The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF

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    cummings’s “dooms of love,” “sames of am,” and “haves of give” recall Dickinson’s peculiar use of the genitive case in a poem in which she describes heaven as “The House of Supposition” that “Skirts the Acres of Perhaps” ( Complete Poems, poem 696). In addition, the paradoxes of the third and fourth lines of cummings’s stanza—“each morning out of each night” and “depths of height”—resemble Dickinson’s characteristic trait, discussed earlier, of translating big into small, life into death, and—in the case of poem 696, riches into poverty: “The Wealth I had—contented me—/ If ‘twas a meaner size—”.
    Dickinson has even made her way into fiction. Judith Farr’s 1996 novel I Never Came to You in White offers a fictionalized biography of Dickinson. And in A. S. Byatt’s 1990 novel Possession: A Romance—a double love story in which two modern academics investigate the secret love affair of two Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte—Dickinson is the model for the female heroine. At the beginning of the novel, Byatt provides a list of some of the more silly-sounding articles critics have written about her heroine:
    They wrote on “Arachne’s Broken Woof: Art as Discarded Spinning in the Poems of LaMotte.” Or “Melusina and the Daemonic Double : Good Mother, Bad Serpent.” “A Docile Rage: Christabel LaMotte’s Ambivalent Domesticity” (Byatt, Possession: A Romance, p. 43).
    But before long, these limited views of LaMotte give way to a much more rich and complex one, mostly because Byatt lets the poet speak for her eccentric, resourceful self, as in this letter:
    I have chosen a Way—dear Friend—I must hold to it. Think of me if you will as the Lady of Shalott—with a Narrower Wisdom—who chooses not the Gulp of Outside Air and the chilly river-journey deathwards—but who chooses to watch diligently the bright colours of her Web—to ply an industrious shuttle—to make—something—to close the Shutters and the Peephole too—(Byatt, p. 205).
    Dickinson’s influence can be felt everywhere. Writers are in her thrall; every year the Poetry Society of America offers an award “for a poem inspired by Dickinson”; the 2002 Modern Language Association featured several panels on her work; she even has her own International Society. As Dickinson herself predicted, her light may have gone out, but the lenses of later ages keep reflecting and refracting it in all sorts of inventive and unexpected ways. The intense eyes of the young woman in the photograph will keep peering into ours for a very long time.
     
    Rachel Wetzsteon received her doctorate in English from Columbia University in 1999 and is Assistant Professor of English at William Paterson University. She has published two books of poems, The Other Stars and Home and Away, and has received various awards for her poetry. She currently lives in New York City.

PART ONE
    LIFE
    THIS is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,—
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
     
    Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!

I
    SUCCESS is counted sweetest
By those who ne‘er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
     
    Not one of all the purple host
Who took the flag to-day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of victory,
     
    As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Break, agonized and clear.

II
    OUR share of night to bear,
Our share of morning,
Our blank in bliss to fill,
Our blank in scorning.
     
    Here a star, and there a star,
Some lose their way.
Here a mist, and there a mist,
Afterwards—day!

III
    SOUL, wilt thou toss again?
By just such a hazard
Hundreds have lost, indeed,
But tens have won an all.
     
    Angels’ breathless ballot
Lingers to record thee;
Imps in eager caucus
Raffle for my soul.

IV
    ’T is so much joy! ’T is so much joy!
If I