I have written a couple of Close Passage essays that are now available for purchase. Check out my introduction to:

Blazing in Gold and quenching in Purple – 228
Two Butterflies went out at Noon – 533
The saddest noise, the sweetest noise – 1764

Foregrounding grief as a pre-eminent concern, the poems (228), (553) and (1764) convey Emily Dickinson’s preoccupation with death and abandonment. In Blazing in Gold… the going down of the sun is associated with mortality and the finiteness of life. The line ‘laying her spotted face to die’ denotes the temporariness of existence. Communicating this fact in a neutral way, the speaker accepts death as an inevitable cyclical pattern as she watches from the detached vantage point of the ‘kitchen window’. In comparison, the distress of a speaker ‘left at noon’ communicates the feeling of abandonment associated with being alone and friendless. Finally, in The Sweetest Noise… the all-consuming nature of grief transforms the beauty of birdsong in spring into a ‘siren’. The piercing roar connoted in the description of birds singing, conveys the speaker’s resistance to ‘the sweetest noise’ and her desire to block out the sound so that it sings ‘no more’. For Dickinson, beauty and grief cannot co-exist. Resistant to the state of vulnerability that the joy of friendship and the joy of the natural world necessarily arouses, rejection becomes a means by which loss and abandonment can be negated. Retreating from the world altogether, the conundrum that emerges as the speakers in the three poems inure themselves to grief, abandonment and loss, invites the very same emotional state they attempt to ward off. By denying joy and embracing a state of reclusive solitariness, it seems, the speakers and in turn, Dickinson herself, cannot resolve the essential paradox that each of the poems addresses.