Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) Emily Dickinson was born and died at Amherst, Massachusetts. Her father was the treasurer of Amherst College. The poet was a complete recluse. She hardly left her own house during her lifetime. She sought the advice of Colonel Thomas W. Higginson in 1862, as to her work, and he corresponded with her for many years. He and her sister Sue and her friend Mabel Loomis Todd knew most about her poetry. Three or four only of her poems were printed during her lifetime, despite her remonstrance. After her death, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd brought out her Poems in 1890, Poems-Second Series in 1892, and Poems-Third Series in 1896. In 1914, her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, published a further volume, The Single Hound. The same relative has just published her Life and Letters, and edited her complete Poems in one volume. Emily Dickinson, it is almost needless to say, never wrote for publication. Poems and letters reveal a shyly courageous, sharply individual, and quite fantastic spirit. Her personality and her work avoid categories. She wrote entirely spontaneously, to please herself and out of affection for a very few. She never desired fame, but fame has stolen upon her sleeping. Her fancy is entirely and freshly her own, sometimes she hides herself in the cryptic, sometimes she repeats herself or simply tangles herself up in fantasy. Yet she has said some of the shrewdest things within the smallest compass, and apparently with the least effort, of any American poet. When her verses are likely to rhyme too patly she seems often purposely to remove the rhymes. Her acuteness is always busily determined not to be caught by your own acuteness, and she is usually peeping at you from around a corner. She conducts the wedding of odd words with an innocence and sobriety that is wholly delicious. I believe she wrote many of her poems hit or miss on any old scrap of paper, but they remain the oracle's flittering, whispering leaves. THE LONELY HOUSE* I KNOW Some lonely houses off the road A robber'd like the look of. Wooden barred, And windows hanging low, How orderly the kitchen'd look by night, With just a clock,— But they could gag the tick, And mice won't bark; And so the walls don't tell, None will. A pair of spectacles ajar just stir An almanac's aware. Was it the mat winked, Or a nervous star? The moon slides down the stair To see who's there. *From The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Published by Little, Brown & Company, and reprinted by their permission. There's plunder,—where? Earring, or stone, A watch, some ancient brooch To match the grandmama, Day rattles, too, The sun has got as far As the third sycamore. And echoes, trains away, Sneer "Where?" While the old couple, just astir, Fancy the sunrise left the door ajar! "MUCH MADNESS IS DIVINEST SENSE" * MUCH Madness is divinest sense To a discerning eye; Much sense the starkest madness. 'Tis the majority In this, as all, prevails. Assent, and you are sane; Demur, you're straightway dangerous, And handled with a chain. PARTING* My life closed twice before its close; It yet remains to see If Immortality unveil A third event to me, So huge, so hopeless to conceive, Helen Hunt Jackson (1831-1885) Who now remembers that Helen Hunt Jackson wrote "A Century of Dishonor" in behalf of the American Indians, attacking the policy of the United States toward them? She too, like Emily Dickinson, was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, and only a year later; but her life led her much farther afield. She was educated at Ipswich, Massachusetts, and at the age of twenty-one married Captain Edward Hunt of the United States Army, who died in 1863. In 1875 she married again, and lived at Colorado Springs. In 1883 she was appointed special examiner into the condition of the Mission Indians of California, after her book on the Indians had appeared. In 1884 she wrote a novel dealing with the Indians, Ramona. Two other novels followed. Verses by H. H. had appeared in 1870 and Sonnets and Lyrics in 1876. "Coronation," here included, is perhaps one of her bestknown poems. Her work was widely known in her own day, and these several poems remain to us the expression of an unusually brave and free-born spirit. CORONATION * At the king's gate the subtle noon Into the drowsy snare too soon Through the king's gate, unquestioned then, Fare better, being kings.' From Poems by H. H. (1892), by Helen Hunt Jackson. Published by Little, Brown & Company, and reprinted by their permission. |