Cryptopoetry: My Cocoon Tightens- Colors Tease

 My latest adventure in literature is reading the collected works of Emily Dickinson at breakneck speed.  Probably not the best idea, because these poems beg to be digested slowly.  Many stanzas in the same poem seem unrelated to each other, yet the reader knows they are connected in the subtlest ways possible.  Her poems aren't the most fluent however, so I find myself only scanning them for nuggets of beauty and not giving them the attention they fully deserve.  Part of the reason is that she is so difficult to interpret that an ugly poem on the surface doesn't seem worthy of being given the attention required.  Though if you analyze her poetry as a whole, one of the main themes she's exploring is the ability to look past appearances and see the true meaning of things. 

That is the main theme of poem 1099: My Cocoon Tightens- Colors Tease- in my opinion, one of her best.  Rarely does a poet explicitly confront what they are trying to do in their poetry, but Dickinson does so here: 

 

 

My Cocoon tightens — Colors tease — 

I'm feeling for the Air — 

A dim capacity for Wings 

Demeans the Dress I wear — 

 

A power of Butterfly must be — 

The Aptitude to fly 

Meadows of Majesty implies 

And easy Sweeps of Sky — 

 

So I must baffle at the Hint 

And cipher at the Sign 

And make much blunder, if at last 

I take the clue divine — 

 

It's clear to me that the first two stanzas are about transformation, about seeing past the original appearances of color that a caterpillar would see, then seeing a whole new world once the butterfly it becomes is able to fly.  But like many of her other poems, this one is open to interpretation.  In the third stanza, I think she is lighting on the fact she knows her poetry is cryptic, using the butterfly symbolically to reveal the poet she's matured into.  Baffling at the hints, ciphering at the signs, making blunders [in writing], all point to her awareness of hiding meaning between the lines of her poetry, not explicitly conjuring them up in the words.  The clue divine is the ultimate message she is trying to reveal with her words, angelically placed in a sort of "heaven" between the words, a higher realm we can't quite see.  Perhaps she's expressing how the appearance of her poetry only runs skin deep, that the real beauty it exudes lies beneath the surface, like her physical appearance and the fact that she is a woman writing it, which at the time was considered a man's profession. 

This poem is Dickinson at her cryptic best, teasing us with confounding imagery, oddly placing dashes that interrupt our train of thought, catching us off guard in the last stanza, which is so unlike the first that no coherence can be seen at first.  More importantly, it's about her general appeal as a poet.  She's a thinker's poet, not a romantic.  The Romantics were too busy musing on nature and emotions to confront a darker wisdom in the text, which is ultimately the "divine" purpose her poem seeks to find.