chapter 1. biography and main works.............................. 115
chapter 2. Introduction to “Emily Dickinson” ................... 117
chapter 3. selected poems ...................................... 119
ATTENTION!
NOTICE ABOUT COPYRIGHT
The texts that comprise this unit have been extracted from a
selected bibliography. You MUST quote those sources – and
not this booklet (“apostila”) - any time you use the texts
to write an academic essay. You will find the page numbers
of the original passages within square brackets, [ ], so
that you can provide the correct bibliographical references.
For more information on How to write an academic essay check
the Professor’s website: www.letras.ufrj.br/veralima
UNIT III- SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
CHAPTER 1 & 3
MCMICHAEL, George [Editor]. Concise Anthology of American Literature. 2 a
edição. New York: Macmillan, 1986
CHAPTER 2
KNAPP, Bettina. Emily Dickinson. New York: Continuum, 1989. 202 pp.
113
UNIT V – EMILY DICKINSON
114
UNIT V – EMILY DICKINSON
EMILY DICKINSON, 1830-1886
chapter 1. biography and main works
George MCMICHAEL
[1025] One day in April 1862, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a poetry
critic for The Atlantic Monthly, received a letter from Emily Dickinson of
Amherst, Massachusetts, asking, "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my
verse is alive?" The four poems she enclosed provoked an immediate
response and began a correspondence that lasted twenty-two years. Although
Emily Dickinson thanked her "preceptor" Higginson for the "surgery" he
performed on her poetry, she wanted his encouragement more than his
advice, and she politely ignored his suggestions for regularizing her
rough rhythms and imperfect rhymes and for correcting her spelling and
grammar. Recognizing Emily Dickinson's poetic genius, despite her
violations of poetic convention, Higginson remained her friend and adviser
throughout her life, and after her death he assisted in gathering her
poems for publication.
Only eight of Emily Dickinson's poems were published while she lived,
and it was not until the appearance of Poems by Emily Dickinson (1890),
four years after her death, that her work became available to the general
reading public for the first time.^ The early critical estimates were
mixed. Some reviewers found the poetry "balderdash" suffering from lack of
rhyme, faulty grammar, and incomprehensible metaphors, a "farrago of
illiterate and uneducated sentiment." But other readers found them
remarkably pointed and evocative. As the years passed and as more poems
were published, critical estimates grew more favorable until, with the
publication of all her known poetry, in The Poems of Emily Dickinson
(1955), the shy, reclusive poet had come to be regarded, with Whitman and
Poe, as one of America's greatest lyric poets.
The range of Emily Dickinson's worldly experience was small by any
standard. Her entire life, except for brief visits to nearby Boston and to
Washington, D.C., was spent in and around her birthplace, Amherst. The
Dickinsons of Amherst were prominent. Her grandfather was a founder of
Amherst College; for seventy years her father and then her brother,
both lawyers, served as College Treasurer and Trustee. Her mother claimed
115
[1026] Emily's affection, but not her wholehearted respect:
"Mother does not care for thought," she wrote to Higginson.
As Emily Dickinson grew older, she increasingly withdrew
from society, seldom leaving her garden and her large family
house. There she wrote poems and letters to her friends and
watched the life of the town from her upstairs bedroom window.
Her friends, she said, were her "estate," and among them were
men, other than Higginson, her father, and her brother, who
profoundly affected her creative and emotional life. One of
them was her second "preceptor," the Reverend Charles
Wadsworth, whom she met in Philadelphia in the mid-1850$. The
facts of their relationship are obscure, but there is little
doubt about her love for him and for his "kindly spiritual
counsel," although they seldom met, and he was a married man
with a family. His departure to California perhaps caused the
emotional crisis she experienced in 1862, provoking a great
creative outburst, for in that single year she wrote the
astonishing total of j 66 poems.
Emily Dickinson lived a more intense and passionate life
than was thought by neighbors and acquaintances who saw her
only as an eccentric maiden lady, the "moth" of Amherst,
dressed only in white, who flitted almost ghostlike through her
house and garden. Not even those closest to her knew fully the
depth and extent of her emotions or that the nearly 1,800
poems, tied neatly in packets found after her death, would
reveal an immensely complex and passionate sensibility.
Her subjects were love, death, nature, immortality,
beauty. Written largely in meters common to Protestant hymn
books, her poems employed irregular rhythms, off- or slantrhymes, paradox, and a careful balancing of abstract Latinate
and concrete Anglo-Saxon words. Her lines were gnomic and her
images kinesthetic, highly concentrated, and intensely charged
with feeling. Her greatest lyrics were on the theme of death,
which she typically personified as a monarch, a lord, or a
kindly but irresistible lover, yet her moods varied widely,
from melancholy to exuberance, grief to joy, leaden despair to
spiritual intoxication.
UNIT V – EMILY DICKINSON
Emily Dickinson's poetry at times descended to coyness and
sentimentality. She had no firsthand contact with contemporary writers or
critics of the highest order. Her favorite authors included Shakespeare,
Keats, the Brownings, Ruskin, and Sir Thomas Browne, whose uneasy balance
of faith and skepticism she shared. Early in life she rebelled against the
Calvinism of the Amherst Congregational Church, yet she retained the
Calvinist tendency to look inwardly, and she had a Calvinist sense of both
the inherent beauty and the frightening coldness of the world. With her
fellow New Englanders Jonathan Edwards and Emerson, she perceived beauty
in the wholeness and harmonious relationships of nature, and like Edwards
and Emerson she has come to stand as a dominant figure in her nation's
literary history, a poet whose work reflects a spiritual unrest and a
sense of the _ human predicament that defy all easy categories.
FURTHER READING:
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. T. Johnson, 1960, 1976; The
Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. Franklin, 1981; The Letters of
Emily Dickinson, 3 vols., ed. T. Johnson, 1955; J. Leyda, The Years and Hours
of Emily Dickinson, 2 vols., 1960; G. Whicher, This Was a Poet, 1938, 1952,
1957; M. Bingham, Ancestor's Brocades, 1945, 1967; R. Chase, Emily Dickinson,
1951; T.Johnson, Emily Dickinson, ig55;T. Ward, The Capsule of the Mind,
1961; D. Higgins, Portrait of Emily Dickinson, 1967; The Recognition of Emily
Dickinson, ed. C. Blake and C. Wells, 1964; A. Gelpi, Emily Dickinson, 1965;
K. Lubbers, Emily Dickinson, the Critical Revolution, 1968; J. Pickard, Emily
Dickinson, an Introduction and Interpretation, 1967; C. Anderson, Emily
Dickinson's Poetry, 1960; C.Griffith, The Long Shadow, Emily Dickinson's
Tragic Poetry, 1964; R. Miller, The Poetry of Emily Dickinson, 1968; E.
Wylder, Emily Dickinson's Manuscripts, 1971; R. Sewall, The Life of Emily
Dickinson, 1974; R. Weisbuch, Emily Dickinson's Poetry, 1975; P. Ferlazzo,
Emily Dickinson, 1976; S. Cameron, Lyric Time, Dickinson and the Limits of
Genre, 1979; K. Keller, The Only Kangaroo Among the Beauty, 1979; D. Porter,
Dickinson the Modern Idiom, 1981; J. Diehl, Dickinson and the Romantic
Imagination, 1981; J. Juhasz, The Undiscovered Continent, Emily Dickinson and
the Space of the Mind, 1983.
IMPORTANT!!
All references and numbering to Emily Dickinson’s poems are in
116
keeping with The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols.; ed. T.
Johnson, 1955. That is the compilation about Emily Dickinson
preferred in scholarly research. However, not all anthologies
– mainly the new ones on the Internet – comply with Johnson’s
numbering system.
UNIT V – EMILY DICKINSON
chapter 2. Introduction to “Emily Dickinson”
Bettina KNAPP
[9] To read the poetry and letters of Emily Dickinson is to marvel
at the extraordinary modernity and rigor of her ideas, at the courage and
strength of her nonconformity, and at the manner in which she overcame
patriarchal dominance. It is to be excited and haunted by the mystery of
her elusive thought, which lies buried in what might be alluded to as the
geological folds of her verse.
Dickinson's was a poetry for all time, no longer to be understood
only in terms of her immediate background in a puritanical,
Transcendentalist-tinged nineteenth-century small town. Her verbal and
ideological innovations arose from her inborn talent, but also stemmed in
part from her boldness and heroic temperament; she kept a firm desire to
be emotionally and intellectually independent, as a person in her own
right. At a time when women enjoyed virtually no intellectual freedom,
Dickinson chose to carve out her own role. Although adhering to the strict
social regulations imposed on a refined Amherst girl, she nevertheless had
a mind of her own and a will of iron. No one could tell her how to think
or how to write. So determined was she in thinking things out for herself
that she even rejected the tenets of her church. The course she chose for
herself is perhaps best understood when considering the fact that she had
come from very solid stock. Paradoxically, she was a product of her
background: a Protest-ant in the real sense of the word.
A spirit of contest, inquiry, and continuous transformation prevailed
in Dickinson's search for true form, meaning, and faith. Her analytical
and probing mind helped her to face pain and doubt and concomitantly
increased her feelings of self-worth.
[10]After its transition from the uncreated to the created, the
inaudible to the audible, the invisible to the visible, the word not only
took on flesh but became Dickinson's armament, her ammunition. The word
was Dickinson's livingness, actuality, dynamism. As it catalyzed and
interacted with other morphemes in the verse, the word impacted on her and
the reader as well.
For Dickinson, as for the mystic, language was a sign, a mask, a
117
protection, and a shelter for her oblique thoughts. It helped
her to carve the bedrock of her ambiguous and always fleeting
feelings. Verbalization was crucial in helping her face aspects
of life to which she reacted traumatically: Creation, Death,
God, Love, Sex, Nature. Only in hermetic terms could Dickinson
convey the complexity and ambiguity of her intellectual
meanderings. Like the ancient Orphics and the modern
Surrealists, she manipulated her consecrated gleamings in
encoded messages, from timeless and spaceless regions. Drawing
from her "box of phantoms," which contained the nourishment
necessary to recount her turmoil, she engaged in her secret
activity of writing in the privacy and silence of her room:
Pain —has an Element of Blank—
It cannot recollect
When it begun—or if there were
A time when it was not—
It has no Future—but itself—
Its Infinite contain
Its Past—enlightened to perceive
New Periods—of Pain. (#650)
Poetry, for Dickinson, was a celebration of .the creative
power of the word. Only partially articulated truths and
ambiguous syntax were molded by her into sculptured verse,
which she then smoothed and refined into what we might consider
occult diachronic and synchronic progressions. Placing her
figures of speech and cryptic allusions in special spaces
within the line, Dickinson was able to locate and isolate
nonmaterial thoughts and sensations, thereby arousing the
reader's fascination and spirit of inquiry.
That hers was a poetry both classical in quality and
contemporary in technique in no way intimates its
accessibility. Quite the [11] contrary: Dickinson's verses are
for the most part impenetrable. Esoteric in nature, behind her
private metaphoric mode, forms, and organic shapes there lies a
world hidden or buried in darkness that readers attempt to
experience according to their own understanding.
UNIT V – EMILY DICKINSON
Poetry restored to Dickinson what had been lost, located what had
been missing, and renewed what had been corroded. It was her lifeline to
the world: "she ate and drank the precious words," endowing them with a
fresh life culled from her private lexicon of symbols, signs, and totems.
Like the symbolists, Dickinson felt that a correspondence— subtle,
forever fluctuating, and unnameable—existed between spiritual ideations
and empirical reality. To use everyday terminology in her poetry, but in a
new way, as had Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, and Stephane Mallarme, was
to inject new energy into colloquialisms, thereby altering their meaning,
impact, and resonance.
The Lightning is a yellow Fork
From Tables in the sky
By inadvertently fingers dropt
The awful Cutlery (#1173)
I felt a Cleaving in my Mind—
As if my Brain had split—
I tried to match it—Seam by Seam—
But could not make them fit. (#937)
Like the work of Samuel Beckett, which cannot be
categorized, so Dickinson's word must be examined for its
infinite implications, each being a microcosm of the macrocosm.
Poetic creation, for Dickinson, was like the opening of
doors and windows onto an unknown and frequently monstrous
world:
I've seen a Dying Eye
Run round and round a Room (#547)
Visual in every way, Dickinson's poems are verbal transliterations of
the New England portraiture and landscape paintings of her day, rigorous
and outwardly simple, without great consideration for perspective. As
visual dramas ("A Bird came down the Walk— / He did not know I saw,"
*328), they are as clear, concise, and precise as the drawings of John
James Audubon. Cut off from the fustian fineries of her day, she saw
mercilessly into nature's raw and rapacious world, both menacing and
enthralling, beauteous and ugly. Her concretization of abstract concepts,
the singling out of parts of the body to determine states of mind, and her
mathematical notions—the "static representation of movement," to quote
Marcel Duchamp's paradoxical description of his painting Nude Descending a
Staircase—actually liken her to the twentieth-century Dadaists,
Surrealists, Expressionists, and Abstract Expressionists.
[12]Like the Dadaists and Surrealists, Dickinson uses words according
to her own unconventional understanding of them, without embellishment.
They stand solitary, like one of Giorgio De Chi-rico's heads on a street,
detached, uncentered, thrust there by some happenstance; or like one of
Dali's clocks, bent to fit the sides of a low wall.
Reminiscent of the Expressionists and Abstract Expressionists,
Dickinson sometimes conveys her subjective feelings in violent distortions
rather than in ordered representations, thereby underscoring the terror,
pathos, and agony of the moment.
118
leading on through inner circular paths of memory,
recollection, contradiction, where nothing is fixed. "I dwell
in Possibility," Dickinson wrote. Despite the fluidity of her
thought and sensations, the certainty of her course made of her
inner world a fortress "Impregnable of Eye." (#657) Secretly
and privately, "How powerful the Stimulus / Of an Hermetic
Mind," she forged on. (#711)
A Word made Flesh. . . .
A Word that breathes distinctly
Has not the power to die. . . . (#1651)
psP
UNIT V – EMILY DICKINSON
chapter 3. selected poems
1
l written in 1858
8
There is a word
Which bears a sword
Can pierce an armed man -It hurls its barbed syllables
And is mute again -But where it fell
The saved will tell
On patriotic day,
Some epauletted Brother
Gave his breath away.
Wherever runs the breathless sun -Wherever roams the day -There is its noiseless onset -There is its victory!
Behold the keenest marksman!
The most accomplished shot!
Time’s sublimest target
Is a soul "forgot!"
Few of Dickinson’s poems have titles. The numbers used here follow the reference edition of her
works, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols.; ed. T. Johnson, 1955, which contains 1775 poems, all
of them numbered. The footnotes below were extracted from Mc Michael’s anthology. Writing years
are presumed. [Note by Vera ]
1
119
UNIT V – EMILY DICKINSON
To the ecstacy.
 49
I never lost as much but twice,
And that was in the sod.
Twice have I stood a beggar
Before the door of God!
For each beloved hour
Sharp pittances of years—
Bitter contested farthings—
And Coffers heaped with Tears!
Angels—twice descending
Reimbursed my store—
Burglar! Banker—Father!
I am poor once more!
l written in 1859
 67
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of Victory
As he defeated—dying—
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!
 125
For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
120
UNIT V – EMILY DICKINSON
 130
Mirth is the Mail of Anguish—
In which it Cautious Arm,
Lest anybody spy the blood
And "you're hurt" exclaim!
These are the days when Birds come back—
A very few—a Bird or two—
To take a backward look.
These are the days when skies resume
The old—old sophistries of June—
A blue and gold mistake.
 185
"Faith" is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see—
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.
Oh fraud that cannot cheat the Bee—
Almost the plausibility
Induces my belief.
Till ranks of seeds their witness bear—
And softly thro' the altered air
Hurries a timid leaf.
Oh Sacrament of summer days,
Oh Last Communion in the Haze—
Permit a child to join.
Thy sacred emblems to partake—
Thy consecrated bread to take
And thine immortal wine!
l written in 1860
 165
A Wounded Deer—leaps highestI've heard the Hunter tell—
'Tis but the Ecstasy of death—
And then the Brake is still!
The Smitten Rock that gushes!
The trampled Steel that springs!
A Cheek is always redder
Just where the Hectic stings!
121
UNIT V – EMILY DICKINSON
Till Seraphs3 swing their snowy Hats—
And Saints—to windows run—
To see the little Tippler
From Manzanilla4 come!5
 210
The thought beneath so slight a film—
Is more distinctly seen—
As laces just reveal the surge—
Or Mists—the Appenine—
l written in 1861
 214
 216
I taste a liquor never brewed—
From Tankards scooped in Pearl—
Not all the Frankfort Berries2
Yield such an Alcohol!
Safe in their alabaster chambers,
Untouched by morning and untouched by noon,
Sleep the meek members of the resurrection,
Rafter of satin, and roof of stone.
Inebriate of Air—am I—
And Debauchee of Dew—
Reeling—thro endless summer days—
From inns of Molten Blue—
Light laughs the breeze in her castle of sunshine;
Babbles the bee in a stolid ear;
Pipe the sweet birds in ignorant cadences, -Ah, what sagacity perished here!
When "Landlords" turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove's door—
When Butterflies—renounce their "drams"—
I shall but drink the more!
Grand go the
Worlds scoop
Diadems drop
Soundless as
years in the crescent above them;
their arcs, and firmaments row,
and Doges surrender,
dots on a disk of snow.
 280
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading -- treading -- till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through -And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum --
3
The highest ranking of the nine orders of angels
A sherry wine exported from Manzanilla, Spain.
5 Two other versions of the final line exist: "Come staggering toward the sun."
"Leaning against the—-sun—"
4
2
Grapes grown in the region of Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and used in making a fine Rhine wine.
Another version of this line reads, "Not all the Vats upon the Rhine."
122
UNIT V – EMILY DICKINSON
Kept beating -- beating -- till I thought
My Mind was going numb --
Nods from the Seconds slim -Decades of Arrogance between
The Dial life -And Him --
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space -- began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here -And
And
And
And
then a Plank in Reason, broke,
I dropped down, and down -hit a World, at every plunge,
Finished knowing -- then --
 287
A Clock stopped -Not the Mantel’s -Geneva’s farthest skill
Can’t put the puppet bowing -That just now dangled still -An awe came on the Trinket!
The Figures hunched, with pain -Then quivered out of Decimals -Into Degreeless Noon -It will not stir for Doctors -This Pendulum of snow -This Shopman importunes it -While cool -- concernless No -Nods from the Gilded pointers -123
UNIT V – EMILY DICKINSON
Earn her own surprise!
l written in 1862
But -- should the play
Prove piercing earnest -Should the glee -- glaze -In Death’s -- stiff -- stare --
 328
A Bird came down the Walk -He did not know I saw -He bit an Angleworm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,
Would not the fun
Look too expensive!
Would not the jest -Have crawled too far!
And then he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass -And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass -He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all around -They looked like frightened Beads, I thought -He stirred his Velvet Head
Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home -Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam -Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon
Leap, plashless as they swim.
 338
I know that He exists.
Somewhere -- in Silence -He has hid his rare life
From our gross eyes.
‘Tis an instant’s play.
‘Tis a fond Ambush -Just to make Bliss
124
UNIT V – EMILY DICKINSON
 375
And let you from a Dream -As if a Goblin with a Gauge -Kept measuring the Hours -Until you felt your Second
The Angle of a Landscape -That every time I wake -Between my Curtain and the Wall
Upon an ample Crack --
Weigh, helpless, in his Paws -And not a Sinew -- stirred -- could help,
And sense was setting numb -When God -- remembered -- and the Fiend
Like a Venetian -- waiting -Accosts my open eye -Is just a Bough of Apples -Held slanting, in the Sky -The Pattern of a Chimney -The Forehead of a Hill -Sometimes -- a Vane’s Forefinger -But that’s -- Occasional --
Let go, then, Overcome -As if your Sentence stood -- pronounced -And you were frozen led
From Dungeon’s luxury of Doubt
To Gibbets, and the Dead --
The Seasons -- shift -- my Picture -Upon my Emerald Bough,
I wake -- to find no -- Emeralds -Then -- Diamonds -- which the Snow
And when the Film had stitched your eyes
A Creature gasped "Reprieve"!
Which Anguish was the utterest -- then -To perish, or to live?
From Polar Caskets -- fetched me -The Chimney -- and the Hill -And just the Steeple’s finger -These -- never stir at all --
 441
This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me -The simple News that Nature told -With tender Majesty
 414
‘Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch,
That nearer, every Day,
Kept narrowing its boiling Wheel
Until the Agony
Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see -For love of Her -- Sweet -- countrymen -Judge tenderly -- of Me
Toyed coolly with the final inch
Of your delirious Hem -And you dropt, lost,
When something broke --
 520
I started Early -- Took my Dog -125
UNIT V – EMILY DICKINSON
And visited the Sea -The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me -And Frigates -Extended Hempen
Presuming Me to
Aground -- upon
 619
Glee -- The great storm is over -Four -- have recovered the Land -Forty -- gone down together -Into the boiling Sand --
in the Upper Floor
Hands -be a Mouse -the Sands --
Ring -- for the Scant Salvation -Toll -- for the bonnie Souls -Neighbor -- and friend -- and Bridegroom -Spinning upon the Shoals --
But no Man moved Me -- till the Tide
Went past my simple Shoe -And past my Apron -- and my Belt -And past my Bodice -- too --
How they will tell the Story -When Winter shake the Door -Till the Children urge -But the Forty -Did they -- come back no more?
And made as He would eat me up -As wholly as a Dew
Upon a Dandelion’s Sleeve -And then -- I started -- too --
Then a softness -- suffuse the Story -And a silence -- the Teller’s eye -And the Children -- no further question -And only the Sea -- reply --
And He -- He followed -- close behind -I felt his Silver Heel
Upon my Ankle -- Then my Shoes
Would overflow with Pearl -Until We met the Solid Town -No One He seemed to know -And bowing -- with a Might look -At me -- The Sea withdrew --
126
UNIT V – EMILY DICKINSON
The Wind -No nearer Neighbor -- have they -But God --
l written in 1863
 712
Because I could not stop for Death -He kindly stopped for me -The Carriage held but just Ourselves -And Immortality.
The Acre gives them -- Place -They -- Him -- Attention of Passer by -Of Shadow, or of Squirrel, haply -Or Boy --
We slowly drove -- He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility -We
At
We
We
passed
Recess
passed
passed
What Deed is Theirs unto the General Nature -What Plan
They severally -- retard -- or further -Unknown --
the School, where Children strove
-- in the Ring -the Fields of Gazing Grain -the Setting Sun --
Or rather -- He passed Us -The Dews drew quivering and chill -For only Gossamer, my Gown -My Tippet -- only Tulle -We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground -The Roof was scarcely visible -The Cornice -- in the Ground -Since then -- ‘tis Centuries -- and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity --
 742
Four Trees -- upon a solitary Acre -Without Design
Or Order, or Apparent Action -Maintain -The Sun -- upon a Morning meets them -127
UNIT V – EMILY DICKINSON
And opens further on -He likes a Boggy Acre
A Floor too cool for Corn -Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot -I more than once at Noon
Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
l written in 1864
 894
Of Consciousness, her awful Mate
The Soul cannot be rid -As easy the secreting her
Behind the Eyes of God.
The deepest hid is sighted first
And scant to Him the Crowd -What triple Lenses burn upon
The Escapade from God --
It wrinkled, and was gone -Several of Nature’s People
I know, and they know me -I feel for them a transport
 967
Pain -- expands the Time -Ages coil within
The minute Circumference
Of a single Brain -Pain contracts -- the Time -Occupied with Shot
Gamuts of Eternities
Are as they were not --
l written in 1865
 986
A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides -You may have met Him -- did you not
His notice sudden is -The Grass divides as with a Comb -A spotted shaft is seen -And then it closes at your feet
128
UNIT V – EMILY DICKINSON
Of cordiality -But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone --
Italicized -- as ‘twere.
As We went out and in
Between Her final Room
And Rooms where Those to be alive
Tomorrow were, a Blame
l written in 1866
That Others could exist
While She must finish quite
A Jealousy for Her arose
So nearly infinite --
 1068
Further in Summer than the Birds
Pathetic from the Grass
A minor Nation celebrates
Its unobtrusive Mass.
We waited while She passed -It was a narrow time -Too jostled were Our Souls to speak
At length the notice came.
No Ordinance be seen
So gradual the Grace
A pensive Custom it becomes
Enlarging Loneliness.
Antiquest felt at Noon
When August burning low
Arise this spectral Canticle
Repose to typify
Remit as yet no Grace
No Furrow on the Glow
Yet a Druidic Difference
Enhances Nature now
 1100
The last Night that She lived
It was a Common Night
Except the Dying -- this to Us
Made Nature different
We noticed smallest things -Things overlooked before
By this great light upon our Minds
129
UNIT V – EMILY DICKINSON
l written in 1881
She mentioned, and forgot -Then lightly as a Reed
Bent to the Water, struggled scarce -Consented, and was dead --
 1518
Not seeing, still we know -Not knowing, guess -Not guessing, smile and hide
And half caress -And quake -- and turn away,
Seraphic fear -Is Eden’s innuendo
"If you dare"?
And We -- We placed the Hair -And drew the Head erect -And then an awful leisure was
Belief to regulate --
l written in 1870
 1173
The Lightning is a yellow Fork
From Tables in the sky
By inadvertent fingers dropt
The awful Cutlery
Of mansions never quite disclosed
And never quite concealed
The Apparatus of the Dark
To ignorance revealed.
l written in 1872
 1233
Had I not seen the Sun
I could have borne the shade
But Light a newer Wilderness
My Wilderness has made --
130
UNIT V – EMILY DICKINSON
l “date unknown”
 1695
There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself -Finite infinity.
131
UNIT V – EMILY DICKINSON
cartoon available at
http://www.cabanonpress.com/News/news-5.ED.htm
132