Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), 1890
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Short poems that fit in a single scroll and still leave you rearranging your view of hope, fear, nature and death. Read them slowly, once aloud, and they get stranger. The poems are brief, aphoristic and lyrical, with a cool melancholy and sudden wonder, moving at the pace of thought rather than story.
Feels like wonder, melancholy and curiosity. About death, nature and solitude.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy short, hymn-like poems that reward slow rereading and quiet attention. The compressed syntax, dashes and nineteenth-century punctuation can make individual lines genuinely hard to parse at first.
Why read it
These poems give you a compact way to think about hope, fear, nature and death, and they stay stranger and more interesting each time you return.
Pages from the book
What keeps singing in the worst weather and never sends a bill.
Hope is the thing with feathersThat perches in the soul,And sings the tune without the words,And never stops at all,And sweetest in the gale is heard;And sore must be the stormThat could abash the little birdThat kept so many warm.I ‘ve heard it in the chillest land,And on the strangest sea;Yet, never, in extremity,It asked a crumb of me. A small, delighted conspiracy against everyone who needs to be noticed.
I’m nobody! Who are you?Are you nobody, too?Then there ‘s a pair of us — don’t tell!They ‘d banish us, you know.How dreary to be somebody!How public, like a frogTo tell your name the livelong dayTo an admiring bog! An argument that your mind outweighs everything it ever looks at.
The brain is wider than the sky,For, put them side by side,The one the other will includeWith ease, and you beside.The brain is deeper than the sea,For, hold them, blue to blue,The one the other will absorb,As sponges, buckets do.The brain is just the weight of God,For, lift them, pound for pound,And they will differ, if they do,As syllable from sound. More passages from Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete
Emily Dickinson.Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems but published fewer than a dozen in her lifetime; her sister Lavinia found the rest in a locked chest after Emily died in 1886.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy short, hymn-like poems that reward slow rereading and quiet attention. The compressed syntax, dashes and nineteenth-century punctuation can make individual lines genuinely hard to parse at first.
- What is Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete like?
- The poems are brief, aphoristic and lyrical, with a cool melancholy and sudden wonder, moving at the pace of thought rather than story. Feels like wonder, melancholy and curiosity. About death, nature and solitude.
- What should I read after Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete?
- If you liked Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete, try Poetry (John Keats), Twice-told tales (Nathaniel Hawthorne) and The Natural History of Selborne (Gilbert White).
A taste of the feed
A song that makes one night feel as old as the species.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Poetry · John Keats
What a week of disappearing does to the person who loves you.
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.
Twice-told tales · Nathaniel Hawthorne
The strange intimacy of the thing that keeps defeating you.
Defeat, my Defeat, my shining sword and shield, In your eyes I have read That 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 fullness And 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.
The Madman · Kahlil Gibran
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