For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,

I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin — I draw near,

Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

WHEN I HEARD THE LEARN'D ASTRONOMER When I heard the learn'd astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before

me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

MIRACLES

Why, who makes much of a miracle?

As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,

Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of

the water,

Or stand under trees in the woods,

Or talk by day with any one I love,

Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,

Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,

Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer fore

noon,

Or animals feeding in the fields,

Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,

Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;

These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.
To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,

Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,

Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

From the walls of the powerful fortress'd house,

From the clasp of the knitted locks, from the keep of the well-closed doors,

Let me be wafted.

Let me glide noiselessly forth;

With the key of softness unlock the locks with a whisper, Set open the doors O soul.

Emily Dickinson, whose work is one of the most original contributions to recent poetry, was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, December 10, 1830. She was a physical as well as a spiritual hermit, actually spending most of her life without setting foot beyond her doorstep. She wrote her short, introspective verses without thought of publication, and it was not until 1890, four years after her death, that the first volume of her posthumous poetry appeared with an introduction by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

66

'She habitually concealed her mind, like her person, from all but a very few friends," writes Higginson, "and it was with great difficulty that she was persuaded to print, during her lifetime, three or four poems." Yet she wrote almost five hundred of these direct and spontaneous illuminations, sending many of them in letters to friends, or (written on chance slips of paper and delivered without further comment) to her sister Sue. Slowly the peculiar, flamelike quality of her thought won a widening circle of readers; Poems (1890) was followed by Poems Second Series (1890) and Poems Third Series (1896), the contents being collected and edited by her two friends, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd. Several years later, a further generous volume was assembled by her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, entitled The Single Hound (1914).

Although her chief poems were published in the 'Nineties and although the recent revival of interest in poetry drew attention to the decided individuality of Emily Dickinson's expression, her readers remained few. An occasional article appeared, showing her "lack of control" or, beneath a cover of condescension, ridiculing her "hit-or-miss grammar, sterile rhythms, and appalling rhymes. Her audience grew but gradually. Suddenly, without warning, she leaped into international prominence. Almost forty years after her death, her name was everywhere. The year 1924 saw the publication of Martha Dickinson Bianchi's important volume, The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson, the first collected Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson and the first English compilation, Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited with a splendid prefatory essay by Conrad Aiken.

66

The enthusiasm attending the triple appearance was unbounded. Martin Armstrong, the English poet, said in a review, "Mr. Aiken calls Emily Dickinson's poetry 'perhaps the finest by a woman in the English language.' I quarrel only with his 'perhaps."" Nor were the other comments less definite. "A feminine Blake," an epigrammatic Walt Whitman, "a New England mystic," were a few of the characterizations fastened upon her. Other appraisals sought to "interpret" her verses in the light of the "mystery" of her life. It is no secret that Emily Dickinson fell in love with a man already married, that she renounced her love, and withdrew from the world. But "The Amherst Nun" would have repudiated the analysts as vigorously as she, whose verses and letters brim with mischievous fancy, would have laughed at the grandiose epithets. That her work will last longer than the work of the majority of her generation is, I think, indubitable. That it is sometimes erratic, half-done and, thrown off with no thought of

or our

publication, in need of the finisher's file is also, I believe, self-evident. But, in the greater number of the poems, the leap of thought is so daring, the gaps so thrilling, that moments which in a lesser spirit would have turned to merely audacious conceits, become flashes of revelation. She wrote chiefly of four things: Love, Nature, Life, Death. But what immensities were sounded within this gamut! In 1884 she was stricken, like her father before her, with Bright's disease. Two years later, on May 16, 1886, this woman with "the soul of a monk of the Middle Ages bound up in the flesh of a Puritan" died, after a life bare of outward adventure, at Amherst. Few were present at the funeral; fewer still dreamed that she would outlive the obituary in the Springfield Republican. Today her place in literature is secure; her work is definitely

Of the colossal substance
Of immortality.

CHARTLESS

I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;

Yet I know how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.

I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in Heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.

INDIAN SUMMER

These are the days when birds.come back,
very few, a bird or two,

A

To take a backward look.

These are the days when skies put on

The old, old sophistries of June, -
A blue and gold mistake.

Oh, fraud that can not cheat the bee,
Almost thy plausibility

Induces my belief,

Till ranks of seeds their witness bear,
And softly through the altered air
Hurries a timid leaf!

Oh, sacrament of summer days,
Oh, last communion in the haze,
Permit a child to join,

Thy sacred emblems to partake,
Thy consecrated bread to break,
Taste thine immortal wine!

SUSPENSE

Elysium is as far as to
The very nearest room,

If in that room a friend await
Felicity or doom.

What fortitude the soul contains,

That it can so endure

The accent of a coming foot,

The opening of a door.

A CEMETERY

This quiet Dust was Gentlemen and Ladies,
And Lads and Girls;

Was laughter and ability and sighing,
And frocks and curls.

This passive place a Summer's nimble mansion,
Where Bloom and Bees

Fulfilled their Oriental Circuit,

Then ceased like these.

BECLOUDED

The sky is low, the clouds are mean,
A travelling flake of snow