A Little Madness in the Spring

Emily Dickinson’s “Experiment of Green”

Colorized version of the 1848 daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson via Wikimedia. Based on the public domain image in the Todd-Bingham Picture Collection and Family Papers, Yale University Manuscripts & Archives Digital Images Database, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

Imagine a world where inside every Crackerjack box was not a surprise toy for the kids but a short Emily Dickinson poem. And imagine, too, that children loved getting their Emily Dickinson prizes rather than a useless little toy.

“Mom! Dad! I have a new Emily poem to read! I’m gonna collect all 1,789!”

“But dear, you don’t understand a single one.” “I don’t care! I will someday!”

Nice dream.

Entering Dickinson’s Spring

It’s a little how I feel when I crack open my fat volume of Dickinson poems and randomly reach in for my expected surprise. Like a kid with a new toy, I immediately set to work every time.

Here’s a recent surprise, a Spring poem of Emily’s written in 1875 which makes it a later-life poem for her. It floated into my world at just the right time: April. There is so much to unravel in this short puzzler of only 34 simple words.

A little madness in the Spring

A little madness in the Spring Is wholesome even for the King, But God be with the Clown — Who ponders this tremendous scene — This whole Experiment of Green — As if it were his own —

(J1333, Fr1356)

I write from Portland, Oregon. Springtime in Portland is explosive, florally and arboreally. The greenery in this town never quite goes away during the winter months, given the area’s copious population of evergreen trees, reasonably mild winters, and mossy multi-green wetness. But then the early bloom starts in March and the first bloom-drops arrive later that month or early April, painting the sidewalks white, pink, and red.

Author’s photograph, Portland, Oregon (March 26, 2024)

Come May, the earth and air are vibrant with color, scent, and breeze. The roses are waiting for their own pageantry in June. The nearby forests waken and feel very much alive.

Whether in 21st century Portland or in Emily Dickinson’s 19th century Amherst, Massachusetts, if you open your Spring senses, you will become as pollen-drunk as a dancing bee. From limb to leaf, bee to bird, mossy hill to flowering mountain, there is a palpable exhalation in the air, a great melting and a kind of madness, as all of Spring’s participants busy themselves with renewal and growth, indoors and out, everywhere. Soon the deep green landscape will mature and settle down.

For Emily Dickinson, pondering this “tremendous scene” required simply looking out her bedroom window in Amherst, Massachusetts upon the green swath of shrubbery, grass, and trees between the Homestead, where she lived with her parents and sister in her father’s house, and The Evergreens next door, the house built by her father for her brother Austin and his wife Susan. Emily and Susan were close confidantes and, according to some Dickinson scholars, romantically involved before Susan’s marriage to Austin.

Susan Gilbert Dickinson is almost certainly the first person to ever read the poem I am writing about. Emily sent her a pencilled copy in an unaddressed envelope across the lawn in 1875. By this time Emily had long abandoned the idea of publication, but she had the delightful habit of mailing her poems to friends and family, sometimes embedded within the contents of a letter, sometimes separately. In the course of her life she shared about 500 letter-poems this way.

Thus, while Emily remained unpublished and unknown in her lifetime, a lucky few in her circle knew she had a poet’s soul. Of these, Susan knew best how prolific she was, since Emily sent her about 300 poems over the years (some of which seemed to substitute for love letters). Susan also believed that her friend was, despite her anonymity and poetic oddness, an important and original poet.

After Emily’s death in 1886, her sister Lavinia discovered a tranche of nearly 2,000 poems and took steps to get some of them out to the public. When a first volume of edited poems was published in 1891, Emily was posthumously embraced by an adoring public. Two more volumes were hastily arranged and published to tremendous acclaim.

It was the Springtime of Dickinson adoration, a season that has lasted over 130 years and is still blooming.

King and clown

On to the poem.

In six short lines, “A Little Madness in the Spring” presents two figures symbolically representing two modes of being: the King and the Clown. They are the top and bottom of the hierarchical order. One, the sovereign power and possessor of the land and all its natural parts and incidents, living in gilded affluence. “L’Etat c’est moi”: he is the law and the state itself. The other, a dispossessed and lowly figure, providing foolish entertainment, pathos, comic relief, and from time to time truths that no one else dares to speak. In such a short poem, these abstract figures are unadorned by description or detail but, like characters in a parable, they come with a message.

Into their opposing spheres comes the chaotic abundance of Spring, and they are at odds. How does each partake of the season’s madness? The King with caution, the Clown with God.

A little madness in the Spring Is wholesome even for the King,

The poem’s opening rhyme and meter (iambic tetrameter) create a brisk and friendly tone, almost like the start of a nursery rhyme (“The king was in the counting house/ counting out his money;/ The queen was in the parlour. . . etc.).

But this is not a children’s fairy tale. The madness of Spring is at large. Dickinson’s narrative voice tells us a little frolic is wholesome, even for a king. But only a little, even for the King. Why?

The king

Where polite society might permit just ‘a little madness in the Spring,’ Emily well understood there was a grander, greener, drunker madness to be had.

Who is the “king” who Dickinson invites to partake of a little Spring madness? He is the embodiment and enforcer of the established social order. Nonetheless, in Springtime even a king should sip from the Dionysian cup. A sip of madness is wholesome! And when it is thus royally licensed, when it is measured, contained, and perhaps ceremonial, it will not pose a threat to the social order.

The poem, though, is not about monarchical power. Dickinson, of course, lived in a country without a king — then or now! Rather, her “King” symbolizes authority in principle and, perhaps, the living principals of civic and family authority in Emily’s life. The tight bands of tradition and custom in 19th century New England constrained the lives of all women as well as any freethinking person, and Emily was both.

Consider the societal constraints that Emily had to resist for her own idiosyncratic self to survive. The central authorities in her life were her father and the Church, both bastions of a patriarchal order and social norms that demanded conformity and eschewed excess and ecstasy.

She revered her father, and he loved her back. But he was a very stern and serious man indeed — a lawyer, a state legislator, briefly a United States Congressman — who ran a strict Calvinist household. Yet he found a way to tolerate and accept his eldest daughter’s peculiarities and iconoclasm, her fierce independence and little madnesses, her quiet but consistent refusals to conform.

What did she refuse? She would not do womanly domestic chores (except bake), attend social events in town, or even attend church on Sunday. Eventually she would not leave the house at all or even come downstairs to greet visitors. Most boldly, she refused from an early age to accept Christ as her lord and savior, even though the rest of her family had, as had most of Amherst’s upright citizens.

Amherst knew Emily as a strange one, but it had no idea a true poetic mystic was in its midst.

Where polite Society might permit just “a little madness in the Spring,” Emily well understood there was a grander, greener, drunker madness to be had. She felt the piercing intensity of living in everything — in her love life (in joy, sorrow, and transgression), in good poetry (which, she wrote to her preceptor Thomas Higginson, feels like it “takes off the top of my head”), in the beauty and terror of Nature, and in Springtime’s miraculous fecundity. “I find ecstasy in living,” Higginson recalled her saying to him, “the mere sense of living is joy enough.”

Wholesome for the King to enjoy a little Spring madness. But for Amherst’s most unusual daughter and resident mystic, the wholesomeness of a little madness would never be “joy enough.”

The clown

“But God be with the Clown” is the fulcrum in this compact poem, interpretively and prosodically.

Enter the Clown.

But God be with the Clown — Who ponders this tremendous scene — This whole Experiment of Green — As if it were his own —

It appears that this poem is the only time Emily used the word “clown” in her poetry. What did a “clown” mean to a New England poet writing in the 1870’s? What did Emily envision?

The 1848 edition of Noah Webster’s Dictionary of the American Language (which Emily owned and used) defines the word “clown” to mean “Rustic; peasant; countryman; man of coarse manners.” This reflects the word’s earlier pejorative reference to an uncultured country bumpkin.

But the word had another layer of meaning as early as Shakespeare’s time, and Emily knew her Shakespeare well. There are clowns, fools, and jesters aplenty there. His “fellows of infinite jest” range from hapless figures of comic relief to wise truth-tellers hiding in fools’ garb. As Isaac Asimov said in his book on Shakespeare, “the secret of the fool is that he is no fool at all.”

Emily would have also known of clowns more directly, since traveling circuses had become popular in mid-19th century America, and the town of Amherst is known to have hosted several. In a letter to a friend in May 1866, she says, “Friday I tasted life. It was a vast morsel. A circus passed the house — still I feel the red in my mind though the drums are out.” If Emily didn’t attend the circus, she surely heard about them and their popular clowns from those who did.

In trying to understand what a “clown” meant to Dickinson, I will set aside the limited 1848 dictionary definition. Circus clowns were not the wise fools of Shakespeare, but nor were they the dull peasants of Webster’s dictionary. They were colorful, unrestrained, playful, and surprising, and with their physical and behavioral transgressions, they operated outside social norms. Her clown is closer to Shakespeare’s wise fool who knows more than he lets on than to Webster’s cloddish buffoon.

The Clown makes his entrance at the end of line 3: “But God be with the Clown -”. When the word “God” appears in a Dickinson poem, pay attention, even where, as here, the word appears to be a figure of speech and not the invocation of divinity. “But God be with the Clown” is the fulcrum in this compact poem, interpretively and prosodically.

The poem’s form

First, look at the poem’s architecture. Although there are no line breaks in this six-line poem, two tercets (that is, two three-line stanzas) is what the reader will most naturally hear. Why? Because the rhyme scheme carries over from one tercet to the next (A-A-B/ C-C-B) and the rhythm of the perfect iambic lines metrically scan as 4–4–3/ 4–4–3. From the perspective of rhyme and meter, the line “But God be with the Clown –” squarely belongs to the first stanza.

But from the perspective of substantive meaning, line 3 belongs with lines 4–6. And this changes the shape of the poem. With the Clown’s early appearance in stanza 1, Emily places him on the King’s own turf. Substance and form are now at odds. The poem — and the social order — are out of balance.

Instead of two symmetrical tercets, the poem can be read as having one royal couplet (a two-line stanza about the King) and one quatrain (a four-line stanza about the Clown), each with unlike rhyme and metrical schemes. I’ll insert a line break to demonstrate my point visually:

A little madness in the Spring Is wholesome even for the King,

But God be with the Clown — Who ponders this tremendous scene — This whole Experiment of Green — As if it were his own —

The structural asymmetry is simply weird. The stanzas are no longer equals. One is short, one is long. The first stanza no longer has a rhyme echoing in the second stanza. The metrics differ. It is as if the Clown has jumped the ramparts and seized one-third of the King’s domain!

There’s a little poetic madness afoot here.

God be with the clown

The Spring’s annual rebirth is a time of madness from king to clown.

Let’s look at the meaning of that pivotal third line. What does it mean to say “God be with the Clown”? Theory (1): It sounds like the idiomatic “God be with you,” a genteel form of “goodbye,” though emptied of meaning through polite repetition. Perhaps the narrative voice is simply wishing the Clown well. As in “Go with God.”

Or Theory (2): perhaps Emily meant “God be with the Clown” to be a warning, as in “God help the poor Clown.” After all, by embracing the green madness of Spring or, even worse, by exceeding what the King allows, he will soon need all the help he can get, especially God’s.

Or (3): perhaps the line is Emily’s way of suggesting that a kind God is offering absolution to the Clown for his folly in succumbing to the green experiment. Or for acting presumptuously in looking upon the “whole Experiment of Green — / As if it were his own.” Imagine the brazen folly of believing the “tremendous scene” within the King’s domain could be his own! Or worse, the blasphemy of treating God’s own creation as if it was his own!

Or finally (4): maybe “God be with the Clown” simply means “God is with the Clown” and supports him, that God would give his blessing to the Clown and anyone else who ponders the glory, madness, and divinity in Nature.

I know where I land in my interpretation: (4).

Theory (1) begone. I think the poem’s speaker is doing more here than using a well-worn phrase to wish the Clown well. Each word in this 34-word poem carries some part of the poem’s weight, and Dickinson is not likely to mention “God” in an off-handed, idiomatic way.

As for theory (2), I don’t read the line as the poet’s warning or reproach to the Clown for over-indulging in Spring or presuming to possess the “tremendous scene.” Emily’s sensibilities would have aligned her with the Clown, a figure of humanity unrecognized and dispossessed just as she was.

“Who are You?/ I am Nobody,” she wrote in a line that was unknown to the world until long after she was gone. She lived her life in a house and on land owned by her father which, upon his death, passed to her brother. She possessed nothing but her own extraordinary interior life.

Nor do I think, per theory (3), that Emily would believe the Clown was in need of God’s kindness, forgiveness, or absolution. Emily spent her life looking with awe upon the “tremendous scene” out her window in every season, and she loved and wrote about the “Experiment in Green” that was Spring. Where’s the error in that, where’s the sin?

In any event a “kind” God is not Emily Dickinson’s God. Her God offered no guarantee of benevolence, but only distance and indifference and even abdication. What else to make of such poems as “Those — dying, then” in which the dying go to sit at the right hand of God and find that “The hand is amputated now/ And God cannot be found — .” Emily quarreled with her God, and she had moments of darkness when belief abandoned her: “Better an ignis fatuus/ Than no illum at all — ”.

In my view, the phrase “God be with the Clown” embodies Emily’s hope for the choice God would make toward someone, even a clown, who ponders “this whole Experiment of Green” and drinks up the full madness of Spring. A Calvinist God selects some and passes over others, and one can always hope and even believe that such a God would select the Clown. Emily’s instinct was of generosity and human connection with all the nobodies in society (“are you — Nobody — too? . . / they’d banish us — you know!”). She would ask God to favor the Clown, if God would only listen.

What about the Clown looking upon the King’s domain and God’s creation “as if it was his own”? This is a wonderfully ambiguous phrase. I don’t read it as a reproach for foolish effrontery in thinking a lowly clown might actually own the landscape. Emily’s own vantage point for “pondering the whole the Experiment in Green” was to look out her bedroom window onto the deepening greenery of her father’s property and the farmer’s burgeoning fields across Main Street and the distant purple hills, and she owned none of it. But legal possession of the land does not entitle one to own the “tremendous scene” that sits upon it. The land was not her own, but her pondering mind was. In the clutch of the sublime, she claimed the scene inwardly and turned it into poetry.

Why shouldn’t a clown?

Emily’s nature

The land was not her own, but her pondering mind was.

It’s worth pondering what “this whole Experiment in Green” (line 5) means, particularly in light of word choices that we know Emily rejected. In writing out her poems, Emily often struck words and wrote others in the margins, thus creating a future cottage industry of Dickinson scholarship. As the great Dickinson editor Ralph Franklin noted, the 1875 worksheet for this poem “revealed a determined effort” to find the phrase she wanted in line 5.

In one version, rather than “this whole Experiment in Green,” she wrote “this sudden legacy of Green.” She tried numerous words in place of “sudden” such as “fleet” and “sweet.” In the version she sent to Susan, “sudden” becomes “whole,” which teasingly looks back at the King’s “wholesome” little madness in line 2. And “legacy,” perhaps sounding too much like a word of ownership, gives way to other ideas. Before “Experiment of Green” she considered some startling options: “this whole Apocalypse of Green” is dark and dangerous. Less so but still powerful is “this whole Astonishment of Green” or “this wild Experiment of Green.”

These self-edits reveal something important about Emily’s own relationship to Nature.

The natural world was one of her primary preoccupations in her poetry and daily life. Her gardening was advanced and locally known and admired, and she maintained notebooks of pressed flowers with their Linnaean classifications. (She also studied and had significant knowledge of astronomy, chemistry, and geology, all of which find their way into her verse.)

But her relationship to Nature was, first and foremost, deeply spiritual, not merely scientific or scenic. In Nature she experienced what other spiritual, poetical, and philosophical thinkers before her experienced: the sacrality of creation, the immanence of the divine. The Tang dynasty landscape poets, the Japanese Haiku masters, the Salmon People in the Pacific Northwest, the English and German Romantic poets, Christian poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, the American Transcendentalists: all radically different cultures at different times pursuant to radically different traditions encountered Nature as a place where reality is at its deepest, most mysterious, and most sacred.

Closest in time and geography to Emily was the American Transcendental movement, associated most prominently with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Emily knew their work. She was delighted by Emerson’s poetry (he visited the Dickinson home, though she declined to meet him) and she owned and read Thoreau’s work and referred to it in her private correspondence.

But she was not an adherent of American Transcendentalism (nor of any social or literary movement, for that matter). She was, at most, a fellow traveler. Her manner of thought and spirituality aligned with certain of its key strands: individualism over institutional authority, the privacy of one’s own spirituality, and a love of beauty and the sublime.

Yet she sharply deviated from the Transcendentalist’s sunlit view of Nature as the manifestation of a benevolent divinity, redemptive of human suffering and shortcoming.

Her view of Nature was darker, more complex. Nature held Beauty and Terror in equal measure. It was capricious, it could be sublime, or it could leave you freezing outside the door. Little birds could do awful things to worms before flying off to “the banks of noon.” The Frost “beheads” the happy flowers at play.

So when she welcomes the Clown to the full mad pageantry of Spring, there are two sides to it. Behind the joyous newborn quality of the season, there is the astonishing, wild, apocalyptic “Experiment of Green” to be experienced.

And God be with the one who ponders and embraces it not wholesomely like a king but wholly like a clown.

A little madness in the Spring Is wholesome even for the King, But God be with the Clown — Who ponders this tremendous scene — This whole Experiment of Green — As if it were his own —

Author’s photograph, Portland Oregon in late February (!)