Jugami Poetry

High School Poetry · Unit 1

Emily Dickinson

Nearly 1,800 poems. About ten printed while she lived. None with her name on them.

Imagine writing almost two thousand poems, binding hundreds of them into little homemade booklets with string, and keeping them in your room. After you die, your sister finds them. Editors print them, fix your punctuation, give them titles and change a few words they think are wrong. A century later, readers decide the “wrong” parts were the best parts.

Emily Dickinson didn’t have to imagine it. It happened to her. On this page you will meet her, learn a method for reading any poem, figure out her dashes and her not-quite rhymes, and read six of her poems in full with notes beside every one. Then test yourself with a rhyme game and a quiz.

A slant of winter light through a window onto a string-bound booklet A tall many-paned window on a cream wall. A pale band of light slants down across a writing table, where a small booklet of folded pages lies open, tied with string through two holes. A pressed leaf and a pencil sit beside it, and a bee rests on the windowsill.
Winter light, a window, and a string-bound booklet. Original art made for Jugami.

Who Was Emily Dickinson?

She is often pictured as a shy woman in white who never left her room. The letters and poems show someone else: a sharp, funny, well-read writer who chose very carefully who got to read her work.

Amherst, start to finish

Born December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, into a prominent family. Her father was a lawyer. She studied at Amherst Academy, spent a year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, and from 1855 lived in the family home on Main Street. She died there on May 15, 1886, at 55.

A botanist’s eye

As a girl she studied botany and made an herbarium: a book of pressed plants, each labeled with its Latin name. Gardens, bees, birds and seasons fill her poems, but she watches them closely enough to find something strange.

Barely published

She wrote nearly 1,800 poems. Only about ten appeared in print during her life, all without her name, and scholars believe she did not approve any of them. When a newspaper printed her poem about a snake in 1866, she complained that its punctuation ruined her third line.

Homemade books

Between about 1858 and 1864 she copied more than 800 poems onto folded sheets of paper, stacked the sheets and bound them with string into about forty small booklets. Mabel Loomis Todd, one of her first editors, called them “fascicules” (today spelled “fascicles”), an old word for a small bundle. She also shared hundreds of poems in letters to friends.

Found after her death

Her sister Lavinia found the poems and asked family friend Mabel Loomis Todd to help publish them. Todd and the writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson edited Poems (1890) and a Second Series (1891). Todd edited a Third Series alone (1896). The first book went through eleven editions in under two years.

Why we quote the 1890s books

The editions scholars use today, by Thomas H. Johnson (1955) and R. W. Franklin (1998), follow her manuscripts much more closely, but they are still under copyright. So every poem on this page is quoted from the 1890s books, which are in the public domain. That is also a chance to see what those editors changed.

“When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse – it does not mean – me – but a supposed person.”

Dickinson to T. W. Higginson, 1862, as quoted by the Emily Dickinson Museum. A warning to readers: the “I” in a poem is not automatically the poet.

How to Read a Poem

A short poem can be harder than a long novel, because nothing is wasted. Here is a method that works on any poem. Try it on “Hope is the thing with feathers” (Poem 3) before you read the notes.

  1. Read it out loud, twice. The first time, just listen. The second time, notice where your voice wants to pause, speed up or slow down.
  2. Paraphrase by sentences, not lines. A sentence can run across several lines. Find where each one ends and say it in your own plain words.
  3. Look up the odd words. Dickinson loves legal, religious and scientific words: assignable, imperial, surmised. Old meanings matter.
  4. Ask who is speaking, to whom, and in what situation. The speaker might be dead, or whispering to you, or arguing with an imaginary army.
  5. Listen to the form. Count the beats in a line. Check which line ends rhyme, and which only almost rhyme. Notice where punctuation interrupts.
  6. Find the turn. Most short poems change direction once. What shifts there: the tone, the speaker, the time, the idea?
  7. Make a claim, then keep one question open. Say what you think the poem is doing, point to the exact words that show it, and write down what still puzzles you. It’s fine to finish with a question; the best readings usually do.

Dickinson’s poems often have more than one good reading. That doesn’t mean any reading works. It has to fit the words on the page.

Dashes, Slant Rhyme and the Hymn Stanza

The dashes

In her handwriting, Dickinson punctuated mostly with dashes, short or long, level or tilted, sometimes several in one line. She also capitalized nouns in the middle of lines. Nobody knows exactly why. The Emily Dickinson Museum notes that the dash was common in letters of the time, and that the grammar book used at Mount Holyoke allowed both dashes and capitals for emphasis. But she may have been the only poet who depended on them.

Readers hear the dashes in different ways: as a pause for breath, as a bridge between two thoughts, or as a way to leave a sentence open instead of closing it with a period.

Her first editors mostly took them out. The person who prepared the Project Gutenberg text of the 1890s books puts it plainly: in Dickinson’s manuscripts the dashes were “often small enough to appear as dots,” and they “became commas and semi-colons.” A few survived. Look for them:

  • “Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!” (Poem 2, line 3)
  • “’T is the seal, despair, —” (Poem 4, line 10)
  • “Could make assignable, — and then” (Poem 6, line 11)

Try this. Read “Hope is the thing with feathers” aloud and stop fully at every comma and semicolon. Then read it again, replacing each one with a short catch of breath, as if it were a dash. Which version sounds more like someone thinking while they speak?

Slant rhyme

A perfect rhyme matches the stressed vowel and everything after it: frog / bog, breath / death. A slant rhyme (also called near rhyme or half rhyme) gets close but doesn’t match: the vowel differs, or only the last consonant lines up. Slant rhyme is everywhere in modern songs and poems, but it was unusual among poets of Dickinson’s time.

PairFromKindWhy
frog / bogPoem 2PerfectSame vowel, same ending.
soul / allPoem 3SlantBoth end in L; the vowels differ.
to-day / victoryPoem 1Slant“Victory” ends on a weak, unstressed syllable.
breath / deathPoem 4PerfectExact match.
me / ImmortalityPoem 5SlantThe vowel matches, but on an unstressed last syllable.
ground / moundPoem 5PerfectExact match.

Why use a rhyme that doesn’t quite land? Because the near miss is something you can hear. A rhyme that “should” click and doesn’t can sound unsettled, doubtful or honest. Ask yourself what a slant rhyme is doing in each poem.

The hymn stanza (common meter)

Dickinson grew up singing Protestant hymns, and many of her poems borrow the most familiar hymn shape: common meter. It runs in four-line stanzas that alternate a line of four beats (often 8 syllables) with a line of three beats (often 6). “Amazing Grace” is in common meter. Britannica notes that Dickinson knew the hymns of Isaac Watts well, and that her rhythms and off-rhymes may owe something to them.

beCAUSE i COULD not STOP for DEATH (8 syllables, 4 beats)
he KINDly STOPPED for ME (6 syllables, 3 beats)

That gentle, rocking beat is the sound of church. Dickinson uses it to talk about death, despair and doubt, which can make familiar comfort sound strange. The Emily Dickinson Museum adds that she bent the pattern often, with lines that have extra or missing syllables and other stanza shapes.

Six Poems, with Notes

Each poem is quoted in full from the 1890s editions as published by Project Gutenberg. The punctuation, spelling and titles are the editors’, not Dickinson’s manuscript versions. Read the poem first, aloud if you can, then use the notes.

Transcription note: the Project Gutenberg plain-text file types dashes as double hyphens and uses straight quotation marks. Here they appear as dashes and curly apostrophes. Spellings such as “to-day” and spaced forms such as “’t is” and “I ’ve” follow the 1890s printing. Line numbers appear every fourth line.

Poem 1
“Success is counted sweetest”

Printed in 1890 as “Success”

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!

Text: Poems by Emily Dickinson, First Series (1890), eds. Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson, section “Life,” poem I, titled “Success” by the editors. Public domain, via Project Gutenberg eBook #12242. First printed (untitled) in 1864, and again anonymously in the 1878 anthology A Masque of Poets.

Words to know

ne’er (l. 2)
never
comprehend (l. 3)
fully understand
nectar (l. 3)
the sweet drink of the gods in Greek myth, and the sugar in flowers that bees collect
sorest (l. 4)
most painful, most aching
purple host (l. 5)
an army; purple is the color of royalty and glory
took the flag (l. 6)
won the battle (captured the enemy’s flag)
strains (l. 11)
bits of music, here a victory song heard from far off

Close reading

An argument in three steps. Stanza 1 makes a claim: you understand something best when you lack it. Stanzas 2 and 3 prove it with one picture: the winning army can’t “tell the definition” of victory as clearly as one dying soldier on the losing side, who hears the winners’ music from a distance.

Notice the word “forbidden.” The victory music is not meant for his ear. He hears it anyway, and the knowledge hurts. The last line puts “agonized” and “clear” side by side: the pain and the clarity come together.

Listen to the rhymes. succeed / need and ear / clear are perfect rhymes. to-day / victory only half rhymes. Even in this early, neat poem, Dickinson lets a rhyme slip.

A small irony. This is one of the few poems printed in her lifetime, and it appeared without her name. A poem about not getting the prize, by an author who didn’t get the credit.

Open questions

  • Is the poem saying that losing is better than winning, or only that it teaches you more? Point to a word that supports your reading.
  • Does the dying soldier gain anything from understanding victory so clearly?

Poem 2
“I’m nobody! Who are you?”

Printed in 1891 without a title

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!

Text: Poems by Emily Dickinson, Second Series (1891), eds. Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson, section “Life,” poem I (printed without a title). Public domain, via Project Gutenberg eBook #12242.

Words to know

banish (l. 4)
force someone to leave a place; send into exile
dreary (l. 5)
dull and gloomy
public (l. 6)
out in the open, always on show
livelong (l. 7)
the whole long (day)
bog (l. 8)
a wet, muddy swamp, where frogs live

Close reading

The speaker talks straight to you. In two lines she has found a partner, and by line 3 the two of you are keeping a secret. Being “nobody” turns out to be a club.

The frog joke. Stanza 2 flips the usual idea that fame is good. Being “somebody” means croaking your own name all day to an audience of mud. The bog is “admiring,” but what is its admiration worth?

One dash survived. Look at line 3: “a pair of us — don’t tell!” The editors kept this dash, and you can hear why: it is the sound of someone leaning in to whisper.

A word she weighed. The Emily Dickinson Museum notes that on her manuscript Dickinson also wrote advertise as a possible alternative for “banish us.” Try the line both ways. Which is the bigger threat: being driven out, or being made famous?

Open questions

  • Is being “nobody” in this poem freedom, loneliness, or both?
  • A poem is a way of telling your name to readers. Is the poem secretly doing what it mocks?

Poem 3
“Hope is the thing with feathers”

Printed in 1891 as “Hope”

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.

Text: Poems by Emily Dickinson, Second Series (1891), eds. Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson, section “Life,” poem VI, titled “Hope” by the editors. Public domain, via Project Gutenberg eBook #12242.

Words to know

perches (l. 2)
sits, the way a bird sits on a branch
gale (l. 5)
a very strong wind
sore (l. 6)
severe, terrible
abash (l. 7)
embarrass, shame into silence
chillest (l. 9)
coldest
extremity (l. 11)
the most desperate moment; the very worst point

Close reading

An extended metaphor. The whole poem treats one idea, hope, as a small bird living inside you. Look at how long she waits to say “bird” (line 7). At first it is just a “thing with feathers.”

A song with no words. Hope “sings the tune without the words”: it doesn’t give you reasons or promises, just the feeling that you can go on.

The turn. Stanza 3 switches to “I.” Now the speaker gives her own evidence: she has heard this bird in the worst places. Then comes the surprise in the last line. Hope has never asked for anything back, not even “a crumb.”

Rhymes to test. soul / all is a slant rhyme. storm / warm and sea / me are full rhymes in most American speech. Then read lines 9–12 aloud: the steady, hymn-like beat makes the comfort feel solid.

Open questions

  • Does anything in the poem suggest hope can fail, or does it always win?
  • Why might it matter that hope asks “a crumb” of nothing? Is that comforting, or a little strange?

Poem 4
“There’s a certain slant of light”

Printed in 1890 without a title

There’s a certain slant of light, On winter afternoons, That oppresses, like the weight Of cathedral tunes.
Heavenly hurt it gives us; We can find no scar, But internal difference Where the meanings are.
None may teach it anything, ’T is the seal, despair, — An imperial affliction Sent us of the air.
When it comes, the landscape listens, Shadows hold their breath; When it goes, ’t is like the distance On the look of death.

Text: Poems by Emily Dickinson, First Series (1890), eds. Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson, section “Nature,” poem XXXI (printed without a title). Public domain, via Project Gutenberg eBook #12242.

Words to know

slant (l. 1)
an angle; low winter sun comes in sideways
oppresses (l. 3)
weighs down on; makes you feel crushed
cathedral tunes (l. 4)
slow, solemn church music, like organ hymns
internal difference (l. 7)
a change inside you, not a wound anyone can see
seal (l. 10)
a stamp pressed into wax to mark a document as official or owned
imperial affliction (l. 11)
a suffering sent from on high, as if by an emperor or by God
the look of death (l. 16)
the face of a dead person; or the way death looks at you

Close reading

Light that you can feel. The poem keeps translating one sense into another. Light becomes a weight (touch), the weight is like tunes (sound), and the tunes cause a hurt with no scar. That mixing is called synesthesia.

Where is the pain? “We can find no scar, / But internal difference / Where the meanings are.” The poem’s idea is that the deepest changes happen where we make meaning, inside us.

No one can teach it. Stanza 3 makes the light sound like an official order: a seal, an imperial affliction. You can’t argue with it. It simply arrives.

An editor’s word. According to the Academy of American Poets, Dickinson’s manuscript has Heft in line 3. Merriam-Webster’s first sense of heft is “weight, heaviness,” so the two words mean nearly the same thing; the difference is in the sound and the feel. The 1890 editors printed the more polite “weight.” Which word feels heavier to you? And notice that line 10 still ends “despair, —”: the editors kept this dash.

The ending. When the light goes, it leaves a feeling like “the distance / On the look of death.” Leaving doesn’t bring relief. It feels like staring at something gone.

Open questions

  • Why winter afternoons? Would this poem work in a summer morning?
  • Is the “slant of light” causing despair, or just showing a despair that was already there?

Poem 5
“Because I could not stop for Death”

Printed in 1890 as “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; 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.

Text: Poems by Emily Dickinson, First Series (1890), eds. Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson, section “Time and Eternity,” poem XXVII, titled “The Chariot” by the editors. Public domain, via Project Gutenberg eBook #12242. Dickinson’s manuscript copy is in Fascicle 23 (about 1862).

Words to know

Immortality (l. 4)
living forever; life after death
haste (l. 5)
hurry
civility (l. 8)
politeness, good manners
gazing grain (l. 11)
ripe grain that seems to stare back as she passes
cornice (l. 16)
the decorative ledge along the top of a building
surmised (l. 19)
guessed, began to suspect

Close reading

Death as a gentleman caller. The speaker is too busy to stop for Death, so he politely stops for her, the way a suitor might pick someone up in a carriage. It’s calm, even courteous. That calm is what makes the poem unsettling.

A ride through a lifetime. Stanza 3 passes childhood (the school), the prime of life (ripe grain) and the end of the day (the setting sun). Then the carriage pauses at a “house” that is only “a swelling of the ground”: a grave.

Strange time. The last stanza jumps forward: it has been “centuries,” yet they feel shorter than that one day. The speaker is telling this from somewhere after death, and only now “surmised” where the horses were heading.

What the 1890 editors did. They gave the poem a title, changed some words, and left out a whole stanza. In Dickinson’s manuscript, a stanza after the one about the sun describes the evening turning cold and damp, and the speaker noticing how thinly she is dressed for the journey, in a light gown and a shawl of fine net. Without it, the poem never shows her feeling the chill. Modern editions restore the stanza (see the sources to read it).

Open questions

  • Is Death kind in this poem, or is “kindly” ironic?
  • The speaker was too busy to stop. Is the poem criticizing her, comforting her, or neither?

Poem 6
“I heard a fly buzz when I died”

Printed in 1896 as “Dying”

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.

Text: Poems by Emily Dickinson, Third Series (1896), ed. Mabel Loomis Todd, section “Time and Eternity,” poem XLVI, titled “Dying” by the editor. Public domain, via Project Gutenberg eBook #12242. The indented lines follow the 1896 printing.

Words to know

heaves (l. 4)
the surges or gusts of a storm
wrung them dry (l. 5)
cried until no tears were left
onset (l. 7)
an attack, or the arrival of something; here, the moment of death
the king (l. 7)
probably Death, or God, expected to appear at the deathbed
keepsakes (l. 9)
small objects kept in memory of someone
assignable (l. 11)
able to be legally handed to someone else, as in a will
interposed (l. 12)
came in between

Close reading

A dead narrator. The first line tells you the speaker died. Everything after is a memory of her own deathbed.

Everyone is waiting for something grand. The mourners have stopped crying and are bracing for “the king.” The speaker has given away everything she owns. The room is ready for a great spiritual moment, and what arrives is a fly.

Read the last stanza slowly. The fly’s buzz is “blue, uncertain, stumbling.” It comes “Between the light and me”: maybe between her and heaven, maybe just between her eye and the window. Then “the windows failed,” which can mean her eyes. And “I could not see to see”: she can no longer see, and can no longer understand.

Smoothed for 1896. The University of Toronto’s Representative Poetry Online notes several of the editor’s changes. Dickinson’s manuscript has the stillness “in the Room,” not “round my form,” and the editor’s version makes line 2 rhyme with “storm.” The king was to be witnessed “in the Room,” not “in his power,” and stanza 3 was reworded to fit a rhyme.

Open questions

  • Why a fly? What would be lost if a dove or an angel appeared instead?
  • Does the ending suggest there is nothing after death, or only that the speaker couldn’t see it?

What Her Editors Changed

The 1890s editors had a real problem. Dickinson left no instructions, many poems exist in more than one version, and on her manuscripts she often listed alternative words without choosing one. Todd and Higginson wanted readers to accept a strange new poet, so they made her look less strange. In their 1890 preface Higginson admitted the poems were unpolished but defended them: “After all, when a thought takes one’s breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence.”

Here is what they did, with examples from this page:

  • Regularized punctuation. Most dashes became commas, semicolons and periods. Dickinson’s capitals mid-line were mostly lowered.
  • Added titles. Dickinson almost never gave her poems titles. “Success,” “Hope,” “The Chariot” and “Dying” are editors’ titles.
  • Changed words, often to make a rhyme or a meaning more regular: “weight” for her “Heft” in Poem 4, and “round my form” for “in the Room” in Poem 6, to rhyme with “storm.”
  • Cut lines. “The Chariot” lost an entire stanza.
  • Sorted the poems into sections they invented, such as “Life,” “Nature” and “Time and Eternity.”

Was this wrong? It is fair to argue both sides. Without these books, Dickinson might have stayed unknown, and they sold well. But they also hid the very things that make her sound modern. Thomas H. Johnson’s 1955 edition first printed all the poems as close to the manuscripts as he could, and R. W. Franklin’s 1998 edition revised his work.

When you quote Dickinson in an essay, say which edition you are using. A poem’s punctuation, and sometimes its words, depend on it.

The Manuscripts

Most of Dickinson’s poems survive in her own handwriting. The Emily Dickinson Museum counts about 2,500 poem manuscripts. There are three main kinds:

  • The fascicles: about forty booklets, made from folded sheets of writing paper. She pierced each stack with two holes and tied it with string. Fair copies, carefully written. Todd’s 1891 preface describes poems “tied in little fascicules, each of six or eight sheets.”
  • The “sets”: about fifteen groups of copied sheets that she never bound.
  • Loose drafts and scraps: about a hundred late poems and fragments on whatever paper was handy, including envelopes and torn wrappers. Plus poems written into letters to more than forty people.
How a fascicle was made Three steps in a row. First, a sheet of letter paper folded in half. Second, several folded sheets stacked together. Third, the stack pierced with two holes along the fold side and tied with string to make a small booklet. 1. Fold a sheet2. Stack the sheets3. Pierce and tie
How a fascicle was put together. Diagram drawn for Jugami; not a copy of any manuscript.

On the page you see things no printed book can fully show: dashes of different lengths and angles, capitals that may or may not be capitals, line breaks that might be hers or just the edge of the paper, and small marks (like a plus sign) leading to alternative words she wrote at the bottom. In the fascicles, she often left those choices open.

You can look at the real thing. Harvard and Amherst College, which hold most of the manuscripts, have put scans online:

Try this. Find one of the six poems on this page in the Emily Dickinson Archive. Compare her handwritten version with the 1890s text here. List three differences, and decide which one changes the meaning most.

Game: Slant or Perfect?

Every pair comes from one of the six poems on this page. Say the words out loud. Do they rhyme exactly, or only almost? Use the buttons, or press P for Perfect and S for Slant.

Round 1 of 10 · Score: 0

…

Quiz

Ten questions on Dickinson’s life, her poems and her editors. Choose one answer for each, then check your score.

1. Where and when was Emily Dickinson born?
2. About how many of her poems were published while she was alive?
3. What is a fascicle, in Dickinson’s case?
4. Who edited the first book of her poems in 1890?
5. What did the 1890s editors usually do with Dickinson’s dashes?
6. What is common meter?
7. Which pair from “Hope is the thing with feathers” is a slant rhyme?
8. When the 1890 editors printed “Because I could not stop for Death,” what did they do?
9. In “I heard a fly buzz when I died,” what interrupts the deathbed scene?
10. In “I’m nobody! Who are you?”, being somebody is compared to being:

Talk About It

  • Dickinson asked her sister Lavinia to burn her letters after her death, and Lavinia did. She left no such order about the poems, but she also never published them. Was printing them the right call?
  • The 1890s editors made her poems easier to read and much less like hers. When is it fair to change someone’s work to reach more readers?
  • Three of these poems are about death. Do they feel morbid to you, or curious, or even funny? Pick a line to defend your answer.
  • “I’m nobody! Who are you?” mocks fame. Would the poem read differently today, in a world of followers and likes?
  • Pick one slant rhyme on this page. Rewrite the line so the rhyme is perfect. What did you gain, and what did you lose?

Sources

Poem texts: Emily Dickinson, Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete (First Series 1890 and Second Series 1891, ed. Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson; Third Series 1896, ed. Mabel Loomis Todd), Project Gutenberg eBook #12242. Public domain.

Colophon: all illustrations on this page (the window, the booklet, the bee, the fascicle diagram) are original SVG art made for Jugami. No manuscript images are reproduced.