Hermetic Memory: An Exchange on Dickinson Between Two Poets
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPPoets Brenda Hillman and Katie Peterson write about two Dickinson poems, “A Cloud withdrew from the Sky” and “After a hundred years,” in a collaborative, epistolary essay.
In March, 2006, we began to email each other about a few of ED's poems. We had met after a conference, and thought of the project as an alternative to a more academic approach to Dickinson, at a time when we were both very busy. We decided to exchange "loose paragraphs" for a few weeks, beginning with the following poem:
A Cloud withdrew from the Sky
Superior Glory be
But that Cloud and it's Auxiliaries
Are forever lost to meHad I but further scanned
Had I secured the Glow
In an Hermetic Memory
It had availed me now -Never to pass the Angel
With a glance and a Bow
Till I am firm in Heaven
Is my intention, now -(Fr1077)
B: Just the bafflement about the first stanza: "withdrew" is so forceful, clinching the "personification" that Dickinson's noun-caps often set up. To withdraw, the Cloud has to have willed itself to be in that context in the first place, and of [End Page 47] course, her universe is inhabited in that way. It seems Blakean (the Clod talking to the Worm, etc.) the way her Cloud has not only a will, a procedure, but also a shared will (its Auxiliaries). Does it withdraw so it can be Superior Glory? Punctuation—lack thereof—makes that hard to determine; I'm struck especially that the familiar breath-emphasis-dash (her half-horizon) is missing completely from the first stanza. The poem is written in the period of her greatest production, yet has the elegiac tone not of the intensity of terror or degrees of pain, but that those things are on the way out. Some of the promise that accompanies the fear during the time of her immense energetic output has also been withdrawn, though the sense of purpose remains; she writes to Higginson: "The Sailor cannot see the North—but knows the Needle can—" [L265]) The meter the first stanza sets up—cobbling iambs, trochees and a breathless gallop of anapests, as if she were running in her slippers—puts stresses in unexpected places (Glow gets a stress). What do you think about the first stanza?
K: There are a number of poems where Dickinson sees a splitting in the sky in the years before this poem was written: "I saw no Way - The Heavens were stitched - " (Fr633), for example, that surreal sci-fi vision of touching the hem of the universe. But this is different; she's not just at the mercy of a world but implicating her own ability to see and save and savor and know. This first stanza wears its loss lightly, just as you say, as if the danger is passed. The placement of "Superior Glory be" in the second line, after the departure, stopped me in my tracks because the glory should be that the cloud exists, right? Not that it's withdrawn? But of course both are true: the second line enacts the way she realizes the glory of the thing only as it disappears and the Glory of the poem is the disappearance itself. Also, there's contagious loss here, the multiplication of loss, though there's almost a pleasure in it. I remember something that Elaine Scarry wrote about beauty wanting to make copies of itself. As soon as Dickinson's "I" realizes the cloud has departed she misses not only it but its "Auxiliaries," perhaps copying that beauty across the sky in memory in order to preserve it in greater copiousness? The extra syllable in "forever" reminds me how different a kind of time an "ever" of any kind is compared to the amount of time a cloud takes to withdraw from a sky. I'm...
