Lughnasa                                                             Harvest Moon

Here’s my submission for the first writing assignment in ModPo.  The poem itself is below the essay this time.

The poet drinks deep of creative ecstasy and tastes this ecstasy as a liquor, though not one found in package stores. It is a liquor that needs only the alembic of the mind and heart. She drinks it from a lidded beer hall stein, but one filled not with liquid but with pearl or pearls. It’s used for finer stuff than Alcohol. The Rhine is the chief wine producing area of Germany now and was in the mid-nineteenth century, too, but even the famous Rhenish wine makers could not produce a liquor to compare with creative ecstasy.

The poet’s intoxication can come, too, from breathing as well as drinking. She is an “Inebriate of Air.” Perhaps here in stanza 2 she is on an early morning walk, breathing in the cooled air of the night and getting wet (and intoxicated) from the dew as well. She lifts her feet and begins a dance, a reel(ing). This dance becomes an ecstatic one, like whirling Dervishes, that continues “thro endless summer days”. She visits these days from “inns of Molten Blue”. This could be the gambreled sky of “Tell all the Truth but tell it Slant.”

“Landlords” (sober uprights) remove the drunken (ecstatic) bee from the Foxglove, the flower or a pub or bar or inn. The disciplined Butterflies renounce their “drams”, their tots of liquor. Renouncing is a temperance flavored term or a religious one related to repentance. The poet will not allow, however, forcible ejection from her ecstasy nor will she willingly renounce it. In fact, she will drink more.

Through the first three stanzas the metaphor shifts from Alcohol to pantheistic enthusiasms and then to nectar, remaining within the secular realm. The poem then appears to curve acutely toward the religious.

We come, in sudden sibilance, to Seraphs and Saints in the fourth stanza. Seraphs were fiery angels, the burning ones, who flew round and round the celestial throne singing holy, holy, holy. Saints, in the context of New England Calvinism, referred to church goers, not Catholic saints, but church goers still. Both the burning ones and the ordinary Saints of the church stop their explicitly religious activity, the Seraphs “swinging their snowy Hats” and the Saints to (church?) windows run. Drawn by voyeurism toward a pagan ecstasy, they see the poet, the little Tippler, the inebriate of air and debauchee of dew, leaning.

Ah. Does she lean on the everlasting arms of Jesus or in the strong arms of the Father? No. In spite of Dickinson’s staid Christian environment we’ve never really left the inner and pantheistic ecstasy of stanza’s one through three. Sufi poets write often of inebriation and intoxication as euphemisms for religious ecstasy. The poet, the little Tippler, returning to the liquor metaphor of stanza one, has a similar, but secular meaning in mind. She leans against the Sun, the burning one that exists within this realm, a metaphor for her creative ecstasy.

I taste a liquor never brewed –
From Tankards scooped in Pearl –
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of Air — am I –
And Debauchee of Dew –
Reeling — thro endless summer days –
From inns of Molten Blue –

When “Landlords” turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove’s door –
When Butterflies — renounce their “drams”
I shall but drink the more!

Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats –
And Saints — to windows run –
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the — Sun –