Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson
With Writing Prompts for Students

Edited by William E.DeLamater

Published by eReadia

2011

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Editor's note: These poems were selected as the most accessed of Emily Dickinson's poems at several websites.

Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson

Table of Contents

Title Page

Introducing Emily Dickinson

I'm nobody! Who are you?

Because I could not stop for Death

There is another sky

I like to see it lap the miles

The soul selects her own society

Hope is the thing with feathers

A narrow fellow in the grass

I died for beauty, but was scarce

Some things that fly there be

I taste a liquor never brewed

Introducing Emily Dickinson

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life. After she studied at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she spent a short time at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's house in Amherst. Thought of as an eccentric by the locals, she became known for her penchant for white clothing and her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even leave her room. Most of her friendships were therefore carried out by correspondence.

Although Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime.[2] The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation.[3] Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends.

Although most of her acquaintances were probably aware of Dickinson's writing, it was not until after her death in 1886—when Lavinia, Emily's younger sister, discovered her cache of poems—that the breadth of Dickinson's work became apparent. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1890 by personal acquaintances Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, both of whom heavily edited the content. A complete and mostly unaltered collection of her poetry became available for the first time in 1955 when The Poems of Emily Dickinson was published by scholar Thomas H. Johnson. Despite unfavorable reviews and skepticism of her literary prowess during the late 19th and early 20th century, critics now consider Dickinson to be a major American poet.[4]

I'm nobody! Who are you?

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 frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

After Reading:

1. Read the biography of Emily Dickinson and comment on how this poem could be seen as an explanation of her desire to live a private life. Also, comment on how the role of the poet in society is that of a "nobody." Why is the poet a "nobody" artistically?

2. Who do you think "they" are at the end of the first stanza, and why would they banish a "nobody" like the speaker of the poem?

Because I could not stop for Death

Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me
The Carriage held but just Ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the School, where Children strove
At recess in the ring
We passed the fields of gazing grain
We passed the setting sun.

Or rather, he passed us
The dews drew quivering and chill
For only Gossamer, my gown
My tippet only tulle.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the GROUND
The roof was scarcely visible
The cornice in the ground.

Since then 'tis centuries and yet
Feels shorter than the DAY
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

After Reading:

1. How does Dickinson personify Death in the poem? How does this personification lead to an extended metaphor?

2. What do you think the "house" in the next to last stanza represents?

3. What is the significance of Dickinson's idea of taking a journey with Death?

There is another sky

There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there;
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind silent fields -
Here is a little forest,
Whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a frost has been;
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum:
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come!

After Reading:

1. Who is Austin?

2. What kind of "garden" is Dickinson describing, where "not a frost has been"?

3. What does the speaker hear among the flowers? Is it real?

I like to see it lap the miles

I like to see it lap the miles,
And lick the valleys up,
And stop to feed itself at tanks;
And then, prodigious, step

Around a pile of mountains,
And, supercilious, peer
In shanties by the sides of roads;
And then a quarry pare

To fit its sides, and crawl between,
Complaining all the while
In horrid, hooting stanza;
Then chase itself down hill

And neigh like Boanerges;
Then, punctual as a star,
Stop—docile and omnipotent—
At its own stable door.

After Reading:

1. When Dickinson's friends were preparing her poems for publication, they added the title "The Railway Train" to this one. What evidence can you find in the poem that supports this interpretation? What evidence argues against assigning that name to the poem?

2. Describe the use of personification in the poem.

3. Who or what is Boanerges? Why is that significant to the poem?

The soul selects her own society

The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.

Unmoved, she notes the chariot's pausing
At her low gate;
Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling
Upon her mat.

I've known her from an ample nation
Choose one;
Then close the valves of her attention
Like stone.

After Reading:

1. How do the external circumstances of Dickinson's life parallel her discussion of the soul in this poem?

2. What does "divine majority" mean in this context?

3. What metaphor does Dickinson employ to describe the way that "attention" operates?

Hope is the thing with feathers

Hope is the thing with feathers
That 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 storm
That could abash the little bird
That 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.

After Reading:

1. What is the "tune without the words"? In a song, how do the melody and the words work together? Can you think of different words for a song that you like?

2. Again, Dickinson personifies an abstract concept. What is the nature of the personification here? How does the word "crumb" in the last line support this conceit?

A narrow fellow in the grass

A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him, — did you not,
His notice sudden is.

The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,

Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun, —
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.

Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;

But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.

After Reading:

1. "His notice sudden is": Does Dickinson mean that the speaker notices the narrow fellow suddenly or that the narrow fellow gives notice suddenly? Why does the difference matter? Why is Dickinson not clear about what she means here?

2. If the speaker feels "cordiality" toward the things of nature, why does she feel "zero at the bone" when encountering this narrow fellow?

3. Write a description in your journal of a creature without mentioning its name. Share it with others to see if the description alone can give them enough clues to guess what you are talking about.

I died for beauty, but was scarce

I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth, — the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.

After Reading:

1. The English poet John Keats has a famous line that reads "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." How does Dickinson's poem bring this idea to life?

2. Dickinson is renowned for her use of small but telling details in her poetry. What image does the word "Adjusted" suggest in the second line? What other meaning might the word have in this context?

3. "We talked between the rooms": write a dialog of what the two might have talked about as they lay in the tomb.

Some things that fly there be

Some things that fly there be, —
Birds, hours, the bumble-bee:
Of these no elegy.

Some things that stay there be, —
Grief, hills, eternity:
Nor this behooveth me.

There are, that resting, rise.
Can I expound the skies?
How still the riddle lies!

After Reading:

1. Rewrite the first line of the third verse, filling in the missing words. Note the elliptical grammar of this line as another indicator of Dickinson's extreme economy with language.

2. Write a new poem that uses the first line of each stanza but offers your own examples of things that fly, that stay, and that, resting, rise.

I taste a liquor never brewed

I taste a liquor never brewed,
From tankards scooped in pearl;
Not all the vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an alcohol!

Inebriate of air am I,
And debauchee of dew,
Reeling, through endless summer days,
From inns of molten blue.

When landlords turn the drunken bee
Out of the foxglove's door,
When butterflies renounce their drams,
I shall but drink the more!

Till seraphs swing their snowy hats,
And saints to windows run,
To see the little tippler
Leaning against the sun!

After Reading:

1. Dickinson mentions "the drunken bee." In what way is the speaker of the poem "drunken"? Is Dickinson advocating the consumption of alcohol?

2. Where are the saints and seraphs watching from? What do you think they would think of the speaker's debauch?