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.
Dickinson is one of the great poets of pain; here she captures the timeless quality of pain, the sense that it obliterates the past and future and locks the sufferer into an eternal present.
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, –
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.
What mystery pervades a well!
The water lives so far,
Like neighbor from another world
Residing in a jar.
The spider as an artist
Has never been employed
Though his surpassing merit
Is freely certified
By every broom and Bridget
Throughout a Christian land.
Neglected son of genius,
I take thee by the hand.
High from the earth I heard a bird;
He trod upon the trees
As he esteemed them trifles,
And then he spied a breeze,
And situated softly
Upon a pile of wind
Which in a perturbation
Nature had left behind.
A sepal, petal, and a thorn
Upon a common summer’s morn,
A flash of dew, a bee or two,
A breeze
A caper in the trees, –
And I’m a rose!
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October 18, 2007 at 1:05 pm
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