The cricket sang
The cricket sang,
And set the sun,
And workmen finished, one by one,
Their seam the day upon.
The low grass loaded with the dew,
The twilight stood as strangers do
With hat in hand, polite and new,
To stay as if, or go.
A vastness, as a neighbor, came,--
A wisdom without face or name,
A peace, as hemispheres at home,--
And so the night became.
Commentary
Not cricket? You decide…
One of Dickinson’s many impressive poetic talents is the ability to write in a wonderfully and deliberately quirky style, and yet not have that quirkiness become the focus of the poem, or overshadow its more ‘poetic’ aspects. Today’s poem doesn’t quite succeed in that particular regard - the convoluted syntax is obtrusive, and forces several readings of the poem, but that is not necessarily a bad thing, and indeed, the poem itself is quite beautiful, packing several layers of imagery into a few precisely-chosen words.
The images themselves are original and evocative (and sometimes even both <g>) - the cricket singing the sun into setting (compare Thomas’s “wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight”), the workmen seaming1 up the day, the startlingly apt comparison in the second verse, and the unoriginal but very well executed last verse.
Note, too, the deceptively regular-seeming verse, both in terms of metrical structure and rhyme. Particularly impressive is how well the short first verse blends into the longer (by a whole line2) second and third verses, though the varying rhyme scheme is handled perfectly too.
Links
Set to music by Ernst Bacon:
[broken link] http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/d/dickinson/cricket.html
Biography:
Poem #92
Dickinson poems on Minstrels:
Poem #92, "There's a certain Slant of light"
Poem #174, "A Route of Evanescence"
Poem #341, "The Grass so little has to do -"
Poem #458, "The Chariot"
Poem #529, "If you were coming in the fall"
Poem #580, "Split the Lark"
Poem #687, "Success is counted sweetest"
Poem #711, "I'm Nobody! Who are you?"
Poem #829, "It dropped so low in my regard"
Poem #871, "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain"
Poem #891, "A Doubt If It Be Us"
And the cricket theme:
Poem #946, Sir Henry Newbolt, "Vitai Lampada"
Poem #947, John Kendal, "Ballad of a Homeless Bat"
Poem #948, Julia A. Moore, "Grand Rapids Cricket Club"
Poem #949, Andrew Lang, "Brahma"
— Martin
-
though I am unable to decide quite what Dickinson intended here - there is the obvious sense of stitching, but the OED also gives “Agric. A furrow, (seed) drill.”, and the more I think about it, the more appropriate a usage it seems in context. ↩
-
if you count lines one and two as a single, broken line ↩