By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Future never spoke –’: with these simple four words, Emily Dickinson begins one of her finest meditations on the unknowability of the future. Although ‘The Future never spoke’ does not present the challenges some of Dickinson’s more formidably cryptic poems pose, some words of analysis may nevertheless prove helpful.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘I had been hungry, all the Years’ is one of hundreds of poems Emily Dickinson wrote but never published. (As we’ve previously noted, when she died she was far better-known as a gardener than as a poet.) ‘I had been hungry, all the Years’ uses hunger and food as metaphors, a way to explore other themes, much as Dickinson does elsewhere (such as when she compares fame to food).
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Night was wide, and furnished scant’: not one of Emily Dickinson’s most memorable opening lines, but it opens a curious poem which is worth closer analysis.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘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 image. But what should we make of ‘Presentiment – is that long Shadow – on the Lawn –’ (to reinstate Dickinson’s trademark dashes)?
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
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 noon’.
A long — long Sleep — A famous — Sleep —
That makes no show for Morn —
By Stretch of Limb — or stir of Lid —
An independent One —
Was ever idleness like This?
Upon a Bank of Stone