After A Hundred Years. Poem By Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) is one of the most important American poets of the 19th century. Although only a few of her poems were published during her lifetime, her body of work—nearly 1,800 poems altogether—has become a staple of the American literary canon, and is now considered among the finest in the English language.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born into a prominent family in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a lawyer, a politician, and a trustee of Amherst College, of which his father, Samuel Dickinson, was a founder. He and his wife Emily (Norcross) had three children; Austin, Emily and Lativia. When she was ten, Dickinson and her sister began attending Amherst Academy. Dickinson excelled at her studies and studied literature, the sciences, history, philosophy, and Latin. Domestic duties like baking and gardening occupied her spare time along with taking part in church activities, reading books, learning to sing and play the piano, writing letters, and taking walks.

Dickinson’s youthful years were not without turmoil. At the age of fourteen, her friend and cousin Sophia Holland died of typhus. Holland’s death sent her into such a melancholic spiral that she was sent away to Boston to recover. Upon her recovery, she returned to Amherst, continuing her studies alongside some of the people who would be her lifelong friends, including her future sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert. After completing her education at Amherst Academy, Dickinson enrolled at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. She spent less than a year there, returning home by the time she was 18.

Dickinson was in good spirits in the early 1850s, but it did not last. Once again, people near to her died, and she was devastated. Dickinson stopped traveling much outside of Amherst, slowly developing the later reputation for being reclusive and eccentric. She cared for her mother, who was homebound with chronic illnesses from the 1850s onward. As she became more and more cut off from the outside world, Dickinson leaned more into her inner world and her creative output. The years from 1858 to 1865 was the most prolific period in Dickinson’s writing. By the time she turned 35, Dickinson had composed more than 1100 concise, powerful lyrics that astutely examine pain, grief, joy, love, nature, and art. She recorded about 800 of these poems in small handmade booklets that she kept to herself.

Dickinson did share a portion of her poems with family and selected friends whose literary taste she admired. Her friend Susan, who, by then, was her sister-in-law, received more than 250 poems over the two women’s forty-year relationship, and to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a literary critic, she sent about 100 poems. Although a few of her poems were published in newspapers, they were printed anonymously and apparently without prior consent. During this time period, Dickinson also drafted a trio of mysterious letters which were later referred to as the “Master Letters.” They were never sent and were discovered as drafts among her papers. Addressed to an unknown man she only calls “Master,” they’re poetic in a strange way that has eluded understanding even by the most educated of scholars.

By 1866, Dickinson’s productivity began tapering off. She had suffered personal losses, including that of her beloved dog Carlo, and her trusted household servant got married and left her household in 1866. Dickinson’s reclusive tendencies became more and more extreme. She began refusing to see visitors, only speaking to them from the other side of a door, and rarely went out in public. On the rare occasions she did leave the house, she always wore white, gaining notoriety as “the woman in white.” Despite this avoidance of physical socialization, Dickinson was a lively correspondent. In these years, Dickinson may also have briefly had a romantic correspondence with Otis Phillips Lord, a judge and a widower who was a longtime friend.

Dickinson’s later life was marked by illness and death: her father’s death in 1874, her mother’s stroke in 1875, her old mentor Charles Wardsworth’s death in 1882, her nephew Gib’s death at age eight in 1883 and Otis Lord’s death in 1884. The poet herself became ill shortly after her nephew Gib died. She remained in poor health until she died at age 55 on May 15, 1886. Dickinson was buried in her family’s plot at West Cemetery in Amherst.

The great irony of Dickinson’s life is that she was largely unknown during her lifetime. In fact, she was probably better known as a talented gardener than as a poet. When the first volume of her poetry was published in 1890, four years after her death, it met with stunning success. Since that first publication, Dickinson’s poetry has never been out of print.

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[senk]

Time is a corrosive acid that eats into everything and leaves behind only a heap of ash. Time that erases doesn't get erased away. In three stanzas of four lines each, in twelve lines, Emily Dickinson has touched the pulse of time and transience. What are we but coffins created by time? We carry within us the corpse of the past. Emily is echoing what the Buddha said, "Sarvam anityam anityam/ Sarvam shunyam shunyam/ Sarvam dukham dukham." To transcreate the depth of the lines into visuals calls for creative visualisation. The colour scheme of the frames is remarkable. Skillful cuts. Good rendition. One of the most memorable videos in the ongoing series.