Of All the Sounds Despatched Abroad
poem 321
Of All the Sounds Despatched Abroad - meaning Summary
Wind as Inheritance
Dickinson celebrates the wind-and-bird music in trees as a spontaneous, almost sacred inheritance beyond human art or effort. The speaker describes the wind — fingers combing the sky — producing phraseless melody that persists beyond life, suggesting even the dead’s dust might join the sound. She asks for the grace to hear this ‘‘fleshless Chant,’’ imagining the music as a seamless caravan of sound that unites sky and earth.
Read Complete AnalysesOf all the Sounds despatched abroad, There’s not a Charge to me Like that old measure in the Boughs That phraseless Melody The Wind does working like a Hand, Whose fingers Comb the Sky Then quiver down with tufts of Tune Permitted Gods, and me Inheritance, it is, to us Beyond the Art to Earn Beyond the trait to take away By Robber, since the Gain Is gotten not of fingers And inner than the Bone Hid golden, for the whole of Days, And even in the Urn, I cannot vouch the merry Dust Do not arise and play In some odd fashion of its own, Some quainter Holiday, When Winds go round and round in Bands And thrum upon the door, And Birds take places, overhead, To bear them Orchestra. I crave Him grace of Summer Boughs, If such an Outcast be Who never heard that fleshless Chant Rise solemn on the Tree, As if some Caravan of Sound Off Deserts, in the Sky, Had parted Rank, Then knit, and swept In Seamless Company
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