829.1864.Between My Country — and the Others —

829.1864.Between My Country — and the Others —

There are no alternate words in Fr829:

Between My Country — and the Others —
There is a Sea —
But Flowers — negotiate between us —
As Ministry.

My interpretation of Fr829:

Between my home, “Homestead”, and Sue’s home, “Evergreens”, there is a meadow of grass and wildflowers and a footpath about 100 yards long:

Between My Country — and the Others —
There is a Sea —

Sue and I share our love of poetry by sending my poems back and forth by messengers, either our hired housekeepers or by Sue’s children. First, I send the poem to her, and she replies with her comments on the poems:

But Flowers — negotiate between us —
As Ministry.

Usually when I interpret a poem, I start with the literal first level, then dig deeper for universality. Continuing with the digging metaphor, a good poem has at least one level below the literal, which we label “second level”, even though we are digging downward. This is confusing because an elevator goes up to get to the second level.

For me, the words we read on the page comprise the second level of meaning and our job as readers is to guess their literal meaning, so here are five (5) words that we must interpret in reverse: “Country”, “Others”, “Sea”, “Flowers”, and “Ministry”. (Lest my quotation-mark punctuation confuses, I prefer British rules, which put periods and commas outside quotation marks when they logically belong there.)

“My Country” means “Myself” or “Me”. Not including first words in lines, ED capitalized Myself and Me many times in her poems, e.g., Fr14 (last line), Fr255, Fr273, Fr310, Fr332, Fr426 (Line 1), Fr455, Fr481 (twice), Fr553, Fr570, and many more.
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Line 1 in this poem (Fr829), “Between My Country — and the Others”, leaves us wondering, If “My Country” is ED or her home, “Homestead”, who are “the Others”? My immediate guess is Sue and Austin, who live in their newly built home, “Evergreens”. “Between” the two houses is 100 yards of meadow. But “Others” may also include anyone who reads ED’s poems.
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In ED’s poem that meadow is a “Sea” of grass and wildflowers. In an 1858 poem, ED told us “One Sister [Vinnie] have I in the house – / And one [Sue] a hedge away”. ED neglected to tell us that “a hedge away” meant 100 yards “Between” Homestead and Evergreens. And if “Others” is anyone who reads her poems, then the “Sea” is the literal or metaphorical distance from Homestead to wherever the reader happens to be.
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That meadow may be full of grass and wildflowers, but in this poem (Fr 829), “Flowers” probably means “Poems”, which “negotiate” between Sue and ED, especially during their 15-year hiatus when ED did not step foot into “Evergreens”.
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Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “Ministry” as “A government department headed by a minister; a departmental minister together with his or her associated staff; [or] the building occupied by a government department.” (Def, 1.5.c.)”. Ministers often personally carried important letters from one country to another. I suppose the word “Ministry” in the poem could be the employees or children that carried the poems back and forth across the “Sea” of meadow.

Historical perspective: Sue summarized her relationship with ED in a poem she wrote about 1891, five years after ED died:

Minstrel of the passing days
Sing me the song of all the ways
That snare the soul in the October haze
Song of the dark glory of the hills
When dyes are frightened to dull hues
Of all the gaudy shameless tints
That fire the passions of the prince
Strangling vines clasping their Cleopatras
Closer than Antony’s embrace
Whole rims of haze in pink
Horizons be as if new worlds hew
Shaping off our common quest –

ED was the minstrel who sang songs (sent poems):

“. . . . of all the ways
That snare the soul in the October haze”

As young women, Sue and ED read Shakespeare’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ together, with ED reading the part of Antony and Sue Cleopatra. In Fr829, ED’s poems sang:

“Of all the gaudy shameless tints
That fire the passions of the prince”.

The reason the two did not meet in person was that Sue felt strangled by ED’s neediness for love:

Strangling vines clasping their Cleopatras
Closer than Antony’s embrace

Sue recognized ED’s genius and understood her poems:

Horizons be as if new worlds hew
Shaping off our common quest –

Their “common quest” was their shared love of poetry.

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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.