A daily poem from the complete works of Emily Dickinson.
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As imperceptibly as grief
The summer lapsed away, –
Too imperceptible, at last,
To seem like perfidy.
A quietness distilled,
As twilight long begun,
Or Nature, spending with herself
Sequestered afternoon.
The dusk drew earlier in,
The morning foreign shone, –
A courteous, yet harrowing grace,
As guest who would be gone.
And thus, without a wing,
Or service of a keel,
Our summer made her light escape
Into the beautiful.
Farther in summer than the birds,
Pathetic from the grass,
A minor nation celebrates
Its unobtrusive mass.
No ordinance is seen,
So gradual the grace,
A pensive custom it becomes,
Enlarging loneliness.
Antiquest felt at noon
When August, burning low,
Calls forth this spectral canticle,
Repose to typify.
Remit as yet no grace,
No furrow on the glow,
Yet a druidic difference
Enhances nature now.
It sounded as if the streets were running,
And then the streets stood still.
Eclipse was all we could see at the window,
And awe was all we could feel.
By and by the boldest stole out of his covert,
To see if time was there.
Nature was in her beryl apron,
Mixing fresher air.
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.
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.
Nature, the gentlest mother,
Impatient of no child,
The feeblest or the waywardest, –
Her admonition mild
In forest and the hill
By traveller is heard,
Restraining rampant squirrel
Or too impetuous bird.
How fair her conversation,
A summer afternoon, –
Her household, her assembly;
And when the sun goes down
Her voice among the aisles
Incites the timid prayer
Of the minutest cricket,
The most unworthy flower.
When all the children sleep
She turns as long away
As will suffice to light her lamps;
Then, bending from the sky
With infinite affection
And infiniter care,
Her golden finger on her lip,
Wills silence everywhere.
The official Daily Dickinson 2008 Calendar is available, featuring poems and pictures that have been featured on this site.
Tags: away, bee, bird, care, children, fair, flower, house, ice, Nature, noon, poem, sky, summer, sun
By way of LiveInspirations.com: Ferenc Mate’s Autumn: A New England Journey pairs the words of Dickinson (and Frost, Cummings, Thoreau, and others) with photographs of New England’s most splendid time of year.
It’s a magnificent journey in the fascinating autumn nature. Wonderful photographs of forests, villages, farmsteads from Maine to Conneticut are accompanying the poetry and literature of Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau and Waldo Emerson. Their words complement the magnificent nature. New England autumn colors create meditative and passionate images.
Another work of performance art inspired by the poetry of Emily Dickinson is Stevan Novakovich’s dance piece, “Hour of Lead.” This work premiered at California State University – Long Beach in October, 2007. Says the Daily 49er:
In the center of the stage, there was a thick, white wall on which the dancers focused their motions, pressing, twisting and supporting their bodies against its surface. Functioning as the verbal or musical backdrop, the voice of an older woman reciting lines of poetry in which Dickinson explores the nature of pain was projected into the audience.
The title is taken from Dickinson’s “After great pain a formal feeling comes”, a poem we haven’t covered yet at Daily Dickinson.
Though she has a reputation for the ethereal, bolstered no doubt by her spinster reputation and white dress, Dickinson could be a surprisingly physical poet, particularly on the topic of pain. Note, for example, The Mystery of Pain, in which she explores the all-consuming nature of pain: pain has “no future but itself,” consuming everything with its white heat. It is entirely appropriate that Dickinson’s pain poetry should be explored in dance.
Tags: brook, die, drop, fall, ice, music, Nature, october, pain, poem, sing
