“Where the Meanings Are” – Four Poems by Emily Dickinson – Part 4

Erin & Wes continue their discussion of four of Dickinson’s best-loved poems, whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on grief, pain, violence, death, reason, identity, and encounters with the divine. Upcoming Episodes: “Rosemary’s Baby,” Yeats (“Sailing to Byzantium” and “Leda and the Swan”). Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Welcome to part four of our four part series on the poems of Emily Dickinson. In part three, we just got done talking about there's a certain slant of light and now we're going to cover for our Last poem, number 315. He fumbles at your soul, so I'll go ahead and read it. He fumbles at your soul as players at the keys before they drop full music on. He stuns you by degrees, prepares your brittle nature for the ethereal blow by fainter hammers further heard, then nearer, then so slow your breath has time to straighten, your brain to bubble cool deals one imperial thunderbolt that scalps your naked soul. When winds take forests in their paws, the universe is still. So this is a wild one. It's a Shakespearean sonnet or an English sonnet, one of the few that she has sprinkled around her works. And yeah, it doesn't look like or feel like a sonnet at first. So I think when I texted you about how I wanted to do this one, I was like, it's a sonnet. Maybe when you first looked at it, you immediately discovered that. But it took me a second when I, I was introduced to this poem. 1:54 Wes: No. Yeah, I didn't. 1:55 Erin: Yeah. And there's some really cool stuff going on formally here that I could talk about. But one of the things is just, you know, we start with soul. We have the final couplet separated out from the rest of the poem. So we have this 12 line stanza and then the final couplet isolated. And in the 12 line stanza, Soul ends the first line and it also ends the last line of that stanza. But it moves from the slant or the non rhyme position, the 1 and 3 to the full rhyme position or the 2 and 4 by the end of 12. So at first it's not rhyming with anything. And then at the end of that 12 line stanza it's in the position to rhyme. So it receives the rhyme. So cool and soul. So it's something happens over the course of that. And then of course there's this famous, you know, maybe like the best rhyme ever in Dickinson is the final couplet, paws and still, which is a. We have P, A, W, S. But of course, we could say that it's a. It's a homonym for P, A, U, S, E. And therefore it rhymes sensically with stillness still. Yeah. So some really cool, strange, subversive sonnety things going on here. But yeah. He fumbles at your soul. Who is this? Who is it, Wes? 3:09 Wes: God playing us. That's my read on the stanza. 3:14 Erin: Yeah, that's my best guess too. 3:18 Wes: He, he, the big he. He sounds kind of pervy in this. 3:23 Erin: He's a John Donne kind of God. I think John Donne wishes that he had a God like this. 3:32 Wes: Yeah. So it's interesting, right? So God should not be fumbling, whether it's in football or the piano or with our souls. 3:43 Erin: He should know how to unhook a 3:44 Wes: bra in one movie, Right, Exactly. He was a jock in high school, but he was also valedictorian. But anyway, yeah, so really fascinating right from the get go. So again, I think, yeah, we have to think about this in terms of divine influence or maybe Providence. Right. What God, I don't want to say predestines us to do, do, but whatever influence is there from the divine. And yeah, we're not even the performance. We're just him diddling around on the piano before he gets serious. Is that what's going on? 4:29 Erin: I think so, yeah. The fumbles implies an ineptitude, obviously. But then it seems like he's just toying with us actually, because he's in control. He's quite gifted. 4:42 Wes: Yeah. It looks like ineptitude on first blush. But then we find out that he's the brooding genius who's just dicking around before he becomes. Transforms himself into a virtuoso. 4:55 Erin: The wordplay in this is really, really stunning. Your wordplay. But he fumbles at your soul. Yeah. I like this idea. Idea that the soul is the most intimate part of your body. Right. It's the inside. There's something of greatest intimacy about the soul. Yeah. So as players at the keys before they drop full music on. Yeah. So the fumbling seems. There's something inept and then suddenly it's like, oh, maybe this is actually just. What is it? A few arpeggios. He's noodling around, then he's gonna start. So it's actually something. The fumbling is actually something like literal and figurative in terms of the meaning of this word foreplay. But it's a slow process. He stuns you by degrees. So there's this mixture, the stunning and the imagery in this, I think are marrying positive and negative Valences, as usual in Dickinson. We're stunned because we're so amazed by his talent. Or we're being clubbed over the head or something like that. We're being. We're, you know, losing. Almost losing consciousness. 6:06 Wes: Exactly. So we're stunned in the sense that we're impressed. We're duly impressed. God. But also it sounds a bit sinister because he's luring us into complacence. Right. So his whole reason for not going right into the performance is to sort of boil the frog, let's say. And we're being our brittle nature getting into the second stanza. Or substance. Is it nature in your version? Or substance? There's different versions, obviously, of these poems. Yeah. Because people altered them at first. Okay. Yeah. So our brittle natures. Our natures are too brittle to be played, so to speak, to be hammered at, like a piano key. Right off they would shatter. So we need to be molested a little bit. Sorry. We need to be fumbled around with a little bit warmed up, I guess. Foreplay. You already got that metaphor. We need to be warmed up before he really hits us with his best shot, so to speak. I love that song. Hit me with your best shot. 7:14 Erin: That was written by Dickens. I was adapted from Dickinson poem right after her hit single, no pain, no gain. But the genius. I mean, so many genius things about this poem, but one of the most genius things is the fact that the hammers inside the piano, because, of course, it's a percussive instrument. Right. So the little hammers inside the piano actually then become the hammer of the blacksmith. The first thing I thought of was Hephaestus. Yeah, yeah. The blacksmith. So the piano keys. Right. So he goes from being a pianist to a blacksmith. One needs to be literally heated up to be manipulated by the blacksmith to be hammered, or else we will break. So you have to be heated to a certain temperature determined by the color of the metal in the forge. Yeah. So we could say that the volta occurs just before the final couplet. But like most Shakespearean sonnets, there are a couple of voltas. So we could argue that this. This first one happens in this subtle way with the change in the imagery or the adjustment. The ethereal blow is something that I didn't put much pressure on in my research reading, but now I'm looking at it and I'm thinking. I'm thinking I should have. Do you have a reading for ethereal? Suddenly interested in this word? 8:44 Wes: I'm thinking of my struggle now to use a different word than intangible. But Actually, ineffable was the word that I was saying. 8:51 Erin: Ineffable. Okay, okay. 8:54 Wes: But that's my fancier word for intangible. Yeah. Why an ethereal blow? Except that he's goth and he's ethereal. And we're getting a contrast here between this very concrete image of him creating us by working with the products of the earth. Right. With metals. So it's an ethereal blow by fainter hammers. And I suppose this is just because we're being pointed to the fact that this is a spiritual process. 9:20 Erin: Yeah, she's trying to make it more palatable for the censors or something like, this is ethereal, I swear. Yeah. I'm thinking of the air, ethereal. So this is related maybe to the slant of light, too, right? From the ether. So it's the blow that, like the slant of light, seems to make a rather violent entrance. And yet it's not actually a physical violation, though, much like the heft of the cathedral tunes. This is related to sound, of course. And so actually, the blow. I think we talked about this with the bell and the head, too, Right. Like, there's the hammer. Something having to do with the functioning of the ear here. And if it's a sound, we could say that there is. In fact, even if it is ethereal, if it's a sound wave, it's still having an actual physical impact on our bodies, on our physicality in some way. I didn't think of this until now. Now, but the eardrum. Something about the drum and the right banging on the drum, and then it 10:23 Wes: gets closer and closer and it starts slowing down, which is very ominous. And now it sounds like what's happening to us is not that we're being created, but that we're. That this is about dying, right? 10:35 Erin: Oh, is that what you think? 10:36 Wes: Well, your breath has time to straighten, your. Your brain to bubble. Cool. Deals one imperial thunderbolt that scalps your naked soul so that the thing that we're being prepared for is death. 10:48 Erin: Hmm. 10:48 Wes: Yeah. How are you. How are you reading this? 10:51 Erin: Some kind of encounter. 10:53 Wes: Oh, okay. Okay. 10:54 Erin: It could be the poem itself, too. I mean, that scalps your naked soul. Of course, to the famous. You know, one of the things, along with hope is the thing with feathers. And various other Dickinson quotes that are famous are about poetry taking the top of one's head off. So you could almost read this as an encounter with the muse. Divine inspiration. When it comes to poetic inspiration. No. I thought of a few possibilities. 11:16 Wes: I think this is the best reading, the one you give Me, like just an encounter with God. 11:20 Erin: Yeah, an encounter, yeah, yeah. 11:22 Wes: So it could be. I mean, in the beginning it sounds as if we're talking about creation. Right. Him hammering us into existence. And then it also sounded a bit to me like the moment of death, 11:33 Erin: so Hammering us out of existence. 11:35 Wes: Well, yeah, that's why thought it was very weird. But this is much more sensible just to think of it in terms of an encounter with divine. So you might, you know, you could even read it as a. Yeah, well, moment of inspiration or. Faith is not the right word, but a moment where one is. Has an encounter with the divine. 11:54 Erin: I saw the primary tension, I think where you're seeing either creation or death. I saw as either an encounter, in a less fraught sense, a sexual encounter or a rape. Either one of these. Right. And I think that whether or not this is a rape for me is what is most complicated for me here because it seems the participation of the speaker and the agency of the speaker seems non existent. My favorite reading in the reading that I actually think is primary is the. This muse or poetry itself or whatever, like coming in and kind of, you know, invading us. But the, like the level of violence here and the. It could be, you know, I think all these readings are correct. That's always the case, you know, that's always the message. It seems for us with Dickinson is that it's all correct. Right. The complication for me, the interest is the violence and whether or not it is a rape. I mean, that scalps your naked soul seems pretty. I mean, I don't know. 12:55 Wes: Batter my heart, three-personed God. 12:57 Erin: Exactly. Exactly. Right. I mean, that could be. On the one hand, I mean, it's kind of a. Am I wrong in thinking that's a very erotic line? Obviously rape and erotic are at opposite ends of the spectrum. 13:08 Wes: Yeah. So that's why you have me thinking now of the John Donne poem, this comparison of him wanting to have God's force kind of usurp him in order to instill belief in him. 13:24 Erin: Right, yes. And make it so that he doesn't really have to go through the slow process of transforming himself through conquering his passions. He's saying, God, just, you know, have your way with me and violently make me do what you want me to do. Because he himself is too weak to make himself do this. You know, he has no. He doesn't have enough self control. And so the desire for God to come in and take that control is about probably his. I think we got at this in our episode on this probably his sexual sin is the thing that he doesn't have any control over. 14:03 Wes: So he's asking, except you enthrall me. Never shall be free, nor ever chaste. Except you ravish me. Yeah, yeah. 14:11 Erin: So it's the whole waging war for peace kind of idea. A few other things that interest me here. Your breath has time to straighten, your brain to bubble cool. So she drops the word before. Right. Then so slow we would then expect before your breath has time to straighten. But this is even before the word before. And I get the brain bubbling cool. Right. Because we've had this idea that there needs to be. So we've transitioned into the blacksmith metaphor. And so this is where, before she can even cool from the heat of the forge, he then deals the final blow. But I wonder about breath having time to straighten. I'm having more difficulty locating that. And I wonder if that has to do. That goes back to the piano metaphor somehow. Something about the rhythm of the music, the complexity of the playing, the time signature of the piano music as affecting the breath in some way. But I can't quite make those line up. I was wondering if you had a reading of that. 15:13 Wes: Yeah. I don't know. Your breath is time to straighten. You're reading the word before into this. Right. That's the missing word. So it sounds like one is breathing heavily and one's brain is hot or frantic. There's anxiety, there's fear. And before you even have time to calm down, this thunderbolt scalps your naked soul. Right. And the soul is naked. There's nothing to scalp off the soul. The soul's naked. There's no hair or scalp there to be taken off. What question were you asking about the straightening the breath Straightening? I don't make it anything else of it other than that. But yeah. 15:53 Erin: Yeah. I was just wondering if there was a musical parallel there that was. 15:56 Wes: Oh, I see. 15:57 Erin: Has time to straighten. The fumbling and then the dropping. Full music on. I'm wondering about time signature. 16:04 Wes: Yeah. One can imagine the breathing. The breathing is irregular. 16:08 Erin: Mm. Yes. Yeah. And I wondered if that was simply a connection back to the music. Yeah. Because we have the further nearer then so slow. Oh, and I also just wanted to say another little cool Easter egg in the poem is prepares your brittle nature for the ethereal blow by fainter hammers further heard. So the one in three in each one of these quatrains is a non rhyming position, except for here, nature further heard, which is a sort of slant R. And it's nature heard further Off. Right. So there's something. There's something going on there with the music of the poem where it actually, like, picks up. It echoes. So something quite cool going on there. Yeah. So anyway, so. So mentally flummoxed, overheated, and quite vulnerable, too, in your breath and your brain, and then deals one imperial thunderbolt that scares scalps your naked soul. I think, of course, of the slant of light. Again, the imperial affliction. This is a lot more personal than affliction, which is sort of unlocatable. It's oddly depersonalized or uncorporeal kind of way of phrasing. The hurt, the heavenly hurt. This is far more. But then again, it's about soul. So there's something also, like, incorporeal about this last line as well. But it feels super violent and personal and. Yeah. And intimate. If we're thinking of the idea of fumbling at the soul as being fumbling at the innermost part of us. 17:37 Wes: I'm looking at this in terms of the reading where this is about creation. Now, I had thought that this sounded like death because of the scalp, I guess, the moment of scalping and the breath and the brain. But, yeah, here you can imagine us on the. On the forge, or where would we be resting if we're little figurines being made by Vulcan. Right. So we've come out of the forge and. Right. We're cooling down and apparently we're already breathing, but our breathing is not yet ordered. And then God has got to zap life into us. Right. Normally, Zeus, if it's Zeus, right. It's a thunderbolt to punish you and kill you, but in this case, it's like Frankenstein. He's got to use electricity to bring us to life. 18:25 Erin: Oh, that's cool. 18:26 Wes: Yeah. Yeah. So Vulcan did his part, and now it is. Vulcan and Hephaestus are the same. Right. This image of the. The instilling of electricity into us, of. Of life on this reading is complicated by this idea that this is a scalping. Or maybe this is to say that by instilling a soul in us, God gives us something that's unprotected. Right. It's not simply located in the cranium. It's not a physical thing surrounded by a skull, but in a way, it's infinitely vulnerable, especially to God himself. It's completely naked. So that the very giving of a soul just is a scalping because it's giving us this thing that is uncovered and has no boundary around it. 19:14 Erin: I like that. So at first, though, there Is obviously there's a violence inherent to the imagery. From the very beginning. There's a studied quality because we have this. I'm imagining this concert pianist, you know, who's stunning us with his talent. And eventually by the end of the first stanza, we get this more primal, violent, just instinctual type of action. Maybe there's something that kind of goes from most to least studied over the course of the stanza. Because we could say that the concert pianist is an artist. Then we could say that the blacksmith is like an artisan. And then we have the idea of the primal, of just the violent impulse that is not in any way reflected upon, mediated by some kind of study or some, you know, it's just an urge. It's just a. Because then in the final couple, we just get the winds, you know, the forces of nature themselves, which are unconnected from any kind of, like, personification. So it seems that there's some sort of, you know, we're going down in an elevator here somehow into. Into nature itself. 20:25 Wes: Yeah. Our artistry has become something violent, something purely savage violent. 20:32 Erin: Yeah. 20:32 Wes: Right. When we go from the hammering to the scalping, it's interesting because in the version edited by Mabel Loom, Loomis Todd and then the other person, Higginson, right. They. They changed scalps to peels. P, E, L, S. Which I guess is a bit, you know, and maybe there's meant to be double meaning, like the peeling of a bell or something. 20:59 Erin: Oh, yeah. 21:00 Wes: But also it's a bit. It's a bit of a softer image. Right. Instead of scalping, instead of this violent act, it's like, oh, here's an orange. I'm going to peel it. 21:11 Erin: Well, yeah, I mean, it's a different form of savagery. I think of someone's skin being flayed off. 21:20 Wes: Right. There's something much more casual about just peeling a person into existence. 21:25 Erin: Yeah. This is the. I'm thinking of that gross, gross scene I could never watch in Lord of the Rings where they're cutting the orcs out of the wombs. You know, those, like, disgusting. 21:39 Wes: I don't even remember that. Oh, you mean in Mordor. Right. So that's. Yeah. 21:43 Erin: Where they're being burst or Isengard. Whichever. All the. Gosh, my sister's going to come after me for not knowing. For not knowing which one. I think it's an Isengard because Saruman is overseeing it. 21:55 Wes: Oh, right, yeah. Okay. The. 21:58 Erin: He's birthing more soldiers for his army, but, yeah, they're being peeled out of that womb type structure. And obviously gross. That's something that's going on here, too. We're peeled out of the womb. I don't know. My mom had a C section After 23 hours of labor, as she loves to tell me, so. C sections. Maybe there's more peeling than a vaginal birth. Depends. 22:25 Wes: Yeah. 22:27 Erin: Now it's getting really. 22:28 Wes: All right. Is any other gross association we could make? 22:31 Erin: Wes is turning pale. I'm just kidding. 22:36 Wes: I'd rather be scalped into existence than. 22:40 Erin: Than birthed into existence. 22:41 Wes: Than naturally birthed. 22:43 Erin: Than naturally birthed, yeah. Oh, come on. 22:48 Wes: But getting away from vaginas, 22:53 Erin: you can't. You can't get away. 22:57 Wes: What is this completely left turn that she makes into. What is this? I mean, what does this couplet have to do with anything? 23:06 Erin: I was hoping you were going to tell me. Yeah. When winds take forests in their paws, the universe is still. We're suddenly cutting in a cinematic way. We cut to am an image of a forest from above. You know, a drone is taking this footage. And I'm envisioning a cloudy day because I'm thinking of cloudy, cloudy paws. The winds or something. Yeah. And so it leaves us with this. What just seems like a total non sequitur image. Why do we cut to this? Well, first of all, cloudy pause. Again, there are no clouds in here, but pause. It's like. It's something rounded. I'm thinking of. And since prior to this, maybe the importance of hands, it's invisible because there's no use of the word hands in the first part of the poem. It's just fumbles and then players at the keys. So hands are implied. But maybe with concert pianists, it's like white gloved hand hands, you know? And so now that's what I think of when I think of the paws. Like there's something kind of blunted. 24:17 Wes: Yeah. Yeah, it does make sense. Paws are good for fumbling. 24:20 Erin: Right? Right. Keep your paws off me. Yeah. 24:23 Wes: I'm thinking of. Have you read the Confederacy of Dunces? 24:27 Erin: Yeah, a long, long time ago. 24:29 Wes: The book ends with this scene where Ignatius O'Reilly kind of paws at one of the pigtails of his romantic interest. I guess that's like. And that always. For some reason, that image always stuck with me. His hands are compared to paws. I couldn't tell you. I've forgotten most of the book, but for some reason, that particular scene really stuck with me. Does God have paws at this point? Has God been transformed into kind of some sort of sylvan type of deity? Right. Something appropriate to the Forest and an animal. Something more rustic and natural at this point. 25:08 Erin: Well, maybe I'm also thinking of the image of Jupiter and IO. Again, if we're thinking of. We've already made this connection with the thunderbolt to Zeus, and Zeus as creator. But also, of course, if we're talking about rape here, he's also serial rapist. And pawing, as I think we've already hinted at, there's the frequent association with keep your paws off me, a guy pawing a woman. There's something of. Yeah. Violation and also a little bit of fumbling of. Of. Of. Of sexual ineptitude. You know, they're. They're like making a pass, but it's a. It's a bad one. It implies a lack of sophistication or something to be pawed at. 25:49 Wes: Get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape. 25:52 Erin: Aha. 25:53 Wes: To get at that quote. 25:55 Erin: There we go. Yeah, no, but the. I'm just thinking of the Correggio painting of Jupiter embracing IO with those cloudy paws. You know, they look like paws. And that's a moment of rape where she's enveloped by the cloud. So sort of uniting all of that in the same way that, I guess, Zeus unites this creator, destroyer, seducer, rapist, whatever. All of these. All these epithets we could apply to him. Yeah. I don't know if it's pawing at someone. That had to have been an idiom in Dickinson's day, in any case. 26:31 Wes: Yeah. The God in this poem does sound quite pagan, you know. Right. With references to Vulcan and Zeus. Yeah. And now some sort of. Yeah. Are we still talking about Jupiter here or. I mean, I like your. This idea of the Correggio painting, but. 26:48 Erin: Yeah. And the forest. Like the forest nymphs. 26:51 Wes: So. Yeah. Some sort of natural force. But we've been talking about the relationship between God or Zeus and. And we created ones. Whether it's the moment of creation or whether it's some moment of contact with God, maybe even rebirth, you know, within. Within life. And now the image that seems to replace that is. It's as if we've been born and it's the winds of the midwife. Maybe they're holding the newborn in their paws. We've been delivered up and now we're being held. And then the universe stands still in awe of this created scalped baby. 27:35 Erin: Yeah, but the baby is also being. We're also shaking the baby. I mean, this is the strange thing, because if the winds are taking. We have to think through that. Because if the winds are taking yes, right. It's the winds themselves. 27:54 Wes: The forest, by the way, being a stand in for us. Right. With trees representing humanity, so the created ones. And so we get a collective. An image of collective birth and being held. But yeah, so we're onto shaken baby syndrome. 28:11 Erin: There's a paradox when the. 28:13 Wes: Yes, yeah. 28:14 Erin: Between the forest and the universe. Because there's. If the winds are shaking the trees, then somehow the universe is still. That seems to be it. Or are they just not moving? Are they about to shake the trees? This is the right. 28:26 Wes: Right, yeah, no, this is good. I'm glad you pointed this out because. Yeah, we would think that the baby upon birth would be held and contained and that holding and containment happens at a psychological level as well. It's not just a physical thing. It's evocative of care. Right. What's being evoked here is the concept of care. But winds, as you're pointing out, blow. They don't hold normally. They are disorganizing instead of containing. And then the thing that is seems to get contained or held is the universe, or actually held is the universe as a whole. That's the thing that is made still by all this. Yeah, that. That's. That's really interesting. So that. In other words, just to say one more thing about that, our life on Earth, of course, is going to be full of turmoil and tumult. It's not going to be peaceable. 29:17 Erin: That's just not if you have anything to do about it. Oh, okay. 29:22 Wes: It's a lot of scalping, hammering. But one might treat this as theodicy. Right. So that for all the blowing of our force on Earth, from a grander point of view, it's all for the. We live in the best possible universe and it's all for the good. So there's some higher harmony, as Ivan would put it, in the Brothers Karamazov. Right. So the world looks evil from our perspective, or there's a lot of evil in the world from our perspective, but the universe as a whole is good and the best possible universe. So it's still in that sense. 30:00 Erin: Yeah, still. Still. Now I'm realizing how many potential meanings still can have. 30:03 Wes: Well, how were you. Yeah, remind me how you. You were reading it. 30:06 Erin: Yeah, so. So as we've already said, there are these. Universe is somehow differentiated from forest, but also wind is somehow differentiated from itself as being both the wind and the stopping of the wind. Like the image of throttling. 30:20 Wes: Yeah. I think we have to hold the contradiction there, which is that our birth into this world you know, it doesn't stop with the birth into the hands of kind midwife and swaddling. And that. That image of a newborn being held. Right. It goes beyond that and it's full of the winds of fortune blow us around, so to speak. Right. To be held on birth is for us mortals to be blown around. If we think of our whole lifespan and, you know, we would hope it would be nice if it weren't that way. And if we were just. We came out of the forge, we cool down and then someone puts us on a shelf and we're just happy forever. But instead we're animate, we're scalped, and we're subject to all this turmoil. And it's just a very clever paradoxical image. Where we're holding is not really holding unless you look at it from this other perspective. Right. Where if we stand outside of time, maybe we could see all this buzzing confusion as a stillness from that higher perspective. 31:24 Erin: Yes. I'm beginning to think of this as just. This whole poem is just a rewriting of King Lear's blow, winds speech. Doesn't he have thunderbolts in there? There's a bunch of things in there that are the same, Right? Blow, winds, crack your cheeks. 31:41 Wes: He probably asks to be hit by one. 31:45 Erin: Yeah, yeah. He's like, oh, that. You know, when I went to that recital last night, it really moved me a bunch of other things. But also the naked soul. Right. The forked, bare, forked creature. 31:57 Wes: Oh, unaccommodated men. 31:59 Erin: Yeah. 32:00 Wes: Unclothed, uncovered up by the false pretense of culture. And so blow, winds, and crack your cheeks. Rage. Blow. You cataracts and hurricanos, spout till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks, you sulfurous and thought executing fires. Okay, so I think that's where we get the lightning. Right. Vaunt couriers to oak cleaving thunderbolts. All right. Forests, singe my white head. He does. He does ask to be led by light. Okay, I knew it. All right. And thou all shaking thunder, smite flat the thick rotundity of the world. Crack nature, nature's molds all. Oh, crack nature's molds. Speaking of a forge, all germens spill at once. That make ingrateful man. 32:52 Erin: Yeah, and that's dirty too. 32:54 Wes: Wow. All germens spill at once. Wow. What is Shakespeare saying with them? Let's just talk about Shakespeare for a second. 33:01 Erin: Well, first of all, I can't believe I was right, that I. That this is just a re. Like. Yeah. The more I thought about it, the more I was like, wait a minute, there's thunderbolts in there. But, like, I didn't remember anything in particular from that speech except for those, like, couple of images. But everything is in there. The trees. 33:16 Wes: Wow. Singe. My white head is very reminiscent of scalping. Wow. This is really cool, but man Shakespeare, Man Dickinson. He's got it all. He's got it all. They both got it all. 33:28 Erin: Yeah. 33:29 Wes: All right, so are we gonna. Shall we wind down? 33:32 Erin: Sorry. Oh, you truly have the Dickinsonian mind going on there. 33:39 Wes: Exactly. 33:40 Erin: All wins all wines. 33:44 Wes: That's right. That's right. 33:45 Erin: That's good. Okay, thank you. 33:48 Wes: Thank you, 33:51 Erin: and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.