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;
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.
[ The Mystery of Pain] (c. 1862)
Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.
It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.
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 Thunder-storm] (c. 1864)
The wind begun to rock the grass
With threatening tunes and low,—
He flung a menace at the earth,
A menace at the sky.
The leaves unhooked themselves from trees
And started all abroad;
The dust did scoop itself like hands
And throw away the road.
The wagons quickened on the streets,
The thunder hurried slow;
The lightning showed a yellow beak,
And then a livid claw.
The birds put up the bars to nests,
The cattle fled to barns;
There came one drop of giant rain,
And then, as if the hands
That held the dams had parted hold,
The waters wrecked the sky,
But overlooked my father’s house,
Just quartering a tree.
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 Lost Thought] (c. 1864)
I felt a cleaving in my mind
As if my brain had split;
I tried to match it, seam by seam,
But could not make them fit.
The thought behind I strove to join
Unto the thought before,
But sequence ravelled out of reach
Like balls upon a floor.
SOURCE: Poems by Emily Dickinson: Edited by Two of Her Friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson. Third Series. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1896.
[ The Snake] (c. 1865)
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 too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,
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
Of cordiality;
But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.
SOURCE: Poems by Emily Dickinson: Edited by Two of Her Friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson. Second Series. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892.
“ Nature rarer uses yellow” (c. 1865)
Nature rarer uses yellow
Than another hue;
Saves she all of that for sunsets,—
Prodigal of blue,
Spending scarlet like a woman,
Yellow she affords
Only scantly and selectly,
Like a lover’s words.
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 Book] (c. 1873)
There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human 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.
[ The Humming-Bird] (c. 1879)
A route of evanescence
With a revolving wheel;
A resonance of emerald,
A rush of cochineal;
And every blossom on the bush
Adjusts its tumbled head,—
The mail from Tunis, probably,
An easy morning’s ride.
SOURCE: Poems by Emily Dickinson: Edited by Two of Her Friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson. Second Series. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892.
Letters to Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1862–1869)
Having been writing her verses in private, Dickinson looked for a mentor. When she read a compelling article about the craft of writing in The Atlantic Monthly magazine, “Letter to a Young Contributor,” she wrote to the author, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, w
ho, as she had guessed, was a sympathetic soul. The Civil War was underway, however, and Higginson soon volunteered to command a “colored” troop (about which he wrote the fascinating memoir Army Life in a Black Regiment). After Dickinson’s death, Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd edited three volumes of their friend’s poetry, which excited great interest, and a volume of her letters. With the publication of the letters, Higginson described the history of his correspondence and relationship with Dickinson. Higginson notes: “These were my earliest letters from Emily Dickinson, in their order. From this time and up to her death (May 15, 1886) we corresponded at varying intervals, she always persistently keeping up this attitude of ‘Scholar,’ and assuming on my part a preceptorship which it is almost needless to say did not exist. Always glad to hear her ‘recite,’ as she called it, I soon abandoned all attempt to guide in the slightest degree this extraordinary nature, and simply accepted her confidences, giving as much as I could of what might interest her in return.”
[April 15, 1862]
Mr. Higginson,
Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?
The mind is so near itself it cannot see distinctly, and I have none to ask.
Should you think it breathed, and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude.
If I make the mistake, that you dared to tell me would give me sincerer honor toward you.
I inclose my name, asking you, if you please, sir, to tell me what is true?
That you will not betray me it is needless to ask, since honor is its own pawn.
[April 26, 1862]
Mr. Higginson,
Your kindness claimed earlier gratitude, but I was ill, and write to-day from my pillow.
Thank you for the surgery; it was not so painful as I supposed. I bring you others, as you ask, though they might not differ. While my thought is undressed, I can make the distinction; but when I put them in the gown, they look alike and numb.
You asked how old I was? I made no verse, but one or two, until this winter, sir.
. . .
I had a terror since September, I could tell to none; and so I sing, as the boy does of the burying ground, because I am afraid.
You inquire my books. For poets, I have Keats, and Mr. and Mrs. Browning. For prose, Mr. Ruskin, Sir Thomas Browne, and the Revelations. I went to school, but in your manner of the phrase had no education. When a little girl, I had a friend who taught me Immortality; but venturing too near, himself, he never returned. Soon after my tutor died, and for several years my lexicon was my only companion. Then I found one more, but he was not contented I be his scholar, so he left the land.