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The Dover Anthology of American Literature Volume II

From 1865 to 1922

Dover Publications, Inc.

EMILY DICKINSON

As radically original and private a poet as Walt Whitman was radically original and public, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, and attended college at Mount Holyoke for a year. When she was thirty-one years old, she initiated a correspondence with the writer and activist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. We present seven of Dickinson's letters after an assemblage of twenty-two of her nearly 1,800 poems (only ten poems of hers were published in her lifetime). Our selection of poems spans probably two decades. The best source of dates of original composition (usually only approximate) is The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, n.d. (c. 1960). The dates provided here are based on Johnson's research. Dickinson did not as a rule title her poems, though Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, in preparing them for publication, added topical or thematic titles to some. We have bracketed those titles or quoted the first line as a title guide.

    [Escape] (c. 1859)

    I never hear the word "escape"
    Without a quicker blood,
    A sudden expectation,
    A flying attitude.

    I never hear of prisons broad
    By soldiers battered down,
    But I tug childish at my bars,—
    Only to fail again!

Source: Poems by Emily Dickinson: Edited by Two of Her Friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson. Second Series. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892.

    [Compensation] (c. 1859)

    For each ecstatic instant
    We must an anguish pay
    In keen and quivering ratio
    To the ecstasy.

    For each beloved hour
    Sharp pittances of years,
    Bitter contested farthings
    And coffers heaped with tears.

Source: Poems by Emily Dickinson: Edited by Two of Her Friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson. Second Series. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892.

    "A wounded deer leaps highest" (c. 1860)

    A wounded deer leaps highest,
    I've heard the hunter tell;
    'T is but the ecstasy of death,
    And then the brake is still.

    The smitten rock that gushes,
    The trampled steel that springs:
    A cheek is always redder
    Just where the hectic stings!

    Mirth is the mail of anguish,
    In which it caution arm,
    Lest anybody spy the blood
    And "You're hurt" exclaim!

Source: Poems by Emily Dickinson: Edited by Two of Her Friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson. Second Series. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892.

    "Heaven is what I cannot reach!" (c. 1861)

    Heaven is what I cannot reach!
    The apple on the tree,
    Provided it do hopeless hang,
    That "heaven" is, to me.

    The color on the cruising cloud,
    The interdicted ground
    Behind the hill, the house behind,—
    There Paradise is found!

Source: Poems by Emily Dickinson: Edited by Two of Her Friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson. Third Series. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1896.

    [Hope] (c. 1861)

    Hope is the thing with feathers
    That perches in the soul,
    And sings the tune without the words,
    And never stops at all,

    And sweetest in the gale is heard;
    And sore must be the storm
    That could abash the little bird
    That kept so many warm.

    I've heard it in the chillest land,
    And on the strangest sea;
    Yet, never, in extremity,
    It asked a crumb of me.

Source: Poems by Emily Dickinson: Edited by Two of Her Friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson. Second Series. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892.

    "There's a certain slant of light" (c. 1861)

    There's a certain slant of light,
    On winter afternoons,
    That oppresses, like the weight
    Of cathedral tunes.

    Heavenly hurt it gives us;
    We can find no scar,
    But internal difference
    Where the meanings are.

    None may teach it anything,
    'T is the seal, despair,—
    An imperial affliction
    Sent us of the air.

    When it comes, the landscape listens,
    Shadows hold their breath;
    When it goes, 't is like the distance
    On the look of death.

Source: Poems by Emily Dickinson: Edited by Two of Her Friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson. Second Series. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892.

    "I'm nobody! Who are you?" (c. 1861)

    I'm nobody! Who are you?
    Are you nobody, too?
    Then there's a pair of us—don't tell!
    They'd banish us, you know.

    How dreary to be somebody!
    How public, like a frog
    To tell your name the livelong day
    To an admiring bog!

Source: Poems by Emily Dickinson: Edited by Two of Her Friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson. Second Series. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892.

    "The nearest dream recedes, unrealized" (c. 1861)

    The nearest dream recedes, unrealized.
    The heaven we chase
    Like the June bee
    Before the school-boy
    Invites the race;
    Stoops to an easy clover—

    Dips—evades—teases—deploys;
    Then to the royal clouds
    Lifts his light pinnace
    Heedless of the boy
    Staring, bewildered, at the mocking sky.

    Homesick for steadfast honey,
    Ah! the bee flies not
    That brews that rare variety.

Source: Poems by Emily Dickinson: Edited by Two of Her Friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson. Second Series. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892.

    [The Master] (c. 1862)

    He fumbles at your spirit
    As players at the keys
    Before they drop full music on;
    He stuns you by degrees,

    Prepares your brittle substance
    For the ethereal blow,
    By fainter hammers, further heard,
    Then nearer, then so slow

    Your breath has time to straighten,
    Your brain to bubble cool,—
    Deals one imperial thunderbolt
    That scalps your naked soul.

Source: Poems by Emily Dickinson: Edited by Two of Her Friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson. Third Series. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1896.

    [In the Garden] (c. 1862)

    A bird came down the walk:
    He did not know I saw;
    He bit an angle-worm in halves
    And ate the fellow, raw.

    And then he drank a dew
    From a convenient grass,
    And then hopped sidewise to the wall
    To let a beetle pass.

    He glanced with rapid eyes
    That hurried all abroad,—
    They looked like frightened beads, I thought;
    He stirred his velvet head

    Like one in danger; cautious,
    I offered him a crumb,
    And he unrolled his feathers
    And rowed him softer home

    Than oars divide the ocean,
    Too silver for a seam,
    Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
    Leap, plashless, as they swim.

Source: Poems by Emily Dickinson: Edited by Two of Her Friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson. Second Series. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892.

    [Retrospect] (c. 1862)

    'T was just this time last year I died.
    I know I heard the corn,
    When I was carried by the farms,—
    It had the tassels on.

    I thought how yellow it would look
    When Richard went to mill;
    And then I wanted to get out,
    But something held my will.

    I thought just how red apples wedged
    The stubble's joints between;
    And carts went stooping round the fields
    To take the pumpkins in.

    I wondered which would miss me least,
    And when Thanksgiving came,
    If father 'd multiply the plates
    To make an even sum.

    And if my stocking hung too high,
    Would it blur the Christmas glee,
    That not a Santa Claus could reach
    The altitude of me?

    But this sort grieved myself, and so
    I thought how it would be
    When just this time, some perfect year,
    Themselves should come to me.

Source: Poems by Emily Dickinson: Edited by Two of Her Friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson. Third Series. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1896.

    "I died for beauty, but was scarce" (c. 1862)

    I died for beauty, but was scarce
    Adjusted in the tomb,
    When one who died for truth was lain
    In an adjoining room.

    He questioned softly why I failed?
    "For beauty," I replied.
    "And I for truth,—the two are one;
    We brethren are," he said.

    And so, as kinsmen met a night,
    We talked between the rooms,
    Until the moss had reached our lips,
    And covered up our names.

Source: Poems by Emily Dickinson: Edited by Two of Her Friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson. Second Series. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892.

    [Dying] (c. 1862)

    I heard a fly buzz when I died;
    The stillness round my form
    Was like the stillness in the air
    Between the heaves of storm.

    The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
    And breaths were gathering sure
    For that last onset, when the king
    Be witnessed in his power.

    I willed my keepsakes, signed away
    What portion of me I
    Could make assignable,—and then
    There interposed a fly,

    With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
    Between the light and me;
    And then the windows failed, and then
    I could not see to see.

Source: Poems by Emily Dickinson: Edited by Two of Her Friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson. Third Series. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1896.

    "It was not death, for I stood up" (c. 1862)

    It was not death, for I stood up,
    And all the dead lie down;
    It was not night, for all the bells
    Put out their tongues, for noon.

    It was not frost, for on my flesh
    I felt siroccos crawl,—
    Nor fire, for just my marble feet
    Could keep a chancel cool.

    And yet it tasted like them all;
    The figures I have seen
    Set orderly, for burial,
    Reminded me of mine,

    As if my life were shaven
    And fitted to a frame,
    And could not breathe without a key;
    And 't was like midnight, some,

    When everything that ticked has stopped,
    And space stares, all around,
    Or grisly frosts, first autumn morns,
    Repeal the beating ground.

    But most like chaos,—stopless, cool,—
    Without a chance or spar,
    Or even a report of land
    To justify despair.

Source: Poems by Emily Dickinson: Edited by Two of Her Friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson. Second Series. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892.

    [The Railway Train] (c. 1862)

    I like to see it lap the miles,
    And lick the valleys up,
    And stop to feed itself at tanks;
    And then, prodigious, step

    Around a pile of mountains,
    And, supercilious, peer
    In shanties by the sides of roads;
    And then a quarry pare

    To fit its sides, and crawl between,
    Complaining all the while
    In horrid, hooting stanza;
    Then chase itself down hill

    And neigh like Boanerges;
    Then, punctual as a star,
    Stop—docile and omnipotent—
    At its own stable door.

Source: Poems by Emily Dickinson: Edited by Two of Her Friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson. Second Series. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892.

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Excerpted from The Dover Anthology of American Literature Volume II by Bob Blaisdell. Copyright © 2014 Dover Publications, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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