my love affair with emily dickinson

i've quite fallen in love with this poet and think everyone should know more about her than the three sentence blurb in their highschool lit. book. her work is not only creative and original verses about flowers and loneliness, but holds a depth of wisdom and intense emotional expressiveness that is only found in the masters. the simplicity of her poetry disguises her extraordinary insight into the life of the soul. i'm sure you are all familiar with the stories of her secluded life and eccentric ways, which makes her gift of understanding the life, love and societal pressures even more remarkable. but she wasn't just a solitary soul wandering through the meadows around her new england home penning romantic prose, but intuitivical muse better at expressing truths than we are even at understanding them. she wrote not to amuse or impress. her poems were not attractive in rhyme and meter, but truth. i think she saw things more clearly than most of us realize we do, but at least is better at expressing it. a few of her little verses that i'm especially fond of:

"I I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain."



"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."

i love her exquisite choice of diction..."bring me the sunset in a cup"..."the debauchuery of dews", the wisdom..the heart asks pleasure first, and then, excuse from pain..." and her contentment with humility...

"I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there ’s a pair of us—don’t tell!
They ’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!"

so that's it for tirzah's personal hero of the day, along with an encouragement to become better steeped in the lovelier contributions to this thing we call culture...goodnight to all and...

"Here a star,
There a star-
Some lose their way.

Here a mist,
There a mist-
Afterwards--Day!