Emily! No one can write like Emily. The poems always seem so simple, but they’re definitely not. They’re subtle and require close reading. They always reward that close reading.
It’s true that a light exists in spring. I know it’s spring by the light. The birds know it, too. Things are a particular color — not just the budding leaves but in the solitary fields. It’s not a color to be analyzed by science, although I suppose it could be. It’s something we feel in our bones.
I notice how the eye moves in this poem, takes us from the lawn to the furthest slope, to horizons. There’s almost a sound, the world almost speaks to us, but there’s no sound. This is all an internal vision, “without the Formula of sound.” We stand there while it passes. While horizons step (as the eye travels outward) and Noon reports (a noon whistle?) We have to go back to the first line of the poem to remember what “it” is. It’s the particular quality of light. We humans remain, watching the parade of seasons, The delicate quality of spring light passes, at last.
What are we left with? A “quality of loss.” We have had this moment, which has felt as precious as a sacrament. What’s a sacrament? It’s important to know what that word means. In the Christian theology that Emily was steeped in, (even if she was agnostic), a sacrament is a visible, outward sign instituted by Jesus Christ to impart spiritual grace to a believer. It could be communion bread, marriage, or simply this moment that strikes the speaker as filled with grace.
But when the delicate spring light passes, we are left with a sense of loss, a feeling that instead of being here in this grace-filled moment, it feels as if trade (commerce, the busy world) has gotten in the way.
That’s my close reading. But there’s more to see. The poem’s short lines urge the reader to slow down, to feel each line on its own. It’s a contemplative poem. There’s nothing specifically concrete in the poem (“horizons,” “tree,” “fields”), no particular object. And it’s stepped back even further than that. There’s not even a particular speaker. There’s a “you,” but not any particular “you.”
There’s a distance in the poem. Like an oracle, it speaks a truth not personal, but universal.
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) lived in Amhurst, Massachusetts most of her life. Only 10 of her 1,800 poems were published in her lifetime. No wonder. They were unusual for her time, with their short acerbic lines, their spare descriptions, and their off-rhymes. The first posthumous edition of her poems regularized them to fit contemporary convention. It wasn’t until 1955 that Thomas H. Johnson published an edition that tried to fit them back into her original intention.