Эмили Дикинсон
352
Возможно, я просила слишком много -
Я беру - не меньше, чем небеса -
Для Земель, что толстеют как
Ягоды, в моем родном городе
Моя Корзина держит - только - Небосводы -
Те - болтаются легко - на моей руке,
Но связки меньшие - Барахло.
Перевод с английского Сергей Лузан
Оригинал
352
Perhaps I asked too large --
I take -- no less than skies --
For Earths, grow thick as
Berries, in my native town --
My Basket holds -- just -- Firmaments --
Those -- dangle easy -- on my arm,
But smaller bundles -- Cram.
Poem 352 F358 ‘Perhaps I asked too large’
At the end of her book The Passion of Emily Dickinson Judith Farr leaves the reader
with this poem. It reflects, she suggests, both Emily’s nature and her art.
She asked to be a poet (= the skies) rather than an ordinary housewife (= the
earths, which are as thick as berries in Amherst). This basket dangled easily on her arm, whereas the duties of a wife and mother would have stifled her.
Similarly, perhaps asking too large, she wanted immortality as the subject of her
poetry rather than the themes of the lady poets published in the Springfield
Republican. This was the subject where she felt at home and could breathe easily,
whereas the Springfield Republican subjects would have choked her.
F358 (1862) 352
It’s poems like this that makes one want to stand up and cheer for Dickinson. Her life was in many ways imaginary: she didn’t go out on the ocean or even travel to the beach. Unless she’s writing about robins and flowers and village people she is writing from imagination. In 1862 she was withdrawing more and more from the world, rarely leaving her own property. Her room became her private fantasy world where she sat at a very tiny desk and wrote what she saw, felt, and imagined.
This poem has a heroic feel: the poet, writing from some vasty cosmic vantage point, moseys about with a basket of starry skies. In fact, skies are the minimum unit she’s interested in: “I take—no less than skies,” she informs us. After all, earth is common—they’re like berries on a bush back where she comes from.
And where is that? Why in the brain. In several of the last batch of poems I’ve commented on the detached and observing “I” that is the speaker. This “I” stands outside body and soul and although part of the self, is detached. This large world of the brain is seen in a later poem “The brain is wider than the sky,” where in addition to the wideness of the brain it is also “deeper than the sea” and as weighty as God. That’s a big claim for the brain, but it bears thinking over.
There is a note of sarcasm in the poem, I think, introduced in the first line: “Perhaps I asked too large.” The poet isn’t really suggesting that she was being too grand; she’s really quite pleased about it.
The implication is that lesser beings carry “smaller bundles” than Firmaments. That may be fine for them, but for a deep thinker and creative type like the poet, such bundles “Cram.” All those cares about shopping lists and the kids’ doctors’ appointments, and what the next concert in town will be are all just petty concerns that cram your head and get in the way.
I just like the image of bonneted Dickinson out and about in her woods with a basket of stars over her arm.
Posted by Susan Kornfeld at 4:32 PM