Emily Dickinson - Poems.pdf

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The Poetry of Emily Dickinson
The Poems of
Emily Dickinson
With an Introduction by
Martha Dickinson Bianchi
A Penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication
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The Poems of Emily Dickinson is a publication of the Pennsylvania State University. This Por-
table Document file is furnished free and without any charge of any kind. Any person using
this document file, for any purpose, and in any way does so at his or her own risk. Neither
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the Pennsylvania State University assumes any responsibility for the material contained
within the document or for the file as an electronic transmission, in any way.
The Poems of Emily Dickinson, the Pennsylvania State University, Electronic Classics Series , Jim
Manis, Faculty Editor, Hazleton, PA 18202-1291 is a Portable Document File produced as part
of an ongoing student publication project to bring classical works of literature, in English, to
free and easy access of those wishing to make use of them.
Cover Design: Jim Manis
Copyright © 2003 The Pennsylvania State University
The Pennsylvania State University is an equal opportunity university.
Contents
Emily Dickinson (1830–86). Complete Poems.
1924.
a God we do not believe in, and trusted in an immortality we
do not deserve, in that confiding age when Duty ruled over
Pleasure before the Puritan became a hypocrite. Her aspect of
Deity,—as her intimation,—was her own,—unique, pecu-
liar, unimpaired by the brimstone theology of her day. Her
poems reflect this direct relation toward the great realities we
have later avoided, covered up, or tried to wipe out; perhaps
because were they really so great we become so small in con-
sequence. All truth came to Emily straight from honor to
honor unimpaired. She never trafficked with falsehood seri-
ously, never employed a deception in thought or feeling of
her own. This pitiless sincerity dictated:
Introduction
T HE POEMS OF E MILY D ICKINSON , published in a series of three
volumes at various intervals after her death in 1886, and in a
volume entitled The Single Hound , published in 1914, with
the addition of a few before omitted, are here collected in a
final complete edition. In them and in her Life and Letters ,
recently presented in one inclusive volume, lives all of Emily
Dickinson—for the outward circumstance matters little, nor
is this the place for discussion as to whether fate ordained her
or she ordained her own foreordination. Many of her poems
have been reprinted in anthologies, selections, textbooks for
recitation, and they have increasingly found their elect and
been best interpreted by the expansion of those lives they have
seized upon by force of their natural, profound intuition of
the miracles of everyday Life, Love, and Death. She herself
was of the part of life that is always youth, always magical.
She wrote of it as she grew to know it, step by step, discovery
by discovery, truth by truth—until time merely became eter-
nity. She was preëminently the discoverer—eagerly hunting
the meaning of it all; this strange world in which she
wonderingly found herself,—“A Balboa of house and garden,”
surmising what lay beyond the purple horizon. She lived with
“I like a look of agony
Because I know it’s true
Men do not sham convulsion
Nor simulate a throe.”
As light after darkness, Summer following Winter, she is
inevitable, unequivocal. Evasion of fact she knew not, though
her body might flit away from interruption, leaving an in-
truder to “Think that a sunbeam left the door ajar.” Her en-
tities were vast—as her words were few; those words like dry-
point etching or frost upon the pane! Doubly aspected, every
event, every object seemed to hold for her both its actual and
imaginative dimension. By this power she carries her readers
behind the veil obscuring less gifted apprehension. She even
descends over the brink of the grave to toy with the outworn
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vesture of the spirit, recapture the dead smile on lips surren-
dered forever; then, as on the wings of Death, betakes herself
and her reader in the direction of the escaping soul to new,
incredible heights. Doubly her life carried on, two worlds in
her brown eyes, by which habit of the Unseen she confessed:
“I fit for them,
I seek the dark till I am thorough fit.
The labor is a solemn one,
With this sufficient sweet—
That abstinence as mine produce
A purer good for them,
If I succeed,—
If not, I had
The transport of the Aim.”
This transport of the aim absorbed her, and this absorption
is her clearest explanation,—the absorption in This excluding
observance of That. Most of all she was busy. It takes time
even for genius to crystallize the thought with which her let-
ters and poems are crammed. Her solitude was never idle.
Her awe of that unknown sacrament of love permeated all
she wrote, and before Nature, God, and Death she is more
fearless than that archangel of portentous shadow she instinc-
tively dreaded. Almost transfigured by reverence, her poems
are pervaded by inference sharply in contrast to the balder
speech of to-day. Here the mystic suppressed the woman,
though her heart leaped up over children,—radiant phenom-
ena to her, akin to stars fallen among her daffodils in the
orchard; and her own renunciation, chalice at lip, was nobly,
frankly given in the poem ending:
“Each bound the other’s crucifix,
We gave no other bond.
Sufficient troth that we shall rise—
Deposed, at length, the grave—
To that new marriage, justified
Through Calvaries of Love!”
Her own philosophy had early taught her that All was in All:
there were no degrees in anything. Accordingly nothing was
mean or trivial, and her “fainting robin” became a synonym of
the universe. She saw in absolute terms which gave her poetry
an accuracy like that obtained under the microscope of mod-
ern science. But her soul dominated, and when her footsteps
wavered her terms were still dictated by her unquenchable spirit.
Hers too were spirit terms with life and friends, in which re-
spect she was of a divergence from the usual not easily to be
condoned. It was precisely the clamor of the commonplace
exasperated by the austerities of a reserved individuality, that
provoked her immortal exclamation:
“Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye.
Much sense the starkest madness;
’T is the majority
In this, as all prevails.
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