Happy Birthday, Emily!

Emily Dickinson was born today in 1830, in Amherst Massachusetts. Self-described as "small, like the wren; and my hair is bold, like the chestnut burr; and my eyes, like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves," Dickinson was reclusive, cut-off from the townsfolk not least because she was agnostic and never went to church; she found the steady stream of visitors to her widowed father's house, where she lived, "tedious". (Aha! An introvert, too ...)

She wrote more than 1700 poems, and although it took until after her death, she is now regarded as the first great lyric poet of America, and one the great American poets ever.

Martha Dickinson Bianchi wrote of her:

As light after darkness, Summer following Winter, she is inevitable, unequivocal. Evasion of fact she knew not, though her body might flit away from interruption, leaving an intruder to “Think that a sunbeam left the door ajar.”

Herewith a couple of her poems:

Let down the bars, O Death!
The tired flocks come in
Whose bleating ceases to repeat,
Whose wandering is done.

Thine is the stillest night,
Thine the securest fold;
Too near thou art for seeking thee,
Too tender to be told.

and

Some things that fly there be,—
Birds, hours, the bumble-bee:
Of these no elegy.

Some things that stay there be,—
Grief, hills, eternity:
Nor this behooveth me.

There are, that resting, rise.
Can I expound the skies?
How still the riddle lies!

This poem, the one they had on Writers Almanac today, is not one of my favorites, but it too (like the second one abo should dispel the myth that you can sing any Dickinson poem to The Yellow Rose of Texas (though, frankly, if you could, so what? All sonnets are the same, too.)

After great pain, a formal feeling comes —
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs —
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round —
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought —
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone —

This is the hour of Lead —
Remembered, if outlived
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow —
First — Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go —