Poems by Emily Dickinson
Book III.
Nature.
- The springtime's pallid landscape
- Will glow like bright bouquet,
- Though drifted deep in parian
- The village lies to-day.
- The lilacs, bending many a year,
- With purple load will hang;
- The bees will not forget the tune
- Their old forefathers sang.
- The rose will redden in the bog,
- The aster on the hill
- Her everlasting fashion set,
- And covenant gentians frill,
- Till summer folds her miracle
- As women do their gown,
- Or priests adjust the symbols
- When sacrament is done.
- She slept beneath a tree
- Remembered but by me.
- I touched her cradle mute;
- She recognized the foot,
- Put on her carmine suit,--
- And see!
- A light exists in spring
- Not present on the year
- At any other period.
- When March is scarcely here
- A color stands abroad
- On solitary hills
- That science cannot overtake,
- But human nature feels.
- It waits upon the lawn;
- It shows the furthest tree
- Upon the furthest slope we know;
- It almost speaks to me.
- Then, as horizons step,
- Or noons report away,
- Without the formula of sound,
- It passes, and we stay:
- A quality of loss
- Affecting our content,
- As trade had suddenly encroached
- Upon a sacrament.
- A lady red upon the hill
- Her annual secret keeps;
- A lady white within the field
- In placid lily sleeps!
- The tidy breezes with their brooms
- Sweep vale, and hill, and tree!
- Prithee, my pretty housewives!
- Who may expected be?
- The neighbors do not yet suspect!
- The woods exchange a smile--
- Orchard, and buttercup, and bird--
- In such a little while!
- And yet how still the landscape stands,
- How nonchalant the wood,
- As if the resurrection
- Were nothing very odd!
- Dear March, come in!
- How glad I am!
- I looked for you before.
- Put down your hat--
- You must have walked--
- How out of breath you are!
- Dear March, how are you?
- And the rest?
- Did you leave Nature well?
- Oh, March, come right upstairs with me,
- I have so much to tell!
- I got your letter, and the birds';
- The maples never knew
- That you were coming,--I declare,
- How red their faces grew!
- But, March, forgive me--
- And all those hills
- You left for me to hue;
- There was no purple suitable,
- You took it all with you.
- Who knocks? That April!
- Lock the door!
- I will not be pursued!
- He stayed away a year, to call
- When I am occupied.
- But trifles look so trivial
- As soon as you have come,
- That blame is just as dear as praise
- And praise as mere as blame.
- We like March, his shoes are purple,
- He is new and high;
- Makes he mud for dog and peddler,
- Makes he forest dry;
- Knows the adder's tongue his coming,
- And begets her spot.
- Stands the sun so close and mighty
- That our minds are hot.
- News is he of all the others;
- Bold it were to die
- With the blue-birds buccaneering
- On his British sky.
- Not knowing when the dawn will come
- I open every door;
- Or has it feathers like a bird,
- Or billows like a shore?
- A murmur in the trees to note,
- Not loud enough for wind;
- A star not far enough to seek,
- Nor near enough to find;
- A long, long yellow on the lawn,
- A hubbub as of feet;
- Not audible, as ours to us,
- But dapperer, more sweet;
- A hurrying home of little men
- To houses unperceived,--
- All this, and more, if I should tell,
- Would never be believed.
- Of robins in the trundle bed
- How many I espy
- Whose nightgowns could not hide the wings,
- Although I heard them try!
- But then I promised ne'er to tell;
- How could I break my word?
- So go your way and I 'll go mine,--
- No fear you 'll miss the road.
- Morning is the place for dew,
- Corn is made at noon,
- After dinner light for flowers,
- Dukes for setting sun!
- To my quick ear the leaves conferred;
- The bushes they were bells;
- I could not find a privacy
- From Nature's sentinels.
- In cave if I presumed to hide,
- The walls began to tell;
- Creation seemed a mighty crack
- To make me visible.
- A sepal, petal, and a thorn
- Upon a common summer's morn,
- A flash of dew, a bee or two,
- A breeze
- A caper in the trees,--
- And I 'm a rose!
- High from the earth I heard a bird;
- He trod upon the trees
- As he esteemed them trifles,
- And then he spied a breeze,
- And situated softly
- Upon a pile of wind
- Which in a perturbation
- Nature had left behind.
- A joyous-going fellow
- I gathered from his talk,
- Which both of benediction
- And badinage partook,
- Without apparent burden,
- I learned, in leafy wood
- He was the faithful father
- Of a dependent brood;
- And this untoward transport
- His remedy for care,--
- A contrast to our respites.
- How different we are!
- The spider as an artist
- Has never been employed
- Though his surpassing merit
- Is freely certified
- By every broom and Bridget
- Throughout a Christian land.
- Neglected son of genius,
- I take thee by the hand.
- What mystery pervades a well!
- The water lives so far,
- Like neighbor from another world
- Residing in a jar.
- The grass does not appear afraid;
- I often wonder he
- Can stand so close and look so bold
- At what is dread to me.
- Related somehow they may be,--
- The sedge stands next the sea,
- Where he is floorless, yet of fear
- No evidence gives he.
- But nature is a stranger yet;
- The ones that cite her most
- Have never passed her haunted house,
- Nor simplified her ghost.
- To pity those that know her not
- Is helped by the regret
- That those who know her, know her less
- The nearer her they get.
- To make a prairie it takes a clover
- and one bee,--
- One clover, and a bee,
- And revery.
- The revery alone will do
- If bees are few.
- It 's like the light,--
- A fashionless delight
- It 's like the bee,--
- A dateless melody.
- It 's like the woods,
- Private like breeze,
- Phraseless, yet it stirs
- The proudest trees.
- It 's like the morning,--
- Best when it 's done,--
- The everlasting clocks
- Chime noon.
- A dew sufficed itself
- And satisfied a leaf,
- And felt, 'how vast a destiny!
- How trivial is life!'
- The sun went out to work,
- The day went out to play,
- But not again that dew was seen
- By physiognomy.
- Whether by day abducted,
- Or emptied by the sun
- Into the sea, in passing,
- Eternally unknown.
- His bill an auger is,
- His head, a cap and frill.
- He laboreth at every tree,--
- A worm his utmost goal.
- Sweet is the swamp with its secrets,
- Until we meet a snake;
- 'T is then we sigh for houses,
- And our departure take
- At that enthralling gallop
- That only childhood knows.
- A snake is summer's treason,
- And guile is where it goes.
- Could I but ride indefinite,
- As doth the meadow-bee,
- And visit only where I liked,
- And no man visit me,
- And flirt all day with buttercups,
- And marry whom I may,
- And dwell a little everywhere,
- Or better, run away
- With no police to follow,
- Or chase me if I do,
- Till I should jump peninsulas
- To get away from you,--
- I said, but just to be a bee
- Upon a raft of air,
- And row in nowhere all day long,
- And anchor off the bar,--
- What liberty! So captives deem
- Who tight in dungeons are.
- The moon was but a chin of gold
- A night or two ago,
- And now she turns her perfect face
- Upon the world below.
- Her forehead is of amplest blond;
- Her cheek like beryl stone;
- Her eye unto the summer dew
- The likest I have known.
- Her lips of amber never part;
- But what must be the smile
- Upon her friend she could bestow
- Were such her silver will!
- And what a privilege to be
- But the remotest star!
- For certainly her way might pass
- Beside your twinkling door.
- Her bonnet is the firmament,
- The universe her shoe,
- The stars the trinkets at her belt,
- Her dimities of blue.
- The bat is dun with wrinkled wings
- Like fallow article,
- And not a song pervades his lips,
- Or none perceptible.
- His small umbrella, quaintly halved,
- Describing in the air
- An arc alike inscrutable,--
- Elate philosopher!
- Deputed from what firmament
- Of what astute abode,
- Empowered with what malevolence
- Auspiciously withheld.
- To his adroit Creator
- Ascribe no less the praise;
- Beneficent, believe me,
- His eccentricities.
- You've seen balloons set, have n't you?
- So stately they ascend
- It is as swans discarded you
- For duties diamond.
- Their liquid feet go softly out
- Upon a sea of blond;
- They spurn the air as 't were too mean
- For creatures so renowned.
- Their ribbons just beyond the eye,
- They struggle some for breath,
- And yet the crowd applauds below;
- They would not encore death.
- The gilded creature strains and spins,
- Trips frantic in a tree,
- Tears open her imperial veins
- And tumbles in the sea.
- The crowd retire with an oath
- The dust in streets goes down,
- And clerks in counting-rooms observe,
- ''T was only a balloon.'
- The cricket sang,
- And set the sun,
- And workmen finished, one by one,
- Their seam the day upon.
- The low grass loaded with the dew,
- The twilight stood as strangers do
- With hat in hand, polite and new,
- To stay as if, or go.
- A vastness, as a neighbor, came,--
- A wisdom without face or name,
- A peace, as hemispheres at home,--
- And so the night became.
- Drab habitation of whom?
- Tabernacle or tomb,
- Or dome of worm,
- Or porch of gnome,
- Or some elf's catacomb?
- A sloop of amber slips away
- Upon an ether sea,
- And wrecks in peace a purple tar,
- The son of ecstasy.
- Of bronze and blaze
- The north, to-night!
- So adequate its forms,
- So preconcerted with itself,
- So distant to alarms,--
- An unconcern so sovereign
- To universe, or me,
- It paints my simple spirit
- With tints of majesty,
- Till I take vaster attitudes,
- And strut upon my stem,
- Disdaining men and oxygen,
- For arrogance of them.
- My splendors are menagerie;
- But their competeness show
- Will entertain the centuries
- When I am, long ago,
- An island in dishonored grass,
- Whom none but daisies know.
- How the old mountains drip with sunset,
- And the brake of dun!
- How the hemlocks are tipped in tinsel
- By the wizard sun!
- How the old steeples hand the scarlet,
- Till the ball is full,--
- Have I the lip of the flamingo
- That I dare to tell?
- Then, how the fire ebbs like billows,
- Touching all the grass
- With a departing, sapphire feature,
- As if a duchess pass!
- How a small dusk crawls on the village
- Till the houses blot;
- And the odd flambeaux no men carry
- Glimmer on the spot!
- Now it is night in nest and kennel,
- And where was the wood,
- Just a dome of abyss is nodding
- Into solitude!--
- These are the visions baffled Guido;
- Titian never told;
- Domenichino dropped the pencil,
- Powerless to unfold.
- The murmuring of bees has ceased;
- But murmuring of some
- Posterior, prophetic,
- Has simultaneous come,--
- The lower metres of the year,
- When nature's laugh is done,--
- The Revelations of the book
- Whose Genesis is June.
Dickinson, Emily. 1896. Poems.