Emily Dickinson!!!

Emily Dickinson is a joy and a hope, a light and a delight - right in the heart.

I started reading her again after a lapse of forty years, and I can barely believe what I am now seeing, and that I missed so much before, and have since then.

The first thing that strikes me now is that she has provided the best resolution I've found of the Puritan, New England, Congregational, cultural issues that marked my own soul so deeply. I, too, was born and raised in Massachusetts in that same tradition as she was. Reading her now just bowled me over. Robert Frost's remark about her goes through my mind: “When she started a poem, it was 'Here I come' and she came plunging through.”

An unknown photo of her seems to have surfaced in 2007:

1859 Photo believed to be of Emily Dickinson (left) with a friend.

Here is a previous photo we have of her:

Emily Dickinson, 1847, about sixteen years old.

Her early letters from South Hadley have “it” as do the letters and poems right up until the end, but if I could pick out only one poem for you, it would be the one that begins “Because I could not stop for death...”

Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –

The Carriage held but just Ourselves –

And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labor and my leisure too,

For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess – in the Ring –

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –

We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed Us –

The Dews drew quivering and Chill –

For only Gossamer, my Gown –

My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground –

The Roof was scarcely visible –

The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses' Heads

Were toward Eternity –

The fact that she refused to publish, or even to title, her poems makes perfect sense to me, but what a loss it might have been, but for her friend, Sue! There is now an astonishingly large scholarship on Emily and I think I can detect that same feeling, of our great luck, in such places that normally seem so cold.