I have more favorite Dickinson poems than I can remember, and I tend to find new ones at each reading. I posted those two poems because they find the author in a particularly philosophical frame of mind. I think her punctuation works well for conveying the hesitations, qualifications, reversals, and paradoxes of a "deliberate mind," to borrow RCL's excellent phrase. At the risk of sounding facetious, I would add that she might even have deliberated over her recipes, so deeply ingrained was her habit of reflection. I find Highlander's comment about outpourings of the heart to be jejeune. Miss D. was a philosopher.
Alan Sullivan
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