Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886)
American poet.
FAME is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate,
Whose table once a Guest, but not
The second time, is set.
Whose crumbs the crows inspect,
And with ironic caw
Flap past it to the Farmer’s corn;
Men eat of it and die.
NEW feet within my garden go,
New fingers stir the sod;
A troubadour upon the elm
Betrays the solitude.
Emily Dickinson is the female Sade, and her poems are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadmomasochistic imaginist. When she is rescued from American Studies departments and juxtaposed with Dante and Baudelaire, her barbarities and diabolical acts of will become glaringly apparent. Dickinson inherits through Blake the rape cycle of The Faerie Queene. Blake and Spenser are her allies in helping pagan Coleridge defeat Protestant Wordsworth.
MINE enemy is growing old,—
I have at last revenge.
The palate of the hate departs;
If any would avenge,—
GLEE! the great storm is over!
Four have recovered the land;
Forty gone down together
Into the boiling sand.
PRESENTIMENT is that long shadow on the lawn
Indicative that suns go down;
The notice to the startled grass
That darkness is about to pass.
How wrong Emily Dickinson was! Hope is not "the thing with feathers". The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.
To Whom the Mornings stand for Nights,
What must the Midnights — be!
THE DISTANCE that the dead have gone
Does not at first appear;
Their coming back seems possible
For many an ardent year.
OUR journey had advanced;
Our feet were almost come
To that odd fork in Being’s road,
Eternity by term.
SURGEONS must be very careful
When they take the knife!
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the culprit,—Life!
Her poetry is the diary or autobiography — though few diaries or autobiographies compare with it for intentional and, especially, unintentional truth — of an acute psychologist, a wonderful rhetorician, and one of the most individual writers who ever lived, one of those best able to express experience at its most nearly absolute.
Because I could not stop for Death —
He kindly stopped for me —
The Carriage held but just Ourselves —
And Immortality.
THERE is a word
Which bears a sword
Can pierce an armed man.
It hurls its barbed syllables,—
At once is mute again.
But where it fell
The saved will tell
On patriotic day,
Some epauletted brother
Gave his breath away.