Emily Dickinson
It is an honorable thought,
And makes one lift one’s hat,
As one encountered gentlefolk
Upon a daily street,
That we’ve immortal place,
Though pyramids decay,
And kingdoms, like the orchard,
Flit russetly away.
Emily Dickinson
If you were coming…
Emily Dickinson
If you were coming in the fall,
I’d brush the summer by
With half a smile and half a spum,
As housewives do a fly.
If I could see you in a year,
I’d wind the months in balls,
And put them each in separate drawers,
Until their time befalls.
If only centuries delayed,
I’d count them on my hand,
Subtracting till my fingers dropped
Into Van Diemen’s land.
If certain, when this life was out,
That yours and mine should be,
I’d toss it yonder like a rind,
And taste eternity.
But now, all ignorant of the length
Of time’s uncertain wing,
It goads me, like the goblin bee,
That will not state its sting.
I like to see…
Emily Dickinson
I like to see it lap the miles,
And lick the valleys up,
And stop to feed itself at tanks;
And then, prodigious, step
Around a pile of mountains,
And, supercilious, peer
In shanties by the sides of roads;
And then a quarry pare
To fit its sides, and crawl between,
Complaining all the while
In horrid, hooting stanza;
Then chase itself down hill
And neigh like Boanerges;
Then, punctual as a star,
Stop–docile and omnipotent–
At its own stable door.
I heard a fly …
Emily Dickinson
I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.
The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in his power.
I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable,–and then
There interposed a fly,
With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed, and then
I could not see to see.
I found the phrase…
Emily Dickinson
I found the phrase to every thought
I ever had, but one;
And that defies me,–as a hand
Did try to chalk the sun
To races nurtured in the dark;–
How would your own begin?
Can blaze be done in cochineal,
Or noon in mazarin?
Her final summer…
Emily Dickinson
Her final summer was it,
And yet we guessed it not;
If tenderer industriousness
Pervaded her, we thought
A further force of life
Developed from within,–
When Death lit all the shortness up,
And made the hurry plain.
We wondered at our blindness,–
When nothing was to see
But her Carrara guide-post,–
At our stupidity
When, duller than our dulness,
The busy darling lay,
So busy was she, finishing,
So leisurely were we!
He fumbles…
Emily Dickinson
He fumbles at your spirit
As players at the keys
Before they drop full music on;
He stuns you by degrees,
Prepares your brittle substance
For the ethereal blow,
By fainter hammers, further heard,
Then nearer, then so slow
Your breath has time to straighten,
Your brain to bubble cool, —
Deals one imperial thunderbolt
That scalps your naked soul.