Free The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by Emily Dickinson Page A

wrinkled, and was gone.
     
    Several of nature’s people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;
     
    But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.

XXV
    THE mushroom is the elf of plants,
At evening it is not;
At morning in a truffled 95 hut
It stops upon a spot
     
    As if it tarried always;
And yet its whole career
Is shorter than a snake’s delay,
And fleeter than a tare. 96
     
    ’T is vegetation’s juggler,
The germ of alibi;
Doth like a bubble antedate,
And like a bubble hie.
     
    I feel as if the grass were pleased
To have it intermit;
The surreptitious scion
Of summer’s circumspect.
     
    Had nature any outcast face,
Could she a son contemn,
Had nature an Iscarioty 97
That mushroom,—it is him.

XXVI
    THERE came a wind like a bugle;
It quivered through the grass,
And a green chill upon the heat
So ominous did pass
We barred the windows and the doors
As from an emerald ghost;
    The doom’s electric moccason
That very instant passed.
On a strange mob of panting trees,
And fences fled away,
And rivers where the houses ran
The living looked that day.
The bell within the steeple wild
The flying tidings whirled.
How much can come
And much can go,
And yet abide the world!

XXVII
    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. 98

XXVIII
    I know a place where summer strives
With such a practised frost,
She each year leads her daisies back,
Recording briefly, “Lost.”
    But when the south wind stirs the pools
And struggles in the lanes,
Her heart misgives her for her vow,
And she pours soft refrains
     
    Into the lap of adamant, 99
And spices, and the dew,
That stiffens quietly to quartz,
Upon her amber shoe.

XXIX
    THE one that could repeat the summer day
Were greater than itself, though he
Minutest of mankind might be.
And who could reproduce the sun,
At period of going down—
The lingering and the stain, I mean—
When Orient has been outgrown,
And Occident becomes unknown,
His name remain.

XXX
    THE wind tapped like a tired man,
And like a host, “Come in,”
I boldly answered; entered then
My residence within
    A rapid, footless guest,
To offer whom a chair
Were as impossible as hand
A sofa to the air.
     
    No bone had he to bind him,
His speech was like the push
Of numerous humming-birds at once
From a superior bush.
     
    His countenance a billow,
His fingers, if he pass,
Let go a music, as of tunes
Blown tremulous in glass.
     
    He visited, still flitting;
Then, like a timid man,
Again he tapped—’t was flurriedly—
And I became alone.

XXX I
    NATURE rarer uses yellow
Than another hue;
Saves she all of that for sunsets,—
Prodigal of blue,
     
    Spending scarlet like a woman,
Yellow she affords
Only scantly and selectly,
Like a lover’s words.

XXXII
    THE leaves, like women, interchange
Sagacious confidence;
Somewhat of nods, and somewhat of
Portentous inference,
     
    The parties in both cases
Enjoining secrecy,—
Inviolable compact
To notoriety.

XXXIII
    How happy is the little stone
That rambles in the road alone,
And doesn’t care about careers,
And exigencies 100 never fears;
Whose coat of elemental brown
A passing universe put on;
And independent as the sun,
Associates or glows alone,
Fulfilling absolute decree
In casual simplicity.

XXXIV
    IT sounded as if the streets were running,
And then the streets stood still.
Eclipse was all we could see at the window,
And awe was all we could feel.
     
    By and by the boldest stole out of his covert,
To see if time was there.
Nature was in her beryl 101 apron,
Mixing fresher air.

XXXV
    THE rat is the concisest tenant.
He pays no rent,—
Repudiates the obligation,
On schemes intent.
     
    Balking our wit
To sound or circumvent,
Hate cannot harm
A foe so reticent.
     
    Neither decree
Prohibits him,
Lawful as
Equilibrium.

XXXVI
    FREQUENTLY the woods are