Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, May 21st, 2025.

Today's poem is by Emily Dickinson, and it is very much an Emily Dickinson poem.

It's called The Saddest Noise, the Sweetest Noise. I'll read it once,

say a few words, and then read it one more time. The saddest noise, the sweetest noise, the maddest noise

that grows, the birds, they make it in the spring at night's delicious clothes. Between the

March and April line, that magical frontier, beyond which summer hesitates almost too heavenly near,

it makes us think of all the dead that sauntered with us here, by separation's sorcery made cruelly more dear. It makes us think

of what we had and what we now deplore. We almost wish those siren throats would go and sing no

more. An ear can break a human heart as quickly as a spear.

We wish the ear had not a heart so dangerously near.

The teacher and critic Marjorie Bolton once said about poetry that it's perfectly sensible and reasonable to ask about particular phrases or lines or even whole

images in a poem. What does it mean? And to give some kind of technical or prosaic answer,

like a paraphrase. But she says, when we take the whole beautiful verse and ask what it means, the only proper answer is to repeat the verse over again.

And in this, of course, she's not saying something unique to herself.

She's echoing T.S. Eliot and other greats.

But of course, that just increases her likelihood of being right. She goes echoing T.S. Eliot and other greats, but of course that just increases her likelihood

of being right. She goes on to say, rather than ask, or really rather than be told what a poem is or

means, we must simply ask or attend to what we feel as we hear it.

Now, there's more to poem than emotion, but there's certainly not less.

And if what a poem is meant to be and to express could be equally expressed in prose,

there would be no need for poetry.

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