Did anyone else grow up with this? We used to have Gyo Fujikawa’s illustrated poetry books which are gorgeous and sweet. When I was a kid I memorized Owl and the Pussycat. I memorized Emily Dickinson:
I never saw a Moor-
I never saw the Sea-
Yet know I how the Heather looks
And what a wave must be.
Do you see the issue? This version cuts the second verse:
I never spoke with God
Nor visited in Heaven-
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if a chart were given-
This poem is about God. If you are familiar with Emily Dickinson, this will not surprise you. If you me at age eight, this would’ve freaked you the hell out. I grew up with a lot of pragmatic religious relativism, which I’m grateful for. But as a child, I got cramps when I sneezed in public because someone might say “Bless You.” Faith made me nervous. This gave me mixed feelings about Emily Dickinson: Loved her poesies and her little breathing verses, all little puzzles and clues. But she worried me, with the Christian thing.
And I don’t know how I accepted the first stanza of Certainty without the second. Why have faith in heather? Heather was a friend of my sister’s. I might take on faith that it’s a flower, but with no moors on my continent, I can’t presume to yet-know-I how it looks. Dickinson’s allegory sounded presumptious, or even dishonest. Really, Emily? YOU know how heather looks? You lived in Massachusettes.
I eventually read Wuthering heights: “I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills” (I also grew to my own faith in God, which is not the point, I just disclose it in fairness). Okay, Emily Dickinson knew about the moors because she read Bronte. Yes, good literature can do this: Bronte can describe heather so well you can smell it (or Zilpha Keatley Snyder can show you what it feels like to pit peaches). Is that what faith in God is, though? If it were that simple, a good book (or The Good Book) reveal heaven to all of us, which isn’t the way it works. Faith is a leap, a sixth-sensing a pattern and purpose beyond the empircally-observable world. It’s a mystery, a condition of the soul as much as an understanding of the mind and senses.
A skeptic can demand proof from a person of faith, and they’ll point to the evidence of creation and the universe, but a skeptic won’t see God there. It’s like demanding someone to prove that their mother really loves them (after all, any acts of love could be in fact be an elaborate and self-interesed ruse). At some point, we all take some things on faith.
But around here, none of us have seen a moor. So, risking both literary and religious sacrilege, I don’t think I agree with Emily D. on her poem here (still love the poetry, though). Yes, you can be Certain of God as if a chart were given. No, you are not going to explain this to me by saying you just know how the heather looks. Does it really work that way?
