The saddest noise, the sweetest noise (No 1789)

The saddest noise, the sweetest noise,
The maddest noise that grows, —
The birds, they make it in the spring,
At night’s delicious close,

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.

This undated poem, numbered 1789 in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, seems to inhabit a modest and even populist lexicon at times. Dickinson is known for paradoxical analogies, often opening her poem with a terse declaration of the unexpected: “My life had stood — a loaded gun —”, “Hope is the thing with feathers …” and many others. The two superlatives of the first line, “The saddest noise, the sweetest noise”, are less than arresting. Elsewhere, some adjectives and adverbs seem too metrically driven; “cruelly” in the third verse’s last line may be one of them. But the association of spring and death is slowly firmed and filled out as the slow-paced, regularly constructed verses accumulate. An extraordinary figurative strike in the fifth, with a spear rather than a gun, earns the poem a place among the unforgettable.

It’s a mark of Dickinson’s fidelity to experience that she describes the collective sound of the birds as “noise”, not “song”, and the third of the trio of superlatives, “maddest”, points in a direction neither “saddest” and “sweetest” initially can encompass. That “madness” will become tangible in verse three. Meanwhile, the second verse foregrounds seasonal delight, though hinting that the “magical frontier” between spring and summer might resemble the fine line between life and death: “Between the March and April line — / That magical frontier/ Beyond which summer hesitates, / Almost too heavenly near.”

The verb “sauntered” in the third verse suggests a relaxed pace, as if the companions had felt no fear of time’s passing. Now the noise of the birds “makes us think of all the dead” – as if the birds had become a confusing, ghostly chorus of voices and memories of voices. Even the narratorial voice, always using the first-person plural pronoun, might include the dead. Something unheavenly enters the verse in the third line, the bad magic of a sorcerer who takes away cherished companions to make us cherish them all the more. The birds’ “siren throats” are a threat, because of the awareness of loss they provoke. The poem puts it with appealing bluntness: “We almost wish those siren throats / would go and sing no more.”

Dickinson has made room for sweetness, sadness and madness, but her concluding verse is honed to a figure of startling violence. “An ear can break a human heart …” Instead of bird noise, it’s the human ear which delivers pain, like the “spear” with which it rhymes. A well-aimed spear can literally stop a heart, and so that cliche of metaphorical “heartbreak” is redeemed. With “a heart / so dangerously near,” the ear almost acquires a creaturely existence of its own, especially when the two “hearts” are end words in lines one and three, as if human and ear were indeed separate beings. An adverb powered by understatement, “dangerously” seems fully earned. This perfect verse, in a direct and disturbingly “organic” way, connects sound with emotion, and is almost a poem in itself:

An ear can break a human heart
As quickly as a spear.
We wish the ear had not a heart
So dangerously near.