What is the mysterious music Dickinson heard filling the air before dawn?
Dickinson describes an invisible music wrestling through the crowded air all day and flooding the town before morning. It is not a bird, a brass band, a tambourine or a hymn. She lists the guesses people offer, from the music of the spheres to the voices of the dead, and never settles.
The poem has three six-line stanzas, and it works like a riddle built from negatives. First she registers the sound: a silver strife heard among the crowded air, and an ecstasy breaking over the town as she walks before daybreak, so powerful she takes it for the promised new life. The phrase casts ordinary morning noise as something close to resurrection.
The middle stanza rules things out one by one. The source has no nest, so it is not a bird, and it is not a uniformed band in brass and scarlet, nor a tambourine, nor a person, nor a hymn read from the pulpit. Instead she reaches for an image from the creation story, the morning stars singing on the first afternoon of time. The final stanza hands the question to other people. Some say the planetary spheres are at play; some think it is the great majority of those who have died; others believe it is worship in the place we shall one day see for ourselves, God willing.
Music ran through Dickinson's early life. When she was two, on a long stay in Monson, an aunt reported that she was contented, well behaved and already drawn to the piano, which the toddler called the moosic. The family tree also produced a professional: she was a distant cousin of Baxter Dickinson's line, which included the organist and composer Clarence Dickinson.
Her schooling kept her close to home. After seven years at Amherst Academy she spent only a brief period at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to Amherst, the town she would write from for the rest of her life.
Source: Musicians wrestle everywhere
