Top 10 Best Poems by Emily Dickinson
She didn't title her poems, so, as is custom in these situations, the first line of the poem is used.
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Hope is the thing with feathers
HOPE is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
I hope to someday have an opinion that does not require me to think of one.
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I'm nobody! Who are you?
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!
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Because I could not stop for Death
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
At wrestling in a ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The 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.
I fell in love with this poem when I was about 15 years old. I fell in love with poetry around age 12. Somehow, Emily Dickinson's poems spoke to me in my early teens, and although her life seemed a little sad and lonely, she wrote from a soul that spoke to many.
That was over 40 years ago, and I still appreciate her themes of life's challenges.
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I never hear the word "Escape"
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Much madness is divinest sense
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I died for beauty, but was scarce
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.
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The blunder is to estimate, "Eternity is then"
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Who has not found the Heaven below
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Mine enemy is growing old
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I never saw a Moor
I NEVER saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.
I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.
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?
The grass so little has to do
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?
Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn
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No rack can torture me
NO rack can torture me,
My soul 's at liberty.
Behind this mortal bone
There knits a bolder one
You cannot prick with saw,
Nor rend with scymitar.
Two bodies therefore be;
Bind one, and one will flee.
The eagle of his nest
No easier divest
And gain the sky,
Than mayest thou,
Except thyself may be
Thine enemy;
Captivity is consciousness,
So's liberty.
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Drowning is not so pitiful
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Upon the gallows hung a wretch
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I felt a funeral in my brain
I FELT a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.
And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb.
And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead, again.
Then space began to toll
As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,
And I and silence some strange race,
Wrecked, solitary, here.
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Success is counted sweetest
SUCCESS is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the purple host
Who took the flag to-day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of victory,
As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Break, agonized and clear.
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A spider sewed at night
A SPIDER sewed at night
Without a light
Upon an arc of white.
If ruff it was of dame
Or shroud of gnome,
Himself, himself inform.
Of immortality
His strategy
Was physiognomy.
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New feet within my garden go
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I heard a fly buzz when I died
I HEARD a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.
The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in his power.
I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable, - and then
There interposed a fly,
With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed, and then
I could not see to see.
What Emily is saying is that when she dies, she wants to hear peace and not loud noise by a bee or whatever it is.
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Out of the morning
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Fame is a fickle food
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The sweets of pillage can be known
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It tossed and tossed
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It might be easier
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Love is anterior to life
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Glee! The great storm is over!