Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886)
American poet.
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires a sorest need.
God preaches, a noted Clergyman —
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last—
I’m going, all along.
NO rack can torture me,
My soul ’s at liberty.
Behind this mortal bone
There knits a bolder one
WHO has not found the heaven below
Will fail of it above.
God’s residence is next to mine,
His furniture is love.
I NEVER saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.
I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.
IT tossed and tossed,—
A little brig I knew,—
O’ertook by blast,
It spun and spun,
And groped delirious, for morn.
A DEATH-BLOW is a life-blow to some
Who, till they died, did not alive become;
Who, had they lived, had died, but when
They died, vitality begun.
THE PEDIGREE of honey
Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.
I TOOK my power in my hand
And went against the world;
’T was not so much as David had,
But I was twice as bold.
MUCH madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur,—you ’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.
DROWNING is not so pitiful
As the attempt to rise.
Three times, ’t is said, a sinking man
Comes up to face the skies,
And then declines forever
To that abhorred abode
Richard Chase declares, "No great poet has written so much bad verse as Emily Dickinson." He blames the Victorian cult of little women for the fact that "two thirds of her work" is seriously flawed: "Her coy and oddly childish poems of nature and female friendship are products of a time when one of the careers open to women was perpetual childhood." Dickinson's sentimental feminine poems remain neglected by embarrassed scholars. I would maintain, however, that her poetry is a closed system of sexual reference and that the mawkish poems are designed to dovetail with those of violence and suffering.
God is sitting here, looking into my very soul to see if I think right thoughts. Yet I am not afraid, for I try to be right and good; and He knows every one of my struggles.
THAT such have died enables us
The tranquiller to die;
That such have lived, certificate
For immortality.
SO proud she was to die
It made us all ashamed
That what we cherished, so unknown
To her desire seemed.
FATE slew him, but he did not drop;
She felled—he did not fall—
Impaled him on her fiercest stakes—
He neutralized them all.
How dreary — to be — Somebody!
How public — like a Frog —
To tell one's name — the livelong June —
To an admiring Bog!
LOVE is anterior to life,
Posterior to death,
Initial of creation, and
The exponent of breath.
IT ’S such a little thing to weep,
So short a thing to sigh;
And yet by trades the size of these
We men and women die!
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.