Poems: First, Second and Third Series

Summary

This volume gathers the three books that first introduced Emily Dickinson's poetry to the public, all published in Boston in the decade after her death in 1886. Poems (1890) was edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, a young Amherst neighbor, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the man of letters with whom Dickinson had corresponded since 1862; Poems: Second Series followed in 1891 under the same two editors, and Poems: Third Series in 1896, edited by Todd alone. Each book opens with a preface, Higginson's for the first and Todd's for the second and third, and each sorts the poems into four sections: Life, Love, Nature, and Time and Eternity. Dickinson gave almost none of her poems titles, so the titles printed here (Success, Exclusion, The Chariot, Hope, The Snake, A Book, The Brain, Dying) were supplied by the editors. They also smoothed many of her dashes into commas and periods, lowered her capitals, adjusted some rhymes and words, and occasionally dropped a stanza; modern scholarly editions by Thomas H. Johnson (1955) and R. W. Franklin (1998) restore her manuscript readings. The library text keeps the 1890s versions exactly as first printed. The Life sections hold many of the poems readers meet first: Success is counted sweetest, printed in A Masque of Poets in 1878 at the request of her friend Helen Hunt Jackson; If I can stop one heart from breaking; The heart asks pleasure first; The soul selects her own society; I'm nobody! Who are you?; Hope is the thing with feathers; There is no frigate like a book; and The brain is wider than the sky. The Love sections contain short lyrics of longing, renunciation and imagined reunion beyond death. The Nature sections watch bees, robins, a snake in the grass, frost, sunsets, the seasons and a winter light that weighs like cathedral music. The Time and Eternity sections are the deepest: the dead speaker of The Chariot rides with a courteous Death toward immortality; two people who died for beauty and for truth talk between their tombs until the moss reaches their lips; a speaker who never saw a moor is certain of heaven; a funeral is felt inside the brain; and a fly buzzes into a deathroom at the last moment. Most of the poems are short, in the hymn meters of the Protestant hymnbooks Dickinson knew from childhood, especially common meter, but they use slant rhyme, compressed grammar and startling images that made early reviewers divided. The first series went through many printings within two years, and the books established Dickinson as a major American poet.

Plot or Argument

• First Series (1890): Higginson's preface

  Higginson introduces the poems as the poetry of the portfolio, written without thought of publication, describes Dickinson's secluded life in Amherst, and defends their rough form for the sake of their insight.

• First Series: Life and Love

  Success, Rouge et Noir, In a Library, Exclusion (The soul selects her own society), The Lonely House and The Mystery of Pain open the book; the Love section includes Mine, Bequest, Surrender, Renunciation, Resurrection and The Wife.

• First Series: Nature and Time and Eternity

  The Nature poems include the winter slant of light; Time and Eternity includes I died for beauty, I never saw a moor, and The Chariot, Dickinson's carriage ride with Death.

• Second Series (1891): Todd's preface and Life

  Todd reports the welcome given the first volume and prints a letter to Higginson; the Life section opens with I'm nobody! Who are you? and includes Hope is the thing with feathers.

• Second Series: Love, Nature, Time and Eternity

  Love includes Wild nights; Nature includes The Snake (A narrow fellow in the grass), with many bird, bee and weather poems; the last section returns to death, grief and the hope of heaven.

• Third Series (1896): Todd's preface and Life

  Todd, now sole editor, describes the poems still in manuscript; the Life section includes A word is dead, A Book (There is no frigate like a book) and The Brain (The brain is wider than the sky).

• Third Series: Love, Nature, Time and Eternity

  The final sections include Morning is the place for dew, I felt a funeral in my brain, and Dying (I heard a fly buzz when I died), closing the three books on the threshold of eternity.

Characters

• The speaker of The Chariot, lyric persona

  A woman already dead who recalls the slow carriage ride on which Death called for her.

• Death, personification

  A courteous gentleman driver in The Chariot who stops for one too busy to stop for him.

• Nobody, lyric persona

  The speaker of I'm nobody! Who are you?, who prefers obscurity to telling one's name all day like a frog.

• Hope, personification

  A small bird that perches in the soul and sings through every storm without asking anything in return.

• The narrow fellow, creature

  The snake of Second Series, Nature XXIV, met barefoot as a child and never without a tightening of breath.

• The two dead of I died for beauty, lyric personae

  One who died for beauty and one who died for truth, who call themselves kinsmen and talk between their tombs.

Lessons

• Much said in little

  Dickinson's poems are often only eight or twelve lines long, yet a single image, a carriage, a bird, a frigate, carries a whole argument. Reading her teaches slow attention: each word is chosen, and a single dash or capital can turn the meaning.

  • What does the comparison of a book to a frigate and a chariot suggest about reading?
  • Why might a poet choose the tiny image of a bird for something as large as hope?
  • Which short poem in the collection says the most in the fewest words, in your view?

• Facing death calmly

  Many of the Time and Eternity poems imagine dying from the inside, sometimes with gentleness (The Chariot), sometimes with an interruption as small as a fly. Dickinson keeps returning to the moment when time meets eternity, testing faith by imagination.

  • How is Death described in The Chariot, and why is he polite?
  • What does the fly in Dying interrupt, and why does it matter that it is so ordinary?
  • Does the speaker of I never saw a moor have good reasons for her certainty?

• The worth of the inward life

  Poems such as The soul selects her own society and I'm nobody! Who are you? prize a hidden, chosen life over public notice. Dickinson's own seclusion produced work of great range; the poems show that a small world can hold a large mind.

  • Why does the speaker of I'm nobody think being somebody is dreary?
  • What is lost and what is gained when the soul shuts the door?

• Seeing nature exactly

  Dickinson's snake parts the grass as with a comb and looks like a whip-lash unbraiding in the sun; her winter light has weight. She models careful looking that is both scientific in precision and spiritual in what it notices.

  • Which details make the snake poem feel like a real encounter?
  • How can light oppress like cathedral tunes?
  • What does Dickinson mean when she calls animals nature's people?

Context

Dickinson wrote most of her poems between the late 1850s and the mid-1860s, in the years of the Civil War, in a Calvinist New England town touched by the religious revivals of her youth, which she watched without making the public profession of faith her family made. She knew the Bible, Isaac Watts's hymns, Shakespeare, the Brontës, the Brownings and Emerson. She shared her poems with a small circle, enclosing them in letters and sewing many into hand-made booklets later called fascicles.

Composition

After Dickinson's death in May 1886, her sister Lavinia discovered hundreds of poems in a locked box and asked Mabel Loomis Todd to transcribe them. Todd and Higginson selected and edited the first two series, published by Roberts Brothers of Boston in 1890 and 1891; Todd edited the third series in 1896. The editors supplied titles, grouped the poems by subject, and regularized punctuation and some wording.

Reception

The 1890 volume sold strongly and was reprinted many times within two years, though reviewers argued over its irregular rhymes and grammar. A family quarrel between the Todd and Dickinson households later divided the manuscripts. Thomas H. Johnson's 1955 edition printed the poems as Dickinson wrote them, with her dashes and capitals, and she is now regarded, with Walt Whitman, as one of the two founders of modern American poetry.

Comparisons

• because-i-could-not-stop-for-death

  The library's separate record for this poem studies it alone; here it appears as The Chariot, First Series, Time and Eternity XXVII, among the other death poems that surround it.

• whitman-complete-poems

  Whitman's long, expansive lines and public voice are the opposite pole to Dickinson's short, private hymn stanzas, though both broke with the conventions of American verse in the same decades.

• death-be-not-proud

  Donne argues Death down in a sonnet; Dickinson rides beside him in The Chariot and hears his approach in Dying, both poets looking past death to eternity.

• emerson-essays

  Emerson's call for self-reliance and his phrase the poetry of the portfolio, quoted in Higginson's preface, frame Dickinson's independent, inward art.

• ode-on-a-grecian-urn

  Keats's urn declares beauty truth and truth beauty; in I died for beauty Dickinson's two dead agree that the two are one, then the moss covers their names.

• frost-early-poems

  Frost, another New England poet who taught at Amherst, shares Dickinson's close watching of nature and her habit of leaving the final meaning open.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The four section headings used in every series, Life, Love, Nature, and Time and Eternity, and which poems seem to fit more than one.
• Titles such as The Chariot and The Snake, which the editors added; try reading a poem without its title.
• Common meter, the hymn pattern of eight and six syllables, in poems like I never saw a moor and The Chariot.
• Near rhymes, such as soul and all in Hope, where the sounds almost but not quite match.
• How often Dickinson turns ideas into people or creatures: Death as a driver, Hope as a bird, a book as a frigate.

Key terms and names

Common meter

A four-line stanza alternating eight- and six-syllable lines, used in many Protestant hymns; Dickinson's favorite pattern.

Slant rhyme

A rhyme in which the sounds are close but not identical; Dickinson uses it often, which startled her first reviewers.

Personification

Giving human qualities to an idea or thing, as when Death kindly stops his carriage in The Chariot.

The poetry of the portfolio

Emerson's phrase, used by Higginson in the 1890 preface, for poems written privately without thought of publication.

Mabel Loomis Todd

The Amherst neighbor who transcribed the manuscripts and edited all three series, the third on her own.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

A Boston writer and Dickinson's correspondent from 1862, co-editor of the first two series and author of the first preface.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension In Success is counted sweetest, who understands victory best, and why?
2. Comprehension Where does the carriage go in The Chariot, and what does it pass on the way?
3. Comprehension What does Hope never ask for, according to the poem?
4. Interpretation Why does the speaker of I'm nobody! Who are you? want the other nobody not to tell?
5. Interpretation In There is no frigate like a book, why does it matter that the poorest can take this journey?
6. Interpretation The speaker of I never saw a moor is certain of heaven without having seen it. How is that like and unlike knowing what a wave looks like?
7. Big Question Can a person who lives a hidden, quiet life still do great and lasting work?

Faith Connections

• Hebrews 11:1 (Scripture)

  Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. I never saw a moor states the same confidence in what has not been seen.

• 1 Corinthians 15:54-55 (Scripture)

  Paul's taunt, O death, where is thy sting, stands behind many Time and Eternity poems, and The Chariot gives Death no sting at all, only courtesy and the company of Immortality.

• Isaac Watts, Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707) (Great Conversation)

  Watts's hymns in common meter were sung in New England churches of Dickinson's childhood; she borrows their stanza while asking her own questions inside it.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: We often understand things best by their absence or by imagination: the defeated know victory, the poor travel by books, and the believer is certain of heaven without seeing it. Therefore the inward life, rightly attended to, can reach truths that public success and outward sight miss.

Rhetorical device: extended metaphor. In Hope (Second Series, Life VI) hope is a bird from first line to last: it has feathers, perches, sings, is heard in the gale, and never asks a crumb.

Debate: Resolved: that the 1890s editors were right to give Dickinson's poems titles and regular punctuation for their first readers.

Memory Work

Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all,

I never spoke with God, Nor visited in heaven; Yet certain am I of the spot As if the chart were given.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Choose two poems from different series that use a vehicle or journey (The Chariot, A Book) and explain what each journey stands for.

Comparison with Holy Sonnet X: "Death, be not proud": Donne addresses Death as a proud enemy; Dickinson describes him as a polite driver. Compare the two portraits and explain which seems to you more hopeful.

Medical Lens

Dickinson is among the most searching poets of dying, pain and inner states. Several poems imagine the deathbed from the inside, in a period when most Americans died at home among family watchers, and the attention to the last breath, the wrung-dry eyes and the willing of keepsakes reflects that domestic deathbed culture. The heart asks pleasure first lists the stages of a suffering wish, ending with little anodynes, the period's word for pain-relieving drugs such as opiates, then sleep, then death. I felt a funeral in my brain and the winter slant of light describe states of despair or mental breaking in vivid bodily terms; modern critics have read them as accounts of depression or a breakdown, and some biographers have linked her most productive years with personal crisis, but these are interpretations, not diagnoses. Biographers record that she was treated for an eye complaint in Boston in 1864-65, which some connect with poems about light and sight. The Brain anticipates later reflection on the mind's relation to the body and to God.

• First Series, Life IX

  The heart asks first for pleasure, then for excuse from pain, then for anodynes that deaden suffering, then sleep, and last the liberty to die.

  Pain Death Dying
• First Series, Nature XXXI

  A winter afternoon light gives a heavenly hurt with no scar, called the seal of despair and an imperial affliction.

  Melancholia Depression
• Third Series, Time and Eternity XXX

  Mourners tread and a service beats like a drum inside the speaker's brain until her mind goes numb and she is left wrecked and solitary in a silence where all the heavens toll like a bell; the 1896 printing ends there, without the manuscript's final stanza.

  Madness Psychosis Melancholia Depression
• Third Series, Time and Eternity XLVI (Dying)

  A dying speaker describes the hushed room, the watchers' dry eyes and the signing away of keepsakes, interrupted by a buzzing fly as sight fails.

  Death Dying Grief
• Third Series, Life XLIII (The Brain)

  The brain is measured against sky, sea and God, an imaginative statement of the mind's capacity.

  Mind Body

Creative Prompts

• Poetry

  Write an eight-line poem in common meter (alternating lines of eight and six syllables) that turns one abstract word, such as patience or courage, into a small creature, as Dickinson does with hope.

• Classroom

  Compare the 1890 printing of The Chariot in the library text with a modern edition of the poem that restores Dickinson's dashes and the missing fourth stanza, and list every difference.

• Essay

  Choose three Time and Eternity poems and describe how each imagines the moment of death differently.

• Fiction

  Tell the story of Lavinia Dickinson opening the box of her sister's poems in 1886, using only facts in the prefaces and your own imagined thoughts.

Further Reading

• The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin

  Prints the poems in Dickinson's own punctuation.

• The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson

• The Life of Emily Dickinson, Richard B. Sewall

• My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson, Alfred Habegger