Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Wednesday
I’m at Myrtle Beach with grandchildren at the moment so here’s an eye-catching beach poem. This is one of those Emily Dickinson lyrics that starts off prosaically and then takes off in startling ways. “I started Early – Took my Dog – / And visited the Sea,” the poet begins, only to encounter mermaids and frigates and to go wading into the water all the way “past my bodice.”
Dr. Oliver Tearle of Loughborough University, whose website I visit regularly in search of poems that share a common theme, informs us of the poem’s subtext: it’s about a sexual awakening. The sea, which in Dickinson’s poem “Wild nights! – Wild nights!” stands in for sexual passion, is working its magic again here, only more quietly. She may seem a mousy little woman “aground upon the Sands,” but next thing we know, she’s overflowing “with Pearl”:
And made as He would eat me up –
As wholly as a Dew
Upon a Dandelion’s Sleeve –
And then – I started – too –And He – He followed – close behind –
I felt His Silver Heel
Upon my Ankle – Then My Shoes
Would overflow with Pearl –
After being eaten up, however, the poet then returns to the Solid Town—nothing to see here, folks!—her life-changing awakening witnessed by no one but herself. Tearle explains:
The end of the poem, where the ‘Solid Town’ forces the sea to back off, invites us to consider the clash, so pronounced in nineteenth-century conservative New England, between the social expectations and mores for young women (embodied by the town as a symbol for civilization and society) and the boundless freedom and energy of the individual (encoded in the sea). It’s as if the speaker, having come to terms with her own sexuality, has retreated to the safety of society with its norms and rules.
Unlike Dickinson and J. Alfred Prufrock, I haven’t seen any mermaids as I’ve walked the South Carolina beach at night. But I have seen the moon cast a silver highway on the sea, which is magical in its own right, a ribbon of moonlight (to borrow from Alfred E. Noyes’s “The Highway Man”). And unlike the moon in Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” she was not shining sulkily at all.
Here’s Dickinson’s poem:
I started Early – Took my Dog –
And visited the Sea –
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me –
And Frigates – in the Upper Floor
Extended Hempen Hands –
Presuming Me to be a Mouse –
Aground – upon the Sands –
But no Man moved Me – till the Tide
Went past my simple Shoe –
And past my Apron – and my Belt
And past my Bodice – too –
And made as He would eat me up –
As wholly as a Dew
Upon a Dandelion’s Sleeve –
And then – I started – too –
And He – He followed – close behind –
I felt His Silver Heel
Upon my Ankle – Then My Shoes
Would overflow with Pearl –
Until We met the Solid Town –
No One He seemed to know –
And bowing – with a Mighty look –
At me – The Sea withdrew –
I love the secret understanding that she and the Sea have between them. Something momentous has occurred and the Sea respects how she has been open to the experience. There’s no prudery here, just mutual understanding.
Acknowledged with a bow.
