Giles Watson's Blog - Posts Tagged "wind"
Carried Away: Emily Dickinson, the Spry Arms, and the Loaded Gun
I stood in the eye of the Bronze Age chalk hill-figure, the White Horse of Uffington - a place where it is sensible to make a wish - and stared out across the Vale in a state of total exhilaration, Faringdon Folly concealed by trees in the distance to my left, and the bulging chimneys of the since-demolished Didcot Power Station to my right, half hidden under haze. That is when, my mother swears, an updraft gust of wind surged under my coat and lifted me from my feet. I remember the momentary sense of buoyancy, up there above the world, and then the gentle letting-down. It was a sensation I had only felt previously in dreams - mounting an air-drawn staircase - carried away.
And so throughout my life I have been a seeker-out of wind - the elemental force that brings me out exultant and sends others scurrying for shelter. On the Isles of Scilly, winter gales would stop the shipping and the planes, until the shelves in the supermarket on the most populous of the five inhabited islands, St. Mary’s, were almost empty of supplies. I would walk out towards the Garrison, fortified for centuries with a castle, and with walls built of great blocks of granite. Looking out towards the once-inhabited island of Samson, I would see seals cavorting in the water, only metres away from where waves exploded against the rocks then surged back in white runnels, seething. At the far northwest of the Garrison was a Second World War machine gun emplacement, strafed by nothing but wind, and at the far southwest of it was an ugly concrete “pillbox”, an observation post with a long rectangular slit in its structure looking out across the deep channel between St. Mary’s and the jagged coast of St. Agnes, upon whose beaches it is still possible to pick up terracotta beads from the cargoes of foundered sailing ships. There I would sit for hours as wind and spray blasted the concrete and the stone, the bell clanging arrhythmically on the mid-channel buoy. Afterwards, hands and nose numb with cold, but with my spirits leaping like salmon, I would walk back home via Porthcressa, a beach with a strong sea-wall and a row of houses beyond it, to find that the ocean had festooned the first-floor balconies with kelp and bladder-wrack. Beyond, on the headland called Peninnis, which has a squat little lighthouse, the spray could be seen hurling itself twice as high as the cliffs, describing arcs which would themselves be caught by wind and twisted - some of the water whirled, it seemed, back up into the atmosphere - some of it thrashed against the granite. It was difficult to even stand, so I would find a crag to cling to, and I would watch euphoric - my spirits carried away. When my extremities were numb with cold, I would hurry home, loaded to the muzzle with inspiration. And then would come the poems.
*
Emily Dickinson, it seems, experienced just such exhilarating winds in 1864 - a buffeting, godlike thunderstorm which caused considerable destruction, beginning with an ominous overture:
The Wind begun to rock the Grass
With threatening Tunes and low -
He threw a Menace at the Earth -
Another, at the Sky -
She considered the verb “knead” instead of “rock” - a word more suggestive of creative potential. She may have thought, too, of the wind as the symbol of inspiration in the Book of Acts: “inspiration”, sharing the same root as “respiration”. This wind, personified by her choice of pronoun, being invisible, causes objects to throw themselves around, dancing to those “threatening Tunes”, seemingly by their own volition:
The Leaves unhooked themselves from Trees
And started all abroad -
The Dust did scoop itself like Hands
And throw away the Road -
Dickinson gives the “Leaves” and the “Dust” the active voice, unhooking and scooping themselves. Inspiration shares this characteristic with wind, too: we see the outward signs of its actions, rather than its actual workings. The wind is, as Seamus Heaney would write more than a century later, “a huge nothing”, but one which shapes trees and causes us to “build our houses squat” if we live on an island. Both wind and inspiration defy, in their invisible power, the solidity of human endeavours - they “throw away the road”, destroying, deconstructing, creating anew. The wind is the sublime writ invisible: a vehicle of beauty and terror which emphatically puts us in our insignificant place.
The analogy persists in the line that follows, for anyone who has witnessed the enthusiasms of evangelical preachers -
The Wagons quickened on the streets
- for in their language, the “quickening” is the coming of the Holy Spirit, breathing life into scripture when an inspired believer reads it. But Emily Dickinson is not reading scripture - she is reading the natural world, and like the Dust, she is carried away. There is something of the thrill of watching a predator hunting in seeing the storm unleash its lightning:
The Thunder hurried slow -
The Lightning showed a yellow Beak
And then a livid Claw -
It is like the plunging stoop of a Peregrine Falcon, which has a yellow cere about its beak, or the lightning strike of a Bald Eagle, whose bill is yellow through and through. Pierced by the talons of inspiration, Dickinson magnifies the storm to Biblical proportions:
The Birds put up the Bars to Nests -
The Cattle clung to Barns -
Then came one Drop of Giant Rain
And then as if the Hands
That held the Dams, had parted hold,
The Waters wrecked the Sky,
But overlooked My Father’s House -
Just quartering a Tree -
We cling; Nature flings - and shears off the ending of the poem, leaving that last phrase hanging, with its overtones of execution, and then we hit that devastating ambiguity: the wind “overlooked My Father’s House”, and wonder whether this means “overlooked” as at the first Passover, or “overlooked” in one final sulphur-irised look of triumph before the death-dealing stoop.
Perhaps the memory of this wind was still fresh in 1883, when she returned to the theme, or perhaps there was another. This time, it came “like a Bugle”, and “quivered through the Grass… We barred the Windows and the Doors / As from an Emerald Ghost”, as it carried fences away and caused the bell in the church steeple to tell its flying tidings:
How much can come
And much can go,
And yet abide the World!
And the dizzying calling of the poet is to cling to the glorious wreckage, sing praise, and let her words be carried away.
*
As Dickinson’s poetic gift matured, it was as though she gained the confidence to let the wind blow through her verse and rip it half-apart. In 1864, she took a letter-opener to an envelope, picked up a pencil, wrote “The long Arms”, then changed her mind, crossed these words out, turned the paper upside down and scrawled on the first column of its inside:
The spry Arms
of the Wind
If I could
crawl between
I have an errand
imminent
To an adjoining
Zone -
I should not
care to stop,
My Process is
not long
The “adjoining Zone” to which only the wind can carry her may be the zone from which poems emerge – or it may be the world of the dead. Or, perhaps, these two worlds are one and the same, but whatever is the case, there is something childlike in the undertaking of this “errand” which requires her to “crawl between” the arms of the wind, like Alice going down the rabbit hole. On a literal level, we can tell that the “Process is not long”, because Dickinson has written this first column of the poem neatly, without erasure, but if this is a dalliance with death as much as with the Muse, there is every reason not to linger. On the other side of the crease in the opened-out envelope, she has added, more tentatively:
The Wind could
wait without the
Gate
Or stroll the
Town among.
To ascertain
the House
And is the Soul
at Home
And hold the
Wick of mine to
It
And then, on the front of the envelope, dodging the place where the correspondent had written her name, she has completed the poem:
To light, and
then return -
It becomes unclear whether the Wind is her servant or her master. She expects it to loiter in the Town whilst she has her audience with the Soul it has taken her to visit, or, her annotations suggest, while she ascertains “if the Soul’s at home”, but she is not going to be able to return without it. And then we realise why she has taken this journey: to hold the Wick of the candle of her own Soul to the Wick of this other one, and share a flame.
The wind is an odd mode of transportation to choose if one’s object is the transference of a flame; the wind might blow it out, or fan it to a blaze, but there were flames above the heads of the Disciples at Pentecost. Twelve years earlier, in 1852, she had witnessed a fire which threatened to engulf several buildings in Amherst. In a letter to her brother, Austin, she wrote, “At about three in the afternoon Mr. Kimberly’s barn was discovered to be on fire; the wind was blowing a gale directly from the west, and having had no rain, the roofs [were] dry as stubble. Mr. Palmer’s house was charred - the little house of father’s - and Mr. Kimberly’s also. The [fire] engine was broken, and it seemed for a while as if the whole street must go… If there must be a fire, I’m sorry it couldn’t wait until you had got home, because you seem to enjoy such things so very much…” The Wind of inspiration sets the Disciples speaking in tongues; it may also cause a conflagration in the heart of the poet. It may whisk her off to the realm of the dead and leave her there, but that is the risk that any poet must take: to allow herself to be carried away.
*
The previous year, in one of her most enigmatic and arresting poems, Dickinson found another, equally powerful extended metaphor for the lurking creative – or destructive – potential that is latent in the poet:
My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -
In Corners - till a Day
The Owner passed - identified -
And carried Me away -
Cornered and closeted, the woman who harbours a poetic gift sits there gathering dust, shut up in prose, but loaded, aching to go off. In the lines that follow, it is tempting to read a wry reference to Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poems, ‘Whoso list to hunt? I know where is an hind!’, and ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’, which draw an analogy between his amorous pursuit of women, including Anne Boleyn, and the hunting of deer in the royal forests:
And now We roam in Sovreign Woods -
And now We hunt the Doe -
And every time I speak for Him
The Mountains straight reply -
… yet it is not the felling of the quarry that is important to Dickinson, but the explosive, echoing report when the gun is fired. She has been carried away, and now, she has been given a devastating, death-dealing voice - one which spews fire like a volcano:
And do I smile, such cordial light
Opon the Valley glow -
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let it’s pleasure through -
The gun may be many a swaggering male hunter’s extension of his own phallus, but Dickinson entirely subverts this ridiculous notion: when after a long gestation the poem is triggered, it erupts into incandescence and noise, all that latent potential in the gunpowder suddenly released. Once again, the “business is not long” – the poem is suddenly there in a blaze, echoing down the ages. And now, in a daring flourish, the gun is also the “Master’s” bedfellow, its barrel sharing his pillow as he sleeps:
And when at Night - Our good Day done -
I guard My Master’s Head -
‘Tis better than the Eider Duck’s
Deep Pillow - to have shared -
To foe of His - I’m deadly foe -
None stir the second time -
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye -
Or an emphatic Thumb -
We’ve seen the predatory, falcon-like “yellow beak” and “livid claw” before, in the lightning power of inspiration. Perhaps there is something else that is latent in Dickinson the loaded gun: an anger at having been imprisoned in prose, and left propped up in the corner for so long. And now, the muzzle warm after firing, the gun’s report echoes down the centuries.
Though I than he - may longer live
He longer must - than I -
For I have but the power to kill,
Without - the power to die -
*
Since my move to Australia some years ago, my attitude towards the wind has begun to change. I’m still enthralled, my spirits carried away, by a cold winter wind on a beach with the sand lashing my face. But I know that a hot wind in summer may carry fire, and as the planet warms, such fires are a yearly reality - a wind-borne torrent which can easily deprive human beings of their properties, and humans and animals of their lives. In 2020, on the beach at Mallacoota in Victoria, where I used to holiday as a child, townsfolks dispossessed by wind-driven fire waited at the ocean’s edge, the air around them deep orange with the colour of the flames, to be taken off by naval boats in scenes reminiscent of Dunkirk. The main street of Cobargo in New South Wales, another village I remember from childhood holidays, was razed to the ground.
The aboriginal cultures which held sovereignty over this land for more than forty thousand years knew how to handle fire; we do not, and the more we destroy native vegetation in fear of winds spreading fire, the fewer plants there will be to release water into the atmosphere through transpiration, and the less inland rainfall there will be. Wind is inspiration; it is also terror, sulphurous of eye and bill, and livid of claw. It can kindle the ember of a poem and warm the soul, or, in a holocaust of incandescence, it can carry away everything we love. If, in the twenty-first century, we want our world to abide, we must become great respecters of the wind. In the corner, the loaded gun leans against the wall, waiting to be carried away.
And so throughout my life I have been a seeker-out of wind - the elemental force that brings me out exultant and sends others scurrying for shelter. On the Isles of Scilly, winter gales would stop the shipping and the planes, until the shelves in the supermarket on the most populous of the five inhabited islands, St. Mary’s, were almost empty of supplies. I would walk out towards the Garrison, fortified for centuries with a castle, and with walls built of great blocks of granite. Looking out towards the once-inhabited island of Samson, I would see seals cavorting in the water, only metres away from where waves exploded against the rocks then surged back in white runnels, seething. At the far northwest of the Garrison was a Second World War machine gun emplacement, strafed by nothing but wind, and at the far southwest of it was an ugly concrete “pillbox”, an observation post with a long rectangular slit in its structure looking out across the deep channel between St. Mary’s and the jagged coast of St. Agnes, upon whose beaches it is still possible to pick up terracotta beads from the cargoes of foundered sailing ships. There I would sit for hours as wind and spray blasted the concrete and the stone, the bell clanging arrhythmically on the mid-channel buoy. Afterwards, hands and nose numb with cold, but with my spirits leaping like salmon, I would walk back home via Porthcressa, a beach with a strong sea-wall and a row of houses beyond it, to find that the ocean had festooned the first-floor balconies with kelp and bladder-wrack. Beyond, on the headland called Peninnis, which has a squat little lighthouse, the spray could be seen hurling itself twice as high as the cliffs, describing arcs which would themselves be caught by wind and twisted - some of the water whirled, it seemed, back up into the atmosphere - some of it thrashed against the granite. It was difficult to even stand, so I would find a crag to cling to, and I would watch euphoric - my spirits carried away. When my extremities were numb with cold, I would hurry home, loaded to the muzzle with inspiration. And then would come the poems.
*
Emily Dickinson, it seems, experienced just such exhilarating winds in 1864 - a buffeting, godlike thunderstorm which caused considerable destruction, beginning with an ominous overture:
The Wind begun to rock the Grass
With threatening Tunes and low -
He threw a Menace at the Earth -
Another, at the Sky -
She considered the verb “knead” instead of “rock” - a word more suggestive of creative potential. She may have thought, too, of the wind as the symbol of inspiration in the Book of Acts: “inspiration”, sharing the same root as “respiration”. This wind, personified by her choice of pronoun, being invisible, causes objects to throw themselves around, dancing to those “threatening Tunes”, seemingly by their own volition:
The Leaves unhooked themselves from Trees
And started all abroad -
The Dust did scoop itself like Hands
And throw away the Road -
Dickinson gives the “Leaves” and the “Dust” the active voice, unhooking and scooping themselves. Inspiration shares this characteristic with wind, too: we see the outward signs of its actions, rather than its actual workings. The wind is, as Seamus Heaney would write more than a century later, “a huge nothing”, but one which shapes trees and causes us to “build our houses squat” if we live on an island. Both wind and inspiration defy, in their invisible power, the solidity of human endeavours - they “throw away the road”, destroying, deconstructing, creating anew. The wind is the sublime writ invisible: a vehicle of beauty and terror which emphatically puts us in our insignificant place.
The analogy persists in the line that follows, for anyone who has witnessed the enthusiasms of evangelical preachers -
The Wagons quickened on the streets
- for in their language, the “quickening” is the coming of the Holy Spirit, breathing life into scripture when an inspired believer reads it. But Emily Dickinson is not reading scripture - she is reading the natural world, and like the Dust, she is carried away. There is something of the thrill of watching a predator hunting in seeing the storm unleash its lightning:
The Thunder hurried slow -
The Lightning showed a yellow Beak
And then a livid Claw -
It is like the plunging stoop of a Peregrine Falcon, which has a yellow cere about its beak, or the lightning strike of a Bald Eagle, whose bill is yellow through and through. Pierced by the talons of inspiration, Dickinson magnifies the storm to Biblical proportions:
The Birds put up the Bars to Nests -
The Cattle clung to Barns -
Then came one Drop of Giant Rain
And then as if the Hands
That held the Dams, had parted hold,
The Waters wrecked the Sky,
But overlooked My Father’s House -
Just quartering a Tree -
We cling; Nature flings - and shears off the ending of the poem, leaving that last phrase hanging, with its overtones of execution, and then we hit that devastating ambiguity: the wind “overlooked My Father’s House”, and wonder whether this means “overlooked” as at the first Passover, or “overlooked” in one final sulphur-irised look of triumph before the death-dealing stoop.
Perhaps the memory of this wind was still fresh in 1883, when she returned to the theme, or perhaps there was another. This time, it came “like a Bugle”, and “quivered through the Grass… We barred the Windows and the Doors / As from an Emerald Ghost”, as it carried fences away and caused the bell in the church steeple to tell its flying tidings:
How much can come
And much can go,
And yet abide the World!
And the dizzying calling of the poet is to cling to the glorious wreckage, sing praise, and let her words be carried away.
*
As Dickinson’s poetic gift matured, it was as though she gained the confidence to let the wind blow through her verse and rip it half-apart. In 1864, she took a letter-opener to an envelope, picked up a pencil, wrote “The long Arms”, then changed her mind, crossed these words out, turned the paper upside down and scrawled on the first column of its inside:
The spry Arms
of the Wind
If I could
crawl between
I have an errand
imminent
To an adjoining
Zone -
I should not
care to stop,
My Process is
not long
The “adjoining Zone” to which only the wind can carry her may be the zone from which poems emerge – or it may be the world of the dead. Or, perhaps, these two worlds are one and the same, but whatever is the case, there is something childlike in the undertaking of this “errand” which requires her to “crawl between” the arms of the wind, like Alice going down the rabbit hole. On a literal level, we can tell that the “Process is not long”, because Dickinson has written this first column of the poem neatly, without erasure, but if this is a dalliance with death as much as with the Muse, there is every reason not to linger. On the other side of the crease in the opened-out envelope, she has added, more tentatively:
The Wind could
wait without the
Gate
Or stroll the
Town among.
To ascertain
the House
And is the Soul
at Home
And hold the
Wick of mine to
It
And then, on the front of the envelope, dodging the place where the correspondent had written her name, she has completed the poem:
To light, and
then return -
It becomes unclear whether the Wind is her servant or her master. She expects it to loiter in the Town whilst she has her audience with the Soul it has taken her to visit, or, her annotations suggest, while she ascertains “if the Soul’s at home”, but she is not going to be able to return without it. And then we realise why she has taken this journey: to hold the Wick of the candle of her own Soul to the Wick of this other one, and share a flame.
The wind is an odd mode of transportation to choose if one’s object is the transference of a flame; the wind might blow it out, or fan it to a blaze, but there were flames above the heads of the Disciples at Pentecost. Twelve years earlier, in 1852, she had witnessed a fire which threatened to engulf several buildings in Amherst. In a letter to her brother, Austin, she wrote, “At about three in the afternoon Mr. Kimberly’s barn was discovered to be on fire; the wind was blowing a gale directly from the west, and having had no rain, the roofs [were] dry as stubble. Mr. Palmer’s house was charred - the little house of father’s - and Mr. Kimberly’s also. The [fire] engine was broken, and it seemed for a while as if the whole street must go… If there must be a fire, I’m sorry it couldn’t wait until you had got home, because you seem to enjoy such things so very much…” The Wind of inspiration sets the Disciples speaking in tongues; it may also cause a conflagration in the heart of the poet. It may whisk her off to the realm of the dead and leave her there, but that is the risk that any poet must take: to allow herself to be carried away.
*
The previous year, in one of her most enigmatic and arresting poems, Dickinson found another, equally powerful extended metaphor for the lurking creative – or destructive – potential that is latent in the poet:
My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -
In Corners - till a Day
The Owner passed - identified -
And carried Me away -
Cornered and closeted, the woman who harbours a poetic gift sits there gathering dust, shut up in prose, but loaded, aching to go off. In the lines that follow, it is tempting to read a wry reference to Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poems, ‘Whoso list to hunt? I know where is an hind!’, and ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’, which draw an analogy between his amorous pursuit of women, including Anne Boleyn, and the hunting of deer in the royal forests:
And now We roam in Sovreign Woods -
And now We hunt the Doe -
And every time I speak for Him
The Mountains straight reply -
… yet it is not the felling of the quarry that is important to Dickinson, but the explosive, echoing report when the gun is fired. She has been carried away, and now, she has been given a devastating, death-dealing voice - one which spews fire like a volcano:
And do I smile, such cordial light
Opon the Valley glow -
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let it’s pleasure through -
The gun may be many a swaggering male hunter’s extension of his own phallus, but Dickinson entirely subverts this ridiculous notion: when after a long gestation the poem is triggered, it erupts into incandescence and noise, all that latent potential in the gunpowder suddenly released. Once again, the “business is not long” – the poem is suddenly there in a blaze, echoing down the ages. And now, in a daring flourish, the gun is also the “Master’s” bedfellow, its barrel sharing his pillow as he sleeps:
And when at Night - Our good Day done -
I guard My Master’s Head -
‘Tis better than the Eider Duck’s
Deep Pillow - to have shared -
To foe of His - I’m deadly foe -
None stir the second time -
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye -
Or an emphatic Thumb -
We’ve seen the predatory, falcon-like “yellow beak” and “livid claw” before, in the lightning power of inspiration. Perhaps there is something else that is latent in Dickinson the loaded gun: an anger at having been imprisoned in prose, and left propped up in the corner for so long. And now, the muzzle warm after firing, the gun’s report echoes down the centuries.
Though I than he - may longer live
He longer must - than I -
For I have but the power to kill,
Without - the power to die -
*
Since my move to Australia some years ago, my attitude towards the wind has begun to change. I’m still enthralled, my spirits carried away, by a cold winter wind on a beach with the sand lashing my face. But I know that a hot wind in summer may carry fire, and as the planet warms, such fires are a yearly reality - a wind-borne torrent which can easily deprive human beings of their properties, and humans and animals of their lives. In 2020, on the beach at Mallacoota in Victoria, where I used to holiday as a child, townsfolks dispossessed by wind-driven fire waited at the ocean’s edge, the air around them deep orange with the colour of the flames, to be taken off by naval boats in scenes reminiscent of Dunkirk. The main street of Cobargo in New South Wales, another village I remember from childhood holidays, was razed to the ground.
The aboriginal cultures which held sovereignty over this land for more than forty thousand years knew how to handle fire; we do not, and the more we destroy native vegetation in fear of winds spreading fire, the fewer plants there will be to release water into the atmosphere through transpiration, and the less inland rainfall there will be. Wind is inspiration; it is also terror, sulphurous of eye and bill, and livid of claw. It can kindle the ember of a poem and warm the soul, or, in a holocaust of incandescence, it can carry away everything we love. If, in the twenty-first century, we want our world to abide, we must become great respecters of the wind. In the corner, the loaded gun leans against the wall, waiting to be carried away.
