I’ve spent this week discovering Emily Dickinson, a poet whose work I’d inevitably encountered but never seriously read or given thought to. I’m now hooked on the poems and part way through a biography by Lyndall Gordon – Lives Like Loaded Guns.
What have I learned so far?
I learned that most of her poems never went further than her desk drawer, apart from those she sewed into small booklets called fascicles and gave to friends.
That publication came after her death.
That she was not a public person ‘I’m a nobody/Are you a nobody too?…’ and that she valued her privacy. I warm to this image of the deeply private writer, in an age of the all-too-public it echoes and validates how conflicted I feel about striving for publication, success or recognition and about self-promotion and social media.
I learned that she mostly writes in common metre – a line of four beats followed by a line of three – as in songs. As Billy Collins says in the introduction to his Selected Poems, ‘Almost every Dickinson poem can be sung – like it or not – to the tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas.’ This made me smile, then try it. I found it’s true. Of course her dashes interrupt this regular beat, giving the reader pause or connection, reminding us of the value and importance of punctuation in a poem. Maybe in reading Emily Dickinson I will learn to use the dash too.
What I am most struck by is her ability in these small, untitled and seemingly jaunty pieces to move between the domestic and the cosmic, to merge the ordinary everyday aspects of life with the mystical, the physical with the mental and the exploration of madness and of extremes. Billy Collins says that Dickinson ‘reminds us that poetry is a doorway that connects the room of the invisible with the room of the visible.’
What Dickinson does, like all great poets is put into words what we feel, what we want to say. On a personal level this is both moving and comforting. Here is the beginning (with her unique use of capitals) of the poem that stays with me most at this time
‘There came a Day at Summer’s full,
Entirely for me –‘ Read the whole here
