If I Only Had a Brain...and a Flux Capacitor

I sat down to write about dear Emily and instead imagined Robert Frost reciting "Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood."  Emily materializes overhead in a flowing white gown, leaning out of a DeLorean.  "Roads?" she demurely asks.  "Where we're going we don't need roads." Whiz! Bang! Kapow!  She streaks off into the stratosphere.  

 (It's no matter that Frost's poem was published some 30-odd years after her death.  The flux capacitor renders it all perfectly believable.  And they all thought she never left the house....)

My own flight of fancy aptly describes my feelings for the poetry of Emily Dickinson.  It takes me to a metaphysical plane from which the ordinary seems surreal.  "The Brain -- is wider than the Sky --" is no exception.  It delights, perplexes, confounds, and illuminates in a dizzying display of virtuosity.  It begins innocently enough, by inducing the reader to consider the vastness of human potential and creativity through the lovely comparisons of the brain to the sky and the sea.  It's in the last stanza that she whacks the reader over the head (or in the brain) with a mallet.  "The Brain is just the weight of God--" (9).  Whoa!  Let me wrap my head around that one for a min..uh..lifetime.  "For--Heft them--Pound for Pound--" (10).  "Heft" really says something specific.  It refers to lifting something heavy, like the weight of knowledge?  Maybe I'm going out on a limb here, but could it possibly be referencing the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?  After Adam and Eve had eaten the fruit of the tree, Gen. 3:22 says, "Then the Lord God said, 'behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil...'" (NASB).  While man was created in the image of God, it was not until the fall that he became like God, or of equal weight if we maintain the imagery of the poem.  Still, he is only like God "As Syllable from Sound--" (12).  There is a separation or delineation between God and man as sound is divided into words and words into syllables.  Knowledge is only part, a syllable, of the whole, sound.  Wow.  I am reduced to one whimpering syllable.

Elijah may have ascended to heaven in a chariot of fire, but I rise on the winged words of Emily Dickinson.