becomes calm. The connection with Dickinson’s speaker is striking: both value a form of knowing that does not depend entirely upon verbal or intellectual explanation.

    The “April Day” consequently becomes more than a date on the calendar. It becomes an inward event. The speaker seems to suggest that April can be experienced as a spiritual revelation whose reality is immediately available to those who possess the sensitivity to feel it.

    Second Stanza: “Sweeter than a vanished frolic”

    Sweeter than a vanished frolic
    From a vanished green!
    Swifter than the hoofs of Horsemen
    Round a Ledge of dream!

    The speaker now attempts another comparison, but her comparisons demonstrate only the difficulty of describing the experience. The April sensation is “Sweeter” than something already pleasurable, yet that pleasurable experience itself has “vanished.”

    The repeated word “vanished” introduces impermanence. Whatever the earlier “frolic” may have been, it belongs to the past. Whatever “green” represents, it too has disappeared. The speaker therefore compares April with something remembered rather than something presently available.

    This vanishing quality gives the stanza an almost dreamlike character. The experience is beautiful precisely because it seems fleeting. The speaker cannot hold it still long enough to examine it completely.

    She then changes the comparison from sweetness to speed: “Swifter than the hoofs of Horsemen.” The image is energetic and almost dramatic. Horsemen rushing across a landscape suggest movement that cannot easily be stopped or captured.

    The final phrase, “Round a Ledge of dream,” carries the experience into a more mysterious realm. A ledge suggests an edge or boundary, while a dream suggests a condition in which ordinary rules become uncertain.

    The speaker therefore seems to be approaching the boundary between ordinary consciousness and something more expansive. April is not merely pleasant; it is an experience that arrives swiftly, transforms perception, and then threatens to disappear before language can capture it.

    In my earlier essays on Dickinsonian poems, I have discussed her speakers’ mystical intuition in conjunction with her tendency to use natural phenomena as evidence for realities beyond the immediately visible world. Here, the season becomes another such phenomenon.

    Paramahansa Yogananda teaches that inner perception becomes clearer as the mind grows calm. Self-Realization Fellowship presents his teaching that meditation brings “greater clarity, understanding, and guidance from within.” Dickinson’s speaker similarly turns away from ordinary explanation and toward an experience that must be directly perceived.

    Third Stanza: “Modest, let us walk among it”

    Modest, let us walk among it
    With our faces veiled –
    As they say polite Archangels
    Do in meeting God!

    The speaker now changes her approach. Instead of attempting to explain April, she proposes that the two participants simply “walk among it.” The verb “walk” gives the experience a physical quality, yet the object of the walking remains mysterious.

    The instruction “Modest” establishes the proper attitude. The speaker does not recommend intellectual conquest, confident explanation, or boastful proclamation. She recommends humility before something greater than ordinary human understanding.

    The veiled faces deepen this sense of reverence. The image recalls religious representations of angels who cover themselves in the presence of divine glory. The veil therefore suggests that some forms of reality should be approached with restraint.

    The speaker then introduces “polite Archangels” who apparently veil themselves when “meeting God.” The adjective “polite” is delightfully Dickinsonian because it reduces a majestic heavenly encounter to the language of social manners.

    Yet beneath the humor lies a serious spiritual insight. If even archangels behave modestly in the presence of God, human beings should hardly presume that they can completely explain divine mysteries.

    The speaker’s April experience therefore becomes increasingly associated with sacred encounter. She has moved from seasonal sweetness to vanished dreams and now to the presence of God.

    The movement is subtle rather than doctrinal. The speaker does not announce a theological proposition. Instead, she creates a little drama in which the reader is encouraged to experience reverence rather than merely receive information.

    Paramahansa Yogananda likewise emphasizes inward stillness as a means of approaching divine reality. He teaches that the temple of God is within your soul and encourages the seeker to enter that inner quietness.

    That teaching offers a useful parallel to Dickinson’s speaker. She does not send her companion into a public institution or toward a formal lecture. She invites the companion to walk quietly within the experience, veiled and modest, allowing the mystery itself to make its impression.

    Fourth Stanza: “Not for me – to prate about it!”

    Not for me – to prate about it!
    Not for you – to say
    To some fashionable Lady
    “Charming April Day”!

    The speaker now becomes almost comic in her rejection of conventional conversation. Her effusion—“Not for me – to prate about it!”—announces that she has no intention of turning the experience into empty chatter.

    The word “prate” is particularly revealing because it suggests excessive or foolish talk. The speaker is not merely saying that she lacks words. She is saying that ordinary social talk would diminish the experience.

    She then extends the prohibition to her companion: “Not for you – to say” the conventional thing either. Both participants are being asked to resist the temptation to translate a profound experience into a fashionable compliment.

    The imaginary “fashionable Lady” becomes a representative of polite society. Such a person might be expected to observe the beautiful spring weather and pronounce it a “Charming April Day.” That response is perfectly acceptable socially, but it is inadequate spiritually.

    The speaker is therefore drawing a distinction between noticing beauty and experiencing mystery. One person sees April as pleasant weather; another encounters something that seems to reach beyond ordinary seasonal description.

    The contrast resembles the difference between external observation and inward perception. The speaker does not deny that April is charming. She simply insists that “Charming April Day” fails to express what she and her companion actually perceive.

    In my earlier essays on Dickinsonian poems, I have discussed the speaker’s preference for private spiritual perception over conventional public religious expression. Her religious imagination frequently moves away from formal social observance and toward direct personal awareness.

    Paramahansa Yogananda’s teaching about intuition provides another illuminating parallel. He explains that intuition is direct perception of truth rather than merely an intellectual conclusion. The speaker’s refusal to “prate” about April suggests precisely this preference for direct experience over verbal performance.

    The speaker is therefore not being anti-intellectual. Instead, she recognizes that language has limits. Words can point toward an experience, but they cannot necessarily reproduce it. Sometimes the wisest response is not to talk more but instead to become quiet enough to feel more deeply.

    Fifth Stanza: “Rather – Heaven’s ‘Peter Parley’!”

    Rather – Heaven’s “Peter Parley”!
    By which Children slow
    To sublimer Recitation
    Are prepared to go!

    The final stanza introduces the surprising figure of “Peter Parley,” a name associated with popular instructional books written for children. The speaker transforms that educational figure into “Heaven’s ‘Peter Parley,’” producing one of the poem’s most ingenious images.

    The childlike reference changes the emotional atmosphere. The speaker has been discussing saints, archangels, and God, yet she concludes by bringing the reader into the world of children and elementary instruction.

    The introduction of “Children” is especially important because children are being prepared for something “sublimer.” The ordinary lesson therefore becomes preparation for a higher lesson.  The term “slow” also deserves attention. The children do not rush toward the sublime. They proceed gradually, as though simple lessons prepare the mind for increasingly profound truths.

    This image offers a possible explanation for the entire poem. The April experience may itself be an introductory lesson. Nature provides something beautiful and immediate that prepares consciousness for a deeper spiritual understanding.  The speaker’s April Day is therefore not merely the destination; it may be a threshold. 

    The sweetness, swiftness, mystery, humility, and silence of the experience prepare the participants for something beyond it.  The poem ends without explaining precisely what that “sublimer Recitation” will contain. That omission is essential. The speaker has spent the poem demonstrating that some realities cannot be adequately communicated through ordinary language.

    Paramahansa Yogananda similarly presents ordinary human experience as preparation for deeper spiritual realization. He teaches that meditation can awaken intuitive knowledge and attune consciousness to the Divine.

    The connection is especially appropriate because the speaker’s final gesture is not toward explanation but preparation. She does not solve the mystery of April. She allows the experience to become a lesson that prepares the consciousness for something greater.

    Thus the poem becomes another Dickinsonian riddle. The speaker gives readers enough evidence to recognize that “April Day” means more than spring weather, yet she refuses to provide a simple definition.

    The poem’s final wisdom may therefore be contained in its opening statement: “I can’t tell you – but you feel it.” The speaker understands that some truths become most convincing when they are experienced inwardly rather than reduced to ordinary words.

    The speaker’s April is consequently a doorway. Behind that doorway lies an experience associated with beauty, transience, humility, divine presence, and preparation for a higher understanding. She does not force the reader through the doorway. She simply invites the reader to feel what words alone cannot say.

  • Between Broken Poems

    Image created by ChatGPT inspired by the poem
    Image created by ChatGPT inspired by the poem

    Between Broken Poems

    She sulks between rows where weeds 
    Grow wild as children, where she talks 
    To clods, shiftless and dusty.  
    Men gave her a lot of bull and she loved
    It for the utter cow in her.  Between 
    Finger and thumb, she squirms live bait 
    At the edge of her words, her water.  

    Grapes and memories wet and sweet 
    Pooled under her tongue that day 
    He made her mouth a target for the grapes 
    He threw.  She tasted his laugh in the juice 
    And tangled with his love, she swallowed 
    With the skin and seeds.  She banked off on 
    Maddening and split around midnight.  
    Between broken poems are spaces 
    Where poets keep their lovers—

    Spaces where they slumber— 
    The knotty thoughts they sleep with.
    The man with the axe hacked through 
    The underbrush of what she had written. 
    His sneers posted keep off private property 
    Signs on a fence he erected around words 
    That all these years she thought belonged
    To everyone.  The slash marks he cut 
    Across her voice will grow scars, but the hearts 
    Of poems she wrote for him will bleed forever.  

    Speaking dirt language, she will sway 
    With their love like a cornfield waving 
    Its tassels.  As her poems sting his ears, 
    He will shuck them off easy to forget as corn silk.  

  • Brain Surfing

    Image: Spot & Me – Family Album

    Brain Surfing

    This year, here in Indiana, last day of May
    it’s still cold—
    look at that photo (me and Spot)
    I call us “little girl with the dog,” that squint 
    face little thing, me, not Spot.  he looks 
    quite dignified, satisfied he’s king of himself.  

    I’m just brain surfing—
    searching for that wave 
    that will lift me above myself as I ride
    towards the safe shore of a sunny poem.  

    I haven’t written a poem in days.  down my blood 
    stream float toxins of unvoiced syllables,
    fragments of feelings—
    coffee grounds dumped in the creek—
    and silence, a God-awful, cold silence.

    A rather different version of this poem appears in my collection Turtle Woman & Other Poems

  • Life Sketch of E. E. Cummings

    Image a: E. E. Cummings https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/09/25/e-e-cummings-advice/ The Marginalian
    Image: E. E. Cummings The Marginalian

    Life Sketch of E. E. Cummings

    The poetry of E. E. Cummings holds a special place in the literary world.  His unique style remains a recognizable and delightful experience for poetry readers.  Although he remained quite traditional in his theme and subject choices, his creations on the page virtually always stun and surprise.

    Introduction: Non-Traditional Use of Language

    About the poetic style of E. E. Cummings, poet Randall Jarrell has averred [1], “No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to the general and the special reader.”  

    E. E. Cummings’ experimentation with language led to a distinct style through his invention of new words and new ways to use words.   He even employed novel organizational placings of terms that violated the traditional grammar rules as well as linguistic ordinary sense.

    Despite Cummings’ non-traditional use of language, his poems attracted a wide following.  Many of his poems became quite popular with readers of all stripes. John Logan, writing about Cummings in Modern American Poetry: Essays in Criticism, declared Cummings as “one of the greatest lyric poets in our language.”  

    In Standards: A Chronicle of Books for Our Time,  Stanley Hyman claimed, “Cummings has written at least a dozen poems that seem to me matchless. Three are among the great love poems of our time or any time.”

    Early Life

    Edward Estlin Cummings was born [2] in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894, to Edward Cummings and Rebecca Haswell Clarke.   At the Cambridge Latin High School, the future poet studied Greek and Latin.  After high school, he attended Harvard, where he earned both the BA and MA degrees. Several of his early poems were published in 1917 in Eight Harvard Poets.

    While still a child, Cummings set his sights on becoming a poet, and he instituted for himself the task of composing one poem each day.  Thus, between the ages of eight and 22, he explored the many forms and aspects of poetry composition, mostly the traditional poetic forms that had been employed for centuries.

    Around 1916 as modernism was taking its place among the literary movements, Cummings began experimenting with forms that ultimately led to his unique language use that has captured the imagination of the generations of poetry readers who followed his own.

    War and Marriage

    After World War I broke out in Europe in April 1917, Cummings offered his services by volunteering in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service in France.  This type of service became a common option for many pacifists during the war.  Stationed near the border of France and Germany, Cummings met and became fast friends with William Slater Brown, a fellow American.  

    After inserting veiled comments into letters back home and befriending other soldiers in other units, the pair of friends became suspicious in the eyes the authority and were arrested, charged with treason, and placed in an internment camp in Normandy.  

    Cummings’ father was able to secure his son’s release from the camp in December 1917, but his friend did not secure release until April 1918.    The U.S. Army drafted Cummings into service in July 1918.  He went through basic training for six months in Massachusetts.  

    After his military experience ended, Cummings began an affair with Elaine Thayer, who was married to Schofield Thayer, a friend of Cummings.   An enthusiast for open-marriage, Thayer did not object to that relationship.  Elaine became pregnant with Cummings’ child, a daughter named Nancy.

    Cummings and Elaine married in 1924 after her divorce from Schofield Thayer.  Cummings adopted Nancy, who did not find out that Cummings was her biological father until 1948.  The Cummings-Thayer marriage lasted only a short time.  

    Only two months after the wedding, Elaine left America for Europe to settle her sister’s estate.  On the ship traveling to Europe, Elaine met and fell in love with another man.  She and Cummings divorced in 1925.

    In 1929, Cummings married a second time to Anne Minnerly [3], but that marriage lasted only three years with Minnerly seeking a Mexican divorce in 1932.  The US did not recognize Mexican divorces until August 1934.  

    After separation from his second wife, Cummings began a relationship with Marion Morehouse.  It remains unclear if the pair ever legally married, but the two lived together until his death in 1962.

    Journey to the USSR

    Like a number of artists practicing during the 1930s, Cummings had a brief flirtation with communism, thinking the system might offer a better, freer world.   He traveled to the USSR in 1931 [4], and it did not take long for the poet to realize that the USSR was governed by the strong arm tactics of a dictatorship. Instead of more freedom, the individual was fiercely ruled by state dictates.

    Cummings published his observations of the machinations of dictatorship in his Eimi, a compilation of his journal entries.   In that volume, he accused the Soviets of dehumanizing policies.  The term, “eimi,” is Greek for “I am.”  In this work, he labels the USSR a “uncircus of noncreatures.”

    Cummings became especially disgusted after the body of the dictator Vladimir Lenin was laid to rest in its elaborate tomb.  This event inspired some of Cummings’ most forceful, impassioned pieces that appear in that work.    According to John Peale Bishop, Cummings’ style “reaches its most complete development in the prose of Eimi.”  Bishop continues, 

    Indeed, one might almost say that, without knowing it, Cummings had been acquiring a certain skill over the years, in order that, when occasion arose, he might set down in words the full horror of Lenin’s tomb.

    As Cummings kept track of his 35-day journey through the USSR, he employed various allusions to Dante’s Inferno, equating his Soviet experience to a descent into Hell.   Only after leaving the USSR and entering the free world was it possible for the poet “to feel like a man” again.  

    Bishop claims that Cummings’ Soviet experience had led the poet to understand the true nature of freedom: that the quality exists inside the individual.  It is the free will with which man is endowed that makes all freedoms possible.  According to Rushworth M. Kidder, Eimi  is “a report of the grim inhumanities of the Soviet system, of repression, apathy, priggishness, kitsch, and enervating suspicion.” 

    After the publication of Eimi, Cummings came up against the ignorance of heavily statist-leaning publishers, who refused to publish the already widely noted poet’s works.  Thus, Cummings had to self-publish a number of his collections in the late 1930s.  Cummings’ experience with censorship demonstrates that one pays a price for disagreeing with statist mind-sets.

    The Writing Life

    The 1920s proved to be a highly creative period for Cummings.  He began his publishing career in 1922 bringing out his first book, The Enormous Room.   This fictional account of his experience in the French internment camp is offered in a humorous style, somewhat at odds with the reality of the experience. 

    Cummings’ free-wheeling style nevertheless demonstrates that his experience in the camp contributed to his growth as an artist. Critics such as David E. Smith, John Dos Passos, and John Peale Bishop have all written glowing reviews of Cummings’ The Enormous Room.    As Smith has observed, the emphasis of that work is placed upon what “the initiate has learned from his journey.”  Smith continues, 

    In this instance, the maimed hero can never again regard the outer world (i.e., ‘civilization’) without irony. But the spiritual lesson he learned from his sojourn with a community of brothers will be repeated in his subsequent writings both as an ironical dismissal of the values of his contemporary world, and as a sensitive, almost mystical celebration of the quality of Christian love.

    Dos Passos has remarked that the book, “in a style infinitely swift and crisply flexible, an individual not ashamed of his loves and hates, great or trivial, has expressed a bit of the underside of History with indelible vividness.”    Bishop added, “The Enormous Room has the effect of making all but a very few comparable books that came out of the War look shoddy and worn.”

    Tulips and Chimneys vs Tulips & Chimneys

    In 1923, Cummings’ next publication, his first collection of poems titled Tulips and Chimneys, was brought out. In this collection, his unique language use is on display.    He employed non-traditional spacing, unconventional combinations of terms, fractured grammatical expressions, and many varying combinations of punctuation.

    Cummings originally wanted his first collection to be titled Tulips & Chimneys, but the publisher insisted upon employing the word not the ampersand.   The publisher had also removed a number of offending poems from the collection.  But in 1925, Cummings brought a collection of those excised poems and titled the collection &.  In 1925, rather quickly upon the heals of his publication of &, he came out with XLI Poems.  

    Reviewing this collection in the magazine, The Nation, poet and critic Mark Van Doren averred that Cummings was a poet with “a richly sensuous mind; his verse is distinguished by fluidity and weight; he is equipped to range lustily and long among the major passions.”

    By the end of year 1925, Cummings had garnered a prize of $2000 from Dial Magazine, which offered this annual award to an up-and-coming writer.  At the time, the $2000 sum was equal to a full year’s income for a writer.

    In 1926, in another collection of poems titled Is 5, Cummings for the first time offered an introduction to his philosophy of poetry.  He believed that poetry was a “process” not merely a “product.”   During this decade, Cummings established his reputation as an experimental artist in the avant-garde.  Critics never failed to focus on his unique use of language.  Writing in The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction, M. L. Rosenthal opined, 

    The chief effect of Cummings’ jugglery with syntax, grammar, and diction was to blow open otherwise trite and bathetic motifs through a dynamic rediscovery of the energies sealed up in conventional usage…. He succeeded masterfully in splitting the atom of the cute commonplace.

    Richard P. Blackmur, writing in The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and Elucidation, opines, 

    Cummings has a fine talent for using familiar, even almost dead words, in such a context as to make them suddenly impervious to every ordinary sense; they become unable to speak, but with a great air of being bursting with something very important and precise to say.

    Literary luminaries such as Bethany K. Dumas, S. I. Hayakawa, Norman Friedman, Stephen E. Whicher, and many others have found Cummings a fit focus upon which to opine.  

    For example, Hayakawa has effused, “No modern poet, to my knowledge, has such a clear, childlike perception as E. E. Cummings—a way of coming smack against things with unaffected delight and wonder. This candor … results in breath-takingly clean vision.”

    In 1952, Cummings was honored by being chosen to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures in poetry at Harvard University.  That lecture series was published as i: six nonlectures.   They featured Cummings’ highly personal stories from his life, and Jenny Penberthy has called them “autobiographical rambles.”

    Death of the Poet

    On September 3, 1962, E. E. Cummings died [5] at Memorial Hospital in North Conway, New Hampshire, of a brain hemorrhage [6].  He was 67.  He is interred at Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.    At the time of the poet’s death, he was considered the second most widely anthologized, read, and studied American poet, following Robert Frost.

    Image: E. E. Cummings’s Signature https://nationalvanguard.org/2021/06/a-yankee-poet-in-greenwich-village/  National Vanguard
    Image: E. E. Cummings’s Signature National Vanguard

    e. e. cummings vs E. E. Cummings

    The poet’s name is often expressed in all lower-case letters [7], likely to mimic the poet’s unconventional style.  The critic Henry T. Moore erroneously claimed that Cummings legally changed his name to sport all lower-case letter, and Norman Friedman allowed that inaccurate claim to be published in the preface of his book, E. E. Cummings: The Growth of a Writer.

    Responding to Moore’s erroneous claim, Cummings’ widow [8] offered Friedman a correction: “You should not have allowed H. Moore to make such a stupid & childish statement about Cummings & his signature.”

    Although Cummings did often write his signature in all lower-case letters, he more often used capital letters in the traditional fashion.   The lie that needs to be put to rest is that Cummings legally changed his name.  As his widow made clear, Cummings did not engage in that “stupid & childish” act. 

    Sources

    [1]  Editors.  “E. E. Cummings.” Poetry Foundation.  Accessed August 24, 2026.

    [2]  Editors.  “E. E. Cummings.”  Biography.  April 2, 2014.
    [3]  Curators.  “Who Was E. E. Cummings?”  TheFamousPeople.  Accessed August 24, 2026.
    [4]  Chandrahas Choudhury.  “Review: Cummings’ Soviet trip basis of ‘Eimi’.”  SFGate.  December 10, 2007.
    [5]  Editors. “E. E. Cummings Biography.”  Encyclopedia of World Biography.  Accessed August 24, 2026..
    [6]  Curators.  “E.E. Cummings.”  Bollingen Prize for Poetry.  Accessed August 24, 2026..
    [7]  Editors.  “Biography of E. E. Cummings.”  internetPoem.com.  Accessed August 24, 2026.
    [8]  Norman Friedman.  “NOT ‘e. e. cummings’.”  Grand Valley State University.  Spring 1992.

    Image: E. E. Cummings - Self-Portrait https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.73.26 Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery
    Image: E. E. Cummings – Self-Portrait – Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery

    Sample Poem:  Loneliness (A leaf falls)

    The following poem may be the ultimate sample of an E. E. Cummings poem:  

    l(a

    l(a

    le
    af
    fa
    ll

    s)
    one
    l

    iness

  • Ghastly Dream Ghosts

    Image created by Gemini inspired by the poem.
    Image created by Gemini inspired by the poem.

    Ghastly Dream Ghosts

    Some dreams signal ghastly deeds
    In past lives; likely, we prefer 
    Not to be reminded.  The exorcism 
    Of karmic fire offers the only cleansing. 

    Some dream ghosts you grasp:  your mother’s
    Broken heart healed, your public nakedness, robbers
    Breaking down the door.

    But this one recurs and baffles your equilibrium.
    It is an invasion corrupting your private heart:
    The one who baffles you

    Is neither a father nor a God figure,
    Just a former acquaintance you never knew well
    And never touched (at least in this life).

    Nor do you touch in the dream, except innocently,
    Informally, though some strong emotion seems to float 
    Beneath the surface of dream skin.

    In your society of thoughts, you flesh out reasons 
    For this intrusion:  a past life, too dim to remember,
    Gives the only succor,  as you await enlightenment.

    Trying to neutralize resentment, jealousy, or betrayal,
    Your subconscious may be accusing, judging, condemning,
    But for what you remain unaware.

    Each visit of the form reshapes your conscience
    And the day crawls on its belly:
    You feel a sick-sweet love 

    Coiling and spurning itself until you forget again
    And get on with other details, but give it days or weeks
    And the phantom reappears.

    It begs exorcism: Burning karmic seeds to release 
    The ghost in smoke.  You hope this specter is free of you—
    You prefer to think this aberration is yours alone.

    Original poem appearing in my collection titled “Turtle Woman & Other Poems” under the title “Aberration”

  • Let Shadows Depart

    Image created by Grok inspired by the poem
    Image created by Grok inspired by the poem

    Let Shadows Depart

    “Shadows – hold their breath.” —Emily Dickinson

    The Divine Self engages them—
    Yet they wobble with closed eye. 

    Music’s mystery permeates their depth
    And midnight ponders heavy dreams.

    Bless the fog of days strung in agony
    By the temptress’s needle.

    The Divine Flame will sear the now
    And frame the open pit of desire

    Where tongues that clipped too close their matted fabric
    And stalked in vain a dubious retort— 

    I will never again open the seal that kept me safe
    From the monstrous lie that Evil and her minions spawn. 

  • Emily Dickinson’s “The reticent volcano keeps”

    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

    Emily Dickinson’s “The reticent volcano keeps”

    The speaker in Emily Dickinson’s “The reticent volcano keeps” is musing on the nature of silence and secrets, transforming metaphorically a volcano into a figure of thoughtful restraint. This idea creates a paradox that challenges the nature and purpose of human speech.

    Introduction and Text of “The reticent volcano keeps”

    The speaker in Emily Dickinson’s “The reticent volcano keeps” is exploring the tense relationship between divine knowledge and human awareness by delving into nature’s ability to keep secrets as opposed to humanity’s driving need to speak out and to be heard by others.

    The poem, thus, is ultimately a study in contrasts. The speaker concocts a parallel universe, in which the forces of nature adhere to perfect discretion as human beings often go off the rails by remaining loquacious and even indiscreet, as they engage loudly in mere gossip.

    The metaphorical volcano becomes the speaker’s prime example of nature’s superior restraint. Unlike explosive human beings, this volcanic force has mastered the art of keeping secrets and thus holds its ever awake strategy in blissful silence.

    The reticent volcano keeps

    The reticent volcano keeps
    His never slumbering plan —
    Confided are his projects pink
    To no precarious man.

    If nature will not tell the tale
    Jehovah told to her
    Can human nature not survive
    Without a listener?

    Admonished by her buckled lips
    Let every babbler be
    The only secret people keep
    Is Immortality.

    Commentary on “The reticent volcano keeps”

    Emily Dickinson’s “The reticent volcano keeps” creates a speaker who comments on the nature of silence and secrets. The speaker employs a metaphor of a volcano to compare the ideas of restraint to the chatty nature of humanity, whose only secret “Is Immortality.”

    First Stanza: The Volcano’s Secret

    The reticent volcano keeps
    His never slumbering plan —
    Confided are his projects pink
    To no precarious man.

    The speaker begins by metaphorically creating the image of a  volcano that keeps secrets.  There is almost a hint of personification of that geologic force, as it is described as “reticent” but capable of deliberately and consciously making the choice to keep its secrets.

    By calling the volcano “reticent,” the speaker gives it a personality with intention. Thus the volcano becomes human-like with the ability to make choices.  And its choice is to stay mum about its purpose for its activities.

    The image of the “never slumbering plan” heralds forth a disturbing tension. On its surface, the volcano seems to remain dormant, yet beneath that quiet surface rumbles a permanent, definite intention. 

    According to this fantasized scenario, the volcano is not experiencing a passive rest but instead is engaging in the restraint of wide-awake watching.  Thus the speaker is implying that actual power comes with restraint, not from revelation. 

    Stated another way:  the volcano’s power lies in what it does not say, or what it refuses to reveal about its hidden activities.  The volcano does not merely have a plan, but it also protects and preserves that plan from outside observation that would cause interference with its intentions.

    The speaker is therefore presenting the volcano as a model of perfect prudence, a power that is capable of destroying the landscape yet chooses to keep its secrets.  The speaker is implying that such choices are the result of self-control.  And that kind of self-control is to be admired.

    The speaker unveils minor details, labeling them “projects pink,” which suggest images of dawn, flowering blossoms, or a gently glowing fire.  Still, the volcano reveals these intimate secrets to no one, definitely not to unreliable human beings.

    The color “pink” brings an unexpected gentleness into the scenario of volcanic force.   The speaker seems to be suggesting that even the most dramatic natural forces contain delicate qualities hidden from view.

    The speaker portrays human beings as “precarious” because they remain basically unreliable and too fickle to be trusted with nature’s serious purposes. Human beings are deemed unworthy to be afforded information about nature’s activities.  

    So, the phrase “confided are” suggests that the volcano’s secrets exist in a state of trust. But such trust is not extended to humans, again because human beings have not proven themselves to be trustworthy.  

    The speaker has thus created a hierarchy of trustworthiness. The volcano is placed at the top of the spectrum and humanity at the bottom. The natural world, as opposed to the human world thus serves as the reliable retainer of divine secrets.

    Second Stanza: Divine Silence

    If nature will not tell the tale
    Jehovah told to her
    Can human nature not survive
    Without a listener?

    The speaker then broadens her view beyond the volcanic keeper of secrets to encompass all of nature in this conspiracy of silence. The speaker suggests that God Himself has shared secrets with the natural world.

    The phrase “the tale / Jehovah told to her” implies the intimate conversational relationship between Creator and creation. The speaker presents this scenario as a whispered confidence that remains eternally unbroken.

    By employing the name “Jehovah,” the speaker invokes one of the most sacred names for God. This raises the conversation beyond casual exchange to profound holiness and therefore deserving of absolute attention.

    In other words, the speaker is implying that nature serves as God’s confidante. Unlike the human being,  who is supposed to be God’s most valuable and honored creation but has fallen short, the natural world has proven itself worthy of divine trust and continues to honor that sacred responsibility.

    The term “tale” points to a narrative or story, most likely mythology. The speaker thus implies that God has shared His most profound stories of creation with nature, stories that remain hidden.

    The speaker presents this divine sharing as a test of loyalty. Nature has passed the test by maintaining perfect silence, while humanity has failed time and again because of its compulsive need to speak.  

    At this point, the speaker poses the poem’s poignant question: If nature can keep divine secrets, why cannot human beings behave honorably, without constantly needing to speak and be heard?

    The term “survive” suggests the strong need for listeners; it is not merely a preference but an existential need. The speaker thus implies that humans require witnesses to their thoughts to maintain their very existence.  

    Ultimately, the speaker is creating a sharp distinction between “nature” and “human nature.”  Nature is capable of self-sufficient silence, while human nature has acquired the bad habit of constant verbal interaction just to function.

    The question becomes philosophical as well as practical. The speaker wonders whether humanity’s need for an audience is weakness or simply part of its essential character as social beings.  

    The speaker implies that humanity’s inability to keep secrets stems from its fundamental need for connection.  Human beings speak because they must be heard to feel that they are living.

    The question rises to a note of near-pathetic bewilderment. The speaker remains genuinely baffled by humanity’s inability to match nature’s perfect discretion and self-contained silence.

    Third Stanza: The Moral Lesson

    Admonished by her buckled lips
    Let every babbler be
    The only secret people keep
    Is Immortality.

    The speaker concludes with nature as an instructor of ethical and moral behavior.   The image of nature’s “buckled lips,” clasped tightly, serves to castigate human compulsive loquaciousness.

    The image of “buckled lips” is also mechanical as well as organic. The speaker suggests that while nature’s silence is instinctive, it is also deliberate, making it a disciplined choice.  

    The speaker chastises “every babbler,” shaming human beings for their inability to hold their tongues. Apparently, they cannot mirror the volcano’s patient discretion or even understand nature’s faithful, enduring silence.

    The term “babbler” is especially damning, reducing human communication to meaningless chatter.  Such constant talk lacks the dignity of nature’s meaningfully purposeful silence.

    The speaker delivers the poem’s most devastating irony. The one secret that humans do manage to keep is “Immortality”—their silence about death and what lies beyond.  This final revelation transforms the entire poem’s earlier criticisms. 

    In this final irony, the speaker both condemns and redeems humanity.  Humans are babblers about everything except what matters most—their own eternal destiny and ultimate meaning.

    But what does the speaker imply by claiming that humanity keeps secrets about Immortality?  Merely the fact that most of humanity speaks and behaves without giving Immortality or what lies beyond the grave much thought.

    The topic of “Immortality” is left up to poets, philosophers, and theologians.  And although these groups have proffered tomes on the issue, their theories go largely unnoticed on the street.  

    The speaker would have talk about life beyond this life become more open to everyone.  She seems to feel that the one secret that humanity continues to keep is the only one that truly matters.  

    She thus would have humanity keep some of its more chatty issues to itself, reorder its thinking, and begin producing volcanic force in conversations that would truly move the culture along to a more open sharing of eternal truths.  But first, of course, she must try to influence humanity to take an interest in profundity instead of petty, chatty gossip.

  • Emily Dickinson’s “The Only News I know”

    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

    Emily Dickinson’s “The Only News I know”

    In “The Only News I know,” Emily Dickinson creates a speaker who offers a glimpse at the poet’s satisfying daily existence.  She demonstrates how she keeps her consciousness focused only on things of the Divine Realm, thus, avoiding those of the mundane, vulgar, physical existence.

    Introduction with Text of  “The Only News I know”

    The reality of “the news” automatically holds all manner of things that have gone wrong during ordinary life.  Accidents, illness, murders, robberies, war, deceit, political intrigue all figure in the news reports that come to one daily.  

    While these topics tend to agitate, confuse, and sadden most folks who listen to “the news,” seldom does anyone offer an antidote to lessen the pain, frustration, confusion brought about by the bad news reports that accost the citizenry daily.

    Although Emily Dickinson’s poem, “The Only News I know,” is obviously an exaggeration, it, nevertheless, dramatizes the most important topics with which the poet likes to engage: immortality, eternity, and God.   She likes to engage and occupy her thinking and musing with ethereal places and events.  And this creative thinking easily replaces the mundane and vulgar events that daily hem one round.

    The physical world is such a cold and often desolate place for sensitive individuals and once those individuals acquire some inkling of a different world, a spiritual level of existence, or an astral world, they prefer it. 

    They inquire, read, and study about the possibility of a place where the soul lives on after it leaves the gross physical encasement.  Such a place offers the individual the opportunity to live more abundantly and completely without the trammels and trappings of earthly existence. 

    The thought of a “heaven” or an astral existence gives one hope that all the unseemly events reported in “the news” are only temporary and feature only a passing blight that the pure soul must put up with but only for a while.  While the physical reality is only temporary, the soul’s reality is permanent.

    Emily Dickinson’s “The Only News I Know” consists of four tercets, or three-line stanzas that examine the glorious possibility of living in a world of everlasting beauty, with an always blissful feeling, and ever-new joy. 

    Each tercet adheres to its own rime scheme: ABC, ABA, AAB, ABC. Each line displays six syllables, except for the final line in the final tercet, which yields only four syllables.  The four-syllable line gives the poem an abruptness that further enhances the meaning of the content: the speaker makes her claims in crispness and ends with a snap.

    The Only News I know

    The Only News I know
    Is Bulletins all Day
    From Immortality.

    The Only Shows I see  –
    Tomorrow and Today –
    Perchance Eternity –

    The Only One I meet
    Is God – The Only Street –
    Existence – This traversed

    If Other News there be –
    Or Admirabler Show –
    I’ll tell it You –

    Commentary on “The Only News I know”

    In this poem, Emily Dickinson has created a speaker who reports brief glimpses of what it is like to create a satisfying daily existence.   Instead of “bulletins” from news reports on daily misery, her bulletins come from a mystical place where only joy permeates the soul. 

    First Tercet:  Focus on the Spiritual  

    The Only News I know
    Is Bulletins all Day
    From Immortality.

    In the first stanza, the speaker asserts that the only information she recognizes is that which comes from “Immortality.” She claims that she receives brief news headlines during the whole day, implying that these brief reports come to her even as she is working. 

    This speaker is more interested in mystical, that is, spiritual awareness than she is in mundane earthly things.  Thus she can easily space out the mundane and fill it with ethereal blessings.

    Second Tercet:  A Permanent Frame of Mind  

    The Only Shows I see –
    Tomorrow and Today –
    Perchance Eternity –

    The speaker then avers that the only programs or performances she watches are those that pertain similarly to things and events that are everlastingly entertaining.   She then implies that the time frame in which she experiences these blessings is permanent. She leaves open some doubt by inserting the term “[p]erchance” likely only for the sake of skeptical listeners.

    It becomes clear that this speaker entertains no doubt about her claims regarding the landscape of the soul—those topics that obtain for “Immortality” and “Eternity.”   She is not so naïve as to believe that in the physical world these qualities hold fast.  

    If that were so, she would have no need to report on such beyond-earth loci.  She could go about simply revealing all the blessings she detects from earthly pleasures.   But because earthly paradise remains out of possibility, she has to report about mystical places with figurative language, including colorful images and metaphors.

    Third Tercet:   God Alone

    The Only One I meet
    Is God – The Only Street –
    Existence –This traversed

    The speaker then reveals her startling claim, as Dickinson speakers are often wont to do: “The Only One I meet / Is God.”   And instead of further drama or explication on meeting God, she rushes on mid-line to claim that the only path she travels is that of “Existence.” This “street” is the one that she “traverse[s]” freely. 

    Her interest focuses only on being.  She leaves the idea of becoming to others.  While she experiences this great eternal present of being, she remains in a state of blissful confidence. 

    Fourth Tercet:    No Other News

    If Other News there be –
    Or Admirabler Show –
    I’ll tell it You –

    Then the speaker declares that if, in fact, she ever acquires any other significant information, she will let her listeners know about it. But her matter-of-fact declamations have made it quite clear that she does not expect such “Other News” to assail her consciousness. 

    She is aware that she is creating her own garden of verse into which she has the ability to place anything she wishes.  In her garden of creation, she can remain in her mystical state of awareness, meeting only angels and other eternal beings. 

    Every flower, every bird, every blade of grass has become endowed with the grace of the Heavenly Father, the Ultimate Reality, the Divine Being that is God.  The speaker’s dedication to such bliss becomes so full that she is urged to share her state with her audience, and she gladly complies with that urge.