EMILY DICKINSON Emily Dickinson, I think of you Waking early each morning to write, Dressing with care for the act of poetry. Yours is always a perfect progress through Such cluttered rooms to eloquence, delight, To words - your window on the mystery. By christening the world you live and pray -- Within those lovely titles is contained The large philosophy you tend towards: With the lexicon the birds that play Beside your life, the wind that hold your hand Are recognized. Your poems are full of words. In your house in Amherst, Massachusetts, Though like love letters you lock them away, The poems are ubiquitous as dust You sit there writing while the light permits -- While you grow older they increase each day, Gradual as flowers, gradual as rust. -- Michael Longley (b. 1939 Belfast, Co. Antrim) lexicon/vocabulary -- ubiquitous/seeming to be present everywhere (Note - Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), was one of America's most gifted lyric poets. A Massachusetts spinster and recluse, disappointed in love, Emily wrote over a thousand short lyrics on odd scraps of paper. Only two were published during her lifetime, and those without her consent. When she died, her poems were discovered. Here are four: I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell! They'd banish us, you know. How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog! ---- I died for beauty, but was scarce Adjusted in the tomb, When one who died for truth was lain In an adjoining room. He questioned softly why I failed? "For beauty," I replied. "And I for truth, -- the two are one; We brethren are," he said. And so, as kinsmen met a night, We talked between the rooms, Until the moss had reached our lips, And covered up our names. ---- If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin Unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain. ---- The Chariot Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves and Immortality. We slowly drove, he knew no haste, And I had put away My labor, and my leisure too, For his civility. We passed the school where children played, Their lessons scarcely done; We passed the fields of gazing grain, We passed the setting sun. We paused before a house that seemed A swelling of the ground; He roof was scarcely visible, The cornice but a mound. Since then 't is centuries; but each Feels shorter than the day I first surmised the horses' heads Were toward eternity.