-like a Frog-

Emily Dickinson might be the bane of my existence. In my mind – wrecked with sleep deprivation and overburdened with many concepts waiting to be processed – she has taken on the form of a fiend who wishes to drive English students mad. Half way through a simple – if a little nonsensical – poem, she adds an image or word entirely foreign to her subject. Before I can recover from the shock, the poem is over and I am left pondering how to reconcile the twist in her thoughts with my own. She has leaped away from me, across a chasm to some higher meaning. She leaves me few stepping-stones to build a bridge to follow her. I too must make the dizzying leap. Mustn't I? At the first reading, I think maybe she’s just crazy. Maybe she is laughing because I try to follow, groping for her meaning. She watches me perform mental acrobatics to give deep, intentional meaning to her every word and dash. She is pleased at having fooled me, kept me up late into the night. When the panic has subsided and I can read her poem again, the meaning is clear. I can easily bend my mind to catch her meaning and step neatly over the crack between her words and my expectations. A second reading (or third or forth) does not exclude the possibility that she was a crazy mental sadist. But now that I am of the elite who can understand her, I am far more likely to consider her benignly clever in frustrating my expectations to prove her point. I suspect she is still laughing at me, but after a few mores readings, I can usually laugh with her.