Beauty crowds me till I die
Beauty, mercy have on me!
But if I expire today,
Let it be in sight of thee.
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JOY IN DEATH
If tolling bell I ask the cause.
'A soul has gone to God,'
I'm answered in a lonesome tone;
Is heaven then so sad?
That bells should joyful ring to tell
A soul had gone to heaven,
Would seem to me the proper way
A good news should be given.
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To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.
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Just so, Jesus raps - He does not weary
Last at the knocker and first at the bell,
Then on divinest tiptoe standing
Might He out-spy the lady's soul.
When He retires, chilled and weary -
It will be ample time for me;
Patient, upon the steps, until then -
Heart, I am knocking low at Thee!
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His mind, of man a secret makes
I meet him with a start,
He carries a circumference
In which I have no part,
Or even if I deem I do -
He otherwise may know.
Impregnable to inquest,
However neighborly.
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THE RAT
The rat is the concisest tenant.
He pays no rent, -
Repudiates the obligation,
On schemes intent.
Balking our wit
To sound or circumvent,
Hate cannot harm
A foe so reticent.
Neither decree
Prohibits him,
Lawful as
Equilibrium.
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I know a place where summer strives
With such a practised frost,
She each year leads her daisies back,
Recording briefly, "Lost."
But when the south wind stirs the pools
And struggles in the lanes,
Her heart misgives her for her vow,
And she pours soft refrains
Into the lap of adamant,
And spices, and the dew,
That stiffens quietly to quartz,
Upon her amber shoe.
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THIRST
We thirst at first, - 't is Nature's act;
And later, when we die,
A little water supplicate
Of fingers going by.
It intimates the finer want,
Whose adequate supply
Is that great water in the west
Termed immortality.
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A toad can die of light
A toad can die of light!
Death is the common right
Of toads and men, -
Of earl and midge
The privilege.
Why swagger then?
The gnat's supremacy
Is large as thine.
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Emily Dickinson was the second of three children.
The three remained close
throughout their adult lives: her younger sister, Lavinia, stayed
in the
family home and did not marry, and her older brother, Austin,
lived in the
house next door after his marriage to a friend of Emily's. Her
grandfather,
Samuel Fowler Dickinson, had been one of the founders of Amherst
College,
and her father, Edward Dickinson, served as treasurer of the college
from
1835 to 1872. A lawyer who served one term (1853-55) in Congress,
Edward
Dickinson was an austere and somewhat remote father, but not an
unkind one.
Emily's mother, too, was not close to her children.
Emily was educated at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female
Seminary.
Mount Holyoke, which she attended from 1847 to 1848, insisted
on religious
as well as intellectual growth, and Emily was under considerable
pressure
to become a professing Christian. She resisted, however, and although
many
of her poems deal with God, she remained all her life a skeptic.
Despite
her doubts, she was subject to strong religious feelings, a conflict
that
lent tension to her writings.
Emily began to write verse about 1850, apparently while under
the spell of
the poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Brontė and
under the tutelage of Benjamin F. Newton, a young man studying
law in her
father's office. Only a handful of her poems can be dated before
1858, when
she began to collect them into small, handsewn booklets. Her letters
of the
1850s reveal a vivacious, humorous, somewhat shy young woman.
In 1855 Emily
went to Washington, D.C., with her sister to visit their father,
who was
serving in Congress. During the trip they stopped off at Philadelphia,
where she heard the preaching of the noted clergyman, the Reverend
Charles
Wadsworth, who was to become her "dearest earthly friend."
He was something
of a romantic figure: a man said to have known great sorrow, whose
eloquence in the pulpit contrasted with his solitary broodings.
He and
Emily exchanged letters on spiritual matters, his Calvinist orthodoxy
perhaps serving as a useful foil for her own speculative reasoning.
She may
also have found in his stern, rigorous beliefs a welcome corrective
to the
easy assumption of a benign universe made by Emerson and the other
Transcendentalists.
In the 1850s Emily began two of her significant correspondences--with
Dr.
and Mrs. Josiah G. Holland and with Samuel Bowles. The two men
were editors
of the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican, a paper that took
an
interest in literary matters and even published verse. The correspondence
continued over the years, although in the case of the Hollands
most of the
letters after the 1850s went to Mrs. Holland, a woman intelligent
enough to
comprehend Emily's subtleties and witticisms. Emily tried to interest
Bowles in her poetry, and it was a crushing blow to her that he,
a man of
quick mind but conventional literary tastes, failed to appreciate
it.
By the late 1850s, when she was writing poems at a steadily increasing
pace, Emily Dickinson loved a man whom she called "Master"
in three drafts
of letters. "Master" does not exactly resemble any of
Emily's known friends
but may have been Bowles or Wadsworth. This love shines forth
in several
lines from her poems: "I'm ceded--I've stopped being Theirs,"
"'Tis so much
joy! 'Tis so much joy," and "Dare you see a Soul at
the White Heat?" to
name only a few. Other poems reveal the frustration of this love
and its
gradual sublimation into a love for Christ and a celestial marriage
to him.
The poems of the 1850s are fairly conventional in sentiment and
form, but
beginning about 1860 they become experimental both in language
and
prosody, though they owe much to the metres of the English hymn
writer Isaac Watts and to Shakespeare and the King James Version
of the Bible. Emily's prevailing poetic form was the quatrain
of three
iambic feet, a type described in one of the books by Watts in
the family
library. She used many other forms as well, and to even the simpler
hymnbook measures she gave complexity by constantly altering the
metrical
beat to fit her thought: now slow, now fast, now hesitant. She
broke new
ground in her wide use of off-rhymes, varying from the true in
a variety of
ways that also helped to convey her thought and its tensions.
In striving
for an epigrammatic conciseness, she stripped her language of
superfluous
words and saw to it that those that remained were vivid and exact.
She
tampered freely with syntax and liked to place a familiar word
in an
extraordinary context, shocking the reader to attention and discovery.
On April 15, 1862, Emily Dickinson wrote a letter, enclosing four
poems, to
a literary man, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, asking whether her
poems were "alive." Higginson, although he advised Emily
not to publish,
recognized the originality of her poems and remained her "preceptor"
for
the rest of her life. After 1862 Emily Dickinson resisted all
efforts by
her friends to put her poems before the public. As a result, only
seven
poems were published during her lifetime, five of them in the
Springfield
Republican.
The years of Emily Dickinson's greatest poetic output, about 800
poems,
coincide with the Civil War. Although she looked inward and not
to the war
for the substance of her poetry, the tense atmosphere of the war
years may
have contributed to the urgency of her writing. The year of greatest
stress
was 1862, when distance and danger threatened Emily's friends--Samuel
Bowles, in Europe for his health; Charles Wadsworth, who had moved
to a new
pastorate at the Calvary Church in San Francisco; and T.W. Higginson,
serving as an officer in the Union Army. Emily also had persistent
eye
trouble, which led her, in 1864 and 1865, to spend several months
in
Cambridge, Mass., for treatment. Once back in Amherst she never
travelled
again and after the late 1860s never left the boundaries of the
family's
property.
After the Civil War, Emily Dickinson's poetic tide ebbed, but
she sought
increasingly to regulate her life by the rules of art. Her
letters, some of them equal in artistry to her poems, classicize
daily
experience in an epigrammatic style. For example, when a friend
affronted
Emily by sending a letter jointly to her and her sister, she replied:
"A
Mutual plum is not a plum. I was too respectful to take the pulp
and do not
like a stone." By 1870 Emily Dickinson dressed only in white
and saw few of
the callers who came to the homestead; her seclusion was fiercely
guarded
by her devoted sister. In August 1870 Higginson visited Amherst
and
described Emily as "a little plain woman" with reddish
hair, dressed in
white, bringing him flowers as her "introduction" and
speaking in a "soft
frightened breathless childlike voice."
Her later years were marked with sorrow at the deaths of many
people she
loved. The most prostrating of these were the deaths of her father
in 1874
and her eight-year-old nephew Gilbert in 1883, which occasioned
some of her
finest letters. She also mourned the loss of Bowles in 1878, Holland
in
1881, Charles Wadsworth and her mother in 1882, Otis P. Lord in
1884, and
Helen Hunt Jackson in 1885. Lord, a judge from Salem, Mass., with
whom Emily fell in love about 1878, had been the closest friend
of Emily's
father. Emily's drafts of letters to Lord reveal a tender, mature
love,
which Lord returned. Jackson, a poet and popular novelist, discerned
the
greatness of Emily's poetry and tried unsuccessfully to get her
to publish
it.
Soon after her death her sister Lavinia determined to have Emily's
poems
published. In 1890 Poems by Emily Dickinson, edited by T.W. Higginson
and
Mabel Loomis Todd, appeared. Other volumes of Dickinson poems,
edited
chiefly by Mabel Loomis Todd, Martha Dickinson Bianchi (Emily's
niece), and
Millicent Todd Bingham, were published between 1891 and 1957,
and in 1955
Thomas H. Johnson edited all the surviving poems and their variant
versions.
The subjects of Emily Dickinson's poems, expressed in intimate,
domestic
figures of speech, include love, death, and nature. The contrast
between
her quiet, secluded life in the house in which she was born and
died, and
the depth and intensity of her terse poems, has provoked much
speculation
about her personality and personal relationships. Her 1,775 poems
and her
letters, which survive in almost as great a number, reveal a passionate,
witty woman and a scrupulous craftsman who made an art not only
of her
poetry but also of her correspondence and her life.
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