Disobedient Flowers

I’m horrified to admit that it’s now past noon, and I haven’t written anything.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that yes, I was up by seven, I did the trot, and I’ve been pondering Robert Schumann and Emily Dickinson.

February is always a wrenching time for me, even if I have spent it, these last two decades, in a warm place. And it may be that a Wisconsin childhood will always trump a tropical adulthood. February—darkness. February—change.

And I am facing two potential losses, and starting to grieve for both. Which may be why the final movement of a—for me—unknown piece of Schumann hit me so deeply.

‘How often,’ you think, ‘can Schumann repeat that theme? And why, far from being bored, do I want to hear it again?’

Part of it is the modulation, the shifting from one key to another. Part of it is also the feeling that this is really a folksong, something Mother sings to Baby. A lullaby, really.

It’s marked langsam, the German word for “think glaciers as you play it.” And helpfully, Schumann indicates that it should be melancholic.

Yeah? There’s more blood on the page than ink, and it’s clear—they’re putting the sheets on Robert’s bed in the madhouse. Many people argue that Schumann’s music, in this last decade of his life, shows signs of his mental illness, rapidly cycling between manic elation and haunting grief. And there’s a bit of that in this piece—themes so poignant that you almost feel embarrassed to hear them: they seem to reveal so much so painfully. And yet the third movement is a joy—as playful as a dog chasing a Frisbee on the first day of spring.

So it’s another wonder, another discovery. As was another newcomer, the Master letters of Dickinson. Oddly, they’re from the same decade as the Schumann; the three letters were written between 1858 and 1862.

Time to confess—I don’t do poetry very well. A lot of it goes over my head. More often, it just goes through my head, and seems to stick as well as spaghetti thrown at the fridge. My mother could read Walter de la Mare; I cannot. I get to something like the following and think, ‘so?’   

“We wake and whisper awhile,

But, the day gone by,

Silence and sleep like fields

Of amaranth lie.''

My eyes glaze; my mind is fogged with poetic numbness.

But faithful to my commitment to the mid-nineteenth century, I soldiered through the Dickinson Master letters. And though I ordinarily like Dickinson a lot—seems like a safe thing to say—these letters completely stump me.

Had she been eating too many morning glory seeds? Was a Chinaman smoking opium under her window?

Nor am I alone. Here’s a guy smarter than I:

For nearly twenty years I’ve taught Dickinson and the Master Letters in my early American literature course, always hoping to come closer to the source of the mystery. Instead, just the opposite has happened. The mystery has deepened. The more I study them, the more we hash them out in class, the longer the shadows grow and deepen over their meaning.

That’s Nicholas Rombes, about whom I know nothing. But he has puzzled over lines like the following for 20 years, so he must think it’s worth it….

You ask me what my flowers said—then they were disobedient—I gave them messages—

Gotta be something I get from Jack. Write it simple, write it short. And if, after twenty years of puzzling you’re farther from the shore of understanding, isn’t it time to jump ship? Go on to another poet, and hope for better luck and lucidity?

At the end of his life, Schumann feared that he would hurt his wife. I understand rage and madness, how brooding anger and despair can flash—a match in the rum factory—at a look, a raised eyebrow, the turning of a back. I’ll listen, in these dark days within, to the Schumann again.

But twenty years of wondering about Emily’s disobedient flowers?

Catch you around!