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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
Emily Dickinson's "The Complete Poetry of Emily Dickinson" is a profound collection that encapsulates the introspective and innovative spirit of one of America's most revered poets. Characterized by her unique use of unconventional punctuation, slant rhyme, and succinct yet evocative imagery, Dickinson's poetry invites readers into her contemplative world. The themes of death, nature, immortality, and personal reflection permeate her work, presenting a complex emotional landscape that challenges traditional poetic forms. Contextually, Dickinson wrote during the 19th century, a time of significant societal change, which informed her revolutionary approach to poetry. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), a reclusive figure from Amherst, Massachusetts, crafted her verses largely in solitude, often reflecting on her inner life and the world beyond her confined existence. Influenced by her Puritan upbringing and the prevailing Transcendentalist ideals, her writings reveal a keen awareness of life's transient beauty and the profundity of human experience. Despite her limited recognition during her lifetime, Dickinson's unique voice has since earned her a canonical status in American literature, symbolizing the depth and complexity of individual thought. For those seeking to explore the intricate nuances of human emotion and existence, "The Complete Poetry of Emily Dickinson" is indispensable. It provides an invaluable insight into the mind of a poet whose themes and style continue to resonate with contemporary readers. This collection not only serves as a testament to Dickinson's genius but also encourages readers to engage with the profound questions of love, mortality, and the nature of consciousness. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Complete Poetry of Emily Dickinson
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection assembles Emily Dickinson’s poetry and its essential context into a single, continuous reading experience. Drawing on the foundational posthumous volumes that first carried her work to the world and on a contemporary family compilation, it presents the poems alongside a record of the poet’s voice in life and correspondence. The aim is twofold: to make accessible the full arc of her poetic achievement as it emerged in print, and to provide the contextual materials that clarify how these texts were shaped, received, and remembered. Readers encounter not only the poems but the circumstances that framed their earliest publication.
These volumes encompass concise lyric poems, meditations, riddling epigrams, and extended lyrics, as well as personal letters and biographical narrative. Primary emphasis falls on the poems themselves, gathered in the three early series and the later family collection The Single Hound. The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson contributes selections from correspondence and recollective prose that illuminate the poet’s social and artistic milieu. Together these materials integrate verse with epistolary and memoiristic forms, allowing readers to see how Dickinson’s language operates across genres while keeping the focus on her poetry as a distinct and central body of work.
The poems reached print largely after Dickinson’s death. Poems: First Series (1890) and Poems: Second Series (1891) were edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson; Poems: Third Series (1896) was edited by Todd. Martha Dickinson Bianchi, the poet’s niece, later gathered additional poems in The Single Hound (1914) and compiled The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924). These landmark publications established Dickinson’s reputation and, in different ways, shaped how readers first experienced her work. Early editors sometimes adjusted punctuation, capitalization, and titles to suit prevailing expectations, a history that remains part of the reading experience these volumes preserve.
Dickinson’s poetry traces the largest subjects with an uncompromisingly intimate gaze. Death, mortality, and the possibility of immortality are weighed with both severity and wonder. Nature’s minute particulars—birds, seasons, weather, gardens—become laboratories for examining perception and change. Love and attachment register as rapture, absence, and ethical testing. Faith and skepticism coexist in poised tension, probing scripture, conscience, and interior revelation. Time, fame, and the boundaries of the self recur as questions rather than conclusions. Across these pages the poems do not settle; they interrogate. Their energy lies in thought enacted in language, where intensity, wit, and exactness converge.
Her style is unmistakable: compressed, elliptical, and charged with unexpected turns. She adapts hymn measures and ballad stanzas yet bends them with slant rhyme, syntactic disjunction, and startling metaphor. Dashes and unconventional capitalization act as rhythmic and semantic cues, opening multiple pathways through a single line. Plain diction coexists with scientific, botanical, and devotional vocabularies. The speaking voice can be austere, amused, or fiercely inquisitive, often shifting registers within a few lines. This economy and flexibility enable the poems to hold paradox without dilution, making each lyric feel both intimate and vast, rooted in concrete particulars yet conceptually expansive.
Poems: First Series introduced Dickinson to a wide audience for the first time. Its arrangement presents a spectrum of her concerns, grouping poems in ways that highlight recurring motifs and tonal variety. Readers encounter elegies beside nature lyrics, meditations beside sharp epigrams. The editorial hand is perceptible, but the defining qualities of the voice—its pressure of thought and distinctive cadences—still come through with force. As the opening installment of her posthumous presence, this volume helped establish the contours of her reputation, demonstrating how a poet who wrote privately could speak to public experience without forfeiting intimacy or singularity.
Poems: Second Series expanded the initial portrait by adding range and density. The selection continues the practice of grouping, offering readers alternate vantage points on themes of love, pain, visionary transport, and spiritual inquiry. New tonalities appear alongside familiar ones: playfulness and irony intensify, and the poems’ architecture often grows bolder, juxtaposing images and arguments with greater compression. Editorial conventions remain, yet the vitality of the language consistently exceeds any frame placed upon it. Together with the first volume, this series made clear that Dickinson’s achievement could not be reduced to a single mode, mood, or topic.
Poems: Third Series further broadened the scope, presenting additional lyrics that deepen earlier lines of thought while opening fresh avenues. Edited solely by Mabel Loomis Todd, it continues the organizing strategies readers had come to expect, yet the selection underscores Dickinson’s capacity for surprise. Poems that engage absence and presence, solitude and community, earthly measure and transcendent scale keep recombining in new proportions. The cumulative effect across the three series is one of proliferation and coherence at once: many discrete poems, yet a durable sensibility, a consistent commitment to testing the limits of perception and the resources of language.
The Single Hound, assembled by Martha Dickinson Bianchi, adds another layer to the picture by bringing forward poems not included in the earlier series. Bianchi, as a family custodian of manuscripts, offered readers materials that widened the available canon and reflected her sense of arrangement. The collection’s vantage differs from the editorial approach of the 1890s, yet it remains in conversation with it, continuing the process by which Dickinson’s work entered public view. For readers, it provides further evidence of the poet’s range and persistence, extending familiar themes while revealing new inflections of tone, image, and argument.
The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson complements the poetry with selections of correspondence and biographical narration compiled by Bianchi. While not a collection of poems, it presents the circumstances, relationships, and occasions that surrounded the making and sharing of verse. The letters register wit, courtesy, reticence, and boldness, and they often share the poems’ love of exact word-choice and nimble metaphor. They also trace connections with family, friends, and editors, anchoring the poems in lived exchange. Read alongside the verse, these materials help situate Dickinson’s art without confining it, clarifying context while preserving the independence of the lyric.
Taken together, the poems and letters illuminate one another. The poems show a mind forging forms equal to extreme clarity and uncertainty; the letters reveal how that mind corresponded, negotiated privacy, and responded to interlocutors. Themes echo across genres: the unseen and the intimate, the natural and the numinous, the immediate and the infinite. Editorial histories are also part of the story, reminding readers that Dickinson’s first readers encountered a mediated text and that reception shaped her public image. Yet across all mediation, the singularity of the voice persists, unmistakable in its cadence, its daring, and its exacting attention.
This collection invites a sustained encounter with that voice in the forms through which it first became widely known. It offers a comprehensive pathway for readers who wish to engage the poetry as a living body of work and to understand the contexts that attended its emergence in print. Read sequentially or by theme, the volumes encourage attentive, comparative reading: noticing patterns, tonal shifts, and recurring figures; hearing how diction and measure carry thought; and recognizing how letters and life-writing illuminate, without explaining away, the poems. The aim is immersion, clarity, and renewed appreciation of Dickinson’s enduring art.
Author Biography
Emily Dickinson was an American poet of the nineteenth century whose compressed, enigmatic lyrics reshaped the possibilities of the short poem in English. Living most of her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, she wrote nearly 1,800 poems, yet only a small number appeared in print while she was alive, often heavily edited to meet contemporary conventions. After her death her writings began to circulate widely, gradually establishing her as a central figure in American literature. Her distinctive punctuation, irregular rhyme, and probing meditations on death, faith, nature, and consciousness positioned her as a precursor to modernist experimentation and as a singular voice of interior experience.
Raised in a town shaped by New England religious culture and reformist energy, Dickinson received rigorous schooling at Amherst Academy and later attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for a brief period. Her education emphasized classical rhetoric, natural science, and literature, and she read widely in the Bible, Protestant hymns, Shakespeare, and contemporary periodicals. The rhythms of hymn meter undergird much of her verse, while her engagement with sermons and devotional writing sharpened her attention to doubt and conviction. Though not aligned with any public literary movement, she absorbed prevailing debates about belief, authorship, and gender, transforming them into a private poetics of remarkable precision.
In the late 1850s and especially the early 1860s, Dickinson intensified her writing, copying poems onto loose sheets and assembling many into hand-sewn packets now known as fascicles. She worked largely outside of print culture, revising extensively and experimenting with capitalization, long dashes, slant rhyme, and flexible hymn stanzas. Her compression yields paradox and sudden shifts in perspective, producing an art of exact attention to inward states and the natural world. The poems often refrain from overt statement, staging inquiry rather than pronouncement. This sustained private labor created a body of work both formally idiosyncratic and astonishingly coherent in tone and method.
During her lifetime only a small group of poems and a few letters appeared in newspapers or magazines, typically without her authorization and altered to regularize rhyme and punctuation. In the early 1860s she initiated a long correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a prominent man of letters, seeking advice yet maintaining her independence of judgment. He encouraged but also questioned her unconventional style, reflecting a period culture uneasy with innovation. Dickinson’s guarded relationship to print, along with her preference for manuscript circulation among trusted readers, limited public notice. Nonetheless, the correspondence preserved valuable reflections on her craft and aspirations.
Dickinson’s poems explore mortality, grief, ecstasy, faith and skepticism, the minute textures of perception, and the perilous freedoms of imagination. Death appears as companion, interruption, or ultimate frontier, as in 'Because I could not stop for Death—,' 'I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—,' and 'I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.' Other lyrics test desire and spiritual yearning, including 'Wild Nights—Wild Nights!' and 'My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—,' where power and agency flash in startling metaphors. Her handling of common meter and off-rhymes exposes fissures beneath familiar forms, turning inherited rhythms into instruments of inquiry and dissent.
In later years Dickinson rarely traveled and increasingly focused on poems and letters. After her death in the 1880s, her sister discovered a large cache of manuscripts in drawers and packets. The first posthumous editions, prepared in the 1890s by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, introduced her to a broad readership but regularized many unconventional features. Twentieth-century scholarship worked to restore her textual choices, most notably in Thomas H. Johnson’s variorum and, later, R. W. Franklin’s editions. These efforts reshaped understanding of her prosody, chronology, and method, enabling readers to encounter the poems with greater fidelity.
Today Dickinson stands as a foundational figure in American poetry, her work central to classrooms, scholarship, and the broader culture. Critics value her for a radical clarity that refuses ordinary resolution, for innovations in lyric form, and for probing the boundaries of religious and social expectation. Her language has inspired composers, visual artists, and generations of poets, while ongoing editorial projects continue to refine knowledge of her manuscripts and variants. Far from a historical curiosity, she remains a living presence on the page—an artist whose concentrated music and intellectual daring invite continual rereading and fresh critical approaches.
Historical Context
Emily Dickinson’s career unfolded between 1830 and 1886, a span in which New England moved from Puritan inheritance to industrial modernity and the United States from sectional crisis to national reconstruction. Railroads bound towns like Amherst, Massachusetts, into wider networks, while the telegraph compressed time and distance. The era’s intellectual climate ranged from Transcendentalist self-reliance to evangelical revivalism, from antebellum reform to postwar scientific skepticism. These currents formed the background against which Dickinson composed nearly 1,800 poems and an extensive correspondence, later gathered in volumes such as Poems: First Series (1890), Poems: Second Series (1891), Poems: Third Series (1896), The Single Hound (1914), and The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).
Amherst, Massachusetts, was both Dickinson’s lifelong home and a crucible of civic and collegiate culture. The Homestead on Main Street, where she lived with her father Edward Dickinson (1803–1874), mother Emily Norcross Dickinson (1804–1882), brother William Austin Dickinson (1829–1895), and sister Lavinia Norcross Dickinson (1833–1899), stood near Amherst College, founded in 1821. Edward served as the college’s treasurer and, later, as a Congressman, tying the household to regional and national affairs. The Evergreens, Austin’s house with Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson (1830–1913), became an adjacent literary and social center. This dense local network—town, college, and family—shaped the circulation of poems and letters ultimately represented across the posthumous volumes.
Religious controversy and renewal framed Dickinson’s youth. The echoes of the Second Great Awakening resonated in New England’s Congregational churches and in Mary Lyon’s Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, where Dickinson studied in 1847–1848. Revival meetings, public professions of faith, and communal scrutiny of individual belief created pressures that her work continually interrogates. The Amherst church calendar and periodicals carried reports of conversions and doctrinal debates, while hymnals and sermon rhetoric supplied forms and vocabularies she refashioned. This religious matrix—its promises, terrors, and metaphors—pervades the poems and letters that editors later grouped in the First, Second, and Third Series and that inform the biographical portraits accompanying The Life and Letters.
Dickinson’s education at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke reflected a mid-century expansion of women’s schooling that emphasized languages, rhetoric, and the sciences. She compiled a botanical herbarium in the late 1840s, pressing local flora and rehearsing habits of classification, observation, and naming that migrated into her verse. Scientific developments—geology’s deep time, microscopy’s revelations, and, later, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859)—circulated in Amherst through lectures, libraries, and newspapers. The poems’ meticulous attention to particulars, taxonomies of weather and flora, and metaphors drawn from laboratory and field connect this intellectual atmosphere to the textual artifacts later edited into The Single Hound and contextualized in The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson.
Mid-nineteenth-century print culture reached Dickinson through nearby periodicals like the Springfield Republican, edited by Samuel Bowles (1826–1878), and national magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly (founded 1857). Editors standardized punctuation, regularized rhyme, and prized transparent diction—expectations that influenced how posthumous editors presented her work. Only a handful of poems appeared publicly during her lifetime, often anonymously or altered to fit prevailing conventions. After 1886, editorial decisions by Mabel Loomis Todd (1856–1932) and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911) about capitalization, dashes, and variant readings reflected these nineteenth-century norms, shaping the reception of the poems published in the 1890s and framing the narrative materials later compiled in The Life and Letters.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) saturated New England’s newspapers with casualty lists, sermons of consolation, and debates about emancipation. Dickinson’s years of greatest poetic intensity—especially 1861–1865—coincided with this crisis. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a radical abolitionist and later her co-editor, led the 1st South Carolina Volunteers (African Descent), linking her private correspondence with public military history. The war’s vocabulary of absence, rupture, and reckoning inflected her metaphors of injury, victory, and immortality. The immediate circulation of war news through the Springfield Republican and correspondence networks in Amherst provides a historical texture that threads through the First, Second, and Third Series and informs the epistolary selections that anchor The Life and Letters.
Family and friendship networks shaped both creative practice and posthumous publication. Susan Gilbert Dickinson, a gifted critic and confidante at The Evergreens, received many of the poems in letters; Austin Dickinson’s social reach brought the household into contact with regional editors and visitors; Lavinia Dickinson preserved manuscripts after 1886. Correspondences with figures such as Samuel Bowles, Judge Otis Phillips Lord (1812–1884), and the Philadelphia minister Charles Wadsworth (1814–1882) supplied occasions and addressees for lyric experiments. These ties, often triangulated through domestic spaces, later determined custody of manuscripts, editorial alliances, and the competing interpretive frames that culminated in Todd and Higginson’s 1890s series and Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s volumes, including The Single Hound and The Life and Letters.
The gendered literary marketplace of nineteenth-century America constrained female authors toward piety, sentiment, and decorous self-disclosure. Dickinson’s decision to remain largely unpublished and to circulate work in letters and hand-sewn fascicles can be read against a culture that categorized women writers as “poetess” or moralist. Contemporaries such as Lydia Sigourney and, across the Atlantic, Elizabeth Barrett Browning defined accepted models; editors valued regularity and clarity. The tension between private experiment and public convention helps explain both the editorial alterations in the 1890s and the biographical framing of Dickinson as domestic recluse. These pressures hover over the full corpus, shaping how the poems in all the volumes entered twentieth-century critical conversation.
Transatlantic literary exchange coursed through Amherst via libraries, lectures, and reprinted essays. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays and poems circulated widely, and his 1867 reading in Amherst underscored the local presence of Transcendentalist aesthetics. British Romantic and Victorian currents—Wordsworth’s inwardness, the Brontës’ intensity, Tennyson’s metrics, and Browning’s dramatic monologues—entered Dickinson’s notebook and letters as both stimulus and foil. She adapted hymn meters associated with Isaac Watts and New England psalmody, breaking them with counterrhythms and slant rhymes. This literary ecology set the stage for the editorial choices of the First, Second, and Third Series and informs the intertextual references explained or excerpted in The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson.
Technological modernity furnished metaphors and infrastructures that made Dickinson’s compact poetics possible. The railroad reached Amherst in the 1850s, expediting newspapers and correspondence; the telegraph, operational since 1844, offered images of instantaneous communication and disembodied message. Astronomy lectures at Amherst College and, later, the presence of David Peck Todd (1855–1939), an astronomy professor and husband of editor Mabel Loomis Todd, reinforced celestial vocabularies that appear throughout the poems. Optical treatments for eye trouble in 1864–1865 under Dr. Henry Willard Williams in Boston and Cambridge deepened her engagement with vision, perception, and light. These technologies and experiences inform imagery and editorial networks across the poetic series and the biographical narratives of The Life and Letters.
Dickinson’s manuscripts complicate simple notions of textual fixity. Between the early 1850s and late 1860s, she assembled some forty fascicles—hand-sewn packets of folded sheets—containing carefully arranged poems, along with loose sheets and later “scrap” and envelope drafts. Many poems exist in multiple versions, with alternative words floated in the margins or offered as choices. Such material practices help explain why posthumous editors diverged in transcription and arrangement. The existence of variants, coupled with local addressees and undated drafts, shapes how poems are distributed across the First, Second, and Third Series, reselected in The Single Hound, and glossed or excerpted in the epistolary frameworks of The Life and Letters.
Dickinson died in Amherst on 15 May 1886. Shortly thereafter, Lavinia Dickinson discovered the cache of fascicles and loose manuscripts and, facing editorial disagreements with Susan Dickinson, enlisted Mabel Loomis Todd to prepare them for print. In collaboration with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Todd produced Poems: First Series (1890), followed by Second Series (1891) and Third Series (1896). These volumes standardized punctuation, regularized rhyme, supplied titles, and grouped poems by theme—decisions that made Dickinson legible to late nineteenth-century readers but at a cost to her idiosyncratic prosody. The editorial horizon of the 1890s created the initial public Dickinson that later family-edited volumes would complicate.
Editorial conflict continued into the twentieth century, complicated by the personal history between Mabel Loomis Todd and Austin Dickinson. Legal disputes over manuscripts and property divided the Todd and Dickinson families, affecting which texts could be printed and by whom. Martha Dickinson Bianchi (1866–1943), the poet’s niece, drew on materials held at The Evergreens to publish The Single Hound (1914), offering fresh selections and emphasizing familial custodianship. By redirecting attention to manuscripts Todd had not controlled, Bianchi reframed Dickinson as a more daring artist than the 1890s editions suggested. The Single Hound thus stands as both literary anthology and artifact of contested archival possession and interpretation.
Bianchi’s The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924) consolidated biographical myth and documentary record. Selecting and arranging correspondence, she emphasized Amherst rooms, thresholds, and garden paths, and highlighted relationships with Susan Dickinson, Samuel Bowles, and others, providing contexts for many poems as letters or enclosures. This portrait, while partial, countered the earlier editorial tendency to normalize diction and meter by supplying scenes of composition and exchange. The book bridged the 1890s poetic series and later textual scholarship by foregrounding the domestic and epistolary matrix in which the works originated, shaping how readers encounter poems now aggregated in comprehensive collections bearing Dickinson’s name.
Over ensuing decades, scholarly editions sought to restore Dickinson’s forms and variants. Millicent Todd Bingham, Mabel’s daughter, helped publish additional manuscripts; Thomas H. Johnson’s Poems (1955) and Letters (1958) offered chronological and variorum approaches; R. W. Franklin’s editions (1998) further refined dating and manuscript relations. Although these later milestones lie beyond the early series and Bianchi’s volumes, they illuminate the stakes of earlier editorial choices and underline the material history behind any “complete” Dickinson. Modern editors revisit fascicles, envelopes, and letter-poems to map the relations among texts represented across the First, Second, and Third Series, The Single Hound, and biographical compilations like The Life and Letters.
Critical reception evolved from late nineteenth-century bemusement to twentieth-century admiration. Early reviewers cast Dickinson as quaint or eccentric; by the 1920s and 1930s, critics and poets recognized her compression, irony, and metaphysical daring. The New Critics later prized her craft and ambiguity, while modernists drew on her fractured measures and startling metaphors. This changing horizon affects how we read the selections in the 1890s series, Bianchi’s The Single Hound, and the contextualizing Life and Letters: not as fixed canons, but as historically situated gateways. The reception history, grounded in names like Higginson, Todd, and Bianchi, is itself part of the cultural context of the collected works.
Taken together, the volumes associated with Dickinson—Poems: First, Second, and Third Series; The Single Hound; and The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson—are products of nineteenth-century Amherst, Civil War upheaval, women’s education, religious contention, scientific modernity, and contested family archives. Dates such as 1890, 1891, 1896, 1914, and 1924 mark editorial thresholds rather than discrete creative phases, channeling a life’s work composed between 1830 and 1886. Reading across these books invites attention to the living networks—Susan and Lavinia Dickinson, Samuel Bowles, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Mabel Loomis Todd, Martha Dickinson Bianchi—and to the technologies, institutions, and beliefs that mediated the poems from desk to page.
Synopsis (Selection)
Poems: First Series
A posthumous debut that showcases Dickinson’s compressed lyric style and slant rhyme, exploring life, love, nature, and eternity. The poems probe faith and doubt, death, and the inner self through startling images and paradox.
Poems: Second Series
An expanded selection that deepens themes of solitude, artistic vocation, and the limits of expression. It balances metaphysical inquiry with precise observations of seasons, birds, and landscapes.
Poems: Third Series
Further posthumous lyrics that are often more elliptical and formally daring, sustaining concerns with mortality, desire, and the divine. Many pieces turn inward, capturing moments of revelation or dread against the backdrop of nature.
The Single Hound
Compiled by Martha Dickinson Bianchi, this volume gathers many previously unpublished poems and fragments in a more intimate register. It highlights loyalty, friendship, and the solitary calling of the poet alongside familiar meditations on nature and death.
The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson
Bianchi’s biographical portrait interweaves narrative with substantial excerpts from Dickinson’s correspondence to chart her family life, friendships, and evolving art. The letters reveal her wit, self-definition, and working methods within the social world of Amherst.
The Complete Poetry of Emily Dickinson
Poems: First Series
Table of Contents
PREFACE
The verses of Emily Dickinson belong emphatically to what Emerson long since called "the Poetry of the Portfolio,"—something produced absolutely without the thought of publication, and solely by way of expression of the writer's own mind. Such verse must inevitably forfeit whatever advantage lies in the discipline of public criticism and the enforced conformity to accepted ways. On the other hand, it may often gain something through the habit of freedom and the unconventional utterance of daring thoughts. In the case of the present author, there was absolutely no choice in the matter; she must write thus, or not at all. A recluse by temperament and habit, literally spending years without setting her foot beyond the doorstep, and many more years during which her walks were strictly limited to her father's grounds, she habitually concealed her mind, like her person, from all but a very few friends; and it was with great difficulty that she was persuaded to print, during her lifetime, three or four poems. Yet she wrote verses in great abundance; and though brought curiously indifferent to all conventional rules, had yet a rigorous literary standard of her own, and often altered a word many times to suit an ear which had its own tenacious fastidiousness.
Miss Dickinson was born in Amherst, Mass., Dec. 10, 1830, and died there May 15, 1886. Her father, Hon. Edward Dickinson, was the leading lawyer of Amherst, and was treasurer of the well-known college there situated. It was his custom once a year to hold a large reception at his house, attended by all the families connected with the institution and by the leading people of the town. On these occasions his daughter Emily emerged from her wonted retirement and did her part as gracious hostess; nor would any one have known from her manner, I have been told, that this was not a daily occurrence. The annual occasion once past, she withdrew again into her seclusion, and except for a very few friends was as invisible to the world as if she had dwelt in a nunnery. For myself, although I had corresponded with her for many years, I saw her but twice face to face, and brought away the impression of something as unique and remote as Undine or Mignon or Thekla.
This selection from her poems is published to meet the desire of her personal friends, and especially of her surviving sister. It is believed that the thoughtful reader will find in these pages a quality more suggestive of the poetry of William Blake than of anything to be elsewhere found,—flashes of wholly original and profound insight into nature and life; words and phrases exhibiting an extraordinary vividness of descriptive and imaginative power, yet often set in a seemingly whimsical or even rugged frame. They are here published as they were written, with very few and superficial changes; although it is fair to say that the titles have been assigned, almost invariably, by the editors. In many cases these verses will seem to the reader like poetry torn up by the roots, with rain and dew and earth still clinging to them, giving a freshness and a fragrance not otherwise to be conveyed. In other cases, as in the few poems of shipwreck or of mental conflict, we can only wonder at the gift of vivid imagination by which this recluse woman can delineate, by a few touches, the very crises of physical or mental struggle. And sometimes again we catch glimpses of a lyric strain, sustained perhaps but for a line or two at a time, and making the reader regret its sudden cessation. But the main quality of these poems is that of extraordinary grasp and insight, uttered with an uneven vigor sometimes exasperating, seemingly wayward, but really unsought and inevitable. After all, when a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence. As Ruskin wrote in his earlier and better days, "No weight nor mass nor beauty of execution can outweigh one grain or fragment of thought."
—-Thomas Wentworth Higginson
This is my letter to the world, That never wrote to me, — The simple news that Nature told, With tender majesty. Her message is committed To hands I cannot see; For love of her, sweet countrymen, Judge tenderly of me!
BOOK I.—LIFE.
I. Success
Success is counted sweetest By those who ne'er succeed. To comprehend a nectar Requires sorest need. Not one of all the purple host Who took the flag to-day Can tell the definition, So clear, of victory, As he, defeated, dying, On whose forbidden ear The distant strains of triumph Break, agonized and clear!
II. "Our share of night to bear"
Our share of night to bear, Our share of morning, Our blank in bliss to fill, Our blank in scorning. Here a star, and there a star, Some lose their way. Here a mist, and there a mist, Afterwards — day!
III. Rouge et Noir
Soul, wilt thou toss again? By just such a hazard Hundreds have lost, indeed, But tens have won an all. Angels' breathless ballot Lingers to record thee; Imps in eager caucus Raffle for my soul.
IV. Rouge gagne
'T is so much joy! 'T is so much joy! If I should fail, what poverty! And yet, as poor as I Have ventured all upon a throw; Have gained! Yes! Hesitated so This side the victory! Life is but life, and death but death! Bliss is but bliss, and breath but breath! And if, indeed, I fail, At least to know the worst is sweet. Defeat means nothing but defeat, No drearier can prevail! And if I gain, — oh, gun at sea, Oh, bells that in the steeples be, At first repeat it slow! For heaven is a different thing Conjectured, and waked sudden in, And might o'erwhelm me so!
V. "Glee! the storm is over"
Glee! The great storm is over! Four have recovered the land; Forty gone down together Into the boiling sand. Ring, for the scant salvation! Toll, for the bonnie souls, — Neighbor and friend and bridegroom, Spinning upon the shoals! How they will tell the shipwreck When winter shakes the door, Till the children ask, "But the forty? Did they come back no more?" Then a silence suffuses the story, And a softness the teller's eye; And the children no further question, And only the waves reply.
VI. "If I can stop one heart from breaking"
If 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.
VII. Almost
Within my reach! I could have touched! I might have chanced that way! Soft sauntered through the village, Sauntered as soft away! So unsuspected violets Within the fields lie low, Too late for striving fingers That passed, an hour ago.
VIII. "A wounded deer leaps highest"
A wounded deer leaps highest, I've heard the hunter tell; 'T is but the ecstasy of death, And then the brake is still. The smitten rock that gushes, The trampled steel that springs; A cheek is always redder Just where the hectic stings! Mirth is the mail of anguish, In which it cautions arm, Lest anybody spy the blood And "You're hurt" exclaim!
IX. "The heart asks pleasure first"
The heart asks pleasure first, And then, excuse from pain; And then, those little anodynes That deaden suffering; And then, to go to sleep; And then, if it should be The will of its Inquisitor, The liberty to die.
X. In a Library
A precious, mouldering pleasure 't is To meet an antique book, In just the dress his century wore; A privilege, I think, His venerable hand to take, And warming in our own, A passage back, or two, to make To times when he was young. His quaint opinions to inspect, His knowledge to unfold On what concerns our mutual mind, The literature of old; What interested scholars most, What competitions ran When Plato was a certainty. And Sophocles a man; When Sappho was a living girl, And Beatrice wore The gown that Dante deified. Facts, centuries before, He traverses familiar, As one should come to town And tell you all your dreams were true; He lived where dreams were sown. His presence is enchantment, You beg him not to go; Old volumes shake their vellum heads And tantalize, just so.
XI. "Much madness is divinest sense"
Much madness is divinest sense To a discerning eye; Much sense the starkest madness. 'T is the majority In this, as all, prevails. Assent, and you are sane; Demur, — you're straightway dangerous, And handled with a chain.
XII. "I asked no other thing"
I asked no other thing, No other was denied. I offered Being for it; The mighty merchant smiled. Brazil? He twirled a button, Without a glance my way: "But, madam, is there nothing else That we can show to-day?"
XIII. Exclusion
The soul selects her own society, Then shuts the door; On her divine majority Obtrude no more. Unmoved, she notes the chariot's pausing At her low gate; Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling Upon her mat. I've known her from an ample nation Choose one; Then close the valves of her attention Like stone.
XIV. The Secret
Some things that fly there be, — Birds, hours, the bumble-bee: Of these no elegy. Some things that stay there be, — Grief, hills, eternity: Nor this behooveth me. There are, that resting, rise. Can I expound the skies? How still the riddle lies!
XV. The Lonely House
I know some lonely houses off the road A robber 'd like the look of, — Wooden barred, And windows hanging low, Inviting to A portico, Where two could creep: One hand the tools, The other peep To make sure all's asleep. Old-fashioned eyes, Not easy to surprise! How orderly the kitchen 'd look by night, With just a clock, — But they could gag the tick, And mice won't bark; And so the walls don't tell, None will. A pair of spectacles ajar just stir — An almanac's aware. Was it the mat winked, Or a nervous star? The moon slides down the stair To see who's there. There's plunder, — where? Tankard, or spoon, Earring, or stone, A watch, some ancient brooch To match the grandmamma, Staid sleeping there. Day rattles, too, Stealth's slow; The sun has got as far As the third sycamore. Screams chanticleer, "Who's there?" And echoes, trains away, Sneer — "Where?" While the old couple, just astir, Fancy the sunrise left the door ajar!
XVI. "To fight aloud is very brave"
To fight aloud is very brave, But gallanter, I know, Who charge within the bosom, The cavalry of woe. Who win, and nations do not see, Who fall, and none observe, Whose dying eyes no country Regards with patriot love. We trust, in plumed procession, For such the angels go, Rank after rank, with even feet And uniforms of snow.
XVII. Dawn
When night is almost done, And sunrise grows so near That we can touch the spaces, It 's time to smooth the hair And get the dimples ready, And wonder we could care For that old faded midnight That frightened but an hour.
XVIII. The Book of Martyrs
Read, sweet, how others strove, Till we are stouter; What they renounced, Till we are less afraid; How many times they bore The faithful witness, Till we are helped, As if a kingdom cared! Read then of faith That shone above the fagot; Clear strains of hymn The river could not drown; Brave names of men And celestial women, Passed out of record Into renown!
XIX. The Mystery of Pain
Pain has an element of blank; It cannot recollect When it began, or if there were A day when it was not. It has no future but itself, Its infinite realms contain Its past, enlightened to perceive New periods of pain.
XX. "I taste a liquor never brewed"
I taste a liquor never brewed, From tankards scooped in pearl; Not all the vats upon the Rhine Yield such an alcohol! Inebriate of air am I, And debauchee of dew, Reeling, through endless summer days, From inns of molten blue. When landlords turn the drunken bee Out of the foxglove's door, When butterflies renounce their drams, I shall but drink the more! Till seraphs swing their snowy hats, And saints to windows run, To see the little tippler Leaning against the sun!
XXI. A Book
He ate and drank the precious words, His spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, Nor that his frame was dust. He danced along the dingy days, And this bequest of wings Was but a book. What liberty A loosened spirit brings!
XXII. "I had no time to hate, because"
I had no time to hate, because The grave would hinder me, And life was not so ample I Could finish enmity. Nor had I time to love; but since Some industry must be, The little toil of love, I thought, Was large enough for me.
XXIII Unreturning
'T was such a little, little boat That toddled down the bay! 'T was such a gallant, gallant sea That beckoned it away! 'T was such a greedy, greedy wave That licked it from the coast; Nor ever guessed the stately sails My little craft was lost!
XXIV. Whether my bark went down at sea"
Whether my bark went down at sea, Whether she met with gales, Whether to isles enchanted She bent her docile sails; By what mystic mooring She is held to-day, — This is the errand of the eye Out upon the bay.
XXV. "Belshazzar had a letter"
Belshazzar had a letter, — He never had but one; Belshazzar's correspondent Concluded and begun In that immortal copy The conscience of us all Can read without its glasses On revelation's wall.
XXVI. "The brain within its groove"
The brain within its groove Runs evenly and true; But let a splinter swerve, 'T were easier for you To put the water back When floods have slit the hills, And scooped a turnpike for themselves, And blotted out the mills!
BOOK II.—LOVE.
I. Mine
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!
II. Bequest
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.
III. "Alter? When the hills do"
Alter? When the hills do. Falter? When the sun Question if his glory Be the perfect one. Surfeit? When the daffodil Doth of the dew: Even as herself, O friend! I will of you!
IV. Suspense
Elysium is as far as to The very nearest room, If in that room a friend await Felicity or doom. What fortitude the soul contains, That it can so endure The accent of a coming foot, The opening of a door!
V. Surrender
Doubt me, my dim companion! Why, God would be content With but a fraction of the love Poured thee without a stint. The whole of me, forever, What more the woman can, — Say quick, that I may dower thee With last delight I own! It cannot be my spirit, For that was thine before; I ceded all of dust I knew, — What opulence the more Had I, a humble maiden, Whose farthest of degree Was that she might, Some distant heaven, Dwell timidly with thee!
VI. "If you were coming in the fall"
If you were coming in the fall, I'd brush the summer by With half a smile and half a spurn, As housewives do a fly. If I could see you in a year, I'd wind the months in balls, And put them each in separate drawers, Until their time befalls. If only centuries delayed, I'd count them on my hand, Subtracting till my fingers dropped Into Van Diemen's land. If certain, when this life was out, That yours and mine should be, I'd toss it yonder like a rind, And taste eternity. But now, all ignorant of the length Of time's uncertain wing, It goads me, like the goblin bee, That will not state its sting.
VII. With a Flower
I hide myself within my flower, That wearing on your breast, You, unsuspecting, wear me too — And angels know the rest. I hide myself within my flower, That, fading from your vase, You, unsuspecting, feel for me Almost a loneliness.
VIII. Proof
That I did always love, I bring thee proof: That till I loved I did not love enough. That I shall love alway, I offer thee That love is life, And life hath immortality. This, dost thou doubt, sweet? Then have I Nothing to show But Calvary.
IX. “Have you got a brook in your little heart?”
Have you got a brook in your little heart, Where bashful flowers blow, And blushing birds go down to drink, And shadows tremble so? And nobody knows, so still it flows, That any brook is there; And yet your little draught of life Is daily drunken there. Then look out for the little brook in March, When the rivers overflow, And the snows come hurrying from the hills, And the bridges often go. And later, in August it may be, When the meadows parching lie, Beware, lest this little brook of life Some burning noon go dry!
X. Transplanted
As if some little Arctic flower, Upon the polar hem, Went wandering down the latitudes, Until it puzzled came To continents of summer, To firmaments of sun, To strange, bright crowds of flowers, And birds of foreign tongue! I say, as if this little flower To Eden wandered in — What then? Why, nothing, only, Your inference therefrom!
XI. The Outlet
My river runs to thee: Blue sea, wilt welcome me? My river waits reply. Oh sea, look graciously! I'll fetch thee brooks From spotted nooks, — Say, sea, Take me!
XII. In Vain
I cannot live with you, It would be life, And life is over there Behind the shelf The sexton keeps the key to, Putting up Our life, his porcelain, Like a cup Discarded of the housewife, Quaint or broken; A newer Sevres pleases, Old ones crack. I could not die with you, For one must wait To shut the other's gaze down, — You could not. And I, could I stand by And see you freeze, Without my right of frost, Death's privilege? Nor could I rise with you, Because your face Would put out Jesus', That new grace Glow plain and foreign On my homesick eye, Except that you, than he Shone closer by. They'd judge us — how? For you served Heaven, you know, Or sought to; I could not, Because you saturated sight, And I had no more eyes For sordid excellence As Paradise. And were you lost, I would be, Though my name Rang loudest On the heavenly fame. And were you saved, And I condemned to be Where you were not, That self were hell to me. So we must keep apart, You there, I here, With just the door ajar That oceans are, And prayer, And that pale sustenance, Despair!
XIII Renunciation
There came a day at summer's full Entirely for me; I thought that such were for the saints, Where revelations be. The sun, as common, went abroad, The flowers, accustomed, blew, As if no soul the solstice passed That maketh all things new. The time was scarce profaned by speech; The symbol of a word Was needless, as at sacrament The wardrobe of our Lord. Each was to each the sealed church, Permitted to commune this time, Lest we too awkward show At supper of the Lamb. The hours slid fast, as hours will, Clutched tight by greedy hands; So faces on two decks look back, Bound to opposing lands. And so, when all the time had failed, Without external sound, Each bound the other's crucifix, We gave no other bond. Sufficient troth that we shall rise — Deposed, at length, the grave — To that new marriage, justified Through Calvaries of Love!
XIV. Love's Baptism
I'm ceded, I've stopped being theirs; The name they dropped upon my face With water, in the country church, Is finished using now, And they can put it with my dolls, My childhood, and the string of spools I've finished threading too. Baptized before without the choice, But this time consciously, of grace Unto supremest name, Called to my full, the crescent dropped, Existence's whole arc filled up With one small diadem. My second rank, too small the first, Crowned, crowing on my father's breast, A half unconscious queen; But this time, adequate, erect, With will to choose or to reject. And I choose — just a throne.
XV. Resurrection
'T was a long parting, but the time For interview had come; Before the judgment-seat of God, The last and second time These fleshless lovers met, A heaven in a gaze, A heaven of heavens, the privilege Of one another's eyes. No lifetime set on them, Apparelled as the new Unborn, except they had beheld, Born everlasting now. Was bridal e'er like this? A paradise, the host, And cherubim and seraphim The most familiar guest.
XVI. Apocalypse
I'm wife; I've finished that, That other state; I'm Czar, I'm woman now: It's safer so. How odd the girl's life looks Behind this soft eclipse! I think that earth seems so To those in heaven now. This being comfort, then That other kind was pain; But why compare? I'm wife! stop there!
XVII. The Wife
She rose to his requirement, dropped The playthings of her life To take the honorable work Of woman and of wife. If aught she missed in her new day Of amplitude, or awe, Or first prospective, or the gold In using wore away, It lay unmentioned, as the sea Develops pearl and weed, But only to himself is known The fathoms they abide.
XVIII. Apotheosis
Come slowly, Eden! Lips unused to thee, Bashful, sip thy jasmines, As the fainting bee, Reaching late his flower, Round her chamber hums, Counts his nectars — enters, And is lost in balms!
BOOK III.—NATURE
I. “New feet within my garden go”
New feet within my garden go, New fingers stir the sod; A troubadour upon the elm Betrays the solitude. New children play upon the green, New weary sleep below; And still the pensive spring returns, And still the punctual snow!
II. May-Flower
Pink, small, and punctual, Aromatic, low, Covert in April, Candid in May, Dear to the moss, Known by the knoll, Next to the robin In every human soul. Bold little beauty, Bedecked with thee, Nature forswears Antiquity.
III. Why?
The murmur of a bee A witchcraft yieldeth me. If any ask me why, 'T were easier to die Than tell. The red upon the hill Taketh away my will; If anybody sneer, Take care, for God is here, That's all. The breaking of the day Addeth to my degree; If any ask me how, Artist, who drew me so, Must tell!
IV. “Perhaps you ’d like to buy a flower”
Perhaps you'd like to buy a flower? But I could never sell. If you would like to borrow Until the daffodil Unties her yellow bonnet Beneath the village door, Until the bees, from clover rows Their hock and sherry draw, Why, I will lend until just then, But not an hour more!
V. “The pedigree of honey”
The pedigree of honey Does not concern the bee; A clover, any time, to him Is aristocracy.
VI. A Service of Song
Some keep the Sabbath going to church; I keep it staying at home, With a bobolink for a chorister, And an orchard for a dome. Some keep the Sabbath in surplice; I just wear my wings, And instead of tolling the bell for church, Our little sexton sings. God preaches, — a noted clergyman, — And the sermon is never long; So instead of getting to heaven at last, I'm going all along!
VII. “The bee is not afraid of me”
The bee is not afraid of me, I know the butterfly; The pretty people in the woods Receive me cordially. The brooks laugh louder when I come, The breezes madder play. Wherefore, mine eyes, thy silver mists? Wherefore, O summer's day?
VIII. Summer's Armies
Some rainbow coming from the fair! Some vision of the world Cashmere I confidently see! Or else a peacock's purple train, Feather by feather, on the plain Fritters itself away! The dreamy butterflies bestir, Lethargic pools resume the whir Of last year's sundered tune. From some old fortress on the sun Baronial bees march, one by one, In murmuring platoon! The robins stand as thick to-day As flakes of snow stood yesterday, On fence and roof and twig. The orchis binds her feather on For her old lover, Don the Sun, Revisiting the bog! Without commander, countless, still, The regiment of wood and hill In bright detachment stand. Behold! Whose multitudes are these? The children of whose turbaned seas, Or what Circassian land?
IX. The Grass
The grass so little has to do, — A sphere of simple green, With only butterflies to brood, And bees to entertain, And stir all day to pretty tunes The breezes fetch along, And hold the sunshine in its lap And bow to everything; And thread the dews all night, like pearls, And make itself so fine, — A duchess were too common For such a noticing. And even when it dies, to pass In odors so divine, As lowly spices gone to sleep, Or amulets of pine. And then to dwell in sovereign barns, And dream the days away, — The grass so little has to do, I wish I were the hay!
X. "A little road not made of man"
A little road not made of man, Enabled of the eye, Accessible to thill of bee, Or cart of butterfly. If town it have, beyond itself, 'T is that I cannot say; I only sigh, — no vehicle Bears me along that way.
XI. Summer Shower
A drop fell on the apple tree, Another on the roof; A half a dozen kissed the eaves, And made the gables laugh. A few went out to help the brook, That went to help the sea. Myself conjectured, Were they pearls, What necklaces could be! The dust replaced in hoisted roads, The birds jocoser sung; The sunshine threw his hat away, The orchards spangles hung. The breezes brought dejected lutes, And bathed them in the glee; The East put out a single flag, And signed the fete away.
XII. Psalm of the Day
A something in a summer's day, As slow her flambeaux burn away, Which solemnizes me. A something in a summer's noon, — An azure depth, a wordless tune, Transcending ecstasy. And still within a summer's night A something so transporting bright, I clap my hands to see; Then veil my too inspecting face, Lest such a subtle, shimmering grace Flutter too far for me. The wizard-fingers never rest, The purple brook within the breast Still chafes its narrow bed; Still rears the East her amber flag, Guides still the sun along the crag His caravan of red, Like flowers that heard the tale of dews, But never deemed the dripping prize Awaited their low brows; Or bees, that thought the summer's name Some rumor of delirium No summer could for them; Or Arctic creature, dimly stirred By tropic hint, — some travelled bird Imported to the wood; Or wind's bright signal to the ear, Making that homely and severe, Contented, known, before The heaven unexpected came, To lives that thought their worshipping A too presumptuous psalm.
XIII. The Sea of Sunset
This is the land the sunset washes, These are the banks of the Yellow Sea; Where it rose, or whither it rushes, These are the western mystery! Night after night her purple traffic Strews the landing with opal bales; Merchantmen poise upon horizons, Dip, and vanish with fairy sails.
XIV. Purple Clover
There is a flower that bees prefer, And butterflies desire; To gain the purple democrat The humming-birds aspire. And whatsoever insect pass, A honey bears away Proportioned to his several dearth And her capacity. Her face is rounder than the moon, And ruddier than the gown Of orchis in the pasture, Or rhododendron worn. She doth not wait for June; Before the world is green Her sturdy little countenance Against the wind is seen, Contending with the grass, Near kinsman to herself, For privilege of sod and sun, Sweet litigants for life. And when the hills are full, And newer fashions blow, Doth not retract a single spice For pang of jealousy. Her public is the noon, Her providence the sun, Her progress by the bee proclaimed In sovereign, swerveless tune. The bravest of the host, Surrendering the last, Nor even of defeat aware When cancelled by the frost.
XV. The Bee
Like trains of cars on tracks of plush I hear the level bee: A jar across the flowers goes, Their velvet masonry Withstands until the sweet assault Their chivalry consumes, While he, victorious, tilts away To vanquish other blooms. His feet are shod with gauze, His helmet is of gold; His breast, a single onyx With chrysoprase, inlaid. His labor is a chant, His idleness a tune; Oh, for a bee's experience Of clovers and of noon!
XVI. "Presentiment is that long shadow"
Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn Indicative that suns go down; The notice to the startled grass That darkness is about to pass.
XVII. "As children bid the guest good-night"
As children bid the guest good-night, And then reluctant turn, My flowers raise their pretty lips, Then put their nightgowns on. As children caper when they wake, Merry that it is morn, My flowers from a hundred cribs Will peep, and prance again.
XVIII. "Angels in the early morning"
Angels in the early morning May be seen the dews among, Stooping, plucking, smiling, flying: Do the buds to them belong? Angels when the sun is hottest May be seen the sands among, Stooping, plucking, sighing, flying; Parched the flowers they bear along.
XIX. "So bashful when I spied her"
So bashful when I spied her, So pretty, so ashamed! So hidden in her leaflets, Lest anybody find; So breathless till I passed her, So helpless when I turned And bore her, struggling, blushing, Her simple haunts beyond! For whom I robbed the dingle, For whom betrayed the dell, Many will doubtless ask me, But I shall never tell!
