A Brief Book Review of Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson
I was born in Nairobi, Kenya, but I grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts. For six years—from the seventh grade through my senior year—during the academic year I took essentially the same route to and from school. Whether by bus or by car, I almost always traveled along Main Street. And on Main Street I would pass an imposing yellow brick building on a hill: the Dickinson Homestead. The Dickinson Homestead is the house the 19th century poet Emily Dickinson grew up in. There she spent much of her life and wrote most of her poetry. I would always pass the property with a measure of awe. I was aware a world-renowned poet had resided there, someone, to quote Fitzgerald, with “a heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.” Despite that abundance of sensitivity, Dickinson spent much of her life in seclusion; only ten of her poems were published during her lifetime, and even those were published anonymously and without her permission. Her presence in Amherst today is public and notable, a relatively recent mural of her right in the center of town. And yet, despite my awareness of her place in the history of American poetry, and despite the immediacy of seeing her home nearly every day for years, it was not until this month, years after leaving Amherst for Williams College and then New York, that I finally read her works. Friend, it was tremendous. At turns charming, inspiring, defiant, resigned, beautiful, and hopeful. But consistently thoughtful and vivid. There are 177 poems in this collection of Dickinson’s poetry. Scores of those poems I loved and will revisit again in more depth. An example of a favorite, right on the first page:
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!
Dickinson reads like one of those American writers—Melville comes to mind—who seemed to know not only all the words in the English language, but also how to make good use of them. I think she made best use of her words on grief, whether in reflection or anticipation of it. This is important. We live in a country today that largely doesn’t know how to talk about death and loss. This is not without visible efforts on a mass scale. The highest grossing movie of all time, Avengers: End Game (2019), is squarely about grief, with therapy sessions and many scenes and conversations about healthy and unhealthy ways to cope with loss. Perhaps the most well-known athlete in the history of the world, Michael Jordan, took off two entire years from the sport of basketball at the height of his powers to grieve the death of his father. The most popular musicians celebrate fallen friends regularly in songs (Nas: “Rest in Peace, Ill Will”). And yet you probably unfortunately still hear too many stories of social groups and families that “just don’t talk about it.” In Dickinson’s poetry, we see someone unafraid to pick up and examine the most universal and troubling of human experiences. Here’s an example that evokes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s albatross:
Bereaved of all, I went abroad,
No less bereaved to be
Upon a new peninsula,—
The grave preceded me,
Obtained my lodgings ere myself,
And when I sought my bed,
The grave it was, reposed upon
The pillow for my head.
I waked, to find it first awake,
I rose,—it followed me;
I tried to drop it in the crowd,
To lose it in the sea,
In cups of artificial drowse
To sleep its shape away,—
The grave was finished, but the spade
Remained in memory.
Here’s another:
Softened by Time’s consummate plush,
How sleek the woe appears
That threatened childhood’s citadel
And undermined the years!
Bisected now by bleaker griefs,
We envy the despair
That threatened childhood’s citadel
So easy to repair.
Another one:
To fight aloud is very brave,
But gallanter, I know,
Who charge within the bosom,
The cavalry of woe.
Who win, and nations do not see,
Who fall, and none observe,
Whose dying eyes no country
Regards with patriot love.
We trust, in plumed procession,
For such the angels go,
Rank after rank, with even feet
And uniforms of snow.
Do yourself a favor and consider Emily Dickinson.