Poem of the Week 2024/14

A Light exists in Spring

Not present on the Year

At any other period –

When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad

On Solitary Fields

That Science cannot overtake

But Human Nature feels.

It waits upon the Lawn,

It shows the furthest Tree

Upon the furthest Slope you know

It almost speaks to you.

Then as Horizons step

Or Noons report away

Without the Formula of sound

It passes and we stay –

A quality of loss

Affecting our Content

As Trade had suddenly encroached

Upon a Sacrament.

– Emily Dickinson

Here we begin with light, a certain light visible only for a liver of the year, in early Spring. It would be the result of atmospheric conditions & so forth, but is treated as a thing-in-itself, not as a result of natural processes: it is described as being present on the Year, as if it were a physical object placed over another object. The light becomes a Color (Dickinson capitalizes both Light & Color, emphasizing them as entities, though of course they are disembodied perceptions of our eyes). Like the Light that is on the Year, the Color stands abroad, as if it is also a separate, physical object rather than an effect of the light (a perceptual manifestation of a natural phenomenon that exists only on the level of photons).

It stands on Solitary Fields – perhaps solitary rather than empty, to give a human, emotional dimension to the separation & isolation of the fields. Presumably there are no other people in evidence, except for the poet, observing the Light & its resultant Color. The second stanza ends with an emphasis on the human observer, & the effects of the light/color are taken as not individual but general: this is what Human Nature feels, looking at this color, not what one particular individual witnesses. Science cannot overtake the Color, we are told: is it too evanescent to be analyzed as part of the spectrum of light? too dependent on a combination of other factors (the time of year, the atmosphere) to be reduced to a standard formula? Dickinson will develop this thought further at the end of the poem.

The Light/Color continues to be treated as an entity, given an almost physical shape in the poet's vision, existing as a separate part in the landscape. Not only a physical-seeming entity, but one with consciousness: it waits up on the Lawn. (Lawn suggests human habitation in a way that fields does not; people do not actually appear in this poem, but their effects are palpable, as is the Light/Color they're interacting with.) It shows us a Tree on a Slope – both further out than perhaps we would normally look. The Light draws us there, manifesting the Tree & the Slope as objects we are drawn to. The Light/Color almost speaks to you; here the poet reinforces the suggestion that these are not her individual reactions, but ones that any observer would have. Yet the Light/Color, though presented in almost human terms – as something that can speak directly to us – doesn't quite reach that human-like form; it almost speaks, we are on the verge of being told something, but it eludes us, slipping away with distance & time.

Distance & time are made explicit in the next stanza, with Horizons stepping away & Noons reporting away. Again, conceptual entities – the horizon, noontime – are personified as taking physical action: the Horizons step, the Noons report. Stepping, reporting: business-like & efficient! Formula in the third line of the stanza also carries business-like, scientific overtones: sound is a formula, a product of certain scientific/mathematic principles. This is another way for Dickinson to make her point about the Light/Color almost speaking: it exists, it has something to say, but it passes without saying it in words we can understand.

But perhaps the meaning lies not in sentences that can be formulated with words, but in the quality of loss the poet mentions at the beginning of the last stanza: that evanescent, ineffable feeling that strikes us deep inside, "Affecting our Content" as the poet says: Content here refers primarily, I think, to happiness & satisfaction – contentment – but there's also the implication of our "contents", that is, the miscellaneous things we contain. That's the deep level of effect this passing experience has.

The poem closes with a vivid simile: As Trade had suddenly encroached / Upon a Sacrament. Trade brings up the American mercantile world of buying & selling; it connects with the other scientific/business-like terms to oppose one world – the burgeoning world of American capitalism, based on engineering, mathematics, getting & spending – with the solemn world of the Sacraments. For a nineteenth-century New England poet like Dickinson, the memory of the Puritan colonists would never be far away, even as it was being supplanted by a materialistic, profit-driven society. The fleeting Light/Color leaves us behind, with a sense of loss, as solitary as the fields or the single Tree out on a far slope, divided between an inner sense of a solemn manifestation of the Creator/Redeemer – a Sacrament – which is, however, intruded upon by the bustling new world of capitalism, using, exploiting, & changing Nature to spin the wheels of trade.

This poem strikes me as a spring-time equivalent of Dickinson's wintry There's a certain Slant of light: both poems deal with the interior, psychological & spiritual, effects of light upon a landscape.

This is #812 in Thomas H Johnson's edition of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.