Background Image: Troika In The Steppe, 1882, Ivan Aivazovsky
I love her use of the word “Thill” because it’s so close to ‘thrill’ as in the ‘thrill “of Bee”‘. She creates a sense of excitement and fantasy in this first stanza which she then contrasts to her disappointment (perhaps?) that “no Curricle” bears her in that “Town” (or if that “Town” even exists).
I suppose a question I could ask is if she is skeptical if there is a “Town” ahead (heaven, home), what does she think the “Bee” and the “Butterfly” are doing as they pull their “Curricle”? It would be a strange image to have these creatures trained and attached to their vehicles if there were no destination for them to get on to. When we see a “Road” we assume it leads somewhere and that the travelers we meet on the road are making their way to some destination of which the road allows them to get to. But what if the “little Road” was the destination, what if the journey was the thing we should be more concerned with, not the possible destination?
Emily is not concerned, in this poem, with destinations, she only considers the “Road” and the fantastical creatures she sees there. And even when she does consider a destination she describes that place as somewhere where a “Curricle” would “rumble there”, as if the destination were yet another road filled with magical beasts pulling carts filled with travelers on an endless road, as if heaven itself were not a place but an endless journey. This “Town” (heaven) is a place of movement and magic, not of static foundations and immovable columns, it rather has an energy and a freedom, a ‘thrill’ “of Bee” (perhaps a thrill of being) where existence isn’t one fixed place but everyplace all at once.
Background Image: Ship at Sea, 1895, Ivan Aivazovsky
I wonder if Wallace Stevens had this poem in mind for “Fabliau of Florida“? Both deal with magical / “mystic” images that is dreamlike and borders on the edge of reality and (perhaps) the supernatural. Both poems seem to exist near “isles enchanted” where “sultry moon-monsters / are dissolving” (Stevens). Both end with power of the sea: Emily’s “eye” of storm / Stevens’ “droning of the surf”.
Many of Wallace Stevens’ poem deal with the liminal spaces between land and sea, reality and unreality, and this is a theme Emily Dickinson also seems intrigued by. She often writes about being a part of nature, but also the world beyond, a world of perhaps faith, or God, or just somewhere more perfect where death no longer stalks us.
This poem begins with a sinking, perhaps even a drowning, when her ship (a barque, or here she calls it a bark) “went down at sea”. She most likely talking about a storm being responsible since she not only uses the wordplay of “whether” to open each of the first three lines – which has the effect of the poor craft being battered over and over by the bad ‘weather’ – and she also refers to the “eye” at the end of the poem which could refer to the eye of a storm, or a hurricane.
Yet what Emily does here is wonderful because she combines the image of the storm bending the sails of her ship and the reference to “isles enchanted” as that place in the great beyond, with the journey where “docile” sails have previously taken her to “isles enchanted” on her ocean adventures.
Stevens refers to this liminal place of imagination as moving “outward into heaven” where “foam and cloud are one”. It’s a magical image and is similar to that “mystic mooring” where Emily’s ship now rests. And we sense her trying to use her imagination to see where her “bark” has gone with the image of the eye not only being that of a storm, but her own eye, as if she is looking down from the sky (what she describes as “the errand of the eye”) into the sea of her imagination to find where her little boat has gone which can again grant her passage to new “isles enchanted”.
Stevens describes his little bark / barque as lit with “phosphor” and filled with “white moonlight”, a dreamy image of a boat that can only sail on the seas of one’s imagination, a boat that travels not of this world, but one between heaven and earth and where the “droning of the surf” never ends. Emily’s bark too is “out upon the Bay”, but not an actual bay, but the bay of her imagination.
Yet for Emily there is more desperation than for Stevens. Stevens gives himself over to the dreamlike quality of the image where the surf drones him to sleep and into the realm of imagination, but Emily’s use of the word “Bark” to open the poem and “Bay” to close it, gives this poem the feeling of someone hunting desperately for what they seek, the way hunting dogs “bark” and “bay” when they are on the trail of their prey. Combined with the image of the “gales” and the “eye” of the storm, Emily seems to be describing the state of her mind. These “isles enchanted” could be the dreams or places in the imagination where she likes to go, but this storm could also be her own mind – perhaps even a depression – that has sunk this craft which had before sailed so peacefully upon the sea. In other words, she could be describing the storm of her mind when it rages and does not give her the peace she previously sailed in when she was in her little boat upon the sea of imagination.
One definition could be straightforward in that a “moor” is marshland / poor soil where the “Captives” are “denied the plucking” of something beautiful (the flowers in the bouquet). This alludes to the labor humanity is burdened with after the fall out of Eden which she write about in the previous poem, “Angels, in the early morning” where the morning plenty turns to sand. Here she is talking about how this world, though it can be beautiful, it’s mostly a swamp and paradise is in the next life.
“Moor” can also be as in a ship being secured which references her images of a boat sailing to paradise. Multiple times she has used this image, such as with Noah in “Once more, my now bewildered Dove” where the ship has survived the voyage and the faithful search for dry land (hence the swamp imagery in today’s poem used as a metaphor for the poor soil of mortal land). She also uses the boat metaphor in “Went up a year this evening” where she watched her friend sailing off to a new land, which recalls her earlier poem “Could live – did live” of the spectators watching Jesus. Yet here the spectators are not joyous, but rather compared to “Captives”, prisoners to this mortal world until they are set free and must, until then, stand on the shore and watch their friends make the journey one by one and alone. Thus her “Nosegays” could also be a funeral bouquet.
“Moor” can mean outsider (think Othello who was Shakespeare’s ultimate outsider), and this alludes to the sense of humanity being out of place within this mortal realm, as if our true home is somewhere beyond, and not here (in Venice, nor in Cyprus where they sailed to).
Finally, “moor” can also mean ‘More’ as in wanting more which alludes to the point of a “prayer” in that the “Captives” are wanting for something better, they have no other “errand” than to be like the dove in “Could live, did live” who fly out with hope and faith that there will be dry land where the flowers grow all day.
