Dickinson on Love

By Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson’s poems are characterized by an unmatched emotional and intellectual intensity that is cast into direct and accessible language of unusual brevity and grace. Some of her poems run for only a few lines but they survey the entire cosmos of human experience, including life and death, solitude and society, morality and nature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Warbler Press
• Release date: Feb 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781734588156

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life, but today is considered to be one of the most influential poets in American history.

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A Note on the Text

Emily Dickinson published only eleven poems in her lifetime, ten without her permission. Many other poems were included in letters to friends, relatives, editors, and others, and there are ongoing debates over how best to separate the poems from Dickinson’s prose, how to reproduce her idiosyncratic marks on paper, not all of which correspond to existing typographical signs, and whether to alter spellings that differ from today’s usage. Between Dickinson’s death in 1886 and 1924, Thomas Higginson, the editor who Dickinson first contacted to inquire into his opinion about her poems, Mabel Loomis Todd, and Martha Dickinson Bianchi edited and published several volumes of Dickinson’s poetry and letters as The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson, and a volume called The Single Hound. These books were created from the hundreds of paper packets Dickinson had created with needle and thread and preserved in a wooden trunk for posterity. In the 1950s Thomas Johnson edited and published The Poems of Emily Dickinson, and Thomas Johnson and Theodora Ward edited The Letters of Emily Dickinson. The selections chosen for this volume, Dickinson on Love, have been taken from the editions produced before 1924 by Dickinson’s friends and family members; they are faithful to spelling and punctuation in those publications.

Contents

A Note on the Text

Dickinson on Love

About This Book

Emily Dickinson

Index of First Lines

Dickinson on Love

That love is all there is,

Is all we know of Love;

It is enough, the freight should be

Proportioned to the groove.

It’s all I have to bring to-day

This, and my heart beside,

This, and my heart, and all the fields,

And all the meadows wide.

Be sure you count, should I forget,—

Someone the sun should tell,—

This, and my heart, and all the bees

Which in the clover dwell.

Mine by the right of the white election!

Mine by the royal seal!

Mine by the sign in the scarlet prison

Bars cannot conceal!

Mine, here in vision and in veto!

Mine, by the grave’s repeal

Titled, confirmed—delirious charter!

Mine, while the ages steal!

You left me, sweet, two legacies,—

A legacy of love

A Heavenly Father would content,

Had He the offer of;

You left me boundaries of pain

Capacious as the sea,

Between eternity and time,

Your consciousness and me.

Alter? When the hills do.

Falter? When the sun

Question if his glory

Be