Sunset

A Poem by Emily Dickinson with an interpretation by Bill Reyer

My friend, Bill Reyer, celebrates National Poetry Month each year by sharing poems by Emily Dickinson with his interpretation.

April is National Poetry Month in the USA!

321 (Franklin)

Blazing in Gold and quenching in Purple

Leaping like Leopards to the Sky

Then at the feet of the old Horizon

Laying her Spotted Face to die

Stooping as low at the Otter's Window

Touching the roof and tinting the Barn

Kissing her Bonnet to the Meadow

And the Juggler of Day is gone

Emily Dickinson was a connoisseur of the sky! Some of her most beautiful poems show her rapt as she gazes upward! In this riddle-poem we see the poet contemplating the sunset. First Dickinson presents us with the colors she sees: the imperial Gold and Purple of line 1. Not content to simply describe how the sunset looks, the poet investigates what the sunset does. Her catalog strategy takes in elements of the natural and human worlds. The sunset first upward “leap[s] like Leopards in the dusk sky” (2), adding to the color as well as attributing energy to the sun’s leave-taking. Realizing that sundown transforms all of nature, Dickinson has it downward “Stoop as low at the Otter’s Window” (5). “The Otter’s window”! What a lovely way to envision a pond or river! The human realm is similarly represented in the poem through two additional architectural images: Sunset “Touch[es] the roof and tint[s] the Barn” (6). All is transformed through the agency of the setting sun! But this transformation is momentary. Dickinson imagines the close of sunset twice: In the fourth line her energetic leopard passively curls up “at the feet of the old Horizon” (3), to perish like some loyal pet. In the closing line of the lyric she calls the sunset “the Juggler of the Day [who soon] is gone! (8). Dickinson is perhaps using “Juggler” in its archaic sense of “wizard or sorcerer.” What a fine choice—as many of us have been spell-bound by the gorgeous and fleeting colors of the sunset!

April 3, 2021