Poems by Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9783743109506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Poesie

THE verses of Emily Dickinson belong emphatically to what Emerson long since called "the Poetry of the Portfolio, "-something produced absolutely without the thought of publication, and solely by way of expression of the writer's own mind. Such verse must inevitably forfeit whatever advantage lies in the discipline of public criticism and the enforced conformity to accepted ways. On the other hand, it may often gain something through the habit of freedom and the unconventional utterance of daring thoughts. In the case of the present author, there was absolutely no choice in the matter; she must write thus, or not at all. A recluse by temperament and habit, literally spending years without setting her foot beyond the doorstep, and many more years during which her walks were strictly limited to her father's grounds, she habitually concealed her mind, like her person, from all but a very few friends; and it was with great difficulty that she was persuaded to print, during her lifetime, three or four poems. Yet she wrote verses in great abundance; and though brought curiously indifferent to all conventional rules, had yet a rigorous literary standard of her own, and often altered a word many times to suit an ear which had its own tenacious fastidiousness.

IV. TIME AND ETERNITY.

I.
One dignity delays for all,
One mitred afternoon.
None can avoid this purple,
None evade this crown.



Coach it insures, and footmen,
Chamber and state and throng;
Bells, also, in the village,
As we ride grand along.



What dignified attendants,
What service when we pause!
How loyally at parting
Their hundred hats they raise!



How pomp surpassing ermine,
When simple you and I
Present our meek escutcheon,
And claim the rank to die!



II.
TOO LATE.
Delayed till she had ceased to know,
Delayed till in its vest of snow
Her loving bosom lay.
An hour behind the fleeting breath,
Later by just an hour than death, —
Oh, lagging yesterday!



Could she have guessed that it would be;
Could but a crier of the glee
Have climbed the distant hill;
Had not the bliss so slow a pace, —
Who knows but this surrendered face
Were undefeated still?



Oh, if there may departing be
Any forgot by victory
In her imperial round,
Show them this meek apparelled thing,
That could not stop to be a king,
Doubtful if it be crowned!



III.
ASTRA CASTRA.
Departed to the judgment,
A mighty afternoon;
Great clouds like ushers leaning,
Creation looking on.



The flesh surrendered, cancelled,
The bodiless begun;
Two worlds, like audiences, disperse
And leave the soul alone.



IV.
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 cadence, —
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.



V.
On this long storm the rainbow rose,
On this late morn the sun;
The clouds, like listless elephants,
Horizons straggled down.



The birds rose smiling in their nests,
The gales indeed were done;
Alas! how heedless were the eyes
On whom the summer shone!



The quiet nonchalance of death
No daybreak can bestir;
The slow archangel's syllables
Must awaken her.



VI.
FROM THE CHRYSALIS.
My cocoon tightens, colors tease,
I'm feeling for the air;
A dim capacity for wings
Degrades the dress I wear.



A power of butterfly must be
The aptitude to fly,
Meadows of majesty concedes
And easy sweeps of sky.



So I must baffle at the hint
And cipher at the sign,
And make much blunder, if at last
I take the clew divine.



VII.
SETTING SAIL.
Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea, —
Past the houses, past the headlands,
Into deep eternity!



Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?



VIII.
Look back on time with kindly eyes,
He doubtless did his best;
How softly sinks his trembling sun
In human nature's west!



IX.
A train went through a buri...

Table of contents

• Poems by Emily Dickinson
• PREFACE.
• I. LIFE.
• II. LOVE.
• III. NATURE.
• IV. TIME AND ETERNITY.
• Copyright