A daily poem from the complete works of Emily Dickinson.
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Besides the autumn poets sing,
A few prosaic days
A little this side of the snow
And that side of the haze.
A few incisive mornings,
A few ascetic eyes, –
Gone Mr. Bryant’s golden-rod,
And Mr. Thomson’s sheaves.
Still is the bustle in the brook,
Sealed are the spicy valves;
Mesmeric fingers softly touch
The eyes of many elves.
Perhaps a squirrel may remain,
My sentiments to share.
Grant me, O Lord, a sunny mind,
Thy windy will to bear!
Tags: autumn, brook, days, eyes, may, men, morning, november, sea, sing, snow, sun, touch
Blazing in gold and quenching in purple,
Leaping like leopards to the sky,
Then at the feet of the old horizon
Laying her spotted face, to die;
Stooping as low as the otter’s window,
Touching the roof and tinting the barn,
Kissing her bonnet to the meadow, –
And the juggler of day is gone!
One of the ones that Midas touched,
Who failed to touch us all,
Was that confiding prodigal,
The blissful oriole.
So drunk, he disavows it
With badinage divine;
So dazzling, we mistake him
For an alighting mine.
A pleader, a dissembler,
An epicure, a thief, –
Betimes an oratorio,
An ecstasy in chief;
The Jesuit of orchards,
He cheats as he enchants
Of an entire attar
For his decamping wants.
The splendor of a Burmah,
The meteor of birds,
Departing like a pageant
Of ballads and of bards.
I never thought that Jason sought
For any golden fleece;
But then I am a rural man,
With thoughts that make for peace.
But if there were a Jason,
Tradition suffer me
Behold his lost emolument
Upon the apple-tree.
The official Daily Dickinson 2008 Calendar is available, featuring poems and pictures that have been featured on this site.
The sun just touched the morning;
The morning, happy thing,
Supposed that he had come to dwell,
And life would be all spring.
She felt herself supremer, –
A raised, ethereal thing;
Henceforth for her what holiday!
Meanwhile, her wheeling king
Trailed slow along the orchards
His haughty, spangled hems,
Leaving a new necessity, –
The want of diadems!
The morning fluttered, staggered,
Felt feebly for her crown, –
Her unanointed forehead
Henceforth her only one.
The official Daily Dickinson 2008 Calendar is available, featuring poems and pictures that have been featured on this site.
In lands I never saw, they say,
Immortal Alps look down,
Whose bonnets touch the firmament,
Whose sandals touch the town, –
Meek at whose everlasting feet
A myriad daisies play.
Which, sir, are you, and which am I,
Upon an August day?
The official Daily Dickinson 2008 Calendar is available, featuring poems and pictures that have been featured on this site.
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.
Tags: bee, bird, drop, men, morning, noon, snow, sun, touch, year
In its review of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness by Christopher Lane, Scientific American Magazine asks, “Would Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson be given drugs today?”
Lane’s thesis is that the DSM, psychiatry’s handbook, was re-written in the 1980s with an eye toward pathologizing emotion, largely at the behest of pharmaceutical companies that stood to gain from the prescriptions for shyness, compulsion, and bad attitudes that could be written under the guise of new clinical disorders. And it certainly does seem that the dys-pharma-topia predicted in Brave New World, when a few well-designed pills can smooth out the rough edges of personality and temper the storms of emotion.
Dickinson is a handy touchstone of shyness, though perhaps she wasn’t quite the recluse we want to imagine. She was, after all, well known in Amherst as a knowledgeable botanist and master gardener, which implies that she rubbed a few shoulders. And she carried on lively correspondences with many people; though a shy person might hide behind pens and stationery, Dickinson’s letters display an openness and humor that are far from bashful.
The most telling observation comes, perhaps, from Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dickinson’s editor: on first meeting her, he observed, “she talked soon & thenceforward continuously . . . sometimes stopping to ask me to talk instead of her — but readily recommencing.” Introverted, perhaps; protective of her poetry, certainly; but simply shy?
In any case, though, paroxetine would certainly have changed things, probably not for the better . . .
William Coperthwaite’s A Handmade Life: In Search of Simplicity uses some Emily Dickinson poems, as well as a touch of Thoreau and Emerson and D. H. Lawrence, to help celebrate a close-to-the-earth life. Mr. Coperthwaite lives in a yurt (a nomadic shelter native to the Mongolian steppes) on the north coast of Maine: a level of “simplicity” that borders on “brutal” and “masochistic”. (I live in Minnesota, where we have some pretty impressive winters, and my roots are in Maine, where backwoods antics are often practiced, and the thought of living through a northern winter in a yurt strikes me as equally inspirational and terrifying.)
I’m not sure that Emily Dickinson would have given up her Amherst home for a yurt, even in the summer, but I can imagine her paying Mr. Coperthwaite a visit. Perhaps with an ample serving of her black cake and some of the brandy that she no doubt reserved from the recipe: 8 pounds of dried fruit might not get you through the winter, but with a pint of brandy it might manage February…
Tags: february, ice, Life, poem, sea, summer, thought, touch, winter, woods
