Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson (Barnes & Noble Collectible Editions)

By Emily Dickinson

Although Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 2,000 poems, only a handful were ever published in her lifetime, and those anonymously. Today, she is recognized as one of the most important American poets of the nineteenth century, one whose unconventional use of language and rhyme anticipated the break with tradition of much modern poetry written after it.   The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson collects more than 150 of Dickinsons brief but memorable poems. Bursting with insights about life, love, nature, death, and immortality, these poems are among the best loved and most reprinted in English literature.   The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson is one of Barnes & Nobles Collectible Editions classics. Each volume features authoritative texts by the worlds greatest authors in an elegantly designed bonded-leather binding, with distinctive gilt edging.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fall River Press
• Release date: May 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781435162570

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. After an unusually thorough education for a woman of her time, she began writing poems that drew on her wide knowledge of literature, scripture, and the political discourse of her day. Dickinson fell in love several times during her life but never married, preferring instead to live an increasingly secluded life. She entrusted a number of poems to a well-known editor but published only one poem under her name during her lifetime. With the posthumous publication of her work she was soon recognized as one of the world's great poets.

Book preview

SELECTED

POEMS

OF

Emily

Dickinson

FALL RIVER PRESS and the distinctive Fall River Press logo are registered trademarks of Barnes & Noble, Inc.

This compilation © 2016 by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-4351-6257-0

www.sterlingpublishing.com

Cover design by David Ter-Avanasyen

CONTENTS

Note on the Text

This is my letter to the world,

I’m nobody! Who are you?

Success is counted sweetest

A wounded deer leaps highest,

The heart asks pleasure first,

A precious, mouldering pleasure ’tis

Much madness is divinest sense

I asked no other thing,

The soul selects her own society,

I know some lonely houses off the road

To fight aloud is very brave,

Pain has an element of blank;

I taste a liquor never brewed,

He ate and drank the precious words,

The nearest dream recedes, unrealized.

I found the phrase to every thought

Hope is the thing with feathers

Dare you see a soul at the white heat?

I can wade grief,

The thought beneath so slight a film

I like to see it lap the miles,

I should have been too glad, I see,

Victory comes late,

Faith is a fine invention

Each life converges to some centre

Before I got my eye put out,

When I hoped I feared,

Prayer is the little implement

I know that he exists

Musicians wrestle everywhere:

My life closed twice before its close;

There is no frigate like a book

I felt a cleavage in my mind

Our lives are Swiss,—

The brain is wider than the sky,

The past is such a curious creature,

What soft, cherubic creatures

I stepped from plank to plank

At half-past three a single bird

One of the ones that Midas touched,

I dreaded that first robin so,

A route of evanescence

I started early, took my dog,

A bird came down the walk:

A narrow fellow in the grass

There came a wind like a bugle;

The wind tapped like a tired man,

How happy is the little stone

The wind begun to rock the grass

Bring me the sunset in a cup,

Farther in summer than the birds,

As imperceptibly as grief

The bee is not afraid of me,

Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn

I’ll tell you how the sun rose,—

Of all the sounds despatched abroad,

These are the days when birds come back,

There’s a certain slant of light,

A light exists in spring

The spider as an artist

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,—

Of bronze and blaze

Mine by the right of the white election!

If you were coming in the fall,

As if some little Arctic flower,

I cannot live with you,

There came a day at summer’s full

I’m ceded, I’ve stopped being theirs;

Come slowly, Eden!

I gave myself to him,

Wild nights! Wild nights!

Split the lark and you’ll find the music,

The brain within its groove

I meant to have but modest needs,

Remorse is memory awake,

To learn the transport by the pain,

I years had been from home,

Superiority to fate

Heaven is what I cannot reach!

I had a guinea golden;

I measure every grief I meet

To lose one’s faith surpasses

I worked for chaff, and earning wheat

Remembrance has a rear and front,—

Who never wanted,—maddest joy

Softened by Time’s consummate plush,

The sun just touched the morning;

From cocoon forth a butterfly

To hear an oriole sing

It sifts from leaden sieves,