Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

SYLLABLES OF EMILY DICKINSON 83

Now a sexual hint emerges like Original Sin, as the grass divides and “A spot-
ted shaft is seen.” No creature is named, though she knows him well enough:

He likes a Boggy Acre

A Floor too cool for Corn—

Sam Bowles exclaimed, “How did that girl ever know that a boggy field wasn’t
good for corn?” Her memory then turns to childhood shock:

Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot—

I more than once at Noon

Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash

Unbraiding in the sun.

Her later editor-relatives thought “Child” more seemly than “Boy,” and changed
“Noon” to “Morn,” smoothing the rhyme with “Corn.” But they couldn’t
tame Emily’s wildness. This “Whip lash / Unbraiding” is no mere figure of
speech but visionary menace: “It wrinkled, and was gone.” Compare her calmer
poem—“Sweet is the swamp with its secrets, / Until we meet a snake; / ’Tis
then we sigh for houses... ”
Dickinson unsettles her Sunday hymnal meter too, shifting from an 8-6-8-6
syllable count to 7-6-7-6, every other line hanging on an unstressed syllable:
Barefoot, Whip lash. This odd-even pace keeps us off balance and expectant,
though again reassured for a moment, relaxed:

Several of Nature ’s People

I know, and they know me—

I feel for them a transport

Of cordiality—

Against the whiplash and her sense of unknown nature, Dickinson risks a casual
tone on “Several” and on “People I know,” such as squirrels and deer. Likewise
her “transport” or rapture gets lightened by genteel “cordiality”—Now Emily,
be cordial to our guests! Except that the heart (Latin cor) at the root of “cordial-
ity” will come back to end this tale on a kind of cardiac arrest.
Pointing toward a close, that word “But” rebuts cordiality:
But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone

The lout and somehow fellow creature ’s still not named. One syllable in this
species standoff, “oralone,” turns dire when finally “alone” gets locked in by
its rhyme:

But never met this Fellow

Attended, or alone