I love that little lyric that Tim copied out.
Here are two other short ones that are among
my favorites.
Farther in summer than the birds,
Pathetic from the grass,
A minor nation celebrates
Its unobtrusive mass.
No ordinance is seen,
So gradual the grace,
A pensive custom it becomes,
Enlarging loneliness.
Antiquest felt at noon
When August, burning low,
Calls forth this spectral canticle,
Repose to typify.
Remit as yet no grace,
No furrow on the glow,
Yet a druidic difference
Enhances nature now.
----and this one.
I shall know why, when time is over,
And I have ceased to wonder why;
Christ will explain each separate anguish
In the fair schoolroom of the sky.
He will tell me what Peter promised,
And I, for wonder at his woe,
I shall forget the drop of anguish
That scalds me now, that scalds me now.
I agree, it's maddening to read Johnson's
edition with all the dashes. It strains
credulity to think that she wouldn't have
punctuated them for publication. And I think
Joel is right to question her work. It must
be admitted that of the 1,775 poems we have,
many are very bad, and many more simply eccentric
or impenetrable. And technically she is very
limited. But she can be brilliant within those
limits, and she did write 20 or 30 poems as
beautiful as anything in the language, and like
nothing else in any language---enough to establish
her as one of the great poets. And a hundred or
so others that repay reading and contain wonderful
things.
And JV Cunningham was an excellent poet, and---Tim
Steele is right---the best epigrammatist of the century.
Of most centuries, for that matter. He also wrote
three essays about Dickinson that to my mind are the
best criticism of her poetry (though never cited in the
endless flow of books from the academic Dickinson
industry).
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