'The Gambrels of the Sky' (Emily Dickinson, 466)

I’m a frustrated visual artist — my mother was one and I am not, but I think through shape and line. Poetry does too. Emily Dickinson’s line, ‘The Gambrels of the Sky’ soars imperiously upwards, pushing up from the ‘leg’ of the gambrels — the ‘jamb’ the French say — the hip of the house where the sloping roof meets the side. Think leg of mutton or leg of any mammal. Think of your own leg: how does it hang? How do you stand? What is your posture, your pose? How is your body aligned? What way do you turn and face? It will determine the attitude of your mind. All dancers know this, and all acrobats, and anyone whose art arises from body-life. Musicians. Poets and writers.

Dickinson’s short poem hangs like a painting from the sky. It looks upward and faces out. Each line opens up space (possibility); and so chambers are ‘as cedars’, rooms that open up beyond the limits of seeing: ‘Impregnable of eye.’ Her rooms are limitless, eternal; her roof opens up to the sky. Dickinson’s poem makes me feel lightheaded because it is so open and airy — en plein air — where air is rich and heady. Her chamber is made of cedar, superior to any ordinary manmade room; the room is cedar-filled, cedar-scented, meaning her room has been carried outside. Nothing remains enclosed. In the poet’s house, her poetry, everything made is open to interpretation, to imaginative possibility. Hands spread wide to greet unexpected visitors: surprising thoughts travelling back and forth through open doors and windows. Let them in! Let them in! sings the sylvan poet, her head covered in leaves.

I dwell in Possibility -

A Fairer house than Prose

More numerous of Windows

Superior - for Doors

Of Chambers as the Cedars –

Impregnable of eye –

And for an everlasting Roof

The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –

For Occupation – This –

The spreading wide my narrow Hands

To gather Paradise –

for Suzie, Hannah and Nicole. Poets and Musicians.

The Poems of Emily Dickinson: The Reading Edition, ed. R.W. Franklin (Harvard: Press, 1998).