768.1863. The mountains – grow unnoticed –

768.1863. The Mountains – grow unnoticed –

The Mountains – grow unnoticed –
Their Purple figures rise
Without attempt – Exhaustion –
Assistance – or Applause –

In Their Eternal Faces
The Sun – with just delight
Looks long – and last – and golden –
For fellowship – at night –

When ED composed this poem, five miles of farmland lay between her second-floor south-facing window and the Holyoke Mountain Range. The Range stretches east-west seven miles, and five peaks rise 800 feet above the farmland. These hills were ED’s “Sweet Mountains” of poem F745 (TPB Comment 2). Today, trees on her father’s former hayfield across Main Street would block her view, but in 1863 the setting Sun cast a golden glow on their framed faces.

In a former life as a National Park Ranger, I lived for a year in a Park Service apartment ten miles east of the Teton Mountain Range. The Grand Teton loomed a mile high, framed perfectly in our picture window. For the first month, I couldn’t take my eyes off its massive peaks, but gradually I grew accustomed to my daily view until it became part of my brain’s expected landscape.

No doubt, the same happened with Amherstites and their comparatively miniscule Holyoke Mountain Range. For ED, however, the Holyoke peaks became close friends with sunset-golden faces, her “Strong Madonnas” who “Cherish still – // The Wayward Nun–beneath the hill –”.

Like Shakespeare’s fair friend of Sonnet 18, so long as ED’s poems F745 and F768 live, they give life to her “Sweet Mountains”:

“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
 So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

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