Poets Poetry

Blake
Byron
Dickison
Jonson
Ralegh
Shelley

Emily Dickison

1830-1886

Dickinson spent most of her strange life in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she had been born. Her father was a lawyer who served in the United States House of Representatives. she seems to have been gregarious when young but became reclusive as time passed. Of her many poems - upwards of 1,800 - only eight or so were published in her lifetime. Since she was such a great and eloquent poet, people have naturally been curious about her, but biographical speculations have encountered many barriers, and the poetry itself continues to present inconsistencies, enigmas, anomalies, and opacities. Whatever the truth about her life, she remains a poet of unmatched strength and vitality. The primitive simplicity of some of her stanzas is balanced by the audacious complexity of syntax and rhythm, along with eccentric rhymes.

Because I could not stop for Death

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
I first surmissed the Horses' heads
Were toward Eternity--

Dickinson, a generation younger than Poe, came along just in time to witness a mass movement in obituary poetry so widespread and so bathetically lugubrious that it became a joke. Mark Twain and others repeatedly made fun of the death poems of Julia A. Moore, who appears as Emmeline Grangerfield in Hucklberry Finn. "Because I could not stop for Death" personifies Death as a civil gentleman, not so different from Whitman's "lovely and soothing death" ("When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed) or even Keat's "easeful death" ("Ode to a Nightingale")

A Narrow Fellow in the Grass

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 to 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
or cordiality --
But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
and Zero at the Bone --

Charms and riddles are among the oldest poems, and they are also, in a sense, the "oldest" or earliest poems for many readers. The point is to describe something without naming it. There are riddles in the Bible, in Homer, in Old English literature, and in any schoolyard or workplace.

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

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 -

One hallmark of Dickinson's genius is her skill in capturing extremes of extraordinary vision and horror by means of the simplest verbal traps: "And then...And...And...And..."

 

Entrance || Map || Blake || Byron || Dickison || Jonson || Ralegh || Shelley
View -- Guest Book -- Sign
Top of Page

©2004 B.J. Carper, All Rights Reserved
P.O. Box 125
Hudson, Indiana 46747

E-mail: ragdoll@bajeca.com

Favorite Links

Budding HTML Guru's
HTML Goodies
Juelle Web Design
Web Tech U
W3C