A Slash of Blue! A Sweep of Gray!
Some scarlet patches -- on the way --
Compose an evening sky --

A little Purple -- slipped between --
Some Ruby Trowsers -- hurried on--
A Wave of Gold -- a Bank of Day --
This just makes out the morning sky!
                  -- Emily Dickinson, about 1861
 

Some years ago a student asked me to explain a passage from The Catcher in the Rye in which Holden Caulfield remembers a conversation he and his younger brother Allie had with their older brother D.B.: "I remember Allie once asked him [D.B.] wasn't it sort of good that he was in the war because he was a writer and it gave him a lot to write about. He made Allie go get his baseball mitt and then he asked him who was the best war poet, Rupert Brooke or Emily Dickinson. Allie said Emily Dickinson. I don't know much about it myself, because I don't read much poetry ..."

I'd read Catcher first as a teenager, when it was a cult book in my circle. I can't recall that the passage made any impression on me, if it registered at all. I knew little about Brooke and Dickinson beyond their names, and I was more concerned with seeing myself in Holden, the lonely, troubled youngster who just wants to be understood. Thirty years later I knew more about poetry in general, Brooke and Dickinson in particular, and I was able to give my student an answer. The passage is ironic, I said, because Rupert Brooke was a war poet and Emily Dickinson, although she produced the bulk of her work during the Civil War, was not.

Well, not exactly, I say now (and if you're out there, Katie Alexander, please adjust your notes). I was right about the passage being ironic -- living through a war does give you a lot to write about, but so does everything else, and Allie's naiveté is the point here. But it turns out that Emily Dickinson probably is the better war poet. Brooke (1887-1915), who saw one day of actual military action and died of blood poisoning on his way to battle in Gallipoli, is more accurately regarded now as a "pre-war" poet. His "war sonnets" (which number only five) are sentimental and full of romantic images of heroism, patriotism, and the tragedy of early death. Recent Dickinson scholarship, on the other hand, holds that Dickinson, while seldom addressing the war directly, uses it to explore the theological and spiritual doubts that are at the heart of all her work. For Dickinson, the war serves to intensify her own inner conflicts.

The poem quoted above was for a long time taken to be one of her nature poems, a word painting of the evening and morning sky, to be read on the literal, surface level. First thought to have been written in 1860, before the Civil War began, it is now thought to have been produced much later in 1861, after the Battle of Bull Run. The imagery of the blue and the gray and the "Ruby Trowsers," taken now to be a reference to the gaudy Union unit known as the Zouaves, seems to be operating on two levels, as a description of the colors seen in many a morning and evening sky, and as a description of the warring factions who will cause each other to sprout "scarlet patches." 

In an essay about this poem, critic Lawrence Berkove suggests that it and others among the "war poems" of Emily Dickinson are significant and powerful commentary on the war but nevertheless still "somewhat romantic, treating war in the abstract." Although the Civil War was fought in Dickinson's own country and claimed the lives of young men who came from her town, it stayed very far from the door of her father's house in Amherst, Massachusetts.When I read that comment, I thought, how can anyone like Dickinson, like me, who has only ever read about a war despite living through one, write about it in anything but the abstract?

At left is the slash of blue and gray that dominated my backyard vista today. I went about my business as a mother, a household manager, and a fiction writer. I slipped today's Peanuts cartoon, which shows Peppermint Patty falling asleep at her desk, into Lynn's assignment book with a cheery note expressing hope that she didn't wear herself out at this weekend's Key Club convention. I got out the meat to defrost for tonight's "sirloin satay" and made a note to get snow peas, red bell peppers, and dishwasher detergent at the Giant. And I worked all morning on characterization exercises for my novel, beginning a new scene in which my main character and her husband have a terrible argument the night before the funeral of the fourth of their children to die in the space of one month.

Then I went to Curves, this latest-fad-in-exercise place I joined about a month ago. It's a room with a dozen or so different resistance training machines that you operate for thirty seconds, then march in place for thirty seconds on a springy platform before moving to the next machine. You complete the circuit twice, stretch a bit, and you're done. The place is five minutes from my house, so in the ideal I can be there and back in under forty minutes.

I have some issues with the place -- the music, discoed up renditions of pop classics, is usually too loud, and the posters and other promotional materials try just a little too hard to make me feel happy about being a dumpy middle-aged matron with good cardiovascular health. But it's a programmed workout easier for me to accomplish than working on my own with free weights, and it's quick.

Today when I arrived (late in the afternoon, not at my usual door-buster 8 a.m. slot), I found that for St. Patrick's Day we were required to complete the circuit by moving to the right instead of to the left. The place was crowded, and those who hopped on in their usual fashion were bumping into those who had gotten the message. For some reason, this change, albeit minor, upset me terribly, and I complained, stridently, about it. I couldn't see the connection, if any, between a disruption of the usual routine and St. Patrick's Day, and I objected to the manipulation. Needless to say, my complaints were not well-received by the owner/manager, whose bright idea this was.

So the result was that my exercise time today left me feeling worse instead of better. By eight o'clock, when I dutifully turned on the television to hear the President's address (Lynn was out tutoring at Homework Helpers and Ron had gone to Choral Society rehearsal), I was more anxious and edgy than I needed to be. All my experience and education has taught me that at times like these, what we need most is stability in any area in which that can be achieved. I couldn't control something as small as the way I manage my workout, and my anger was really displaced rage at the very big things in which I feel no power at all.

Like Emily Dickinson, I'm experiencing an intensification of my own inner conflicts. Did crafting them into tiny gems of poetic genius help her? Can my own efforts, more naive and less likely to have such brilliant results, help me?