Today’s Poem: February

Dusting off Helen Hunt Jackson

Frederick John Mulhaupt, February Morning, undated but probably c. 1925 (Wikimedia Commons)

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February

by Helen Hunt Jackson

Still lie the sheltering snows, undimmed and white; 
And reigns the winter’s pregnant silence still; 
No sign of spring, save that the catkins fill, 
And willow stems grow daily red and bright. 
These are days when ancients held a rite 
Of expiation for the old year’s ill, 
And prayer to purify the new year’s will: 
Fit days, ere yet the spring rains blur the sight, 
Ere yet the bounding blood grows hot with haste, 
And dreaming thoughts grow heavy with a greed 
The ardent summer’s joy to have and taste; 
Fit days, to give to last year’s losses heed, 
To reckon clear the new life’s sterner need; 
Fit days, for Feast of Expiation placed! 
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Although she was exactly Emily Dickinson’s age and had passed some years of her childhood in Amherst, Massachusetts, it wasn’t until the 1860s, when she herself had become established as a novelist and poet, that Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885) entered Dickinson’s circle of acquaintance. In their last decade, as both women approached, then passed, their mutual half-century mark, Jackson not only wrote to Dickinson, but was also one of the shrinking number of people the latter poet would consent to see in person.

Now, of course, it’s Dickinson’s name we know, Dickinson we recognize as the great poet of her age — a great poet in all the ages that make up our tradition. But in the 1870s and 1880s, the years of their friendship and correspondence as well as the waning years of their lives, Jackson, not Dickinson, was the figure of literary glamor.

Helen Hunt Jackson was also one of the believers in Dickinson’s greatness. A letter to Dickinson in March of 1876 expresses, touchingly, a wish that “someday I shall find you in a spot where we can know each other,” then chides the Amherst poet for hiding herself and her art away. “You are a great poet — and it is a wrong to the day you live in, that you will not sing aloud.”

Jackson’s pressure, not always subtle, to “sing aloud” by having her poems published, caused Dickinson some consternation. “Mrs. Jackson — of Colorado — was with me a few moments this week,” she wrote to their mutual friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, explaining that Jackson had invited her to submit work to a forthcoming anthology. “I said I was incapable, and she seemed not to believe me . . . .”

Dickinson implored Higginson to intercede; if he said he thought her “unfit,” Mrs. Jackson would believe him, and there would be no more awkwardness between them, or any danger of offending. “I would regret to estrange her,” Dickinson wrote.

This small triangulation offers a revelatory glimpse of the personalities involved. Jackson herself was keenly aware of the day she lived in, and of a mandate to prophesy to it. As a historian and novelist, she embraced human-rights activism after the abolitionist style of fellow New Englander Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896). Her 1884 novel, Ramona, confronts the mistreatment of native peoples in much the same vein as Stowe’s 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin and makes tragic (not to say melodramatic) fiction of the concerns of her 1881 nonfiction history, A Century of Dishonor.

Charles F. Conly, photograph of Helen Hunt Jackson, c. 1884 (Wikimedia Commons)

As a poet, again Jackson belongs to her time. By the early decades of the next century, when Dickinson’s reputation began its serious white-hot ascent, Jackson’s writing — like that of the Fireside Poets who were the real literary stars of 19th-century America — had accrued a layer of dust that remains, today, a little hard to blow off. Contemporary readers and critics are re-engaging with, for example, Jackson’s English contemporary Christina Rossetti, with her technical mastery, radical sincerity, and Victorian vein of sheer strangeness. Beside a Rossetti, let alone a Dickinson, Jackson’s poetic gifts do inevitably look just a little dusty.

Still, it would be a mistake to write her off. Like those Fireside Poets, she belongs to the landscape of 19th-century American literature, and her writing is part of a generative topography whose major promontories — such truly great writers as Dickinson and Herman Melville — might definitively overshadow, but shouldn’t entirely obscure, our hindsight view of the whole terrain.

In that large and varied terrain, Jackson’s A Calendar of Sonnets, published the year after her death from cancer at age 54, constitutes a small feature, easy to overlook but worth stopping for all the same. The book is precisely what its title suggests: a sequence of twelve Petrarchan sonnets that track the year’s cycle through its months, each a composite of weather and the natural world’s progressive phases of dormancy, fecundity, and decline, and of those cultural associations that structure the human understanding of time and season.

Today’s Poem, “February,” is — not surprisingly — the second poem in the sequence. It follows on a vision of January as not a death, but rather a gestation of the coming spring and summer beauties. And it precedes a March in which, contra the month’s warlike name, things don’t so much enter into battle as break loose in a chaos of new life.

Like the other poems in the cycle, “February” plays with the strictures of the Petrarchan sonnet, keeping that form’s abbaabba octave but varying the sestet. In other words, the windup is what you expect, but the poem’s unwinding toward its resolution doesn’t follow a predictable route. Here, the rhyme scheme is cdcddc. This tension between the received form and the innovative impulse extends as well into the poem’s meter: mostly straight iambic pentameter, but with several notable substitutions. Line 5, opening the second abba quatrain, begins on a single stressed syllable, a headless iamb, while lines 8, 10, and 12 begin on the same emphatic, repeated spondaic phrase, “Fit days.”

These subcutaneous layers of tension accord with the poem’s surface, what its words actually say. Yes, February is still cold, still snowy, still a lot like January — though already the incubated life of the natural world begins to assert itself. In the clarity of late winter, the speaker notes, the year is poised on the brink of spring with all its promise. And it’s on this seam of the year, anticipating the spring but with all its wild forces still in check, that the Christian feast of the Purification occurs, and also the ancient Roman Lupercal: those “rites of expiation” that clear the way for something new.

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