#circumference

and to the rest of you

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I’ve been discussing “The Birds begun at Four o’clock” for the past couple of days, and yesterday – with  info from Brenda Wineapple’s book “White Heat, The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson” – I noted the possibility that Dickinson may have been inspired to write the poem after reading Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s essay entitled “Water-Lilies.” 

“Water-Lilies” first appeared in “The Atlantic” in 1858 and later in his 1863 collection of essays called “Out-Door Papers.”  We know that Dickinson read Higginson’s book – she praised him for it  in a letter from 1876 – and she very well might have seen the stand-alone essay in “The Atlantic.”  Today, I will share a second work inspired by Higginson’s words as well.

A paragraph deep in Higginson’s1858 essay begins with this line: “Precisely at half past three, a song-sparrow above our heads gave one liquid trill….”  Then, in 1863 – the year of publication of Higginson’s book – Dickinson wrote “The Birds begun at Four o’clock.”  Two years later she wrote this poem – and take note of the first line:

At Half past Three, a single Bird Unto a silent Sky Propounded but a single term Of cautious melody. At Half past Four, Experiment Had subjugated test And lo, Her silver Principle Supplanted all the rest. At Half past Seven, Element Nor Implement, be seen – And Place was where the Presence was Circumference between.

It seems very likely that Higginson’s essay inspired this poem. Just as he opened his paragraph with a lone sparrow’s  “sudden and delicious” trill, Dickinson begins her work with a solitary bird’s “cautious melody” – and both are at the exact same time, half-past three.

On the surface, Dickinson’s poem sounds very clinical and scientific, with words such as “experiment,” “test,” “element,” “implement,” and “circumference.” Beneath the surface, though, the lines seem to explore the creative process itself.  Is this bird a representation of Dickinson herself (she did, after all, call birds “nature's little poets”), and are her poems her “cautious melody”?  There is a possible hint about this in the final stanza when, several hours later, the bird and melody are no longer present: “And Place was where the Presence was / Circumference between.”

What do you make of that penultimate word, “Circumference”?  The “Place” where the “Presence” of the bird and melody had been, is now – at the end of the poem – restored to its original nature (no pun intended – maybe?)  Therefore, is “Circumference” used solely to signify all that is within the bounds and scope of that place?  Or does it mean something more?  That word “between” seems to convey some sort of added dimension (oddly enough for me, it calls to mind the opening lines of Franklin 373 – though the word “circumference” is not even used: “This World is not conclusion / A Species stands beyond / Invisible, as Music / But Positive, as sound”).

Dickinson used the word “circumference” in 17 different poems, but take a look at the Dickinson Lexicon  entries for her uses of the word.  There are 13 of them – and they include so much more than just the basic meaning of the word, the perimeter of a circular boundary.

Plus – and this takes me back to that possible autobiographical connection within this poem – Dickinson disclosed to Higginson in her fourth letter to him, “My Business is Circumference.”

What do you think?