Alan's Reviews > The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

See the Dickinson documentary A Loaded Gun for my take on this writer, arguably the best poet in English. (I play the villain in that film directed by James Wolpaw.) I have given reading-whistlings of ED's bird poems, from memory of course, in the garden of the Dickinson Manse in Amherst, and I have recited an hour of Dickinson on several occasions (from memory). In fact, Dickinson is fairly easy to memorize--a hallmark of fine verse. Perhaps only Yeats' tetrametric "Under Ben Bulben" is easier to recall, and maybe a couple Seventeenth Century lyrics, and maybe a ballad or two. (I may add, as a Shakespearean for 35 years, I have memorized a couple dozen of his sonnets and maybe twenty major speeches. Some of his sonnets are easy to memorize: one I learned in ten minutes one morning walking; others I have to re-memorize every year.*)
I recommend reading this poet three poems a day for a year and a half. They resonate so much that time between them rewards the reader. If you read them straight through, you may withdraw your participation in the text. A very famous critic I know well read all the poems and her critics in a couple months; he came away less appreciative. I say, he would not have read all Shakespeare like that, and Dickinson has the heft of Shakespeare. In many cases, one must know--say, what Robins eat--to enjoy:
"A Bird came down the Walk -
He did not know I saw -
He bit an Angle Worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw..."

Or on a much less common bird now, which I only saw after decades, though I heard when young:
"I"ll tell you how the sun rose--
A Ribbon at a time.
The Steeple swam in Amethyst,
The News--like Squirrels--ran.

The hills untied their bonnets,
The bobolinks begun.
Then I said softly to myself,
“That must have been the sun!”

Some other Dickinson critiques I have published in my Birdtalk (Random House/ Frog, 2003).

In winters I always recite her Blue Jay, "No Brigadier throughout the year/ So Civic as the Jay..." and always her Oriole, "One of the ones that Midas touched/ Who failed to touch us all.." as well as a couple of her short Robin poems, "The Robin is the One/ That interrupts the Morn/ With Hurried, few, express Reports/When March is scarecely on." E.D. here lays down the best description of a Robin's song,a burbling, impure, emphatic series. This poem is also what Yeats calls "passionate syntax," poetic thwarting of English grammar: here, the poetic singer uses "one" as a collective pronoun. Neat trick. As a collective pronoun, it takes a plural verb, "the One/ That interrupt ...." It's grammatically impossible, but it works. (my book BirdTalk, p.93).

* The former, learned in ten minutes walking, "Why is my verse so barren of new pride"(#76); the one I re-memorize, "Some glory in their birth, some in their skill"(91).