1263
[1129]
Tell all the truth but tell it slant Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind 1872
Emily Dickinson
A Fascicle of Her Poems
627
[593]
I think I was enchanted
When first a sombre Girl—
I read that Foreign Lady—
The Dark—felt beautiful-And whether it was noon at night—
Or only Heaven—at Noon
For very Lunacy of Light
I had not power to tell—
The Bees—became as Butterflies—
The Butterflies—as Swans—
Approached—and spurned the narrow Grass—
And just the meanest Tunes
That Nature murmured to herself
To keep herself in Cheer—
! took for Giants—practising
Titanic Opera—
The Days—to Mighty Metres stept—
The Homeliest—adorned
As if unto a Jubilee
'Twere suddenly confirmed—
I could not have defined the change—
Conversion of the Mind
Like Sanctifying in the Soul—
Is witnessed n o t explained—
'Twas a Divine Insanity—
The Danger to be Sane
Should I again experience—
'Tis Antidote to turn—
To Tomes of solid Witchcraft—
Magicians be asleep—
But Magic—hath an Element
Like Deity—to k e e p 1863
*probably the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
1197
E M I LY D I C K I N S O N
1830-1886
With her formal experimentation and bold thematic ambitions, Emily Dickinson is
recognized as one of the greatest American poets, a poet who continues to exert an
enormous influence on the way writers think about the possibilities of poetic craft and
vocation. Little known in her own lifetime, she was first publicized in almost mythic
terms as a reclusive, eccentric, death-obsessed spinster who wrote in fits and starts as
the spirit moved her—the image of the woman poet at her oddest. As with all myths,
this one has some truth in it, but the reality is more interesting and complicated.
Though she lived in her parents homes for all but a year of her life, she was acutely
aware of current events and drew on them for some of her poetry. Her dazzlingly complex lyrics—compressed statements abounding in startling imagery and marked by an
extraordinary vocabulary—explore a wide range of subjects: psychic pain and joy, the
relationship of self to nature, the intensely spiritual, and the intensely ordinary. Her
poems about death confront its grim reality with honesty, humor, curiosity, and above
all a refusal to be comforted. In her poems about religion, she expressed piety and hostility, and she was fully capable of moving within the same poem from religious consolation to a rejection of doctrinal piety and a querying of Cod's plans for the universe.
Her many love poems seem to have emerged in part from close relationships with at
least one woman and several men. It is sometimes possible to extract autobiography
from her poems, but she was not a confessional poet; rather, she used personae—
invented first-person speakers—to dramatize the various sit uat ions, moods, and perspectives she explored in her lyrics. 'Though each of her poems is individually short,
when collected in one volume, her nearly eighteen hundred surviving poems (she
probably wrote hundreds more that were lost) have the feel of an epic produced by a
person who devoted much of her life to her art.
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, the second child of Emily Norcross Dickinson and L','clward Dickinson. Economically, politically, and intellectually, the Dickinsons were among Amherst's most
prominent families. Edward Dickinson, a lawyer, served as a state representative and
a state senator. He helped found Amherst College as a Calvinist alternative to the more
liberal Harvard and Yale, and was its treasurer for thirty-six years. During his term in
the national House of' Representatives ( I 853-54), Emily visited him in Washington
and stayed briefly in Philadelphia on her way home, but travel of any kind was unusual
for her. She lived most of her life in the spacious Dickinson family house in Amherst
called the Homestead. Among her closest friends and lifelong allies were her brother,
Austin, a year and a half older than she, and her younger sister, Lavinia. In 1856, when
her brother married Emily's close friend Susan Gilbert, the couple moved into what
was called the Evergreens, a house next door to the Homestead, built for the newlyweds by Edward Dickinson. Neither Emily nor Lavinia married. The two women
stayed with their parents, as was typical of unmarried middle- and upper-class women
of the time. New England in this period had many more women than men in these
groups, owing to the male population exodus during the gold rush years (1849 and
after) and the carnage of the Civil War. For Dickinson, home was a place of "infinite
power."
Dickinson attended Amherst Academy from 1840 through 1846, and then boarded
for less than a year at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, ten miles
from Amherst. She quickly became intensely homesick for her "own DEAR HOME"
and never completed the three-year course of study, dropping out in less than a year.
Her stay at Mount Holyoke was not just a time of homesickness but of religious crisis. The school, presided over by the energetic Mary Lyon, sought to develop women
intellectually and spiritually so that some might one day serve as Christian mission-
1198 / E M I LY DICKINSON
aries. In line with the Seminary's Calvinist expectations I hit individuals would experience a religious awakening as a sign of divine favor, students were regularly queried
as to whether they "professed faith," had "hope," or were resigned to no hope." Dickinson remained adamantly among the small group of "no hopes." Arguably, her assertion of no hope was a matter of defiance, a refusal to capitulate to the demands of
orthodoxy. A year after leaving Mount Holyoke, Dickinson, in a letter to a friend'
described her failure to convert with darkly comic glee: "I am one of the lingering bad
ones," she said. But she went on to assert that it was her very "failure" to conform to
the conventional expectations of her evangelical culture that helped to liberate her to
think on her own—to "pause," as she put it, "and ponder, and ponder."
Once back at home, Dickinson embarked on a lifelong course of reading. Her deepest literary debts were to the Bible and classic English authors, such as Shakespeare
and Milton. Through the national magazines the family subscribed to and books
ordered from Boston, she encountered the full range of the English and American literature o f her time, including among Americans Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell,
Hawthorne, and Emerson. Characteristically, however, she did not go next door to
meet Emerson in 1857 when he stayed at the Evergreens during a lecture tour—preferring the Emerson she could imagine to the actual presence. She read the novels of
Charles Dickens as they appeared and knew the poems of Robert Browning and the
poet laureate Tennyson. But the English contemporaries who mattered most to her
were the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, and above all, as an example of a successful contemporary woman poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Poem 627, reprinted here, suggests that Browning may have helped awaken Dickinson to her vocation when she was
still "a somber Girl."
No one has persuasively traced the precise stages of Dickinson's artistic growth from
this supposedly "somber Girl" to the young woman who, within a few years of her
return from Mount Holyoke, began writing a new kind of poetry, with its distinctive
voice, style, and transformation of traditional form. She found a paradoxical poetic
freedom within the confines of the meter of the "fourteener"—seven-beat lines usually broken into stanzas alternating four and three beats—familiar to her from earliest childhood. This is the form of nursery rhymes, ballads, church hymns, and some
classic English poetry—strongly rhythmical, easy to memorize and recite. But Dickinson veered sharply from this forms expectations. If Walt Whitman at this time was
heeding Emerson's call for a "metre-making argument" by turning to an open form—
as though rules did not exist—Dickinson made use of this and other familiar forms
only to break their rules. She used dashes and syntactical fragments to convey her pursuit of a truth that could best be communicated indirectly; these fragments dispensed
with prosy verbiage and went directly to the core. Her use of enjambment (the syntactical technique of running past the conventional stopping place of a line or a stanza
break) forced her reader to learn where to pause to collect the sense before reading
on, often creating dizzying ambiguities. She multiplied aural possibilities by making
use of what later critics termed "off' or "slant" rhymes that, as with her metrical and
syntactical experimentations, contributed to the expressive power of her poetry. In
short, poetic forms thought to be simple, predictable, and safe were altered irrevocably by Dickinson's language experiments with the lyric. Along with its opposite, free
verse, the compressed lyric flaunting its refusal to conform became a hallmark of modernist poetry in the twentieth century.
Writing about religion, science, music, nature, books, and contemporary events
both national and local, Dickinson often presented her poetic ideas as terse, striking
definitions or propositions, or dramatic narrative scenes, in a highly abstracted
moment, or setting, often at the boundaries between life and death. The result was a
poetry that, as is typical of the lyric tradition, focused on the speaker's response to a
situation rather than the details of the situation itself. Her "nature" poems offer sharp,
precise observations but, infused with mingled ecstasy and pain, are often as much
about psychological and spiritual matters as about the specifics of nature. The sight
EMILY DICKINSON / 1 1 9 9
of a fam;linis bird—the robin--in the poem beginning "A bird came down the walk"
l ( ' ; s to a statement about nature's strangeness rather than the expected statement
about friendly animals. Whitman generally seems intoxicated by his ability to appropriate :.ature for his own purposes; Dickinson's nature is much more resistant to
human schemes, and the poet's experiences of nature range from a sense of its hostility to an ability to become an "Inebriate of Air" and "Debauchee of Dew." Openly
expressive of sexual and romantic longings, her personae reject conventional gender
roles. In one of her most famous poems, for instance, she imagines herself as a
"Loaded Gun" with "the power to kill."
Dickinson's private letters, in particular three drafts of letters to an unidentified
"Master," and dozens of love poems have convinced biographers that she fell in love
a number of times; candidates include Benjamin Newton, a law clerk in her father's
office; one or more married men; and above all, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, the friend
who became her sister-in-law, The exact nature of any of these relationships is hard
to determine, in part because Dickinson's letters and poems could just as easily be
taken as poetic meditations on desire as writings directed to specific people. On the
evidence of the approximately five hundred letters that Dickinson wrote Susan, many
of which contained drafts or copies of her latest poems, that relationship would appear
to have been the most passionate and long-lived) of Dickinson's life. Whatever the
nature of their relationship, it melded love, friendship, intellectual exchange, and art.
(See their letters on a Dickinson poem on p. 1222.) One of the men she was involved
with was Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, whom Dickinson
described (in a letter to Bowles himself) as having "the most triumphant face out of
paradise"; another was the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she met in Philadelphia in 1855 and who visited her in Amherst in 1860. Evidence suggests that she was
upset by his decision to move to San Francisco in 1862, but none of her letters to
Wadsworth survive.
Knowing her powers as a poet, Dickinson wanted to be published, but only around
a dozen poems appeared during her lifetime. She sent many poems to Bowles, perhaps
hoping he would publish them in the Republican. Although be did publish a few, he
also edited them into more conventional shape. She also sent poems to editor Josiah
Holland at Scribner's, who chose not to publish her. She sent a few poems to Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, editor at the Atlantic Monthly, after he printed "Letter to a
Young Contributor" in the April]. 862 issue. Her cover letter of April 15, 1862, asked
him, "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?" Higginson, like other
editors, saw her formal innovations as imperfections. But he remained intrigued by
Dickinson and in 1869 invited her to visit him in Boston. When she refused, he visited her in 1870. He would eventually become one of the editors of her posthumously
published poetry.
But if Dickinson sought publication, she also regarded it as "the Auction / Of the
Mind of Man," as she put it in poem 788; at the very least, she was unwilling to submit to the touching-up operations editors performed on her poems. Some critics have
argued that Dickinson's letters constituted a form of publication, for Dickinson
included poems in many of her letters. Even more intriguing, beginning around 1858
Dickinson began to record her poems on white, unlined paper, in some cases marking moments of textual revision, and then folded and stacked the sheets and sewed
groups of them together in what are called fascicles. She created thirty such fascicles,
ranging in length from sixteen to twenty-four pages; and there is considerable evidence that she worked diligently at the groupings, thinking about chronology, subject
matter, and specific thematic orderings within each. These fascicles were left for others to discover after her death, neatly stacked in a drawer. It can be speculated that
Dickinson, realizing that her unconventional poetry would not be published in her
own lifetime as written, became a sort of self-publisher. Critics remain uncertain,
however, about just how self-conscious her arrangements were and argue over what
Eslost and gained by considering individual poems in the context of their fascicle
4,,
120
[130]
124
[216]
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.
Oh fraud that cannot cheat the Bee.
Almost thy plausibility
Induces my belief,
Till ranks of seeds their witness bear And softly throi the altered air
Hurries a timid leaf.
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers Untouched my Morning And untouched by noon Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone.
Grand go the Years,
In the Crescent above them Worlds scoop their Arcs And Firmaments - row Diadems - drop And Doges - surrender Soundless as Dots,
On a Disc of Snow.
1859,1862
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!
1859, 1864
207
[214]
236
[324]
I taste a liquor never brewed From Tankards scooped in Pearl Not all the Frankfort Berries
Yield such an Alcohol!
Inebriate of air - am I And Debauchee of Dew Reeling - thro endless summer days From inns of molten Blue When "Landlords" turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove's door When Butterflies - renounce their "drams" I shall but drink the more!
Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats And Saints - to windows run To see the Tippler
Leaning against the - Sun!
1861
Some keep the Sabbath going to Church
keep it, staying at Home With a Bobolink for a Chorister And an Orchard, for a Dome Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice I just wear my WingsAnd instead of tolling the Bell, for Church Our little Sexton - sings.
God preaches, a noted Clergyman —
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last I'm going, all along.
1861
260
[288]
269
[249]
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise y o u know!
Wild Nights - Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog To tell one's name - the livelong June To an admiring Bog!
Futile - the winds To a Heart in port Done with the Compass Done with the Chart!
1861
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!
Rowing in Eden Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor - Tonight In thee!
1861
10
320
[258]
340
[280]
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes -
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading - treading - till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through -
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us We can find no scar,
But internal difference Where the Meanings, are -
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum Kept beating - beating - till I thought
My Mind was going numb -
None may teach it - Any 'Tis the Seal Despair An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air -
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,
When it comes, the Landscape listens Shadows - hold their breath When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death -
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here -
1862
A
n
d
then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then 1862
347
[348]
I dreaded that first Robin, so,
But He is mastered, now,
I'm accustomed to Him grown,
He hurts a little, though I thought if I could only live
Till that first Shout got by Not all Pianos in the Woods
Had power to mangle me I dared not meet the Daffodils For fear their Yellow Gown
Would pierce me with a fashion
So foreign to my own I wished the Grass would hurry So - when 'twas time to see He'd be too tall, the tallest one
Could stretch to look at me -
I could not bear the Bees should come,
I wished they'd stay away
In those dim countries where they go,
What word had they, for me?
They're here, though; not a creature failed No Blossom stayed away
In gentle deference to me The Queen of Calvary Each one salutes me, as he goes,
And I, my childish Plumes,
Lift, in bereaved acknowledgment
Of their unthinking Drums 1862
359
[328]
372
[341]
A Bird, came down the Walk—
He did not know I saw—
He bit an Angle Worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,
After great pain, a formal feeling comes The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,'
And 'Yesterday, or Centuries before'?
And then, he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass-And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass—
The Feet, mechanical, go round -
He glanced with rapid eyes,
That hurried all abroad—
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—
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone This is the Hour of Lead Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow First - Chill - then Stupor - then the letting go 1862
Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam—
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plash less as they swim.
1862
409
[303]
479 [ 7 1 2 ]
Because I could not stop for Death He kindly stopped for me The Carriage held but just Ourselves And Immortality.
The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more —
We slowly drove - He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility -
Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing —
At her low Gate —
Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat —
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess - in the Ring We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain We passed the Setting Sun -
I've known her — from an ample nation Choose One —
Then — close the Valves of her attention —
Like Stone —
1862
T
h
Or rather - He passed us e
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 1862
591
[465]
598
[632]
I heard a Fly buzz - when I died The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air Between the Heaves of Storm -
The Brain — is wider than the Sky —
For — put them side by side —
The one the other will contain
With ease — and You — beside —
The Eyes around - had wrung them dry And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset - when the King
Be witnessed - in the Room -
The Brain is deeper than the sea —
For — hold them — Blue to Blue —
The one the other will absorb —
As Sponges — Buckets — do —
I willed my Keepsakes - Signed away
What portions of me be
Assignable - and then it was
There interposed a Fly -
The Brain is just the weight of God —
For — Heft them — Pound for Pound —
And they will differ — if they do —
As Syllable from Sound —
With Blue - uncertain stumbling Buzz
Between the light - and me And then the Windows failed - and then
I could not see to see 1863
1863
764 [754]
My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun —
In Corners — till a Day
The Owner passed — identified —
And carried Me away —
And now We roam in Sovereign Woods
And now We hunt the Doe —
And every time I speak for Him —
The Mountains straight reply —
And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow —
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through —
620
[435]
Much Madness is divinest Sense —
To a discerning Eye —
Much Sense — the Starkest Madness —
Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevails —
Assent — and you are sane —
Demur — you're straightway dangerous —
And handled with a Chain —
1863
And when at Night — Our good Day done —
I guard My Master's Head —
'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's
Deep Pillow — to have shared —
To foe of His — I'm deadly foe —
None stir the second time —
On whom 1 lay a Yellow Eye —
Or an emphatic Thumb —
Though I than He — may longer live
He longer must — than I —
For I have but the power to kill,
Without—the power to d i e 1863
1096
(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
And opens further on —
He likes a Boggy Acre —
A Floor too cool for Corn —
But 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
It wrinkled And was gone —
Several of Nature's People
I know and they know me
I feel for them a transport
Of Cordiality
But never met this Fellow
Attended or alone
Without a tighter Breathing
And Zero at the Bone.
1865
Emily Dickinson
A Fascicle of Poems
1263
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
1872
1
627
I think I was enchanted
1863._ .....
2
3-6
Introduction from Norton Anthology*
120
These are the days when Birds come back
1859, 1864
7
124
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers
1859, 1862
7
207
I taste a liquor never brewed
1861
8
236
Some keep the Sabbath going to Church
1861
8
260
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
1861_ .........
9
269
Wild Nights! — Wild Nights! ....... . . . . . .
320
There's a certain Slant of Light
1862
340
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain._ ........ ...... ........
1 8 6 2 _ ......... 10
347
I dreaded that first Robin, so
1862
359
A Bird, came down the Walk
1 8 6 2 _ ......... 12
372
After great pain, a formal feeling comes
409
The Soul selects her own Society__ ...... ........... 1862.........
13
479
Because I could not stop for Death .................. . . . 1862
13
591
I heard a Fly buzz — when I died
1863
14
598
The Brain — is wider than the Sky
1863.............. 14
620
Much Madness is divinest S e n s e _ _ ...........
1863
15
764
My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun... ............
1863._ .....
15
1096
A narrow Fellow in the Grass _ ...... _______ .....
1865
16
..... 1861
..... 1862
9
10
11
12
Baym, Nina, ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature — Shorter Seventh
Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008.