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Dawn to dusk: thoughts from New England
By Abram Van Engen
Staff Writer
FILE PHOTO
Poet Emily Dickinson, who lived and was buried in Amherst, Mass., was keenly sensitive to the ebb and flow of life.
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The wind took teeth and bit us as we bent our backs into the graying black of the early morning. Twelve of twenty five – small enough to consider ourselves a righteous remnant, suffering while the others slept. Three blocks into town, we swarmed a bakery for a box of scones and cups of coffee to keep us sane. The sky was lighter as we left. We had to hurry. Soon the sun would peak its golden crown above the brow of the hill we headed towards. We scampered up its icy side onto the ridge. Around us, gravestones marked where some of Concord’s earliest slept above the sleeping town, looking down on the steeples that competed in their stead. We picked our way between them, careful not to wake the dead so early in the morning. Finally we found a spot, set our scones down, sipped our coffee and turned to the trees in the east. Then we waited. A couple jokes circled through the group, a few goofy giggles came, but mostly silence found her home with us, weaving in among us with the morning breeze.
Perhaps we were too cold to speak. Perhaps we were too tired. But something made me think the silence came from something deeper than discomfort, a silent anticipation that was growing like the glow against the eastern sky – a waiting with a coming soon.
Emily Dickinson seems to have both loved and hated God. She speaks sometimes as if heaven were as near as the flowers outside her home. Other times she lashes out. Grief would make her strike at what she could not see. Selected scholars have theoretically concluded that Emily Dickinson was medically bipolar. I call her human.
“I’ll tell you how the sun rose, – / A ribbon at a time. / The steeples swam in amethyst, / The news like squirrels ran. / The hills untied their bonnets, / The bobolinks begun. / Then I said softly to myself, / ‘That must have been the sun!’” Indeed, it was difficult to believe that the commander of the sky could come so small. The sun ducked behind the trees, shy at first. It was a pin of light and nothing more. Then, slowly, it began to grow a set of shoulders. Tenderly, it reached its slender fingers toward us, stretching up the hill, touching each grave it lightly passed. And then it struck against the steeples, hard and sudden, as if it were the end of Exodus and God himself were coming down in all his glory now.
We read Dickinson’s poem on the birthday of the sun. We felt a life begin among the graves. And for a moment, resurrection seemed wonderful and common, unbelievable and actual at the same time.
We left the graves in their stirring resurrection and returned to the inn where the others slept. What coffee was left was frozen solid now. But we had passed a different way – we had melted on the hill.
But soon enough we’d turn to stone again.
Dickinson knew how to put her grief to words. She could align them so that they stung as the grief stung her. After one particular loss, she wrote, “Parting is all we know of heaven, / And all we need of hell.”
That day we drove to Amherst. We saw where Emily lived and where she walked. We saw the town – the bookstores, the college, the coffee shops – all bustling with its own unstriking life, a life no more alive than any other day or time. Nothing gave me pause – just another day beneath the sun. Before the day was done, however, we gathered in another cemetery, huddled around the grave of Emily herself. The sun began to set. Someone pulled a piece of paper out and read again the poem we’d read to greet the day, looking to the second stanza now: “But how he set, I know not. / There seemed a purple stile / Which little yellow boys and girls / Were climbing all the while / Till when they reached the other side, / A dominie in gray / Put gently up the evening bars, / And led the flock away.” The sun winked and disappeared. Its last fingers let go the stone above her grave and slipped off to another home.
The stone alone remained. Cold and gray, it waited for the night to come. I imagined them setting this chiseled frame above the grave as they buried Emily below, the tears burning as they froze against their cheeks – the grief of each new death a powerful defeat.
“Parting is all we know of heaven, / And all we need of hell.” Sometimes this is how we feel. Perhaps it’s all they felt when family and friends laid Emily to rest with those who slept above the sleeping town. The time will come for me as well, when I too will lay my friends and family down, when my own head will sink beneath a stone.
And when that time comes, I can see above my sleeping eyes that the sun will rise, the steeples will glow, and God will descend like the end of Exodus again. And maybe this is what is meant by the cycle of the day. God descends and gathers in his arms those who have lain themselves where the sun will rise, and as the sun descends then God ascends and like a dominie in gray, he leads the flock away.
And, for a moment, resurrection becomes wonderfully common, incredibly actual.
We know more of heaven than the parting. We have seen the hilltop crowned in light. We have stood the righteous remnant in the bitter cold and felt the warmth rise in our silent expectation, until the Lord of the sky arrives in a pinprick of light that gives the steeples purpose once again. We have each melted in a moment – felt the bonnets of our grief untied until our ears were free to hear the bobolinks begun. These moments are glimpses, and glimpses do not last throughout the day; but still they fill the day. The grief will burn as it returns; the day will progress with the sun soaring high above, and heaven will seem distant and unknown again. And yet the glimpses of heaven we’ve received remain, touching the eyes of both the living and the dead. “I’ll tell you how the sun rose” – it rose like heaven come to rest. And when it left, we knew the dominie in gray had led the flock to where the sun was rising still.
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