A summary of a classic spring poem

‘A Light Exists in Spring’ is not Emily Dickinson’s best-known poem, but it is a fine poem about the spring season, so we wanted to offer a few words of analysis of it here. The poem doesn’t appear to be online anywhere already in the ‘correct’ form – i.e. how it’s rendered in the Complete Poems, with the right words capitalised and those trademark dashes in the right place. Here is ‘A Light Exists in Spring’ as it appears in the Complete Poems.

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period –
When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels. Read the rest of this entry →