Update Note - The version sent earlier today cut off the ending of the Reflection. Below is today's full Reflection.
A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period —
When March is scarcely here
A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.
It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.
Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay —
A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.
My great-grandfather played outside one day with his best friend Gilbert, the nephew of Emily Dickinson, who wrote the above poem. Carefree and joyfully immersed in their play, they leapt into mud puddles and returned home, soaked but elated. The next day, they both came down with Typhoid, contracted, presumably, from the infested puddle. Emily Dickinson’s nephew later died, while my great-grandfather survived. Three years later, Emily Dickinson died too.
Frequently though, she wrote to my great-grandfather, sending him poems and reflections on what life might have been had Gilbert survived. In reading Dickinson’s poetry, I find her work is often about startling us into presence.
In this poem, her words remind us that the experience and witness of the “early light of spring” is a hope, a joy, a revelation that can’t be explained in scientific terms—we must feel it, allowing its beauty to “speak” to us from a soul level.
This week, we surpassed 500,000 COVID-related deaths, a grim milestone to be sure. It’s difficult to put words behind the depth of this loss or imagine the millions of lives left behind to mourn. In a recent conversation with a St. Mark’s parent who has lost a total of six relatives to COVID-19, he described his current mindset as trying to wake up each day and be present: “I look forward to the ways in which I can be transformed. . .everyday is a gift to be discovered.”
Dickinson’s poem reflects a similar perspective, born potentially from the same struggles with loss. Though I have no way of knowing whether this poem was written before or after Gilbert’s death, it reminds us that, given the fleeting, fast-paced nature of life, bearing witness to transformative moments of beauty, which, perhaps, can only be witnessed in moments of solitude and stillness, is a life-giving sacrament.
Perhaps it is no accident that Dickinson imagines this special light to be present in early spring, a time of transition between the dark days of winter and the resplendent light of spring. I would offer Lent as an auspicious occasion to prepare oneself for such an experience. As we reflect on the losses and grief of this past year, we can open ourselves to this healing light Dickinson so brilliantly describes in her poem.
--The Rev. Katie Solter
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