Poetry Wednesday - An Unearthly Hour

A poem from my ancient past, an exercise from my writing, stories, and myths course.

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Dear readers,

I’ve been scanning through and making an index of my poems, for me for easy use, so I can find what I want and know which document a particular one resides in. And I became interested in one in particular.

At uni many, many years ago I took a course as part of my English Lit and Education degree, called Writing, Stories, and Myths (WSM) We were a largish course, for our tiny college, for Eng Lit of around 30 but only a handful of us chose this side course. I can’t remember what the other choices were but I jumped at the chance to learn about writing, rather than just reading and analysing. I think there were 6 of us. I remember Tracy, Mags, Marie, and of course yours truly, and I expect there were a couple more I can’t recall.

Anyways, we were often given a poem to write - sometimes in the main Eng Lit class and then worked more on in WSM. One week we were given the line ‘At 1/2 past three, a single bird’ and told it had to be our first line and to go away and finish the poem. No other information. Now this was in the days before the internet and unless you knew this poem and poet you would struggle to find them in the library as you didn’t have a proper starting point. Most of the poets we studied were white males, like Wordsworth, Byron, and Shakespeare, and I assumed this to be nothing different. So I wrote my poem, gave Tracy an early draft that was different enough and I didn’t like, got an A for mine, a B for the draft, and promptly forgot about it.

So today I was this years old when I decided to look up the poem. Oh my …. I feel a little embarrassed to admit this. It’s Emily Dickinson. Doh 🤦🏼‍♀️!

Hmm, had I known the whole poem rather than just being given one line my own poem would have been quite different indeed.

An Unearthly Hour

At ½ past 3 a single bird
Sang his hearty exultation
To the encroaching day:
Untried in it’s freshness
Full of expectant promise;
Far beyond the rigid, cold glass
I sheltered behind.

He sang
Oblivious to the naked feelings
That raged in my swollen heart and 
The anger that rampaged in my tired head:

And I wished I was that bird
Alone in his 
Twisted, leafless tree
Heralding in another lovely dawn.				

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Photo by Tom Bradley on Unsplash

Firstly, my title was an exclamation that anyone would be awake at such an ungodly hour, but I knew one of my tutors was religious so refrained from using ungodly and used unearthly. I can see in the 2nd and 3rd stanzas that this was written whilst I was struggling with my mental health. Not that we were allowed to talk about it back then. And that was probably caused by undiagnosed autism that meant I struggled to understand the ‘why’s’ of how college worked. ‘How’ relationships within our dorm worked and and then suddenly didn’t, ‘why’ I never really understood what we were meant to do as everything seemed to be fluffy etc. If I wasn’t told explicitly that I needed to look up who the poet was, I expected we were meant to do the task without knowing. That that was the point surely? And I mean, I’m not sure I’d have understood the rest of Dickinson’s words at aged 18 anyway.

So embarrassment abating, that’s all folks, til next time….

P.S. this will be sent out at 3:30am GMT for giggles

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