Split The Lark And You’ll Find The Music
Split the Lark—and you’ll find the Music—
Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled—
Scantily dealt to the Summer Morning
Saved for your Ear, when Lutes be old —Loose the Flood—you shall find it patent—
Gush after Gush, reserved for you—
Scarlet Experiment! Sceptic Thomas!
Now, do you doubt that your Bird was True?.
Emily Dickinson
This outright astonishing eight line poem is just one of scores and scores of American masterpieces by my homegirl Emily Dickinson.
Poetry and Emily are to mind today as I’m a participant in a small school of the soul that’s maintained our studies this year of the plague through the good offices of an online technology provider. Would that the masters in 14th century Spain ever envisioned such sorcery!
At any rate, earlier this year I put together a forty or so page brief of poets and philosophers who exhibit what’s called “cosmic consciousness” or an awareness of the great bigger picture beyond the ego and the emotions, sensations and thoughts of the mundane world. Titans such as St. John Of The Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, Dante Alighieri, Plato, Jacob Boehme, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Blaise Pascal, John Donne, Kabir, and William Wordsworth.
Don’t miss a meeting
Last week we came to the end of spending part of each meeting dedicated to one master. I missed the last meeting for the first time all year on a personal commitment and lo and behold this week was asked to put together another brief as these readings had a most satisfactory amplifying effect on our collective and individual studies.
I was of course honored to do so and pleased to serve but noted to them an old saw learned in the muck and mire of corporate trenches: don’t miss a meeting or you will be tasked with the most laborious assignment. Ha ha!
So I go a-roving over to my shelves to seek not only masters but masters who exhibit cosmic consciousness and at that their utmost digestible creations and passages. First explorations will be William Butler Yeats, John Keats, William Blake, T.S. Eliot, Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman, Li Po, the Tao Teh Ching, the Upanishads, Herakleitos, Goethe, Willy The Shakes and the great Emily Dickinson. There are many more that did not surface right quick in my mind but that’s a hall of fame starting lineup right there.
Beware the scarlet experiment
This poem of Emily’s is not the exhibit for cosmic consciousness. Perhaps poem #479 aka “Because I Could Not Stop For Death” will do, though fine as it is, it’s a bit simplistic and something beyond would be better. I’ve a baker’s dozen books by and about Emily and will find the treasured ore.
I share “Split The Lark And You’ll Find The Music” today because it’s just so marvelous, so joyous, so life affirming. Science and man commit a whole lot of “scarlet experiments” on the beautiful song of the world. Be nice if once in a while they thought twice.
To let some most precious things remain a mystery is A-OK, and if someone sings for you, don’t tear them apart.
P.S.
If you want a mind-expanding, short book through which to take a rocket ride through and around the mysterious and sparkling universe of Emily—and why wouldn’t you—My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe is revelatory.
❏