‘Presentiment is that long Shadow on the Lawn’. Once again, as is so often the case with an Emily Dickinson poem, our attention is immediately arrested by a distinctive and provocative opening line. Something abstract, in this case the idea of presentiment, is given concrete form as an instantly visualised […]
‘Wild nights – Wild nights!’ The energy and exultation with which Emily Dickinson opens this, one of her most passionately felt poems, encourages us to share the excitement and passion, or at least dares us to try to resist it. Although ‘Wild nights – Wild nights!’ is not perhaps the […]
This short poem by one of American literature’s greatest poets is actually about death – but then death is probably Emily Dickinson’s greatest theme. The ‘long, long sleep’ is the sleep of death: death is imagined as an unbroken slumber for centuries, where the sleeper doesn’t ‘once look up for […]