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

pink,
Frequently are brown;
Frequently the hills undress
Behind my native town.
     
    Oft a head is crested
I was wont to see,
And as oft a cranny
Where it used to be.
     
    And the earth, they tell me,
On its axis turned,—
Wonderful rotation
By but twelve performed!

XXXVII
    THE wind begun to rock the grass
With threatening tunes and low,—
He flung a menace at the earth,
A menace at the sky.
     
    The leaves unhooked themselves from trees
And started all abroad;
The dust did scoop itself like hands
And throw away the road.
     
    The wagons quickened on the streets,
The thunder hurried slow;
The lightning showed a yellow beak,
And then a livid claw.
     
    The birds put up the bars to nests,
The cattle fled to barns;
There came one drop of giant rain,
And then, as if the hands
    That held the dams had parted hold,
The waters wrecked the sky,
But overlooked my father’s house,
Just quartering a tree.

XXXVIII
    SOUTH winds jostle them,
Bumblebees come,
Hover, hesitate,
Drink, and are gone.
     
    Butterflies pause
On their passage Cashmere;
I, softly plucking,
Present them here!

XXXIX
    BRING me the sunset in a cup,
Reckon the morning’s flagons 102 up,
And say how many dew;
Tell me how far the morning leaps,
Tell me what time the weaver sleeps
Who spun the breadths of blue!
     
    Write me how many notes there be
In the new robin’s ecstasy
Among astonished boughs;
How many trips the tortoise makes,
How many cups the bee partakes,—
The debauchee of dews!
     
    Also, who laid the rainbow’s piers,
Also, who leads the docile spheres
By withes of supple blue?
Whose fingers string the stalactite,
Who counts the wampum 103 of the night,
To see that none is due?
     
    Who built this little Alban house
And shut the windows down so close
My spirit cannot see?
Who’ll let me out some gala day,
With implements to fly away,
Passing pomposity?

XL
    SHE sweeps with many-colored brooms,
And leaves the shreds behind;
Oh, housewife in the evening west,
Come back, and dust the pond!
     
    You dropped a purple ravelling 104 in,
You dropped an amber thread;
And now you’ve littered all the East
With duds of emerald!
     
    And still she plies her spotted brooms,
And still the aprons fly,
Till brooms fade softly into stars—
And then I come away.

XLI
    LIKE mighty footlights burned the red
At bases of the trees,—
The far theatricals of day
Exhibiting to these.
     
    ’T was universe that did applaud
While, chiefest of the crowd,
Enabled by his royal dress,
Myself distinguished God.

XLII
    WHERE ships of purple gently toss
On seas of daffodil,
Fantastic sailors mingle,
And then—the wharf is still.

XLIII
    BLAZING in gold and quenching in purple,
Leaping like leopards to the sky,
Then at the feet of the old horizon
Laying her spotted face, to die;
    Stooping as low as the kitchen window,
Touching the roof and tinting the barn,
Kissing her bonnet to the meadow,—
And the juggler of day is gone!

XLIV
    FARTHER in summer than the birds,
Pathetic from the grass,
A minor nation celebrates
Its unobtrusive mass.
     
    No ordinance 105 is seen,
So gradual the grace,
A pensive custom it becomes,
Enlarging loneliness.
     
    Antiquest 106 felt at noon
When August, burning low,
Calls forth this spectral canticley 107
Repose to typify.
     
    Remit as yet no grace,
No furrow on the glow,
Yet a druidic 108 difference
Enhances nature now.

XLV
    As imperceptibly as grief
The summer lapsed away,—
Too imperceptible, at last,
To seem like perfidy.
     
    A quietness distilled,
As twilight long begun,
Or Nature, spending with herself
Sequestered afternoon.
     
    The dusk drew earlier in,
The morning foreign shone,—
A courteous, yet harrowing grace,
As guest who would be gone.
     
    And thus, without a wing,
Or service of a keel,
Our summer made her light escape
Into the beautiful.

XLVI
    IT can’t be summer,—that got through;
It’s early yet for spring;
There’s that long town of white to cross
Before the blackbirds sing.
     
    It can’t be dyings—it’s too