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Of Bronze — and Blaze —
The North — tonight —
So adequate — it forms —
So preconcerted with itself —
So distant — to alarms —
An Unconcern so sovreign
To Universe, or me —
Infects my simple spirit
With Taints of Majesty —
Till I take vaster attitudes —
And strut opon my stem —
Disdaining Men, and Oxygen,
For Arrogance of them —
My Splendors, are Menagerie —
But their Competeless Show
Will entertain the Centuries
When I, am long ago,
An Island in dishonored Grass —
Whom none but Daisies — know.
****
“Charged particles from the sun entering Earth’s atmosphere create the vibrant colours,” says this guide to the best views of the Northern Lights in the US. Look at the view from the Aroostook National Wildlife Refuge to get an idea of the impressive aurora borealis Emily Dickinson might have been able to see from her home in Amherst, Massachusetts.
The poem’s focus is immediate and simple. No fulsome adjectives, no list of colours, diffuses it. Dickinson selects a single colour-associated noun, “bronze”, and pairs it with “blaze” – a noun that connotes the effect of fire, or intense fiery light. Single-syllabled and alliterative, the twinned words also gain resonance from their surrounding Dickinsonian typography – the capital opening letter and the dash.
An alloy, predominantly featuring copper, bronze is a highly versatile substance – and has an interesting etymology. It’s derived from the Italian, bronzo, meaning bell metal – brass. The ecclesiastical symbol might be relevant to the poem, but there’s another set of connotations perhaps more significant. Bronze was the material used for cannons, to ensure the iron cannonballs wouldn’t adhere to gun’s inner lining. In Greek historiography, there were three ages, gold, silver and bronze, the latter being the Age of Heroes. For the speaker in the poem, the North in its shining bronze is distant and impassive, perhaps like armour, or an armoury. The unheard “alarms”, pointing up its lack of response, would fit the military metaphor. Even that strange phrase “so preconcerted with itself” has a suggestion of armies purposefully massed, positioned and concentrating on the forthcoming action.
The poem belongs to Packet XIV of her manuscripts and was written between 1860 and 1862. It may predate the civil war (1861-65), but Dickinson’s response to the war remains an interesting topic. The Emily Dickinson Museum site is helpful. It reminds us that roughly half of Dickinson’s output coincided with the war. She acknowledged its influence in a family letter, saying that she wrote “off charnel steps”. The references remain oblique, of course. Interestingly for the current poem, her most overt, or least covert, “war poem” features a bell in the third stanza, which begins “the possibility — to pass / Without a moment’s Bell / Into Conjecture’s presence / Is like a Face of Steel”. The bell not rung symbolises the anonymous, sudden and sometimes unrecorded deaths of the battlefield.
There’s a moral warning, clearly sounded, in the current poem, which may or may not encode an anti-war position. The warning immediately relates to the effects of witnessing stupendous sights. An unexpected metaphor of disease reinforces the perceived need for resistance: the speaker, and the universe itself, risk being infected with “Taints of Majesty”. The magnificent disinterest of the aurora borealis shouldn’t delude its witnesses into a sense of elevation. Dickinson is a forceful anti-Romantic and anti-Transcendentalist literary critic here, as well as a moralist. The clinching correction of possible “vaster attitudes” comes in the image of a cultivated plant that, absurdly, “strut[s] opon its stem” when in reality it’s not only tethered to the earth but dependent on “Men, and Oxygen”.
The poem’s concluding sestet piles on further (apparent) self-denigration. “My Splendors, are Menagerie” is a superbly weighted oxymoron – perhaps weighted towards irony. The puzzle is in the next line and, especially, the word “competeless”. It’s easy to misread it as “completeless” – a feasible synonym for “uncompleted” with the bonus of suggesting the “Show” is not only uncompleted but non-completable. The implications of “competeless” take us in the opposite direction – to competition. As with the Northern Lights, there is nothing to compete with the speaker’s display, which will “Entertain the Centuries / When I, am long ago”. That last clause compresses time and tense, vividly enhanced by avoiding the putative vagueness of “when I will have existed long ago”.
Why does the speaker’s grave “dishonour” the grass? Is this a continuation of the ironical tone? The “islanded” grave is far from presumptuous. It’s so modestly situated, so ancient, unvisited and overgrown, that only daisies know it’s there. Earlier printings give “beetles” instead of “daisies” – but “daisies” is, hopefully, the right editorial decision, introducing another, humbler member of the plant world to contrast with the deluded flower strutting on its stem in line 11. But, finally, I can’t decide if the poet is claiming immortality for her work: I am not even sure that the speaker is Emily Dickinson or any poet. I tried reading it as if spoken by a flower, viewing the lights of the poet’s house at nightfall, a distant, incomprehensible blaze. (Not a very good idea, but interesting at first.) The difficulty of interpretation is part of the attraction. Dickinson’s poems often seem to have travelled to Earth from far away. This one is another “charged particle of sunlight” transforming our horizons with a constantly shifting and expanding play of ideas.