Monday, June 12, 2017
"Emily"––poem by Dorothy
Emily
Oh, Emily, Emily,
with your flaming hair,
your hand sewn rhymes.
How long you held
your secret to your bosom,
how seldom you shared
with anyone at all.
And you held out
against God himself,
the master, the Father
who ruled
with an inflexible iron hand.
You set your own terms,
did not bow down,
kept the Sabbath
staying at home.
And those slanted marks at the end,
signals for elocution,
indications of intonation
up, down, or steady,
the critics never guessed,
thought you did not know
how to punctuate.
You outlived them all,
ended up acclaimed and
revered by throngs,
noticed at last,
even as your carriage
drove ever forward into eternity.
Dorothy Walters
June 10, 2017
Only seven of Emily Dickinson's poems were published during her lifetime, though she is now recognized as one of the most important poets America has ever produced. She lived all of her life with her family in Amherst, Massachusetts, and quietly bound her poems into small packets with spines of yarn. She refused to recognize the patriarchal God with his public ceremonies and enforced doctrine and preferred to acknowledge the divine through her own private connection. The lines of her poetry ended with puzzling dashes, which the critics assumed were evidence that she was ignorant of correct punctuation. These were in fact simply instructions of how the poems were to be read (aloud) with markings derived from the elocution books common at the time. These manuals inserted dashes slanted up or down or steady to indicate rising or falling inflection, or steady voice.
