joanna bujes wrote:
>
> ...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"?
(I've corrected capitalization & punctuation below to fit the Thomas Johnson text)
Schools I presume. The syntax of lines 3 & 4 is definitely hard to unscramble. (This is a late poem; Johnson dates it c. 1881.) One try at paraphrase: "They leap in to the only part of the afternoon that is free (and therefore beloved), because prison (school) does not occupy _that_ part of the day?????? (I keep wanting to parse Beloved as addressing someone who is beloved -- but that clearly won't do.)
She does use school recess in other poems as an image I think, so this might be that part of the afternoon. The Frowns then would be the teacher's frowns as they return to the schoolroom at the end of recess. I wonder what time of day elementary schools in Amherst let out?
I think foe must refer to the mob. I am pretty untutored in Dickensian scholarship, so I don't know whether Dickinson could at this time have become particularly pissed off with formal literary opinion; in which case the schoolteacher's frowns could have been the critic demanding real rhymes and better grammar. And the choked syntax of lines 3-4 are the solid bliss which the critic would frown on?
This is swinging pretty far afield -- but when syntax is this elliptical it almost forces such speculation.
This is poem 1532 in Johnson. Poem 1535:
The Life that tied too tight escapes
Will ever after run
With a prudential look behind
And spectres of the Rein --
The Horse that scents the living Grass
And sees the Pasture smile
Will be retaken with a shot
If he is caught at all --
It is also dated c. 1881. The two poems somehow chime for me. Use 1535 as a gloss on 1532?
Carrol
> 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 could lie in wait
> For such a Foe as this --
>
> Emily Dickenson