1. There's a bucolic innocence here, a sense of childhood recovered. Indeed, "Nature" is "impatient of no Child/The feeblest — or the waywardest". Is the singer a wayward child? Does she already in her naïve youth have a sense of straying from the "proper" path? Is the singer, later, "The most unworthy Flower"? What is the "timid prayer" this waywardest child, this unworthy flower offers? We don't know. Nature "Wills Silence — Everywhere", but the seed has been planted

2. And then, "like a Bugle", an ominous revelation approaches, "a green chill", "an emerald ghost". It passes, but the singer is shaken. "How much can come/And much can go,/And yet abide the World!" The world can be turned upside down in an instant, yet even when all that seemed certain is thrown into doubt, it is still possible to survive

3. "Why — do they shut Me out of Heaven?/Did I sing — too Loud?" Was there too *much* of me? Was I *inconvenient*? There is a very definite rage here, but at times it seems directed back at the singer in a wave of self-loathing. "I can sing a little Minor,/Timid as a bird!" (I can remake myself, I can be different, I can be what you want and expect me to be.) The singer has marked herself off; she very explicitly *isn't* one of "the Gentlemen/In the 'White Robes'", but she still wants to be accepted among their company

4. The singer sits by a dying friend. She can't turn back the clock, can't heal her friend's body, can only offer "the least fan/Stirred by a friend's Hand". The world so often abandons trans women; at least we ourselves can stick together and support one another. "Mine be the Ministry/When thy Thirst comes"

5. The singer stands, holding a picture of herself before transition. "Heart, we will forget him". "He" may have given "warmth" and "light", but there is too much pain bound to these years of dysphoria for these memories to be worth carrying forward. "Haste!", she urges, "Haste! lest while you're lagging,/I may remember him!" We don't see what she does with the photo

6. Where before the singer barred the door against an "emerald ghost", here she urges March (a month of "green chill[s]" if ever there was one) to "Come in". She's "glad" to see March, had "hoped" for this turn. She's embracing and celebrating her transness, and it fills her with such joy that "trifles look so trivial" and "Blame is just as dear as Praise"

7. It isn't all euphoria. The singer struggles with insomnia and restless nights: "Sleep is supposed to be/.../The shutting of the eye." Supposed to be. For her, it isn't. And waking is little better. "Morn is supposed to be/.../The breaking of the day./Morning has not occurred!" The singer wanders in a dissociative fog, exhausted but not asleep, walking but not awake. She imagines a true awakening, one that clears the fog in a grand, sweeping heraldic moment. "_That_ is the break of day"

8. There is a fragility to trans existence. "I always feel a doubt/If Blossoms can be born again/When once the Art is out" Each time you see a trans friend could be the last, whether thru suicide or murder. "I always had a fear/I did not tell, it was their last Experiment/Last Year." It's a little embarrassing tho, right? Trans folks are resilient, and almost always we're totally fine — almost every trans person survives almost every day almost always. It feels paranoid, pessimistic, alarmist to even voice these fears. And yet they come: When it is May, if May return,/Has nobody a pang/That on a Face so Beautiful/We might not look again?" This muddled mix of fear and embarrassment extends to the singer herself: "One does not know/What Party — One may be/Tomorrow, but if I _am_ there,/I take back all I say"

9. Sometimes there's no reprieve from the mental cacophony. Obsessive thoughts intrude, visions of her own death, "beating — beating — beating — till I thought/My Mind was going numb" (and wouldn't numbness be a relief, in the end?) Even post-transition, there are still bad days

10. Trans people make weird art sometimes. And even in its strangeness and incomprehensibility, it can be kind of glorious; it can reach down and resonate with some deep part of you you neither knew about nor fully understand. And there's a lot to be said for that

11. The singer, somehow ("Pray do not ask me how!"), has gained admittance to Heaven, tho now that she has it, she's not sure she wants it: "How dim it sounds!/And yet it will be done" — desire doesn't seem to play much of a role here. The afterlife is mysterious ("Perhaps you're going too!/Who knows?"), but at least holds out the possibility of seeing lost friends again. Or, well, that's the messaging. The singer doesn't buy it. In fact, she goes further: "I'm glad I don't believe it/For it would stop my breath —/And I'd like to look a little more/At such a curious Earth." She wants to live, but she also knows that the beatific promise of Heaven as it is depicted, while perhaps a comfort to the friend to whom she ministered in the fourth song, would prove too strong a temptation for her to resist given the aching pains that attend a mortal life

12. There is something exhausting about the realization that after each day is another day, unspooling in an endless dizzying stream into the future with no break or pause. Living while trans is this today, then again tomorrow, and another time the day after that. "Since then — 'tis centuries — but/Each feels shorter than the Day/I first surmised the Horses' Heads/Were towards Eternity". And yet. "I would not stop for Death." We live on, regardless. Death has to stop for *us*

(for the textual citations, i'm mostly using Dickinson's actual punctuation/capitalization as opposed to Copland's, but there are a couple places where Copland was working from older erroneous editions in ways that have more resonance with this specific reading than the corrected versions, and in those cases, I went with the Copland, since this is really about the song cycle, not Dickinson's poems qua. so the quoted text is a bit of a mish-mosh in places, but such is life)

#trans #DMAB #Copland #AaronCopland #TwelvePoemsOfEmilyDickinson #Dickinson #EmilyDickinson #transfeminine #QueerReadings #StagingConcepts