can anyone help me in understanding emily dickinsons poem A light exists in spring?

Answer 1

My Running Commentary:


- First you need to know the kind of themes she dwelt on: love, marriage, nature, death, poetic expression, individualism, loneliness etc. In most cases some of these occured together in one poem.

812
A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period—
When March is scarcely here

- She is talking about natural light in spring season. That light does not appear all year long but only when March is about.

A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.

- The light casts rays yonder (abroad) on lonely fields (solitary suggests a sense of being alone). Those are fields cannot be explained in human scientific terms. Only nature understands them. Try to imagine someone with torchlight at night seeing distant trees or better, someone seeing light rays coming from far off in the horizon.

It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.

-Note that "it" refers to nature's rays that casts light upon the lawn (metaphorical!) and the distant trees. In other words, it is nature that takes care of (waits) the body politic. Its natural rays shedding light on inner feelings (distant trees on the slope) inner secret passions. It is as if Nature almost talks to/with you.

Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay—

- Still on the image of light. As ithe rays reveal (make visible) the distant horizon making everything appear bright as in the middle of a day, without any human design, without sound, the light recedes, vanishes quietly and we stay on as if nothing wonderful and unique had happened.

A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.

- But the sense of loss is felt all over our bodies/surroundings. Some sudden sense of loss, some sudden sacred change.
Emily deploys a lot of complex images to convey the sense of loss, sense of doom that only nature understands. The light is nature's, metaphor that siggests that no one, not even man-made inventions could ever detect the dark interior chambers of her Being - body and soul! The last stanza conveys the sense of hopelessness that characterizes most of her poems.

Try to approach it along those lines I have suggested in my commentary
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Additional details:
Though Dickinson's insights are profound, they are limited in topic. Northrup Frye points out, "It would be hard to name another poet in the history of the English language with so little interest in social or political events." She lived through the Civil War, yet her poems contain no clear references to that national horror. Richard Howard comments wryly, "... there was only one event, herself."

The idea of identity or, alternately, the failure of identity runs through her poetry. One form it takes is the achievement of status or the lack of status; repeatedly she uses terms like "queen," "royal," "imperial," and "lowly." Status can be achieved through crucial experiences, like love, marriage, death, poetic expression. She insisted on the need and the right of the individual to maintain integrity; one way of doing this was to exercise inflexible principle in selecting.



Good luck

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