807.1864.Away from Home are some and I —

807.1864.Away from Home are some and I —

Away from Home are some and I —
An Emigrant to be
In a Metropolis of Homes
Is easy, possibly —

The Habit of a Foreign Sky
We — difficult — acquire
As Children, who remain in Face
The more their Feet retire.

My interpretation of Fr807:

Away from home are some and I; to be an emigrant in a large city of homes is easy, possibly.
The habit of a foreign sky we difficult acquire, as children who remain home in heart the more their faces leave home.

A biographical interpretation makes the meaning of this poem clear; I think ED intended Line 1 to be read literally, “Away from Home are some and I —”:

During late April to November 21 in 1864, ED lived with her cousins in Cambridge where she could get treatments by the best ophthalmologist in Boston. She was an “Emigrant” because she left her home in Amherst by train bound for Boston, which was a “Metropolis of Homes” compared to Amherst. The train ride was “easy”, but she’s uneasy about what lies ahead, hence the stanza-closing “possibly —”
Getting used to the “Foreign Sky” of Cambridge and Boston wasn’t easy for ED, a small-town girl who liked her home on Amherst’s Main Street. She felt like a child whose “face” was physically in an unfamiliar place where she was supposed to be, but her heart and brain remained in her second-floor bedroom at Homestead writing poetry, or at least trying to. (Habegger 2001)

She used the word “Emigrant” because her travel experience helped her empathize better with the Irish immigrants in Amherst who had arrived in a strange new land under a “Foreign Sky”.

During ED’s months of treatment she apparently composed some poems. However, she was under strict orders not to use her eyes, so she may have dictated new poems to her cousins, Louisa and Francis Norcross. That may explain some of the upcoming short poems.

Habegger, Alfred. 2001. My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson. Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

HOME

After commenting on Poems 1-763 (Franklin) on The Prowling Bee’, I am convinced that (virtually) all of Emily Dickinson’s (ED’s) poems have a factual historical level in addition to their various poetic levels of meaning. The reason for her instant and continuing public adulation (1890 - present) was and is, by far, poetic. She is one of the "Greats" that she always dreamed to be, despite her lifelong refusal to publish. That refusal freed her from criticism and allowed her to explore the outer boundaries of poetic power.

More than a century of scholarly research has resulted in somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 books and published academic papers about ED. A large majority of these publications focus only on the “poetic levels” of one or more of ED’s poems. Publications that consider both the “historic level” and “poetic levels” comprise a small minority. Publications that focus only on the factual history of her life probably number less than 100. (All numbers in this paragraph are my estimates.)

Unfortunately for ED’s universe of readers, these two basic levels (historical and poetic) cannot be separated into two ivory towers. Every history-level publication that I know of includes at least some discussion of the poetic level(s).

The reverse is not true. In fact, authors of the “poetry-level” school seem to avoid commenting on the historical level, sometimes admonishing that a poem must stand on its own, without concern for its historical roots. To my knowledge, there are (virtually) no published “history-level” books or articles that totally ignore ED’s poems and their poetic levels.

Of course, ED’s refusal to publish her poems was only possible because of lifelong financial and daily social/housekeeping support by her family, especially her father and sister, respectively. In addition, throughout her life, the Dickinsons hired servants, first Negro and later Irish, some of whom became much more than housekeepers for ED.

My point is that our appreciation of ED's poems can be enhanced by understanding both poetic and historical levels of her sound and sense. We impoverish ourselves if we ignore their historical base.