HumaneMedicine

From and Ample Nation

Selected Emily Dickinson Poems

I skimmed The Compete Poems of ED -- T. Johnson edition -- and these ones resonated with me.  Undoubtedly, you will bond with others if you drink deep from her poetic spring.  Most or all of these can be found at the Bartleby.com Dickinson Collection.  If you study her further you will resonate with other of her poems which I have not selected.  Dickinson herself tells us: "The Soul selects her own Society/ Then shuts the Door --

Poem #    First Line

26            It's all I have to bring today   
67            Success is counted sweetest
108          Surgeons must be very careful
175          I have never seen "Volcanoes" -
254          Hope is a thing with feathers
255          To die -- just takes a little while -
258          There's a certain Slant of Light
280          I felt a funeral in my Brain
288          I'm Nobody!  Who are You!
294          The Doomed -regard the Sunrise
303          The Soul selects her own Society

328          A Bird came down the walk
341          After great pain, a formal feeling comes -
361          What I can do - I will -
404          How many Flowers fail in Wood -
448          This was a Poet -- It is That
449          I died for beauty -- but was scarce
465          I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died --
547          I've seen a dying Eye --
556          The Brain, within its Groove
568          We learned the Whole of Love
632          The Brain -- is wider than the Sky --
650          Pain -- has an Element of Blank --
656          The name-- of it -- is "Autumn" --
712          Because I could not stop for Death --

743          The Birds reported from the South --
757          The Mountains -- grow unnoticed --
793          Grief is a Mouse --
812          A Light exists in Spring
827          The only News I know
917          Love -- is anterior to Life --
937          I felt a Cleaving in my Mind --
967          Pain -- expands the Time --
986          A narrow Fellow in the Grass
1100        The last Night that She lived

1129        Tell all the Truth but  tell it slant --
1263        There is no Frigate like a Book
1287        In this short Life
1333        A little Madness in the Spring
1383        Long Year's apart -- can make no
1540        As imperceptibly as Grief
1551        These -- dying then
1553        Bliss is the plaything of the child --
1579        It would not know if it were spurned,
1588        This Me -- that walks and works -- must die,
1685        The butterfly obtains
1696        These are the days that Reindeer love

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Capturing The Brief Life And Death Of An Infant

On Dec. 1, 2009 Joanna Blum gave birth to Baruch Levi in Toronto. He weighed 2 pounds, 11 ounces and  lived about 10 minutes. Photographer Ashley Hutcheson, was there to document his birth.

Blum and Hutcheson talk about their extraordinary meeting to record the life and passing of Baruch Levi Blum.

This remarkable piece was aired on NPR on December 30, 2009.  It relates to Deborah Alecson's fine book, "Lost Lullaby," which we will discuss on January 25th.

Painting Amy's Nails

Peggy Rambach is an author and a poet who has taught writing to graduates, undergraduates, non-native speakers, adults, life-long learners, and 5th through 12th graders. She is a resident teaching/artist in healthcare as part of the Vermont Arts Exchange’s Arts and Healing Initiative.  

We will read "Painting Amy's Nails" as an introduction to a memoir writing exercise.  Most of us have stories we could tell.  After you read Peggy's story about her sister, Amy, think about a personal story that needs to be told.  Peggy will help us to explore this idea.

Painting Amy's Nails  Download Painting Amy's Nails .

George S. Bascom, Unsung Hero

George Bascom was a surgeon and a poet who practiced in Manhattan, Kansas.  Some of us are lucky enough to have been exposed to his poetry and his short stories.  I think many of you will appreciate his poems as well.  The two best collections are "Medicine Circle" and "Faint Echoes."  Both, published in 1993, are sadly out of print.  A few of the best poems can be found in the PDF documents below.

Bascom Bio: Download Dr. Bascom Biography

Poems from Medicine Circle:  Download Medicine Circle

Poems from Faint Echoes: Download Faint Echoes

This short verse, epitomizes for me the special genius of Geroge Bascom:

Seminar at Breckenridge

The peaks are frozen gold
above the gritty streets. Boots
grate briskly on the way
to lectures about lungs.
The holy heights
cry down to use, but inside under tinted glass
we file like mourners
to the conference room.

Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886)

Born in Amherst, MA, Emily Dickinson is a major star of the poetic pantheon.  She is a charter member in the Academy of the Immortals.  There are many speculative biographies which try to parse her personhood -- but the important thing is her legacy -- of poems.

Dickinson defined poetry this way: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?"

Strangely, and wonderfully, we live in the Age of Project Gutenberg.  Many of E.D.'s  poems are available on P.G. and other online sites.  If you are particularly taken with her, the best collection is The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson edited by Thomas H. Johnson.  The editors of many of the other Dickinson collections change her quirky punctuation and capitalizations, and, imho, detract from the essence of the poems.

Perhaps, the best introduction to her poems was penned by E.D. ~ 1862:

This is my letter to the World,
That never wrote to me, --
The simple News that Nature told --
With tender Majesty

Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see --
For love of her -- Sweet -- countrymen --
Judge tenderly -- of Me

There are many editions you could get, however, I'd recommend "The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson edited by T.H. Johnson (1775 poems).

Here are some online resources:

Project Gutenberg 
Bartleby.com 

Please go to "From an Ample Nation" for a few poems we may consider.

The Emily Dickinson Museum is around an hour from Williamstown.

The Emily Dickinson Electronic Archives are worth perusing.

Facsimilie and Poem

Wild Nights -- Wild Nights!   
Were I with thee,   
Wild Nights should be   
Our luxury!   
 
Futile -- the winds --           
To a Heart in port —   
Done with the ompass --   
Done with the Chart!
 
Rowing in Eden --   
Ah! the sea!           
Might I but moor -- Tonight --   
In Thee!

See Selected Emily Dickinson Poems.

For care givers, this is ineffably beautiful and True!

If I can stop one Heart from breaking   
I shall not live in vain   
If I can ease one Life the Aching   
Or cool one Pain

Or help one fainting Robin        
Unto his Nest again   
I shall not live in Vain

Doctor, please...

Sarah Lee, a senior at Stanford University, is studying Human Biology, with a focus on Women's Health.  She is particularly interested in establishing women's reproductive rights and fighting sexual violence, both in the United States and abroad. After graduating from Stanford, she would like to pursue degrees in medicine and public health and practice primary care, catering to women and children in urban areas. Hailing from the great city of Seattle, she love to drink coffee, sing in the rain and explore nature through hiking, running, and backpacking.

Her poem, "Doctor, please..." begins:

Doctor, I know that you are busy –

Hospital traffic, buzzing, weaving in and out,

But I’m your patient and I’ve been patient. 

B r e a t h e      for a minute to feel what I’m all about.

Read more:  Download Doctor please

Pathography: Patient Narratives of Illness

by Anne H. Hawkins
West J Med. 1999 August; 171(2): 127-129

Article is available as full text online and also as a pdf: Download Pathography - AHH

Introduction

In ever greater numbers, people are writing autobiographical accounts of their experience of illness and treatment, narratives that are often called pathographies or autopathographies.  Increasingly patients are turning to these narratives for anecdotal information about particular illnesses and their treatments, conventional and alternative. Hence the remarkable popularity of such books, many of them bestsellers.
Pathographies not only articulate the hopes, fears, and anxieties so common to sickness, but they also serve as guidebooks to the medical experience itself, shaping a reader's expectations about the course of an illness and its treatment. Pathographies are a veritable gold mine of patient attitudes and assumptions regarding all aspects of illness. These narratives can be especially useful to physicians at a time when they are given less and less time to get to know their patients but are still expected to be aware of their patients' wishes, needs, and fears.

There are some 60 pathographies now in print about breast cancer alone. They describe orthodox treatments from lumpectomy to bone marrow transplant and alternative treatments from orthomolecular therapy to psychic healing. Prostate cancer pathographies are on the increase. In many, authors detail the way they aggressively seek out "the best" urologist and "the best" cancer center. Pathographies about HIV and AIDS are plentiful: an Online Computer Library Center search reveals 31 were in print in 1992, and the number had increased to 74 by 1997.

I have been working on a Pathography Blog for a year or so.  If you are interested in a particular illness narrative you may find it there..

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, Keats

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,   
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;   
Round many western islands have I been   
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.   
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told           
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;   
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene   
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:   
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies   
When a new planet swims into his ken;          
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes   
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men   
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise— 
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Here is a fine reading of this poem. ..                                                                                  

Ithaka by C. Cavafy

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
 
Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.
 
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
 
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
 
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

There are a number of fine recordings of Cavafy's Ithaka on the web.  Here is one by Sean Connery.  .

The Poetry Project

It is said that poetry is the best medicine for the soul.  From our earliest awakenings as a sentient species music and poetry have been a balm. entertainment and a source of enlightenment.  There is a great beauty in the images that poems project on the screen of our consciousness.  It would be a  shame if we did not spend a part of every session communing with some of the immortal bards: Homer, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Matsou Basho, Rabindranath Tagore, Dante, William Carlos Williams, a long line of dead men (and women) and the beat goes on.

We will begin each session with some poems presented by your instructors and class registrants.  You are encouraged, but not mandated, to memorize the poems, and if you wish you can create a multimedia presentation about your poem(s).

Robert Frost, who is buried a short drive from here in Bennington, had this to day about the poet's craft:

'Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but…differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields. No acquirement is on assignment, or even self-assignment. Knowledge of the second kind is much more available in the wild free ways of wit and art.

If you wish to pursue this theme a bit further here are some resources:

Pass on a Poem is

NY Times essay On Memorizing Poetry:  Got Poetry 

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry--
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll--
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human soul.

                              Emily Dickinson

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