“The Breakfast of Lampoons” was making fun of how people think other people are stupid. But it’s such a natural attitude for me, maybe everybody thought it was for real.
The first “Dickinson” poem was a fake. The original is better. It’s about how good poems last a long time and get reinterpreted from period to period.
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fake 883 The Poets write Lampoons— Themselves—in doubt— The Laughs they simulate— If very loud Inherited of Sons— And of their Friends— Disseminating their Irreverence— |
real 883 The Poets light but Lamps— Themselves—go out— The Wicks they stimulate— If vital Light Inhere as do the Suns— Each Age a Lens Disseminating their Circumference— |
The second one, “I would not paint—a picture—”, is real, but my analysis is all bogus, fabricated point by point. It is a joking poem, as you can tell from the lots of absurdities. Its meaning is a little controversial. Adrienne Rich thinks the poem is about being a female artist—and that fits, but it strikes me as a 20th century reconstruction (or re-imaging: “Each Age a Lens”). I read it as about being a poet, period. We can take the speaker as fictional. The argument of the poem is: “I don’t want to be an artist. It’s better to be the person appreciating the art. I mean, appreciation is already such a huge thing (‘The license to revere [is] a privilege so awful’), that it’s better to just wonder (‘wonder how the fingers feel’) about the talent itself.” Dickinson wrote about words in a letter: “I don’t know of anything so mighty.... Sometimes I write one, and look at his outlines till he glows as no sapphire.” The poem is giving us a hint of what it’s like to be her. I like how it mixes up the roles of reader and writer.
The “lip of Metal” is the cornet. It’s a lip because it “talks.” What I had a hard time figuring out was “The pier to my Pontoon—”. Looking at other Dickinson poems, it seems she usually uses “pier” to mean, literally, the support of a bridge, and metaphorically, the support of a belief. Since pontoons float, I guess she’s conflating the pontoon and the balloon (which represents appreciation), making the cornet (representing music) figuratively support them. It’s another absurdity; pontoons don’t literally need piers. Dickinson liked the word “dower.” You can take it to mean, to a first approximation, “give” (as a verb) or “gift” (as a noun, like here). Dickinson makes use of the echoes of the word’s precise definitions, but this is her primary meaning.
updated 28 June 2000