Here is the portrait of an American Poetess, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, who represents our midnight blue-violet from our CASA yarn.
Born in Amherst, Massachusetts on December 10, 1830, into a wealthy family with strong community ties, she lived an introverted and reclusive life. After studying in her youth for seven years at the Amherst academy, she lived for a while at the female seminary at Mount Holyoke before returning to the family home in Amherst.
What did she look like who pretended to be nobody and refused the horror of being someone? Chaste hairdresser, known for his penchant for white clothes and for his reluctance to receive visitors. The face of her 17-year-old self – “hair bright as chestnut, eyes like sherry that the guest leaves at the bottom of the glass,” she wrote to a correspondent.
When she passed away in 1886, no one in Amherst would have seen the mysterious lady, considered an eccentric, up close. In the village, they call her "the Myth", they fear her like a kind of ghost. We don't know that she writes. The only merit in the eyes of good people: a rye bread which, in October 1856, earned her a second prize at the Amherst fair, as well as an excellent gingerbread which she sent down to street children, in a basket at the end of a rope.
Although she devoted her entire life to poetry, Emily Dickinson had only a dozen of her almost eighteen hundred poems published during her lifetime. The boldness of her thinking and her writing worried publishers who wanted her to rework her poems, which she always refused. Apart from herself, Emily's poems were only read by the family circle, extended to a few friends to whom she offered them, as "flowers" or "bouquets" as she said. His poems are unique for their time: they consist of very short verses, have no titles, and frequently use imperfect rhymes and unconventional punctuation.
His poems reflect the tumult of his inner, sentimental and mystical life, dotted with impossible loves, studded with invocations and snubs to God. Emilie Dickinson's innovative style puzzled and shocked her contemporaries. The extreme density of his poems expresses an intense emotion. Passion and spontaneity give a concise, elliptical writing, "explosive and spasmodic", as she will describe it herself. Through poetry, she becomes man, woman, animal, object. All means are good for her to question life and therefore death, seeking to know the world, herself, God, and lending to writing quasi-magical powers to help her in this quest.
Although most of her acquaintances would have known that Emily Dickinson wrote, the extent of her work was not known until after her death in 1886, when Lavinia, her youngest sister, discovered her stash of poems. It was not until 1955, with “The Poems of Emily Dickinson,” that a complete and virtually intact collection of her work appeared for the first time.
Here are 3 of his poems:
We never know that we are leaving – when we are leaving –
We joke, we close the door
The fate that follows behind us locks it
And we never approach again.
I prefer to remember a Sunset
What to enjoy an Aurora
Although one is superb oblivion
And the other real.
Because there is in the departure a Drama
What staying cannot offer –
To die divinely at once in the evening –
Is easier than to decline –
They locked me in Prose —
Like when I was a little girl
They locked me in the Closet —
Because they wanted me "quiet" —
Calm ! If they could have taken a look —
And spy in my mind — visit it —
They might as well have locked up a Bird
For treason — to the pound —
Source: Wikipedia, Le figaro, Poésie.net.
Sandra & Valentine