A poem for spring.  Last week we had two beautiful, sunny days--followed immediately by 2" of fluffy snow that melted after a couple of hours and then a return to gray, chilly, wintry weather.  The forecast for today is rain, sleet, and snow.  Often we'll have a longer period of warm weather, enough for trees to bud and flowers to bloom before a hard freeze reminds the buds and blooms of nature's power.  That's Kansas weather--and evidently New England weather as well.   Here's Emily Dickinson's poem #1624.

          Apparently with no surprise
          To any happy Flower
          The Frost beheads it at its play--
          In accidental power--
          The blonde Assassin passes on--
          The Sun proceeds unmoved
          To measure off another Day
          For an approving God.

Dickinson, like the aptly named Frost, is a synecdochist, not a symbolist.  And here we have a morning scene in spring, beginning with a close-up and then, as if in a camera shot, pulling gradually out for broader and broader perspectives.  At the center is a single flower--not daffodils, nor roses, nor lilacs, but one lone generic flower, indeed any flower.  The flower is tritely personified: it's happy, though perhaps not entirely naive since it apparently (apparently to whom?  the flower itself?  the observer?) isn't surprised by how short-lived its happiness is. 

Enter the Frost, who is simply playing, the 'who' appropriate since it too is personified.  But what play!  By line three, the flower has been beheaded--an accurate image for what happens to the flower, but a grisly one as well.  The frost has the power all right, but then, unless the world operates by design, which a mere five lines later will seem a distinct possibility, the power is 'accidental.'  Accident or design--a familiar dilemma in Dickinson and Frost.  Then again, one may injure others accidentally or playfully, but behead?  Not such a common accident.  The frost doesn't linger; he has other play to enjoy, but the description of him--a blonde Assassin--may cause the reader a second thought.  Blonde is good, isn't it?  And assassins, aren't they hashish smoking and swarthy? 

And then we pull back: the sun has come out, and it "proceeds unmoved."  At first, that seems like an oxymoron, since 'proceeds' suggests movement.  Is the sun the "unmoved mover" in a cosmic sense?  But then the oxymoron dissolves (almost) as the reader reinterprets 'unmoved' to mean emotionally: the sun is going about its business of measuring time.  If it's personified as potentially having emotions, it's only to say that it has no interest in this springtime death.  We pull back once more for the definitive last line.  Here there is no ambiguity; from the highest perspective of all, God's, we see approval.  God looked at his work and saw that it was good.  The poem has moved from suggesting accident to focusing on design.  Either way, however, the happy flower has quickly been extinguished and forgotten by the dark natural order of things.

While I've got my English teacher hat back on, let me continue my advocacy of eliminating whom and whomever from our language.  It would be no loss.  Over the centuries, we've lost the nominative/objective distinction for all nouns and for almost all pronouns (excepting I/me, he/him, she/her, we/us, and they/them).  Among almost all native speakers, except the most self-conscious, the who(ever)/whom(ever) distinction has disappeared as well.  The problem is that even the most educated often screw up (not to put too fine a point on it) and use the objective form indiscriminately, thinking it sounds more impressive.  In the last New York Review of Books, which doesn't seem to have a proofreader who knows the difference and almost invariably uses whomever when whoever is called for, there are two problems in just one article, Robert Brustein's "From Brecht to Broadway."  First, Brustein writes about George Gershwin that his "brassy syncopations were always unmistakable, whomever his collaborator."  Usually there's a certain logic to the mistaken choice; in this case, I have no idea why anyone would choose 'whomever.'  A few paragraphs later, Brustein writes that Lotte Lenye's husband "continued to accumulate mistresses, whom Mordden (like Fuegli) believes wrote a lot of his plays."  The sentence isn't clear in the first place, but that aside, 'whom' needs to be 'who.'  Here, we can see what Brustein was thinking: 'believes' needs a direct object; thus 'whom' is the appropriate choice.  But that ignores the rest of the sentence, which has the verb 'wrote.'  Verbs need subjects in English, and the subject is 'who.'  What's the direct object of 'believes'?  The noun clause, "who wrote a lot of his plays."

The same erroneous logic is at work in the NYRB's typical construction, "I will give the prize to whomever does the best."  The writer/editor/proofread sees 'to' and assumes that 'whomever' is the needed object of the preposition.  But again, there is a verb, 'does' in this example and the verb needs a subject, 'whoever.'  Isn't 'to' a preposition and don't prepositions need objects?  Yes and yes.  And the object of the preposition is the noun clause "whoever does the best."  For most Americans (and for all Americans in most circumstances) 'whom' and 'whomever' have gone the way of all other pronoun distinctions.  Let's just continue the inevitable trend and sweep these two words away for good as well.

If I were being even more pedantic this morning, I'd explain why Quentin Tarrantino's line from "Django Unchained" ("the d is silent") is nonsense, since whether it's written or not, the /d/ is there, the sound represented by 'j' not a single phoneme but a combination of /d/ and 'zh.'  But I don't want to push my luck.