> ...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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