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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio.
- [00:09]
Gabriel
Summer is coming right to your door with Target Circle360 get all the season go to's at home with same day delivery snacks for the pool party delivered sun lotion and towels for a beach day delivered pillows and lights to deck out the deck that too delivered just when you want them summer your way quick and easy. Join now and get all the summer fun delivered right to your Home with Target Circle 360 membership required Subject to terms and conditions. Applies to orders over $35. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Knowing you could be saving money for the things you really want is a great feeling. Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by.
- [01:05]
Jack Wilson
Hello today on the podcast, Butterflies and poetry. Originality and original music. And lots of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost and a little Wordsworth and John Keats. But mostly butterflies and literature. They are the two sweetest passions known to man, said Vladimir Nabokov. Literature and butterflies. We combine them both in a flitting, floating, fleetly, fleeing, flying episode of the History of Literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. This is an unusual one, even for me. Jack Wilson. That's who I am. And I am also your host. I won't always talk this awkwardly, or should I say awkward. I will not so always talk. I'm glad you're here. It's springtime, damn it. You know, fall is my favorite season. In spring, I want spring to be hopeful. And the world is going to hell. It's hard to find hope. But let's try to find it in some literature and some butterflies if we can. The first question is a poem, essentially a butterfly. You could make the case, sort of. Lets try. You can see they are both ethereal, gentle, the more delicate beings of their respective worlds. If a novel is a wolf or an elephant, a loose baggy monster, as Henry James would have it. And if a song is a bird, like the song for no One by the Beatles, that is a bird, no question about it. Then a poem just might be a butterfly. A quick flash of color, a dash of elegance, often intricate, easily missed. But if you stop and take the time, they are beautiful, exquisite. They move as if by magic. They are kind of miraculous. What gives a Bug, worm. The right to have such beautiful wings and what gives plain words, the ones we use every single day. The right to be so beautiful. In the hands of a superior poet, what we're talking about now can seem like a gift from the gods. Both butterflies and poems can dart about, rise with the wind, rest on a rock, and can be caught, pinned down, destroyed. An overly literal reading of a poem, an analysis of one that counts syllables and does all that schoolmarm stuff, is like a butterfly caught, dissected, splayed out on the pages of some science book. We can appreciate the beauty and appreciate to some extent the appreciators, but we really know that a butterfly has some mystery to it. If it's going to have any magic at all. We want that beautiful thing to come and go, to believe that it's here just to treat us for a few moments, and then it will disappear. And when it does, that's fine. We get to imagine it has a life outside of us, apart from us, beyond our reach. We do not need to take it apart to see what's in it. We do not need to smash butterflies or poems reaching a bit. We might look at the most obvious thing for a poet to discuss and compare that with poems to see just how well our comparison holds. A butterfly famously begins life as a caterpillar, one of the more disgusting things on earth. Caterpillars. Creepy as hell. The worst things in the world to squash. If bubble wrap is the most satisfying thing to press between your two fingers, a caterpillar must be the worst. You'd never do it for fun. It would only ever be by accident. If you step on one a caterpillar, you feel it even through your shoe. What was that? Kids know this. At least all the kids where I grew up did. Mud puddles were awesome. Throwing locusts through the air and watching them land on the neighbor's roof was like experiencing a toy greater than any that Santa had ever brought or could bring. But accidentally stepping on a caterpillar or a tobacco worm was the kind of feeling your foot never forgot. What was the line about Sid Charisse. Fred Astaire's line about her? When you've danced with Cid Charisse, you stay danced with. Well, when your foot has squashed a caterpillar, it stays a squasher. Or something like that. Muscle memory for the creepy things. You never forget that feeling. Anyway, you might think that poets limit themselves to. To discussions of this transformation. Oh, look. An ugly thing goes into a cocoon and emerges a beauty. Now I'll Write a poem about that transformation. What a concept. Well, luckily they don't limit themselves to that. That's a little too obvious, don't you think? We don't need poets to tell us that. If that's the point they're making, keep it to yourself. Poets. We need poets to tell us. Like John Keats, writing to his would be sweetheart, Fanny Brawne. I almost wish we were butterflies and lived but three summer days. Three such days with you I could fill with more delight than 50 common years could ever contain. Now there's a poet who's thinking transformation. Sure, but bring out the heavy stuff, poet. Bring out the death. 50 common years he was willing to trade. Except he didn't have 50 years to trade. Or maybe he did. Keats died when he was 25. He was poetry's butterfly, you might say. Here today, gone tomorrow. Let's think about his idea. Three summer days as a butterfly. Imagining. Now, let's imagine that two butterflies could be paired together, as he speculated to Fanny. That's not so hard to imagine. Actually, as we'll see in a very famous poem by Emily Dickinson, two butterflies is easy to envision. We've seen that before. You see that in life. They kind of move together, not perfectly in sync. Like dancers. Fred Astaire and Sid Charisse. There we go back to them. Or Sid Charisse and Gene Kelly. That's a butterfly moment, too. If butterflies were about a hundred times sexier than they are. Butterflies are beauty without sex. Maybe more like Fred and Vinger, Fred and Fred and Ginger, as dancers go. Or Lizzie and Darcy. Just beauty. The pairing is beautiful. What do you think keats meant by three summer days as a butterfly? How could three days possibly be better than 50 coming years? Well, you have no worries for three days, no cares. Death might be imminent, but no matter. You can live for the moment. You can fly. But let's note that this isn't soaring like an eagle and looking down at the earth, hunting your prey. There's different kinds of flying, right? We're not in a jumbo airplane, the animal world. We're not soaring like an eagle looking down, hunting your prey, scanning the landscape with those eyes. This is staying pretty local, enjoying the natural world, the up close world. Seeming almost to pick your path at random. Up, down, over now to this blade of grass. Now to a branch. Now in the air. Up here. Over there. Here's a little breeze to ride. Let's pop off the breeze. Descend, dart this way and that. Come to rest. Poets are shocked by the resting. The Butterfly goes flat. It's like someone has dropped a scrap of handmade paper or some lovely foreign stamp on your shoe. Or you see one on the windowsill or maybe on a fence post pressed up against a screen flat. And you think, hello, what's this little gorgeous thing doing here? Oh, right, there it goes. It's alive. It opened up its wings and flew away. A miracle for Keats, of course, the transience and the beauty were everything. He was dying. He would die young. But for three days he could be nothing but alive and beautiful. For three summer days, he could be truth. All these thoughts about butterflies for me got started with an email from Gabriel the maestro you hear at the beginning and end of these episodes. And the piano you often hear in between his fingers are like butterflies, moving quickly, darting almost as if they each have their own instinctive desire to press a key. There's a logic to it, but it's insect logic. It's life force logic. That's how it seems from the outside anyway. Mysterious. I'm always begging Gabriel to send me more music for the podcast and he's very gracious about it. And one day he sent me this. Hi Jack. Here is a brief song I wrote a while ago based on two verses of Emily Dickinson's poem Two butterflies went out at noon. And then he included the two verses that he set to music. So here's the poem, here's the verses from the poem. Two butterflies went out at noon and waltzed above a stream, Then stepped straight through the firmament and rested on a beam, and then together bore away upon a shining sea. Though never yet in any port their coming mentioned be. Enjoy. Thanks, Gabriel. Emily Dickinson and music by Gabriel. There was an attachment with an MP3 which we are going to hear later. This was a. A combination I was happy to have Emily Dickinson. Oh, never tire of her and Gabriel's music. I asked him if I could use the piece in the show and if I could also credit the singer. And he wrote back. This was back in early January and he wrote, Jack, Happy New Year. Absolutely. I feel honored to have the piece featured in your program. The singer is Alison Hughes, for whom I wrote the piece commissioned by her family in memory of her grandparents. Okay, so now we are getting somewhere. I don't know Allison or her family, but I love them. I love this idea to commission a piano piece in memory of her grandparents. What a beautiful butterfly like idea. It's not like putting up some building and stamping their name on it or a jewel studded ring or something in Fact, it's not even an object in a sense that it has no matter whatsoever. It's putting out something in the world, a new piece of beauty, something ephemeral, to remember. The spirit of two people. Keats imagined three days as a butterfly against 50 years of common life. Well, this project is distilling decades of common life back into our imagination. The grandparents, as they are best remembered with. With these words and with this music. Naturally, I dove into my trusty Helen Vendler book to see what the poem was all about, get a little commentary, and guess what? The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson let me down. Astonishing. I've come to count on this book so much. Well, Vendler didn't discuss this one. I had to do some non Vendler research, and I came across some. Several other poems. Dickinson wrote about butterflies, but Vendler didn't discuss those either. Hmm. Which is not to say that Vendler had an aversion to butterflies. Dickinson wrote about them so often, and Vendler covered many of those poems. But that's only to let you know that this analysis today is Vendler free. We have to turn elsewhere. And it turns out, thanks to this research, that this poem, or maybe I should call them, lyrics to set Gabriel's words apart from all the other poems about butterflies. This poem that Gabriel set to music is not exactly what Dickinson wrote. This is a rare poem that she wrote and rewrote in different versions. And we're reading and speculating from certain manuscripts, and I don't know why I say that's rare. This is what we do with Dickinson. We have to figure out from manuscripts and notes and scrawlings and things that have been found publications and years. Is this what Dickinson wanted? Is it what an editor introduced? It's one of those. And at least one of the lines appears to have been added by an editor later. And although I hate to say it, I kind of like the change. My apologies to any Dickinson hardcore fanatics, but here we takes good ideas from all directions, as my cowpoke father used to say when we was out punching doggies. And speaking of takes, let's take a quick one now. A break, I mean. And then we're going to look at Dickinson's poem as lyrics for the song. And then we'll look at the different versions of Dickinson's poem, and we'll see if we can discern just what she revised and why and what it says about her views on butterflies. We'll have some other poems by butterfly. I mean, whoops that was a mistake there by me. I meant to say other poems by poets, but hey editors, let's leave that one in. These poets kind of are like butterflies, aren't they? At least Keats was, and maybe Dickinson too. But we'll have poems by some other poets, Robert Frost being one of them. He wasn't really a butterfly. He was much more like the old fence post that the butterflies sat upon when they got tired. Maybe that's unfair to Frost. We're going to be unfair to Frost today. Maybe we are being fair. Maybe he deserves it. But anyway, he's not a butterfly. Maybe he's more like a bee. And we'll hear the song itself, and we'll see whether Gabriel is able to make his piano conjure up a butterfly spirit. All that coming up after this foreign.
- [16:17]
Alan Sisto
I'm Alan Sisto, the man of the west here at the Prancing Pony Podcast. And I'm Sean Marchese, the real life Lord of the Mark. Every week here at the Prancing Pony Podcast, along with Sean or other co hosts, I explore explore the works of J.R.R. tolkien, author of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, bringing along lots of pop culture references, plenty of nerd humor, and the occasional bad pun. It's just a couple of friends hanging out at the pub talking about our favorite books. We cover just a few pages every episode, reading important sections of the books and having a chat about what we've read. Now we do a ton of research for each episode so that we can bring as much background information to our conversation as possible. We do all the heavy reading so you don't have to. It's a great way for first time ready readers to learn the basics of Tolkien's world, while for Middle Earth veterans it's a deep dive into their favorite stories. The Tolkien fandom is like no other, so we spend time in the community giving talks at Tolkien events, recording live episodes, and hanging out with our listeners on Discord to engage with our audience every chance we get. So if you're ready to dive into the most beloved world in fantasy literature and become a part of a vibrant, active community of listeners, then look for the Prancing Pony Podcast wherever you listen.
- [17:19]
Gabriel
Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from Ebgliss. After an initial dosing phase of 16 weeks, about 4 in 10 people taking EBGLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin. And most of those people maintained skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.
- [17:37]
Alan Sisto
EBGLIS Lebricizumab LBKZ, a 250mg 2ml injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis, that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies. EBGLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to ebglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with ebglis. Before starting ebglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection searching for real relief?
- [18:12]
Gabriel
Ask your doctor about eglis and visit ebgliss.lilly.com or call 1-800-LILYRX or 1-800-54.
- [18:20]
Jack Wilson
This episode is brought to you by Tic Tac Summer tastes like Tic Tac. Tantalize your taste buds this sunny season with Citrus Adventure and Orange, two everyday flavors that bring summer in every.
- [18:34]
Gabriel
Tic Tac Citrus Adventure is a yummy.
- [18:37]
Jack Wilson
Vibrant medley of lemon, lime and mandarin. And Tic Tac Orange is the perfect mix of tangy and sweet. Visit us at Tiktacusa on social to refresh your summer with TikTok. Okay, welcome back. Before we get going too far, I wanted to let you know that I had this whole episode planned before my trip to Paris and the return to the news that my college roommate had passed away suddenly. And I told that story in episode 700. And in my struggles to find words, my struggle to find words, I reached for the butterfly analogy and life with its grubby fingers grabbing us all, snatching us out of the air. If you're wondering whether I've developed some kind of obsession doing butterflies in episode 700 and then again in 704, or if I'm giving butterflies some kind of outsized importance, well, that's what happened. They are on my mind. I didn't put them there. Life kind of did. Robert Frost lived from 1874 to 1963. He came after Emily Dickinson, in other words, although their lives overlapped and they share some of the same geography, of course, up there in New England, I'm not sure she was well enough. Let me put it this way, I wasn't sure that she was well known enough to have been an influence on Robert Frost. Her first collection of poems came out in 1890, when he would have been 16. He was influenced by Thomas Hardy and Yeats and Keats. And an American influence, if he had one, might have been Emerson. Let me tip my hand a bit and say that I rather wish. I said rather, rather wish, even though I don't talk that way. This is kind of arch comment, I imagine being said by some British person with their velvet hammer. They say Shakespeare never struck out a line. And Ben Jonson says, I rather wish he had. Okay, well, Robert Frost was not influenced by Emily Dickinson, you say. And I say, I rather wish he had been at least a little bit or a little bit more. If you. And you're probably sitting there, you're way ahead of me. You know that he was. You know that maybe you know even more than I do. Maybe you know that he wrote some letter saying that she meant everything to him or that he admired her so much he couldn't even as aspire to be inspired by it. Well, great. Let me know. I haven't been able to find that. I found some stuff I'll share. I haven't been able to find that, but I did find his poem about butterflies. It's called Blue Butterfly Day. Eight lines. Here we go. It is a blue butterfly day here in spring, and with these sky flakes down in flurry on flurry, there is more unmixed color on the wing than flowers will show for days unless they hurry. But these are flowers that fly and all but sing. And now from having ridden out desire, they lie closed over in the wind and cling where wheels have freshly sliced the April mire. Okay, that's it. Okay, let's look at this. I guessed that he wrote it when he was about 15, maybe 16. But no, he was almost 50, 50 years old. And this is his poem. Why does this poem rankle me? Let's look more closely at it. Blue butterfly day. Okay, great. You name the day after the phenomenon. That's kind of nice. Like it's fresh cut grass day here in spring, or it's flowing moth night on the drive home in the dark with the headlights on. Driving home in Wisconsin during one of those mothy nights. Maybe there's a day or two in Robert Frost's world where there are lots of blue butterflies around. And that's. That's one of the pleasures of the countryside. Like, wow, where did all these come from? They come and go. First, you think this Is going to be awful. Ladybugs are taking over. And then it's like a week later, they're gone. His next line. Back to the poem. His next line is, okay, and with these sky flakes down in flurry, on flurry. Skyflakes is hyphenated. I can picture these. Skyflakes is kind of nice. Clever. And the flurries. I don't get the sky flakes down. What is that? There's no verb there. But whatever he says, there is more. Unmixed color on the wing. Okay, on the wing is not exactly an archaic phrase. I'll allow it. It's close. I sense he's doing it just for the rhyme, though. And the next line. The flowers will show for days unless they hurry. Then flowers. Did I say that? There's more color here. Unmixed color on the wing. Then. Flowers will show for days unless they hurry. Now I'm starting. Frost is losing me here. Hurry is clearly there just for the rhyme. Just for the rhyme. I don't like poems that have lines that make you. Whoa. And then you think, oh, that's a weird thing to say. It's just there for the rhyme. Unless they hurry. Is that what we say to flowers? Oh, those cute. I mean, if we do, is that a good thing to say? Oh, those cute little flowers better hurry. Flowers. This now sounds like a children's story. The baby bear with his paw full of honey. Oh, is your. Is your paw sticky? It's so cutesy. Wootsy. We're going to be late. We better hurry. I don't. I don't need that to be my flowers, thoughts. Plants and trees. They communicate to each other somehow. Do you know that? I read that we don't know how, but we know that they do. Scientists have found that tree roots bend and change to avoid each other. They change paths to avoid each other. Like roots from a different tree. They avoid each other in the soil, before they have contact. Different trees are signaling to each other. Hey, hey. My roots are on their way toward you slowly. And I know you've got them down there, too. Let's share the space, my friend. That's communication. That's a kind of thought. And it's not, oh, gee, My time to show my colors is days from now. But maybe I'll hurry. They'll show their damn colors when they're good and ready. They're flowers, rhyme boy. Rhyming Robert. Okay, next lines. But these are flowers that fly. And all but sing. Okay, again. All but sing. Butterflies maybe looking for the rhymes Here, wing and sing. And now, from having ridden out desire, they lie closed over in the wind and cling where wheels have freshly sliced the apple mite. April Meyer. Okay, got it. I don't mean to nitpick. The lines are fine. There's some nice imagery here. People have selected this poem as one to include in their anthologies or on their top ten lists and so on. The poet makes you see, but he doesn't really make you feel. If you're supposed to feel anything from this poem, it's that the poet has written a poem about butterflies. Emily Dickinson doesn't write poems like that. She doesn't write to say, you will be impressed with my nice lines and my rhymes about this particular subject. She writes to say, I'm a weird perceiving consciousness and this phenomenon has lit a fire in me. I'm a floating cloud. That's who Emily Dickinson is. She's a floating cloud of explosive powder. And she's saying this thing I noticed, this event, this vision, this idea, this concept has just lit a fuse, and I'm going to explode into something like fireworks, and I'm going to let my soul do that, and then I'll put it on the page. What is Frost doing with his poem other than impressing us that he's found some rhymes and placed words into lines that end with those rhymes? Spring, wing, sing and cling, Bravo, flurry, hurry, desire, mire, ho, hum. Finding rhymes is like doing a Sudoku puzzle. It's fun to do. It's tempting to show off, and if someone does show it off, you accept it because you like that person and you agree to look at the Sudoku puzzle they've filled in. And of course, if you're doing that, you want to see that they got it right. You don't want to see a bunch of mistakes. But is it really that fun to see someone else's Sudoku puzzle? Do you have as much fun looking at their filled in puzzle as you do actually writing, you know, filling it in yourself? Is that why we bother with poetry? To see someone else's Sudoku puzzle that they've done? Not me, not me. And so where is Frost in this poem? Where's the speaker? Well, he's noticing something about spring, and I guess, you know, it's a little more than a Sudoku puzzle. Maybe. I guess I'm glad he was alive, as I'm glad every human being ever was alive, apart from Asterisk, a few of history's monsters. I'm glad he had his spring day and that he noticed the blue sky flakes coming down and noticed that there were wheel tracks in the mud, and some of the butterflies came to rest on those grooves in the freshly sliced. April Meyer. Okay, seems like a nice enough guy. This speaker in this poem, out for a walk. He comes home and he tells you that's what he saw. There's room for this in the world of poetry, but let's hear Emily Dickinson to see what she does with her butterflies. I think you'll hear the difference. And guess what? I've done some research, because when I said that Frost was not influenced by Dickinson, I thought, I'm going to get hundreds of emails talking about Frost and Dickinson, people telling me that I had missed the obvious, that Frost was heavily influenced by her, and everyone knows this. So I looked it up and yes, it turns out that he was a deep admirer of Emily Dickinson to a certain point. I guess he had a different project in mind for himself, but at least he recognized her greatness, which he thought was kind of undeniable and kind of overcame her weaknesses. But I'll get to that, because I disagree. He was miffed when they had a. In Amherst, they had a panel discussion to honor Dickinson and he wasn't invited. And so he has this sort of catty conversation where he says, well, the three they. They did invite don't know anything. Archibald McLeish, he says, Archie doesn't know too much about Emily. And Louise Bogan, they invited her. She doesn't know as much as she thinks she does. Said Frost, the other fellow, he says, oh, he's a college man here. He's talking about Richard Wilbur. He says he's a college man here and he isn't interested in Emily at all. Well, meow. Robert Cat's claws are out taking down some fellow poets. But then he talks about Dickinson and he says, if you want my opinion, she is the best of all the women poets who ever wrote from Sappho on down. Hold the. Hold the qualifier woman poets there in abeyance. Let's take it as a compliment on its face and say, why was she so good? We're going to see in a moment. Here's a critic of Frost, George Montero, who described Frost's complicated relationship with the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Quote, frost's insistence that Emerson and Thoreau were the giants of 19th century American letters is confirmed by the many poems variously influenced that derive from them. His attitude toward Emily Dickinson, however, was more complex and sometimes less generous. In his 20s, he molded his poetry after hers, but later, after he joined the faculty of Amherst College, he found her to be less a benefactor than a competitor. Okay, what did he object to? End quote. I should have said that. What did he object to? He tended to like people who shared his view about rhyme and meter, which Dickinson did not. But he admired her ability to create new forms anyway, even without dependence on cadence and rhyme. And he admired her themes. And indeed, in Frost's works. We read Blue Butterfly Day, but there are other poems, not that one, but a poem like Stopping by a woods on a snowy Evening, where we go much deeper into the soul and the nature of human existence than we do in Blue Butterfly Day, with the better hurry, flowers and all that. So let's give Frost some. Some credit here, but let's turn to Emily Dickinson and hear what she does and we'll see the difference. Here's a poem by Dickinson about a flower called the gentian. The gentian. A nice blue flower, intense blue, with big trumpet shaped blue petals that open up. She says the gentian weaves her fringes. The maple's loom is red. My departing blossoms obviate parade. Okay, where are we? Where are we? Autumn. I think this is the end of flowers. The gentian blooms in autumn. It's a late blooming flower. It's a harbinger of autumn. The gentian is weaving like someone making the fringes of a dress. The maple has red leaves. It's produced by its loom. The maple's loom is red. Red leaves. Also a sign of autumn. Summer's closing up shop. This is what. What's happening? My departing blossoms. She says the blossoms are departing. You can have all the parades you want, but they're meaningless with departure and death on the horizon. We're so deeply integrated with nature and beauty and impermanence and loss. The changing of the seasons, the parades of summer. The parades. Maybe you think of parades like a Fourth of July parade that happens in summer, but also just the parade of nature, putting everything on display, marching in front of us. And that's starting to go now. That's what she's saying. The gentian weaves her fringes. The maple's loom is red. My departing blossoms obviate parade. What is going on? Why are we here? Next stanza. A brief but patient illness. An hour to prepare and one below. This morning is where the angels are. It was a short procession. The bobolink was there. An aged bee addressed us. And then we knelt in prayer. Okay, what is this? A funeral. We're in autumn. What kind of funeral? Is this out in nature with a bobolink, a bird and an aged bee giving some kind of sermon and then us kneeling in prayer. Think about where Emily is in her mind to say. An aged bee addressed us and then we knelt in prayer. She's not some gentleman out on a stroll, looking at butterflies down by her feet, noticing that one of them is in the groove of a wheel that's gone through some mud. Emily Dickens said, the speaker of this poem is microscopic, sitting in a congregation small enough to listen to a bee deliver a sermon. And she's kneeling in prayer along with others. We knelt in prayer. Is she tiny or is the bee giant? I think Emily Dickinson is tiny. She's reduced herself down into nature, where she lives. She's living in nature. She is nature. This is part of the universe. To be small when it's called for and giant when that's called for, too. Let's keep going. We trust that she was willing. We ask that we may be. Summer, Sister Seraph, let us go with thee. Oh, my. Dickenson. There's so much here. Summer. Sister Seraphim. We're at the funeral now, the funeral for Summer. Our sister, her sister, Emily's sister, and also an angel. Summer. Sister Seraph. Seraph is an angel. Who else is brave enough to let her mind think it and to put this on the page and let us think it, too? Summer. That's a line. Summer, Sister Seraphim, exclamation mark. That's the line. There's more thought, more intriguing, enticing, deep thought in those three words than in all of Frost's poem. Blue Butterfly Day. Not to pick on Frost, but that's a pedestrian poem about seeing a butterfly. In Dickinson's poem, we are visiting the funeral of Summer itself and viewing Summer as both our sister and an angel. As we might if we are attending a funeral and saying, we will go with you as we feel when we lose someone close to us, someone spiritual, who we know has passed into a better world, a better life. Have you ever thought this about a season, about summer, about attending a funeral for summer and say, let us follow you, please? The bee delivered the news. We're on our knees praying. This is how the seasons change, people. It's not a nice little thing to stitch onto a pillow. This is the amazing universe at work, and we are privileged to see it. And we are also the masters of it. In a sense, each individual commands the thoughts that allow us to think this. We're all artists. The canvas belongs to us. And Summer and flowers and bees. Are like our paint. We're creating masterpieces, and the masterpieces are our lives and how we live. Dickinson. Emily Dickinson. Sometimes I get carried away. Okay, we're not even done. We're not even to the butterfly part yet. The last stanza of the poem concluding this funeral, we get three lines in the name of the bee and of the butterfly and of the breeze. Amen. Okay, very famous. Three lines. In the name of the bee and of the butterfly and of the breeze. Amen. Amen. Exclamation mark. There's a simple version, simple way to interpret this. There's an overly complex way, and then there's the right way. Lol. My way. It just so happens to be the right way. You might read those lines and say, dickinson notes for us that nature is God's creation, from the biggest galaxies down to the tiniest knee joint of the ant. And so does substitute nature for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. As she does here, she puts the bee, the butterfly, and the breeze in the same position. Amen. We get it. It's like the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. And because she's conflated those three things with three things in nature, that's a reminder that we should thank God for all the things in his creation. It's a way of praising God. Fine. Fine. That's a little simple for me, but fine. It will do. From middle school and high school. It's not a bad interpretation. Now, the overly complex analysis would say, okay, the bee is the Father, the butterfly is the sun, and the breeze is the Holy Ghost. Let's do a comparison of each one. Well, that's fine, too. Maybe we're moving into college territory there. Knock yourselves out. But in my interpretation, I don't need to knock myself out because I'm knocked out already. I'm just blown away. I'm lying here on the floor. I just read the poem Falling Down. Dickinson, or the speaker of this poem, we might say, has just attended a funeral for summer where she was addressed by the elderly bee with something to say, and the bobolink was there. She's on her knees with everyone else. People, animal, other animals. Who's with her on their knees? Could be a whole, could be all of us. Could be lots of human beings. It could be insects, flowers, trees. It could be any of those things. It's all of nature. I hope there are at least some people there, and I hope I'm one of them. Hope she's invited me. This poem concludes with not the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost. Which is a human conception. Some might say invention, others might say no, it's objectively real, but. But humans have been given access to it. Whatever you think, however you think that got started, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, it's still human, right? We're the only ones who know about this Trinity. Bees don't, butterflies don't. The breeze doesn't. Dickinson's funeral concludes with reverence for these three things that matter. Down here, on this level, where she's tiny, where we aren't worshiping, or we are, but we're not worshiping a God, we're worshiping particular things on this earth. We mourn summer as if it's our sister. We expect that it now lives with the angels somehow, somewhere, it was and is angelic anyway. And we have a similar attitude toward other things on this planet too. For the mysteries of life, or the even more mind bending mysteries of something like a breeze, it has no immediate explanation, but it exists and. And is pleasant and has character or not. It has beauty, but it's invisible. It has power and charisma and presence. It affects us. It's a breeze. Amen. Frost wrote another poem, My Butterfly, that talks about butterflies and the transience of life. It's less pedestrian, but still less pedestrian than Blue Butterfly Day. I mean, but still it's not Dickinson. Dickinson had another poem about butterflies called the Butterfly Obtains that tweaks puritans for not valuing butterflies. They didn't like the wings, the color too showy. Where's the industry, they say, the hard work. Why have all this excess beauty? Dickinson says, in effect, have you read my poems? I'm projecting that of course we can skip over that poem the Butterfly Obtains because we're running out of time and we still have the song to hear. We have lots ahead of us yet. We'll also skip. From cocoon forth a butterfly as lady from her door emerged a summer afternoon repairing everywhere. That's a great poem, but we got to keep moving, people. We gotta get to these two butterflies and Gabriel's fingers flying and touching down on the keys like ten winged creatures. One more poet of butterflies to see if they can give us something other than that old cliche, the transition, the Cocoon poem, let's call it. Or the beauty and delicacy and ephemerality. Those are beautiful ideas for a poem, but kind of obvious ones too, right? We need that plus something more. So we turn to William Wordsworth and his poem From 1801 to a Butterfly, one of two famous poems that he wrote about butterflies. And it's very wordsworthian romantic and the wordsworthian project of emotions recollected in tranquility. He's giving us some remembrance of his butterfly in his past. He says, I've watched you now a full half hour, self poised upon that yellow flower. Okay, those are good lines. I like that. Self poised is a good description of how a butterfly sits. I like the idea of. Of this moony, leisurely guy for a full half hour. I don't doubt that he did. Taking a break from one of his marathon walks. Sits and watch. And watches a butterfly who apparently is not moving. That's a good, good way to spend a half hour. A full half hour. I'm on board, Mr. Wordsworth. Back to the poem. I've watched you now a full half hour, self poised upon that yellow flower and little butterfly indeed. I know not if you sleep or feed. How motionless, not frozen seas more motionless. And then what joy awaits you when the breeze hath found you out among the trees and calls you forth again. Okay, I was going to skip the rest at this point. I don't like the lines. How motionless, not frozen seas more motionless. And then. Why strangle language in order to hit your rhymes? It's like watching an actor read cue cards and their eyes are moving back and forth. Or even better, it's like one actor delivering lines and another actor, the other actor in the scene is moving their lips as they read the cue cards too. Have you ever seen that? If you want to see that mocked, watch one of the Christopher guest movies where Catherine o' hara does that. Best in show maybe. Or no maybe. It's waiting for guffman. I think Catherine o' hara and Eugene o' Neill, they're out there. She's moving her lips along. Okay, it's also another. Maybe I need a better analogy. Like actors who look down at the stage to find their ex. Why am I using these comparisons? Because we see too much of the work going on. It's not natural. The spell is broken. I love the lines. I've watched you now a full half hour, self poised upon that yellow flower. That rhymes. I like it. All praise to wordsworth at his finest. Then he starts chopping up his lines and saying things out of order and all of that just to hit his rhymes. Let's keep going. Because I actually did find something valuable about his longing for childhood and the way the butterfly kind of opens that up for him. It's not a wild ride through the universe like Emily as Emily Dickinson gives us. But it's a painful trip to the past, to one's own past and the recollection of youth recollected in tranquility. Here we go back to the poem. This plot of orchard ground is ours. My trees, they are my sister's flowers Here rest your wings when they are weary Here lodge as in a sanctuary Come often to us Fear no wrong Sit near us on the bow we'll talk of sunshine and of song and summer days when we were young Sweet childish days that were as long as 20 days are now Stay near me, do not take thy flight a little longer Stay in sight. Much converse do I find in thee, Historian of my infancy. Float near me, do not yet depart Dead times revive in thee Thou bring' st gay creature as thou art A solemn image to my heart. My father's family. O pleasant, pleasant were the days the time when in our childish plays My sister Emmeline and I together chased the butterfly A very hunter did I rush upon the prey with leaps and springs I followed on from brake to bush but she, God love her, feared to brush the dust from off its wings. Okay, historian of my infancy. That is a beautiful line. The butterfly who makes us recall all this as if it's recorded in history. It's like Bruce Madeleine, right? You see the butterfly, all your past comes flooding back. Your infancy was recorded by this butterfly. I like that. There's a little twist at the end. My sister was there and I'm recalling her, but she was gentle and I was like a hunter. That's kind of the hook of nostalgia. It's not just, thank you for letting me remember all my past and my beautiful family and the childhood that was so wonderful. But who was I back then? We look back in wonder at who we were, but we also think, how could I have been that person? Why did that set me off? Why was I cruel to so and so? Why did I cry when this or that happened? What are the secrets in me to unlock? Sometimes we say, this is who I want to be, so I must change. But more often we say, this is who I am and have always been. Why? That's in this poem. I'm almost at the main event, the poem about two butterflies and the song. But I'm interrupted by some late breaking news, which is that Emma, my butterfly. But watch out for her strength. Beauty and strength in one package. Maybe more like a bird, I don't know. Emma, the show's producer, has delivered some research into Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson. And now you don't need to email me about it it people because I will pause for a moment and come back even more informed. Was Frost influenced by Dickinson? What exactly was his relationship? Let's take a break and come back with that story plus the original music plus a closer a closer butterfly that I've been holding in reserve. All that and more and nothing else after this.
- [52:01]
Alan Sisto
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- [52:32]
Jack Wilson
This episode is brought to you by ebay. We all have that piece, the one that's so you. You've basically become known for it. And if you don't yet fashionistas, you'll find it on ebay. That Miu Miu red leather bomber, the cousteau Barcelona cowboy top, or that Patagonia fleece in the 2017 colorway. All these finds are all on ebay, along with millions of more main character pieces backed by authenticity guaranteed. Ebay is the place for pre loved and vintage fashion ebay Things People Love okay, so Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson. It turns out that he read her poetry for almost 70 years. He bought a first edition when it came out in 1890, and he gave it to a friend, his high school sweetheart, Eleanor White, whom he later married. He also seems to have had a copy that he gave to a woman who was kindly to him in England, an important lady, he said. And he said he later saw the book in her house, among some books for children, books that were being discarded. He also bought the second edition of Dickinson's poems, and he marked it up, putting slashes by the first lines of certain poems in some kind of code. One slash, two slashes, or three slashes. Scholars have attempted to guess what that meant, as if he was ranking them three stars, two stars and one star. We just don't know. I'm going to summarize rather than quote here because there's something I like about Frost's reaction to Dickinson and something I don't like. Here's what I like. Frost could not help but admire Dickinson's work. He liked it almost in spite of himself. It seems he Acknowledged its power. He acknowledged the brilliance of particular lines. Frost was a prickly guy. He was very jealous, very territorial. He could be snarky. He tore down his fellow poets. He also praised them sometimes, and he praised their poetry, too. A complicated fellow. And he did this with Dickinson. He found her individual lines to be unimpeachable evidence of her genius. Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. That's a very Frostian line. Remember his idea that good poetry should be something that you can hear from another room with the door closed, but if you hear it being read, you would hear and appreciate the sound through the door in that line, tell all the truth, but tell it slant. There's a cadence, a rhythm, a musicality, a form, and it has Dickinson's usual depth. What does that mean? Tell all the truth? Yes, that's something you could instruct children to do. Tell the truth. Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. Now we have something even more interesting. Why is she telling the listener, the reader, the world? To tell all the truth, but tell it slant? Well, maybe we can't handle the truth. Maybe we don't want it directly. Maybe it needs to be delivered slowly, at an angle, through some prism. We're one line into the poem, and we're deep in Dickinson's world of making us think hard about something that seems easy. What are we supposed to do in this world? Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. She's making us think, and she's done it in eight words. Eight syllables. Eight words, one syllable each. Here's where Frost. And Frost admires this, but here's where he fails, in my opinion. He can't get over his idea that Dickinson was lazy, unfocused. And he says, well, you know, the thing with Emily Dickinson is she didn't have to worry about publishing, so she didn't finish her poems, Quote, unquote. He wanted. I mean, the quote there is for the word finish. He wanted every line to be like that one. Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. Marching along, beating time, headed toward its rhyme. A solid rhythmic scheme, elaborating a theme. I'm making this up on the fly to show you how easy it is and how dumb. I'm so glad Emily Dickinson didn't do that. His explanation was. Was. Oh, well, she didn't have to worry about making her poems poetic, capital P, because she didn't have to publish. It's just wrong. Not publishing. It's backwards. Not publishing. Not submitting your genius to an editor's pen. That's what lets genius explore itself? Think of what you get when you write to expectations or rules or structures. You can get some very fine poetry. You can also get some. Some strained, restricted poetry, conventional poetry, conventional ideas. Your poetry all ends up kind of the same. You're coming down to the level of your audience. You're not soaring above. How many pop songs have you heard that are five hours long or five seconds? They're not allowed to change their general length. Dickinson's poetry, following her genius, uses dashes. She uses dashes like nobody other, like nobody other, like no other, nobody else. And that's a good thing. Her thoughts linger. They dance, they fade. They end sharply, or they just dribble out. That can happen when you're not trying to make everything rhyme. Frost wants poetry to follow the contours of a speaker. Declaiming words to an audience. That's all well and good, but that's only one way of communicating, and it's a little artificial. How often in your life do you declaim thoughts to an audience from a lectern or podium? Dickinson's poems follow the contours of thought, which, admittedly, could be boring, but it's not when the thinker is Emily Dickinson. And so we get Frost in a dialogue with Dickinson, the poet, Frost's view of poetry, dominating his ideas about what Dickinson should have done. And the effect is Robert Frost mansplaining poetry to Emily Dickinson. That's the imaginary dialogue he's having. My imaginary dialogue with Emily Dickinson would not be to tell her that she was not careful enough or that she failed to understand the importance of rhythm and meter. It would be me. My imaginary dialogue with Emily Dickinson. I'm a little overwhelmed just thinking about it. It'd be me finding nothing to say, then bursting into tears at how lucky I was to be standing there, hoping that maybe Emily Dickinson would find something to say to me, or we would say nothing at all. When I say Dickinson's poetry is like thought. Dancing, darting, soaring, but in a delicate way, resting, but in a twitching way. That's, of course, to say that it is like a butterfly. It's also like a bee and a breeze. Amen. And it's a whole lot of other metaphors, too, like the ocean and the universe, the sun. We could do this all day. But let's get back to butterflies, because we have finally come to the point where we're going to listen to two butterflies. Dickinson's poems, the versions of them, and the musical accompaniment that Gabriel has crafted already. I'm hoping that Gabriel does not pin this down. Imagine the disappointment if Gabriel's music feels frost like marching solidly across our ears, giving us one rhythm. I think I know Gabriel better than that. I've listened to him play for hours as he's taught my kids piano. He can certainly keep things on time and in order if he wants to. But there's too much jazz in those fingers and in that brain for me to worry too much. He's not going to Frostify the Dickinson poem. Okay, so this poem by Emily Dickinson is one of the poems she returned to after a 16 year absence. I mean, she wrote the poem, left it alone for 16 years, then came back to it. It first appears in 1862, and then she rewrote it in 1878. And she left behind a lot of notes and lines, crossouts, different ideas. We can see her working extremely hard. Thank you very much, Mr. Frost. She is trying to get this right in her way. She cares. She's diligent. How manly of her. And sarcasm. Let's forget about Frost. Focus on Dickinson. Here's the first version of the poem. This is a perfectly respectable version to cite, by the way. Two butterflies went out at noon and waltzed upon a farm, Then stepped straight through the firmament and rested on a beam, and then together bore away upon a shining sea, Though never yet in any port their coming mentioned be. If spoken by the distant bird, if met in ether sea by frigate or by merchantmen, no notice was to me. What does this mean? Two butterflies disappeared, ascended perhaps they bore away, they left for a shining sea, and I never heard any news of them again. They went on their merry butterfly way. An alternative final line, instead of no notice was to me was report was not to me. And by the way, an editor changed the line from and waltzed upon a farm, which was Dickinson's line. An editor squeezed in and waltzed above a stream. Because in the rest of the stanzas, lines two and four rhyme, and some editor said, oh, I could. I could change farm to waltzed above a stream, and then it would rhyme and. Actually, I kind of don't mind that change. I hate to rewrite Dickinson. My goodness. One does so at one's mortal peril. But waltzed above a stream is kind of nicer than waltzed upon a farm. Seems like a nicer spot for those butterflies to be and a nicer place to watch them waltzing. If Dickinson is rhyming in the rest of the poem, well, why not? But we don't need to make that change in the version that Dickinson herself revised because she drops beam. Here's her revision. Sixteen years later, she says, two butterflies went out at noon she and waltzed upon a farm. And then espied circumference. And caught a ride with him. Stop there. Already we see some change, right? Robert Frost. He stays in one place. Emily Dickinson, in her revision. She goes from. She goes from the farm and stepping through the farm firmament to espying circumference. And caught a ride with him. Circumference. Who's. What is that? How do you catch a ride with circumference? We. We can keep farm now. We don't need to change it to stream for the sake of the rhyme. If anything, it's harmonizing here with him. But any. But leave that alone. Who is this guy? Circumference. My business is circumference. Dickinson once wrote in a letter. Imagine getting a letter like that. Someone telling you, like, what is your business? What would you think? How would you think that would end in a letter coming from Emily Dickinson? Coming from any poet. My business is poetry, right? My business is words. My business is. My business is beauty. Maybe my business is circumference. Okay, genius, you're really going to make me work, aren't you? Even in this letter. So how do we make sense of this and the mind of Emily Dickinson? The farm is at the center. The circumference goes around it. The farm circumference is more like an encircling, a spreading out, a moving out, a wider sense of the world, an expansion, a greater understanding of the world. That's how I see it. The farm is specific, the here, the now, the rooted. The small circumference is vast, big and getting bigger. It might be rading out, radiating out like the universe. Not a point. The big circle around the fixed point, the sweep around the fixed point. That's Emily. Emily Dickinson says business. That's what she makes her business. Our butterflies in the first poem rested on a beam and then bore away. Here they're catching a ride on a big circle. The big wheel of the universe. Next stanza. Then lost themselves and found themselves in eddies of the sun. Till rapture missed peninsula and both were wrecked in noon. Oh, boy. There's all kinds of lines now written in the margins. Alternatives, crossouts. Words she tries in gambles with the sun. Or should it be gambles of the sun in frenzy with this. In frenzy of the sun, in eddies of the sun, or in frenzies of the sun for antics in the sun she tries or Antics with the sun. She changes rapture to zephyr. The word gravitation makes an appearance. Verbs change. She says stepped straight through. She says rested. She says bore away. She says coming, moves, chased, missed, staked, lost. You could write an article or a book just about her revisions to this poem. And in the end, we don't know exactly what she wanted it to be, if she ever did fix her own meaning. Maybe the poem caught a ride with the circumference and she was out there on the sweep, riding the circumference to circling, the meaning that she was looking for that was in that fixed point. But in any case, we have this version published, and I haven't given you the third stanza yet. Let's back up and hear the first version again. Two butterflies went out at noon and waltzed upon a farm. Although here you could say, and waltzed above a stream, Then stepped straight through the firmament and rested on a beam, and then together bore away upon a shining sea. Though never yet in any port their coming mentioned be. If spoken by the distant bird, if met in ether sea by frigate or by merchantman. No notice was to me. Okay, that's pretty basic for Dickinson. The pair of butterflies waltzing, they bore away. They stepped straight through the firmament. You could read that as ascending to heaven, resting on a beam. Could be a fence post, I suppose, a fence rail, but it could also be a beam of light. Now they're on their way. They crossed over. They're on the other side. They go all the way to heaven. Some distant land, a distant shining sea. And the news doesn't come back because we humans are limited from knowledge of that other side. There's the rub. That's actually such a good poem that I don't even want to give you the other one. I don't even want to give you the other one. Keep that in mind. Keep that one in mind when we get to the song. But here, for the sake of complete. I don't want to give you the other one, but I will for the sake of completeness and Jack's generosity. Santa Jack is here to give you the other version of the poem, also done by Dickinson. And let's not speculate too much by going through all the crossouts and so on, and instead just give one that Dickinson's editors have settled upon after lots of thought. And it's. Here's the poem. Two butterflies went out at noon and waltzed upon a farm, and then espied circumference and caught a ride with him. Then Lost themselves and found themselves in eddies of the sun till gravitation missed them and both were wrecked in noon. To all surviving butterflies be this fatuity, example and monition to entomology. So in this poem, she's up to something different. The butterflies now are like Icarus, right? They were flying around, waltzing, enjoying themselves, and then they went higher and higher. They've caught a ride with circumference. Dickinson is imagining, or she maybe has observed these two butterflies that just take off and go up and up and up toward the sun. This is Icarus, right? Until they're wrecked in noon. And here's a lesson for humans. And all surviving butterflies dance. Take a look at the wider world. But be careful. Be careful when you catch a ride with circumference and start thinking too much and start imagining that you can find things in life that are greater and grander. Be careful, you might spiral upwards, you might get into danger, you might get wrecked by the heat and the light. And you might provide an example for the rest of us of what not to do. But also a lesson implied in this, that butterflies are going to butterfly. This is what they do. They live for the moment, those beautiful, glorious color scraps. And we can put on our lab coats and our spectacles and study them under our microscopes, entomologize them, but they are living their lives, come what may, and God bless them for that. Okay, let's go back to the first poem, because the first version of this, because remember now, this is what Gabriel has to work with. He's been given these lyrics, two verses. He is such a humble and modest man. I'm sure he would hate the way I'm describing this, but let's go with it anyway. Gabriel gets these lyrics, we, which are extremely well chosen to honor someone's grandparents and singer. A singer's going to sing. A singer sing a melody, and that's one note at a time. Maybe that will be our farm, our fixed point, our main line of thought. That's our farm. It's the path of the butterfly. Poems have this, too. We read one word at a time, left to right, in sequence, just like the notes of the melody. And then underneath that, in music, there are harmonies at work, rhythms that don't follow the melody, that add to it, that dance around it. They can give us chords and chord structures and chord sequences and partial chords, broken chords, fragments. And that's all going to add color to our melody, just like Dickinson's. Words and dashes and ideas set up expectations and undermine them sometimes and complete them at others. You could say the meaning of her words, the plain meaning, is like the melody and everything she puts underneath it that she sneaks in references, surprises, those words that stop us in our tracks, or the ones that click into place just right, those are like the notes underneath. So here's the lyrics. Think about this in the context of a granddaughter honoring her grandparents. Two butterflies went out at noon and waltzed above a stream Then stepped straight through the firmament and rested on a beam and then together bore away upon a shining sea. Though never yet in any port their coming mentioned be a granddaughter honoring her grandparents. The picture of two longtime life partners as butterflies flying together, waltzing through the air is so beautiful and perfect. It's I've got a lump in my throat, my eyes are stinging. May you all live as a butterfly and may you all find your butterfly pair. Your partner. At noon you go out and then you dance. You follow your hearts close in sync, but also not too in sync, not weirdly paired. You each get to move in your own way, but the other is never too far away. You've seen butterflies in pairs, haven't you? That's how they move. They move together, generally, each on their own path, but moving in the same general direction, up and down and over. Individuals, but not lonely. And then, as happens for all of us, the butterflies fly away together. They leave us. They find another world to inhabit. They follow that shining sea, and we are left to wonder where they are now, kind of knowing that they're together, but we don't have confirmation of that. But we know it. So how does Gabriel capture that feeling? The words are going to do some work, and the singing, of course. But like I said, Gabriel's got 10 fingers that can do what he wants. I've seen it happen. Does he capture the idea of butterflies and their movement, the way they fly, the way they get from point A to point B, but taking their own particular route to get there. Let's listen now to Allison Hughes singing and our friend Gabriel playing the piano. Two butterflies went out at noon and waltzed above a stream. Then step straight through the firmament and rested on though never yet. And there we go. I think he does pull it off. I hear the butterflies, I hear the grandparents in the singer's voice, and I hear the butterflies in their souls. We march through life day by day, hour by hour, moving forward, feeling all the aspects of our world and not just good ones. We're angry, we're frustrated. We sit in our cars and yell at traffic. We drag ourselves to jobs and stare at screens. We look at our bank accounts and the pile of bills and wonder how, why, how, how, how? We receive bad news, the chipping away of our hearts one by one, as the listener reminded me. And yet we are surrounded by miracles every day, every blade of grass beneath our feet, living for sunshine and water, the breeze that comes from nowhere and brushes our cheek and disappears, the lightning scampering across the silver sky. And the people we know and are close to and love. That's all there for us, too. And when we can remember, we can change our from our ugly worm husks into our butterfly selves. We don't have to just push and pull our sorry selves from one dull task to another. We can waltz. We can step right through the firmament. We can sing. And if we can find someone to explore this journey with us, so much the better. And we look to those who came before and we see how they lived. And we aspire to that because we miss them, because we still love them, because we know we're all headed into that same future. The melody is anchored to time. It doesn't go backwards. It goes forwards, inevitably. But that doesn't mean it can only do one thing. We can have those 10 fingers underneath, tinkling and chiming and stopping and going and giving our world color. Okay, that's me doing a lot of talking. And Frost may be doing too much talking. I said he mansplained. And maybe that was unfair. Maybe he poetsplained or Frost splained. And I wouldn't trade Dickinson's ability to go deep, fast, economically deep. She's the queen of that. But part of me thinks we've been too thinky. Aren't we? All of us, Dickinson included. Me, Robert Frost, Dickinson. We've been too wordy. Music just is sometimes. So we will leave our discussion of poetic butterflies in the hands of someone else who is content not to overthink, not to overwrite, not to over talk or over explain or over everything. Basho, the haiku master, he wrote about butterflies too, of course, and he said, a caterpillar this deep in fall, still not a butterfly. Oh boy, oh man, oh man, that hits me hard. A caterpillar this deep in fall, still not a butterfly. Why not, little bug? Because you're waiting? Because you're scared? Or because you're just falling short? A podcaster this many episodes still Jack Wilson it's so rough. It's so heartbreaking. This deep in fall. Everyone knows what you do, little bug. You Transform, caterpillar. You change. You become your best beautiful self. And here we are. Sometimes that doesn't happen. And maybe that's you. It's definitely me. But maybe it's you. And guess what, my listener caterpillar, the world is waiting. We're this deep in fall. We know you can do it. We love you as you are, but we can't wait to see those wings unfold and the colors spreading out. We smile and nod at you as you are now. But we know what will happen soon. You'll change. You'll become your best self, and you'll take our breath away. Okay, there we go. Butterflies. Oh dear. I got carried away once again, didn't I? I don't care. I want to see you emerge a little chrysalis and then crack it open, pop out and fly away. Showing off the new you but not really caring. You didn't do this for us. You did it for yourself. Because it was time. Good morning, butterfly. Wow. My thanks to Gabriel for passing along the music which soothed. Soothed the soul as always. And my thanks to Emily Dickinson and Basho and Wordsworth and yes, even Robert Frost. Sometimes we need a foil. Sometimes a moth sneaks in with the butterflies. But that's okay. Moths will do in a pinch. Speaking of pinch, we're pinching ourselves thinking about upcoming episodes. It's hard to believe how lucky we are. It's like a dream. We'll have the story of the Brownings and an anthology of black American humor and some Emily Bronte alongside some Icelandic folktales. We've got some Virginia Woolf on the horizon and Mark Twain and Einstein meeting Kafka. Things you never knew about Johannes Gutenberg or Emile Zola or atrocities or Huck Finn's Gym. Are these episodes like butterflies flapping their wings, each one different and with some some deep worm like origins? I'm Jack Wilson, wingless and wormy, but doing my best. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. Foreign.
- [84:40]
Gabriel
You'Ve likely heard about touching grass to reconnect with nature. But have you heard about hunting for fossils in conflict zones or saving an endangered species of butterfly while incarcerated? These are just some of the amazing stories we're sharing on Going Wild, the chart topping and award winning podcast produced by Nature on PBS, hosted by me, wildlife ecologist Dr. Ray Winn Grant. In the brand new season of Going Wild, we're talking to some of the most interesting champions of nature, ranging from TikTok's black forager, Alexis Nicole Nelson and Pulitzer Prize winning science journalist Ed Yong to Nat Geo Explorer standup comic Ella Al Shamahi to explore what led them to create change within themselves, their community and the natural world. Get inspired, all while exploring our place in the wild. Listen to going wild with Dr. Rae Wynn Grant wherever you get your podcasts.
- [85:36]
Jack Wilson
I'm Shirley Leung, columnist at the Boston Globe and host of say More where we go beyond the headlines with bold, intimate conversations about the biggest issues shaping our world. In a new special series, we're going to confront the C Word. That's right, cancer. It's a disease that touches us all, but it's hard to talk about. In a new five part series, I open up for the first time about my own battle with breast cancer and explore the science, history and deeply personal stories behind this disease. There is life beyond cancer. Join me for the C Word Stories of cancer. Follow say More from the Boston Globe Wherever you get your podcasts.