Books like Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete

If Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete stayed with you, these share its feel: death, wonder and nature. Each comes with a real page, so you can tell in a minute.

About Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete · Emily Dickinson

1.Poetry

John Keats, 1820

Also wonder and melancholy. Poems that make beauty and mortality argue in the same breath—odes, sonnets, and mythic fragments from a writer who died at twenty-five.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!No hungry generations tread thee down;The voice I hear this passing night was heardIn ancient days by emperor and clown:Perhaps the self-same song that found a pathThrough the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,She stood in tears amid the alien corn;The same that oft-times hathCharm’d magic casements, opening on the foamOf perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
2.Twice-told tales

Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1837

Also melancholy and solitude. Short fables from Puritan New England: veiled ministers, men who step out of their own lives, and the strange, small hours before dawn.

Poor Wakefield! little knowest thou thine own insignificance in this great world. No mortal eye but mine has traced thee. Go quietly to thy bed, foolish man, and on the morrow, if thou wilt be wise, get thee home to good Mrs. Wakefield and tell her the truth. Remove not thyself even for a little week from thy place in her chaste bosom. Were she for a single moment to deem thee dead or lost or lastingly divided from her, thou wouldst be woefully conscious of a change in thy true wife for ever after. It is perilous to make a chasm in human affections—not that they gape so long and wide, but so quickly close again.
3.The Natural History of Selborne

Gilbert White, 1789

Also wonder and nature. A country clergyman spends forty years watching the birds, worms, echoes and weather of one Hampshire parish, and writes it all down in letters of disarming charm.

If ever I saw anything like actual migration, it was last Michaelmas-day. I was travelling, and out early in the morning: at first there was a vast fog; but, by the time that I was got seven or eight miles from home towards the coast, the sun broke out into a delicate warm day. We were then on a large heath or common, and I could discern, as the mist began to break away, great numbers of swallows (hirundines rusticae) clustering on the stinted shrubs and bushes, as if they had roosted there all night. As soon as the air became clear and pleasant they all were on the wing at once; and, by a placid and easy flight, proceeded on southward towards the sea: after this I did not see any more flocks, only now and then a straggler.
4.The Madman

Kahlil Gibran, 1918

Also melancholy and wonder. A madman strips off his masks and speaks in parables about friendship, defeat, grief, and the selves we hide.

Defeat, my Defeat, my shining sword and shield,In your eyes I have readThat to be enthroned is to be enslaved,And to be understood is to be leveled down,And to be grasped is but to reach one’s fullnessAnd like a ripe fruit to fall and be consumed.Defeat, my Defeat, my bold companion,You shall hear my songs and my cries and my silences,And none but you shall speak to me of the beating of wings,And urging of seas,And of mountains that burn in the night,And you alone shall climb my steep and rocky soul.
5.The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi

Giacomo Leopardi, 1819

Also melancholy and death. Poetry that captures the profound beauty and crushing weight of existence, tracing the line from idealized youthful hope to the acceptance of universal melancholy.

Nor wilt thou rest forever, weary heart.The last illusion is destroyed,That I eternal thought. Destroyed!I feel all hope and all desire depart,For life and its deceitful joys.Forever rest! Enough! Thy throbbings cease!Naught can requite thy miseries;Nor is earth worthy of thy sighs.Life is a bitter, weary load,The world a slough. And now, repose!Despair no more, but find in DeathThe only boon Fate on our race bestows!
6.The Art of War

Sun Tzu, -500

Also curiosity and death. A 2,500-year-old manual for conflict, written for generals and read by anyone who has to hold a position, win an argument, or know when to walk away.

Sun Tzǔ said: In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to capture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them.
7.Kwaidan

Lafcadio Hearn, 1904

Also death and wonder. Ghost stories and insect essays from a Greek-born Irishman who became Japanese: a stranger's report on a country of hungry ghosts and cherry trees.
8.The Last Man

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1826

Also death and melancholy. A twenty-first-century plague empties the earth, and the last survivor writes down everyone he has lost. Read it for grief, not gadgets.
9.Poetry

Henry van Dyke Jr., 1894

Also nature and wonder. A minister who loved birds, ships and the sea writes plain, musical poems about time, strangers and the guest-right of God — quieter and stranger than its era suggests.
10.The Jungle Book

Rudyard Kipling, 1894

Also nature and wonder. A boy raised by wolves, a mongoose at war with cobras, a seal hunting for a beach with no men — India's animals, and the laws they keep.
11.Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems

Christina Rossetti, 1862

Also melancholy and death. Poems of goblin fruit, ghostly visitors and stubborn refusals, by a Victorian who made longing sound like a nursery rhyme.
12.Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience

Henry David Thoreau, 1854

Also nature and solitude. A two-year experiment in living cheaply beside a pond, written as a running argument with your own busyness, your possessions, and the life you assumed you had to lead.