![]() ![]() Any of these, or just plain old depression, might have sparked this poem. There is a theory that Dickinson, like her nephew Ned, was epileptic she definitely suffered eye trouble and, as we know, she had agoraphobic tendencies. The poem has the trademark up-note ending, so that the reader must guess where the breakdown leads to – the heaven of well-being, or the hell of continued mental anguish. ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ is one of Dickinson’s most well-known poems on mental health, using some of her favourite metaphors: death and the afterlife. So the abandon of this celebrated Dickinson love poem is not out of place and can be read for what it is: a passionate, exuberant and loving cry from the heart. ‘Wild Nights – Wild Nights’ predates Dickinson’s romance with Lord but she had previous love-objects, like the mysterious ‘Master’ and also sister-in-law Sue, whom she loved ardently, as many Victorian women loved their dearest friends. Dickinson was seen sitting in Lord’s lap and wrote to him (in the third person): ‘I confess that I love him – I rejoice that I love him…’ Lord asked to marry her apparently she refused. ![]() Or perhaps she feared editorial input because she had already been stung.ĭickinson’s posthumous editor and friend, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, worried about including this poem in the 1891 volume of her poetry ‘lest the malignant read into it more than that virgin recluse ever dreamed of putting there.’ Higginson seems very sure of Dickinson’s virginal state but seems to forget that she had a late romance with her father’s friend, Judge Otis Lord. By turning her back on notoriety Dickinson may have been trying to protect her good name. ‘Success is counted sweetest’ brings to mind the four lines of ‘Fame is a Bee’, where Dickinson points out that fame has both song and sting, but also wings. Interestingly, though Dickinson did not seek publication – her father disdained Women of Letters – this poem was published (anonymously) in an anthology called A Masque of Poets. Dickinson is at her aphoristic best in poems like this, where she shines a light on the complexities of human desire. ‘Success is counted sweetest’ is one of Dickinson’s many poems on the subject of fame. There she and her family grew an abundance of produce and flowers all the better for this little tippler. ![]() Luckily the house she chose to sequester herself inside, in the latter part of her life, was set on large grounds. This poem illustrates how intoxicating the natural world was to Dickinson. Here ‘Not all the Frankfort berries’ can be swapped out for ‘Not all the vats upon the Rhine’ we’re still in Germany but with a vastly different image. Dickinson sometimes wrote alternative lines for ‘finished’ poems. While ‘I taste a liquor never brewed –’ illustrates her devotion to rhyme, it also shows her maverick’s disregard for it – she often chose an apt image rather than a full rhyme. In life and in art Emily Dickinson was idiosyncratic – she did not choose the prescribed life of a well to-do woman of her era (marriage etc.) rather she become an outsider. ![]()
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