chapter 1. biography and main workschapter 1. biography ... v – emily dickinson 115 emily...

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chapter 1. biography and main workschapter 1. biography and main workschapter 1. biography and main workschapter 1. biography and main works................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 115115115115

chapter 2. Introduction to “Emily Dickinson”chapter 2. Introduction to “Emily Dickinson”chapter 2. Introduction to “Emily Dickinson”chapter 2. Introduction to “Emily Dickinson”............................................................................................................................................................................................................ 117117117117

chapter 3. selected poems chapter 3. selected poems chapter 3. selected poems chapter 3. selected poems ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 119119119119

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.

UNIT V – EMILY DICKINSON

114


115

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 [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


116

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 slant-rhymes, 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.

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.

IMPORTANTIMPORTANTIMPORTANTIMPORTANT!!

All references and numbering to Emily Dickinson’s poems are in

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.


117

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

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


118

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.

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)

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.

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:


119

I've seen a Dying Eye Run round and round a Room (#547)

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

chapter 3. selected poems 1

l written in 1858

∗ 8888

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!"

1 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 ]


120

∗ 49494949

I never lost as much but twice,

And that was in the sod.

Twice have I stood a beggar

Before the door of God!

Angels—twice descending

Reimbursed my store—

Burglar! Banker—Father!

I am poor once more!

l written in 1859

∗ 67676767

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!

∗ 125125125125

For each ecstatic instant

We must an anguish pay

In keen and quivering ratio

To the ecstacy.

For each beloved hour

Sharp pittances of years—

Bitter contested farthings—

And Coffers heaped with Tears!


121

∗ 130130130130

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 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

∗ 165165165165

A Wounded Deer—leaps highest-

I'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!

Mirth is the Mail of Anguish—

In which it Cautious Arm,

Lest anybody spy the blood

And "you're hurt" exclaim!

∗ 185185185185

"Faith" is a fine invention

When Gentlemen can see—

But Microscopes are prudent

In an Emergency.


122

∗ 210210210210

The thought beneath so slight a film—

Is more distinctly seen—

As laces just reveal the surge—

Or Mists—the Appenine—

∗ 214214214214

I taste a liquor never brewed—

From Tankards scooped in Pearl—

Not all the Frankfort Berries2

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!

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."

Till Seraphs3 swing their snowy Hats—

And Saints—to windows run—

To see the little Tippler

From Manzanilla4 come!5

l written in 1861

∗ 216 216 216 216

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.

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!

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 disk of snow.

3 The highest ranking of the nine orders of angels 4 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—"


123

∗ 280 280 280 280

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 --

Kept beating -- beating -- till I thought

My Mind was going numb --

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 then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down --

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing -- then --

∗ 287 287 287 287

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 --

Nods from the Seconds slim --

Decades of Arrogance between

The Dial life --

And Him --


124

l written in 1862

∗ 328 328 328 328

A Bird came down the Walk --

He did not know I saw --

He bit an Angleworm in halves

And ate the fellow, raw,

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.

∗ 338 338 338 338

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

Earn her own surprise!

But -- should the play

Prove piercing earnest --

Should the glee -- glaze --

In Death’s -- stiff -- stare --

Would not the fun

Look too expensive!

Would not the jest --

Have crawled too far!


125

∗ 375 375 375 375

The Angle of a Landscape --

That every time I wake --

Between my Curtain and the Wall

Upon an ample Crack --

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 --

The Seasons -- shift -- my Picture --

Upon my Emerald Bough,

I wake -- to find no -- Emeralds --

Then -- Diamonds -- which the Snow

From Polar Caskets -- fetched me --

The Chimney -- and the Hill --

And just the Steeple’s finger --

These -- never stir at all --

∗ 414 414 414 414

‘Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch,

That nearer, every Day,

Kept narrowing its boiling Wheel

Until the Agony

Toyed coolly with the final inch

Of your delirious Hem --

And you dropt, lost,

When something broke --

And let you from a Dream --

As if a Goblin with a Gauge --

Kept measuring the Hours --

Until you felt your Second

Weigh, helpless, in his Paws --

And not a Sinew -- stirred -- could help,

And sense was setting numb --

When God -- remembered -- and the Fiend

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 --


126

And when the Film had stitched your eyes

A Creature gasped "Reprieve"!

Which Anguish was the utterest -- then --

To perish, or to live?

∗ 441 441 441 441

This is my letter to the World

That never wrote to Me --

The simple News that Nature told --

With tender Majesty

Her Message is committed

To Hands I cannot see --

For love of Her -- Sweet -- countrymen --

Judge tenderly -- of Me

∗ 520 520 520 520

I started Early -- Took my Dog --

And visited the Sea --

The Mermaids in the Basement

Came out to look at me --

And Frigates -- in the Upper Floor

Extended Hempen Hands --

Presuming Me to be a Mouse --

Aground -- upon the Sands --

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 --

And made as He would eat me up --

As wholly as a Dew

Upon a Dandelion’s Sleeve --

And then -- I started -- too --

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 --


127

∗ 619 619 619 619

Glee -- The great storm is over --

Four -- have recovered the Land --

Forty -- gone down together --

Into the boiling Sand --

Ring -- for the Scant Salvation --

Toll -- for the bonnie Souls --

Neighbor -- and friend -- and Bridegroom --

Spinning upon the Shoals --

How they will tell the Story --

When Winter shake the Door --

Till the Children urge --

But the Forty --

Did they -- come back no more?

Then a softness -- suffuse the Story --

And a silence -- the Teller’s eye --

And the Children -- no further question --

And only the Sea -- reply --

l written in 1863

∗ 712 712 712 712

Because I could not stop for Death --

He kindly stopped for me --

The Carriage held but just Ourselves --

And Immortality.

We slowly drove -- He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labor and my leisure too,

For His Civility --

We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess -- in the Ring --

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain --

We passed 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


128

I first surmised the Horses’ Heads

Were toward Eternity --

∗ 747474742 2 2 2

Four Trees -- upon a solitary Acre --

Without Design

Or Order, or Apparent Action --

Maintain --

The Sun -- upon a Morning meets them --

The Wind --

No nearer Neighbor -- have they --

But God --

The Acre gives them -- Place --

They -- Him -- Attention of Passer by --

Of Shadow, or of Squirrel, haply --

Or Boy --

What Deed is Theirs unto the General Nature --

What Plan

They severally -- retard -- or further --

Unknown --

l written in 1864

∗ 894 894 894 894

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 --

∗ 967 967 967 967

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 --


129

l written in 1865

∗ 986 986 986 986

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 --

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

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 --

l written in 1866

∗ 1068 1068 1068 1068

Further in Summer than the Birds

Pathetic from the Grass

A minor Nation celebrates

Its unobtrusive Mass.

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


130

∗ 1100 1100 1100 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

Italicized -- as ‘twere.

As We went out and in

Between Her final Room

And Rooms where Those to be alive

Tomorrow were, a Blame

That Others could exist

While She must finish quite

A Jealousy for Her arose

So nearly infinite --

We waited while She passed --

It was a narrow time --

Too jostled were Our Souls to speak

At length the notice came.

She mentioned, and forgot --

Then lightly as a Reed

Bent to the Water, struggled scarce --

Consented, and was dead --

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 1173 1173 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.


131

l written in 1872

∗ 1233 1233 1233 1233

Had I not seen the Sun

I could have borne the shade

But Light a newer Wilderness

My Wilderness has made --

l written in 1881

∗ 1518 1518 1518 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"?

l “date unknown”

∗ 1695 1695 1695 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.


132

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