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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• First Series, Nature XXXI

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

• 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.

• 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.

• Third Series, Life XLIII (The Brain)

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