Raining the autumn of Emily Dickinson - Besides the Autumn poets sing

It’s raining outside today, the kind that makes the backyard shine like it had a long awaited bath, and I’m thinking about that in-between time—after summer’s haze, before winter’s snow—and about a small poem I saw via the Emily Dickinson Museum. I pulled up “Besides the Autumn poets sing.” Even in the first line, we know this is going to be not just about Autumn, but also about poets. And it is going to be expansive.  Let us figure out if the poets are singing besides the autumn, or if autumn itself is singing, and does besides here means "next to" or "in addition to" -- if we know Emily well, it's likely going to be all these and more!

When I go outside to sit on my covered into the am sitting with a book of Mary Oliver and one of the chapbooks from Rattle (Sky Mall by Eric Kocher).  The outside is so sharp. I love this season. It is not hot, it is not cold. This is also the case with Sprint, but spring has pollen and this is the cleanest of the seasons. The clearest.  The best season I think. When the drizzle gets harder, some birds start running around in the sky haphazardly - not the normal patterns we see. It is obvious, they are trying to balance their flights to the drops of rain. 

What delights me about Emily is how, in a handful of words, she clears a whole stage. With two quick nods, she waves off the grand, showy version of fall: Mr. Bryant’s “golden-rod” and Mr. Thomson’s harvest “sheaves”. Those links open into big rooms—Bryant’s elegy with its last bright blooms; Thomson’s rolling, “crown’d with the sickle and the wheaten sheaf” pageant—and yet Emily just says “Gone” and ushers us into the skinny hallway where the season actually lives. The old poets are a pathway to the current season. Today’s rain feels like that hallway: a hinge, not a spectacle. (Project Gutenberg)

Then she gets micro. “Still, is the bustle in the Brook— / Sealed are the spicy valves—.” I love how spicy valves makes you smell the pods even as they close. And “Mesmeric fingers softly touch / The eyes of many Elves—” is such a charming way to say dusk or frost is tucking the meadow in for sleep. If you like following her breadcrumbs, the prowling Bee’s note on this poem is a good companion—warm, readable, and full of small observations you can carry on a wet walk. I keep it open here like a second mug of tea. (Blogging Dickinson)

There’s also the last, quiet turn: “Perhaps a squirrel may remain— / My sentiments to share—.” It’s an almost comic image—just you and a squirrel agreeing that the air has changed—before the little prayer about temperament: a mind sunny enough to bear the wind’s will. I don’t know if I want the “sunny mind” today; I want the windy will itself. But I recognize the move: the weather out there becomes weather in here, and the poem teaches you how to feel it without demanding a postcard version of joy. If you want to see the text set cleanly on the page, the Poets.org version is perfect for a reread between rain bands; and if you want to wander further into the sources she’s teasing, there’s more Thomson in The Seasons on Wikisource. (Home)

So that’s my little weather report. The gutters are singing second parts, the sidewalk ferns are uncurling like punctuation, and Dickinson—link by link, line by line—makes this narrow slice of the year feel enormous. I start with the museum, read the poem, peek at Bryant and Thomson, and end up back at the window, happy in whatever green the rain is willing to give. (emilydickinsonmuseum.org)