Poem of the Week 2024/19

An Everywhere of Silver

With Ropes of Sand

To keep it from effacing

The Track called Land.

– Emily Dickinson

The brevity of this poem – barely longer than a haiku, & just as concentrated in its implications – contributes to its force. An Everywhere of Silver: as often with Dickinson, her capitalizations provide emphasis to words that might otherwise not receive full weight. Its an ecstatic image: shining silver, spread all over, covering all. But what is this she's viewing & describing? It's only with the second line that we get a clue: there are ropes of sand. This silver expanse (which might have been moonlight, or a field of flowers) is apparently the ocean, hit by sunlight so that it looks like a molten expanse of silver. Anyone who's been to the seaside, & I honestly don't know if that includes Dickinson or if she's going on imagination & desire here, has seen the waters like that.

But why ropes of sand? As the shore stretches out, it could look like rope, but it could just as easily look like a wall or barrier or the solidity of our earth. Ropes suggest something more tenuous than any of these, some attempt to control something wild, or potentially unruly, like even a domesticated animal. Obviously humanity did not place the sand there, but the word gives the sense that it is somehow related to humanity, something made, held against the vast & gorgeous silver sea. & why are these "ropes" there?

The answer comes in the concluding two lines: To keep it from effacing / The Track called Land. Effacing suggests complete disappearance, & at some subliminal level, the face hidden in the word suggests an erasure of the human face. Land is where the viewer most likely is standing (how else could she see the ropes of sand?). With her characteristically slyly elliptical style, Dickinson, without presenting any obvious humans in this scene, suggests not so much that they don't happen to be present at the moment but that they are swept away into invisibility & even nonexistence by this boundless & regardless Beauty.

Track is an interesting word; as with ropes, it suggests something narrower & more fragile than our usual conception of the massive solid Earth that we live on. The Emily Dickinson Lexicon has an interesting entry for track: the first definition is "Footprints; set of footsteps; trace of passing; marks left behind when one walks on a path; evidence of passing over the ground in a certain direction." Again, the presence of humanity is suggested indirectly, with the suggestion of absence: people were here, but they've passed on (& of course, to pass on is a euphemism for death, & the ocean is often a metaphor for the vast & unknowable life of the universe, & the primal source of life).

Silver is usually found under the earth, or extracted & shaped by humans for their enjoyment or benefit or enrichment. Here Silver is Everywhere; though the poet doesn't mean the word literally – there are narrow barriers keeping it back, however tenuously, from the land – it is metaphorically an erasure of our usual land-based existence. Water is a necessity for life, but the poet never mentions water; it is suggested only by the gorgeous spread of silver, a combination of water & light. The splendor of this view is more than a sumptuous celebration of Nature for the delectation of the human viewer: as with the sensuous allegorical emblems in Spenser, there is a moral message lurking beneath the beauty: a reminder that Nature & what we see as its glories are indifferent to us, that we could disappear & they would go on, that our very admiration of such beauty can wipe us out: with ecstasy comes annihilation.

This is #884 in the Thomas Johnson edition of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.