A Question from Emily Dickinson [by David Lehman]

Emily-Dickinson-Portrait 2I have a great fondness for two-line poems.

Robert Frost’s poem “The Span of Life” is a perfect couplet, enacting the life of a dog as if in a diptych representing youth and old age:

The Span of Life

The old dog barks backward without getting up.

I can remember when he was a pup.

– Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Many of the best two-line poems perform a verbal feat of some kind. The form is an invitation to the maker of epitaphs, including irreverent ones. From John Dryden:  “Here lies my wife. Here let her lie. / Now she’s at rest, and so am I.”

Stacey reminds me of Howard Nemerov’s masterpiece of succinctness:

Bacon & Eggs

The chicken contributes,

But the pig gives his all.

Some two-line poems act like object lessons in montage technique, Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” being the most famous example.

Rarer is the two-line poem that asks a question, a rhetorical question in a sense, but not in the sense that it asserts a self-evident proposition as when Yeats concludes “Among School Children” (not a two-line poem) by asking “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

Emilt Dickinson’s #1095, without a title to help direct us, qualifies as such a question:

To whom the Mornings stand for Nights,

What must the Midnights – be!

The poem ends with an exclamation, rather than a question mark, and what is signified is wonder. But I maintain that the ratio deserves to be completed. If mornings are nights, what, then, are midnights? And whaty causes the poet to utter he exclamation? Think about it.  — DL

– Emily Dickinson, (1830-1886)

       

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Author: The Best American Poetry