Giles Watson's Blog - Posts Tagged "plume-moths"
Dressed in Mechlin
Dressed in Mechlin
The only Ghost I ever saw
… wrote Emily Dickinson some time in 1862, at the beginning of a deluge of poetic inspiration. Edgar Allan Poe was already dead, and ghosts were in vogue, as they would be throughout the nineteenth century, both in Britain and in America. Dickinson herself was alluding to them repeatedly that year. In one poem, “The Shapes we buried” wait for us in the eternal world, a “Mouldering Playmate”, “Bright Knots of Apparitions” that will “Salute us, with their wings” when we arrive in their otherworld, as if we the Living, not they the Dead, are the ghostly ones. In another, she sees Death itself as a ghastly form of liberation, and finds looking on the dead “so appalling - it exhilirates [her spelling]”: “To scan a Ghost, is faint / But grappling, conquers it - ”. In a third, it is Dickinson herself who has died, a year ago, carried out like too-young corn with its tassels still hanging. In yet another, she faces something which seems like Death, but cannot be, because she, ghostlike, is standing up, and concludes that she is in Despair. But this ghost…
Was dressed in Mechlin - so -
He had no sandal on his foot -
And stepped like flakes of snow -
Mechlin is one of the oldest forms of lace, manufactured in the Flemish Municipality of Mechelen. It is exquisitely intricate, made without the use of pins. This ghost must have been tremendously wealthy in life, if he was dressed entirely in Mechlin, an enormously expensive fabric which was normally reserved for the trimmings of dresses and corsets, and occasionally for hair-styling and cravats. This is also a ghost perhaps of some antiquity, since the heyday of Mechlin production was about a century earlier than the poem, although forty years later, Queen Victoria herself would be buried haloed in lace, some of it apparently Mechlin, like a bride awaiting her long-dead beloved Prince Albert. The greatest Mechlin lacemakers were very accomplished indeed, incorporating birds, flowers and figurative features in their designs. Mechlin is exceptionally fine, too - almost insubstantial - so that it shows up best when its whiteness is worn over the top of a darker fabric. This ghost is treading very lightly in the world, unshod, snowlike, fading, evaporative, wrapped in a fabric composed mostly of holes.
His Mien, was soundless, like the Bird -
But rapid - like the Roe -
His fashions, quaint, Mosaic -
Or haply, Mistletoe -
His conversation - seldom -
His laughter, like the Breeze
That dies away in Dimples
Among the pensive Trees -
His fashions would indeed be “Mosaic” if he was dressed in Mechlin. The larger Mechlin fabrics which still exist are all composed of smaller pieces, usually strip-shaped, stitched delicately together. Dickinson hesitated over the choice of “Mien” or “Gait” - the ghost intends, by his passage, to leave as little impression as possible, either in the form of footprints or remembered expressions. He is inscrutable, his face and wrapping as white as mistletoe berries, his movement flitting as the bird, the roe deer or the wind. He has a knack for disappearing - a sort of spiritual camouflage, an ability to die away back into himself.
Our interview - was transient -
Of me - himself was shy -
And God forbid I look behind -
Since that appalling Day!
A poet renowned for her shyness has met her match for elusiveness in this “Ghost”. There’s a pun in that last line of the poem which brings us back to its beginning, the ghost palled in a winding sheet of Mechlin, but the capitalisation also recalls the terror of the Day of Judgement. This “Ghost” lingers in the memory, and will not be looked at straight.
The poem has the air of a riddle, but the critical literature is in puzzlement as to what the solution to it may be. A snow-covered tree in a forest, a bird, the wind, have all been suggested, but Dickinson names all these in the poem itself - an odd thing to do with a riddle. Part of the joy of the poem, of course, is that its representation of beauty, silence, whiteness - and yes, too, of terror - is so broadly applicable. But I have long thought that if the poem has a solution, it is a moth - a white one - one of the ghost or swift moths, for example. Or perhaps something smaller, more delicate, wearing a pall of lace.
There are currently over a hundred and sixty described species of plume moths living in North America. They were classified as micro moths in Dickinson’s time, and they occur all over the world apart from the polar regions. One genus in particular, Pterophorus, presents itself as a delightful contender as a very specific solution to Emily Dickinson’s riddle. Known colloquially as white plume moths, Pterophorus moths are no longer in body than the digit of a finger, and their whole bodies are ghostly white. They are nocturnal, and spend their days hanging from grass stems, wings spread at right angles to their bodies in a cruciform pattern. At these times, they are almost impossible to notice, unless you are stooping and deliberately seeking them out. The shape of the outfolded wings is similar to the leaves of mistletoe, and hangs when the insect is at rest at a similar angle. The hind edges of both forewings and hindwings are finely divided, giving the insect an exquisite, microscopically detailed, lace-like appearance, enhanced by the bifurcation of the hindwings, all of which have the same Mechlin-like adornment. The antennae are exceptionally fine, the legs long, spindly, jointed, and bearing bristly tarsal appendages which add significantly to the visual complexity of these creatures, which look like animated snowflakes - the intricacies of which the microscopes of Emily Dickinson’s time were quite capable of disclosing. Were a plume moth to perch on your hand and walk about, its footsteps would feel as insubstantial as falling snowflakes, since the whole creature weighs a fraction of a gram. Such are its powers of camouflage that it will be perching on your hand moment, and be nowhere to be seen the next.
Moths themselves embody the souls of departed human spirits, according to folklore; one this small and exquisite, dressed exclusively in white, might have seemed to Dickinson like a kindred spirit. The moth itself, therefore, is a metaphor for a ghost, and we are back where we started.
There are also personal reasons why Dickinson may have chosen to write in riddles about so small a moth. In the same year, she would write a poem, “Before I got my eye put out”, which, though very like hyperbolic, does seem to suggest the beginnings of the alarming affliction which would bring her close to blindness in later life. She writes of how her “Heart / Would split” to be able to see the sky, the meadows, the mountains and the stars. How appropriate, then, if she felt her sight was failing, to riddle on so exquisite and tiny an insect, perhaps remembered from childhood, scarcely daring to spell it out straight, for fear of looking behind, like Lot’s wife, and exchanging the transience of snow for the cold white permanence of a sightless pillar of salt. Such microscopic visions would come to sustain a monumental lifetime’s work, and for all that fear of looking behind, Dickinson excelled at the art of finding both the abject and the sublime in the tiniest of creatures, and turning the transient eternal.
The only Ghost I ever saw
… wrote Emily Dickinson some time in 1862, at the beginning of a deluge of poetic inspiration. Edgar Allan Poe was already dead, and ghosts were in vogue, as they would be throughout the nineteenth century, both in Britain and in America. Dickinson herself was alluding to them repeatedly that year. In one poem, “The Shapes we buried” wait for us in the eternal world, a “Mouldering Playmate”, “Bright Knots of Apparitions” that will “Salute us, with their wings” when we arrive in their otherworld, as if we the Living, not they the Dead, are the ghostly ones. In another, she sees Death itself as a ghastly form of liberation, and finds looking on the dead “so appalling - it exhilirates [her spelling]”: “To scan a Ghost, is faint / But grappling, conquers it - ”. In a third, it is Dickinson herself who has died, a year ago, carried out like too-young corn with its tassels still hanging. In yet another, she faces something which seems like Death, but cannot be, because she, ghostlike, is standing up, and concludes that she is in Despair. But this ghost…
Was dressed in Mechlin - so -
He had no sandal on his foot -
And stepped like flakes of snow -
Mechlin is one of the oldest forms of lace, manufactured in the Flemish Municipality of Mechelen. It is exquisitely intricate, made without the use of pins. This ghost must have been tremendously wealthy in life, if he was dressed entirely in Mechlin, an enormously expensive fabric which was normally reserved for the trimmings of dresses and corsets, and occasionally for hair-styling and cravats. This is also a ghost perhaps of some antiquity, since the heyday of Mechlin production was about a century earlier than the poem, although forty years later, Queen Victoria herself would be buried haloed in lace, some of it apparently Mechlin, like a bride awaiting her long-dead beloved Prince Albert. The greatest Mechlin lacemakers were very accomplished indeed, incorporating birds, flowers and figurative features in their designs. Mechlin is exceptionally fine, too - almost insubstantial - so that it shows up best when its whiteness is worn over the top of a darker fabric. This ghost is treading very lightly in the world, unshod, snowlike, fading, evaporative, wrapped in a fabric composed mostly of holes.
His Mien, was soundless, like the Bird -
But rapid - like the Roe -
His fashions, quaint, Mosaic -
Or haply, Mistletoe -
His conversation - seldom -
His laughter, like the Breeze
That dies away in Dimples
Among the pensive Trees -
His fashions would indeed be “Mosaic” if he was dressed in Mechlin. The larger Mechlin fabrics which still exist are all composed of smaller pieces, usually strip-shaped, stitched delicately together. Dickinson hesitated over the choice of “Mien” or “Gait” - the ghost intends, by his passage, to leave as little impression as possible, either in the form of footprints or remembered expressions. He is inscrutable, his face and wrapping as white as mistletoe berries, his movement flitting as the bird, the roe deer or the wind. He has a knack for disappearing - a sort of spiritual camouflage, an ability to die away back into himself.
Our interview - was transient -
Of me - himself was shy -
And God forbid I look behind -
Since that appalling Day!
A poet renowned for her shyness has met her match for elusiveness in this “Ghost”. There’s a pun in that last line of the poem which brings us back to its beginning, the ghost palled in a winding sheet of Mechlin, but the capitalisation also recalls the terror of the Day of Judgement. This “Ghost” lingers in the memory, and will not be looked at straight.
The poem has the air of a riddle, but the critical literature is in puzzlement as to what the solution to it may be. A snow-covered tree in a forest, a bird, the wind, have all been suggested, but Dickinson names all these in the poem itself - an odd thing to do with a riddle. Part of the joy of the poem, of course, is that its representation of beauty, silence, whiteness - and yes, too, of terror - is so broadly applicable. But I have long thought that if the poem has a solution, it is a moth - a white one - one of the ghost or swift moths, for example. Or perhaps something smaller, more delicate, wearing a pall of lace.
There are currently over a hundred and sixty described species of plume moths living in North America. They were classified as micro moths in Dickinson’s time, and they occur all over the world apart from the polar regions. One genus in particular, Pterophorus, presents itself as a delightful contender as a very specific solution to Emily Dickinson’s riddle. Known colloquially as white plume moths, Pterophorus moths are no longer in body than the digit of a finger, and their whole bodies are ghostly white. They are nocturnal, and spend their days hanging from grass stems, wings spread at right angles to their bodies in a cruciform pattern. At these times, they are almost impossible to notice, unless you are stooping and deliberately seeking them out. The shape of the outfolded wings is similar to the leaves of mistletoe, and hangs when the insect is at rest at a similar angle. The hind edges of both forewings and hindwings are finely divided, giving the insect an exquisite, microscopically detailed, lace-like appearance, enhanced by the bifurcation of the hindwings, all of which have the same Mechlin-like adornment. The antennae are exceptionally fine, the legs long, spindly, jointed, and bearing bristly tarsal appendages which add significantly to the visual complexity of these creatures, which look like animated snowflakes - the intricacies of which the microscopes of Emily Dickinson’s time were quite capable of disclosing. Were a plume moth to perch on your hand and walk about, its footsteps would feel as insubstantial as falling snowflakes, since the whole creature weighs a fraction of a gram. Such are its powers of camouflage that it will be perching on your hand moment, and be nowhere to be seen the next.
Moths themselves embody the souls of departed human spirits, according to folklore; one this small and exquisite, dressed exclusively in white, might have seemed to Dickinson like a kindred spirit. The moth itself, therefore, is a metaphor for a ghost, and we are back where we started.
There are also personal reasons why Dickinson may have chosen to write in riddles about so small a moth. In the same year, she would write a poem, “Before I got my eye put out”, which, though very like hyperbolic, does seem to suggest the beginnings of the alarming affliction which would bring her close to blindness in later life. She writes of how her “Heart / Would split” to be able to see the sky, the meadows, the mountains and the stars. How appropriate, then, if she felt her sight was failing, to riddle on so exquisite and tiny an insect, perhaps remembered from childhood, scarcely daring to spell it out straight, for fear of looking behind, like Lot’s wife, and exchanging the transience of snow for the cold white permanence of a sightless pillar of salt. Such microscopic visions would come to sustain a monumental lifetime’s work, and for all that fear of looking behind, Dickinson excelled at the art of finding both the abject and the sublime in the tiniest of creatures, and turning the transient eternal.
