Emily Dickinson was twenty on 10 December 1850. There are 5 of her poems surviving from 1850-4. Poem 1 F1 ‘Awake ye muses nine’ In Emily’s youth the feast of St Valentine was celebrated not for one day but for a whole week, during which ‘the notes flew around like snowflakes (L27),’ though one year Emily had to admit to her brother Austin that her friends and younger sister had received scores of them, but his ‘highly accomplished and gifted elderly sister (L22)’ had been entirely overlooked. She sent this Valentine in 1850 to Elbridge Bowdoin, her father’s law partner, who kept it for forty years. It describes the law of life as mating, and in lines 29-30 she suggests six possible mates for Bowdoin, modestly putting herself last as ‘she with curling hair.’ The poem shows her sense of fun and skill as a verbal entertainer. Poem 2 [not in F] ‘There is another sky’ On 7 June 1851 her brother Austin took up a teaching post in Boston. Emily writes him letter after letter, begging for replies and visits home. He has promised to come for the Autumn fair on 22 October, and on 17 October Emily writes to him (L58), saying how gloomy the weather has been in Amherst lately, with frosts on the fields and only a few lingering leaves on the trees, but adds ‘Dont think that the sky will frown so the day when you come home! She will smile and look happy, and be full of sunshine then – and even should she frown upon her child returning…’ and then she follows these words with poem 2, although in the letter they are written in prose, not verse. The garden of her love and affection for Austin knows no frost or winter. Poem 3 F2 ‘Sic transit gloria mundi’ This Valentine of 1852, at 68 lines easily Emily’s longest poem, was sent to thirty year old William Hoyland, a tutor at Amherst College, and was published in the Springfield Daily Republican of 20 February of that year. The reader can enjoy this 2 sixteen stanza romp, with its opening burst of quotations and abrupt changes of subject and plug for science in the sixth stanza, without understanding all the references, but it is worth knowing about the Peter Parley of line 9, as he reappears in a more serious context in poem 65. Peter Parley was the pen name of Samuel Goodrich, who wrote books for ten year olds and upwards, and also the name of the hero of these books. In the penultimate stanza the ‘Bonnie Doon’ which she had plucked was presumably the ‘good gift’ of a flower, accompanying the Valentine. The ‘Tuscarora’ of the penultimate line were a Red Indian tribe. Poem 4 F3 ‘On this wondrous sea’ About March 1853 Emily sent this poem to Sue in Baltimore, with just the words Write! Comrade, write! at the head of the poem and her signature of Emilie at the end (L105). Susan Gilbert had come to Amherst in 1850, and Emily had rapidly become closely attached to her. In February 1852 she had written these passionate words to her: ‘Oh Susie, I would nestle close to your warm heart, and never hear the wind blow or the storm beat again…..thank you for loving me, darling ….dearer you cannot be, for I love you so already that it almost breaks my heart – perhaps I can love you anew every day of my life, every morning and evening (L74).’ Sue, however, was not a satisfactory correspondent, and Emily continually begged her to reply to her letters. The heading Write! Comrade, write! could be one such appeal for a letter, with Emily in the poem saying that if Sue asks where she can find a safe haven, the answer is that she can find it in ‘the peaceful west’ with Emily. Alternatively, the heading could be an encouragement to Sue to write poems, and the poem an example of what Emily herself can do. If this is so, the poem will be the first on what Emily called her ‘flood subject,’ namely life after death. In the first stanza she asks the Pilot, who is God or one of his angels, if he can guide her through this wondrous life to the safe haven of eternal rest. The second stanza is the pilot’s confident reply. Poem 5 F4 ‘I have a Bird in spring’ 3 This poem was also part of a letter (L173) to Sue while she was absent from Amherst. It was sent in September 1884, about eighteen months after poem 4. In the meantime Sue had become engaged to Emily’s brother Austin, and so was unable to continue her relationship with his sister with the fervour Emily wanted. Emily could not conceal her disappointment, and wrote this letter which Richard Sewall calls ‘an extraordinary one for Emily, the nearest approach to surliness and dismissal of any that survive.’ The letter begins bitterly, ‘Sue – you can go or stay – There is but one alternative – We differ often lately, and this must be the last.’ It ends on a resigned, despondent note, ‘We have walked very pleasantly – Perhaps this is the point at which our paths diverge – then pass on singing, Sue, and up the distant hill I journey on.’ Then follows the poem, in which Emily acknowledges a happier possibility. The spring in which she had been ‘decoyed’ and caught by the bird that was Sue may have been replaced by the summer of Sue’s absence during which ‘little doubts and fears and discords’ have grown up, but Emily tells her ‘doubting heart’ that on Sue’s return she will bring back with her some new melody which she has learned in her absence, and they will live ‘in a serener Bright.’ In a letter to Mrs Holland written a month later Emily comforts herself in her friend’s absence by writing, as prose, words which echo the end of poem 5, ‘Then will I not repine, knowing that bird of mine, though flown – learneth beyond the sea, melody new for me, and will return (L175).’ 1858 (Emily is twenty seven. She writes 51 poems) Poem 6 F24 ‘Frequently the woods are pink’ Ruth Miller offers the following acute reading of a seemingly simple poem. The poet describes seasonal change twice. Firstly she mentions the pink blossom of spring, the brown tree trunks of autumn and the bare hills of winter (lines 1-4). Secondly she describes the head of a tree, which in summer has its full crest of leafage, but which when reduced to trunk and branches in winter, provides a cranny through which we can see (lines 5-8). Finally she concludes how amazing it is that this passage of the four seasons in their twelve months, which we know so well and see so clearly, is connected with still greater cycles in nature, which we do not see and have to be told about (lines 9-12). 4 Nature is personified in this poem: the hills undress, and the months perform, as upon a stage, their changes. Poem 7 F16 ‘The feet of people walking home’ In the first two stanzas Emily three times moves from changes experienced in this life to the change to immortality at death: people returning home, the crocus rising from the snow and then the saved on heaven’s shore singing the Hallelujahs they had long practised in this life; divers winning pearls and then earthly pedestrians becoming winged seraphs; night stealing and bequeathing the day and then death becoming our ‘rapt’ experience of immortality. But in the third stanza she admits her ignorance of the exact nature of eternal life, though she still has the faith to adore that resurrection, however shrouded in darkness the details may be. The ‘Classics’ of line 21 are perhaps her best-loved books, including the Bible. Poem 8 F42 ‘There is a word’ Sue received a copy of this poem. As she was used to accusations that it was ages since she had sent Emily a letter, she no doubt will have taken Emily herself to be the ‘epauletted Brother’ (line 9) slain by the ‘barbed syllables’ (line 4) of that sword- piercing word ‘forgot’ (line 18) – and perhaps winced at Emily’s assertion that the whole world over there is never anything which wounds the heart so deeply as the noiseless arrow of being forgotten, as she has been forgotten by Sue. In the first stanza Emily imagines life as a battlefield on which ‘the saved’ (= those not forgot) report the death of Emily, killed by forgetfulness. In poem 92 Sue is described as having ‘barbs,’ and in poem 479 Emily says of her that ‘She dealt her pretty words like Blades.’ Poem 9 F43 ‘Through lane it lay – through bramble – Our journey through life, with its fourteen lines of perils summed up in lines 15 and 16, reaches its safe destination in the emphatic last line: it is the only fifth line in the stanzas of the poem, ‘fluttered’ is a rare transitive use of that verb, and home is reached in the last word after the perturbations of the journey. In line 14 ‘the valley’ is presumably a temptress rather than a haven. 5 Poem 10 F61 ‘My wheel is in the dark!’ Again the speaker is on a voyage. Perhaps she is at the close of her life and beginning to sail from this world to the next. She knows she is still alive and moving along from the paddle-wheel going round, but all she knows about her journey on this tide where she has never been before is that it will have an end.