Emily Dickinson

Yes, l-k, I will be and I will be staying on the U.Mass. campus, July 3-10. There will be plenty of birth and grave sites to visit in you neck of the woods.

I am going to try and make it to the Women's Mueseum in New York State as well.

Here is the link http://www.nps.gov/wori/ maybe you and quinn1 and anyone else can make it a weekend with me. Do you like to camp out? I will have my Van and a Pop-up.

I, for one, can't go anywhere, but thanks for the invite! There's a Dr Suess park in the Worcester area. Hmmm... what else - so much to see!

Dr. Suess I can do that I like that idea. I have been to Boston proper once in 1985. I took a day tour of the city. In addition I have been to Cambridge and Havard, there was a really great chinese resturant there. I have seen Waldon Pond, The Fogg and the BMA; a Red Socks game and walked from the back bay to the square. That is about it. I can do all of it all over again or new things. Whatever you think I would like. I like to walk so perhaps just walking around Worcester and finding stuff would be good. It will all be new and exciting to me.

I dunno about walking around Worcester! Walking around Cambridge and Boston, yes. Walking around where you're staying in the North Hampton area, yes.... sort of. Maybe Worcester, too, but it's not so neat and tidy as the Boston area.

Anything is good, I like history and good ethnic food. You would know best where to find that. Boston area is all beautiful to me.

Dr. Seuss, Ted Geisal is one of my hero's and I would very much like to go there. Sounds like a great place to play.

Sorry for the interruption Emily Dickinson fans. Now a little Poem for a Sunday morning:

232

The Sun--just touched the Morning--
The Morning--Happy thing--
Supposed that He had come to dwell--
And Life would all be Spring--

She felt herself supremer--
A Raised--Ethereal Thing!
Henceforth--for Her--What Holiday!
Meanwhile--Her wheeling King--
Trailed--slow--along the Orchards--
His haughty--spangled Hems--
Leaving a new necessity!
The want of Diadems!

The Morning--fluttered--staggered--
Felt feebly--for Her Crown--
Her unanointed forehead--
Henceforth--Her only One--

c. 1861

I like birth-places; I pass by Shakespeare's every second day, but I always find that a birthplace is more special if it's nearly deserted... like that of Drieu, which is really neglected, despite his huge impact on French literature..

As for the Great Gatsby, he's the character to whom I warmed the most-- my feelings were split about whether Daisy deserved him or not; after all, she and Tom are models of selfishness, only Tom more so... it was so sad to see how misplaced his dream was; I think that I cried a little on the bus the first time that I finished it...

This poem is about George Eliot, whom I admire too.

Her Losses make our Gains ashamed --
She bore Life's empty Pack
As gallantly as if the East
Were swinging at her Back.
Life's empty Pack is heaviest,
As every Porter knows --
In vain to punish Honey --
It only sweeter grows.

SOFTENED by Time's consummate plush,
How sleek the woe appears
That threatened childhood's citadel
And undermined the years!

Bisected now by bleaker griefs,
We envy the despair
That devastated childhood's realm,
So easy to repair.

SOFTENED by Time's consummate plush...


drom, that's one of my favorite ED poems, especially the last four lines.

As luck would have it I found a paperback copy of Sewall's, The Life of Emily Dickinson today. At one time I had the two volume hard cover edition but I have lost in one of my many moves. It will be good to read it again in preparation for my visit to Amherst, Mass.

SOFTENED by Time's consummate plush... one of the best that is for sure.

1452

Your thoughts don't have words every day
They come a single time
Like signal esoteric sips
Of the communion Wine
Which while you taste so native seems
So easy so to be
You cannot comprehend its price
Nor its infrequency

c. 1878

{one last off-topic correction: the Suess Museum/park is in Springfield, MA - nearer to Amherst and N Hampton....}

OK that sounds good to me. Suess and Dickinson a great combination I think. They would have loved each other if they lived in the same era.

Imagine Seuss and Dickinson collaborating!

It's one of my favourites too... although it's so hard to choose One favourite, due to the fact that nearly every ED poem is an amazing one... if I had to pick a top 5... I don't know. Whereas, with other writers, like Larkin and Plath, I can choose a top five so easily...

I'll be back in a minute after perusing my Collected Poems for an apt one..

You speak the truth DRE I could never pick a top 5 or 10 of ED's. And then there is the fact that I have favorite EDs for different moods and days.

Drom I love the new avatar.

ED's favorite poet's stated in a letter to Thomas Wnetworth Higginson are stated in a letter to :

Keats
Mr. and Mrs. Browning

and for prose,

Mr. Ruskin
Sir Thomas Browne

(Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson, p. 542)

Thank you, Joanne! Though I prefer it at full size, definitely...

I loved Mrs. Browning; Mr. Browning, I disliked totally... as for Keats, I like many of his, but I'm no great fan. If I were to write a list of my top 30 poets of all time, ED would be in the top 3, Keats in the top 25...

Before I go back to my Dickinson of the day, I thought that I would share this piece by EBB, which was actually my University enternce poem.. I had to translate it into Spanish.


Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforth in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand
Serenely in the sunshine as before,
Without the sense of that which I forbore--
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two.

Lovely choices Drom. I suspect ED's life was not a dreary as we might think she was a seeker and observer and while thought of never leaving one's house or of not being connected to world via internet is hard for us the understand; Emily it seems was able to know correspondence and visiting with family and close friends.

Sorry for my absence over the last few days; they have been quite hectic. I know that her life wouldn't have been dreary, due to her imagination; I'm just rather astonished that one can extract 500 pages plus from what must have been quite unchanging.