From all the jails

John K. Taber jktaber at tacni.net
Sat Feb 1 12:20:24 PST 2003


joanna bujes <joanna.bujes at sun.com>


> ...and anyone else who can parse poetry...I'm having trouble:
> Do "jails"
> refer to schools or the womb? I'm having trouble with lines
> 3&4; Is "foe"
> in the last line a reference to "mob of solid bliss"?
>
> Thanks/Joanna
>
> FROM all the jails the boys and girls
> Ecstatically leap,
> Beloved, only afternoon
> That prison doesn't keep.
>
> They storm the earth and stun the air,
> 5
> A mob of solid bliss.
> Alas! that frowns could lie in wait
> For such a foe as this!
>
> Emily Dickenson

Let me give the Johnson version first, poem # 1532 exactly as written:


>From all the Jails the Boys and Girls
Ecstatically leap -- Beloved only Afternoon That Prison doesn't keep

They storm the Earth and stun the Air, A Mob of solid Bliss -- Alas - that Frowns should lie in wait For such a Foe as this --

Emily Dickinson's punctuation was peculiar, so I think it's important to get it as written, rather than as her family edited her poems.

As I read the poem, the children are escaping from a figurative prison, not a literal one, nor yet the womb. Probably, they are released from school in the afternoon. In her more famous poem Because I Could Not Stop For Death, she expresses the same idea:

We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess - in the Ring --

"Strove" seems an odd word to use, but it's just right to name the intensity with which children play.

There is a certain intensity to children freely at play that I think attracted Emily Dickinson just as it did William Blake.

Consider Blake's Nurse's Song in Songs of Innocence

When the voices of children are heard on the green

And laughing is heard on the hill,

My heart is at rest within my breast

And every thing else is still

Then come home my children, the sun is gone down

And the dews of night arise

Come, come leave off play, and let us away

Till the morning appears in the skies

No no let us play, for it is yet day

And we cannot go to sleep

Besides in the sky, the little birds fly

And the hills are all coverd with sheep

Well well go & play till the light fades away

And then go home to bed

The little ones leaped & shouted & laughed

And all the hills ecchoed.

When I was a kid there were always a few old grouches to bitch about our play noise. But to this day I still love hearing the sound of kids at play.

I'm pretty sure that is what this poem is about.

-- John K. Taber

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