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Emily DickinsonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“Song of Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1859)
Here is Emerson’s fullest articulation of the Transcendentalist vision of humanity’s oneness with a glorious and powerful natural world that Dickinson celebrates in the opening 10 lines. Nature, whose “oldest force is good as new” (Line 82), Emerson says, reassures him, who like Dickinson struggles with the awareness of death, that nature does not know exhaustion. To borrow from the poem, a thousand sunrises are as one, apples never cease ripening, and rivers never empty. Within that grand energy field, death is irrelevant. “In slumber,” the speaker ultimately concludes, “I am strong” (Line 8).
“It’s Easy to Invent a Life” by Emily Dickinson (year of composition uncertain)
The poem offers one of Dickinson’s most compelling statements about the ephemeral nature of life, how easy lives come and go, how simply we invent purpose and then find that entire enterprise rendered ironic by the inevitability of death. Within God’s grand scheme, individual people can be easily inserted and just as easily slipped out. As with Poem 54, the irony gives the honesty a certain kind of playfulness, a sly sense of humor. Much as the speaker uses the stock market in Poem 54, here God’s creation itself happily suggests the fragility of human endeavor and the irrelevancy of any single life.
By Emily Dickinson
A Bird, came down the Walk
A Bird, came down the Walk
Emily Dickinson
A Clock stopped—
A Clock stopped—
Emily Dickinson
A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096)
A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096)
Emily Dickinson
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Emily Dickinson
"Faith" is a fine invention
"Faith" is a fine invention
Emily Dickinson
Fame Is a Fickle Food (1702)
Fame Is a Fickle Food (1702)
Emily Dickinson
Hope is a strange invention
Hope is a strange invention
Emily Dickinson
"Hope" Is the Thing with Feathers
"Hope" Is the Thing with Feathers
Emily Dickinson
I Can Wade Grief
I Can Wade Grief
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind
I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain
I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain
Emily Dickinson
If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking
If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking
Emily Dickinson
If you were coming in the fall
If you were coming in the fall
Emily Dickinson
I heard a Fly buzz — when I died
I heard a Fly buzz — when I died
Emily Dickinson
I'm Nobody! Who Are You?
I'm Nobody! Who Are You?
Emily Dickinson
Much Madness is divinest Sense—
Much Madness is divinest Sense—
Emily Dickinson
Success Is Counted Sweetest
Success Is Counted Sweetest
Emily Dickinson
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Emily Dickinson
The Only News I Know
The Only News I Know
Emily Dickinson
There is no Frigate like a Book
There is no Frigate like a Book
Emily Dickinson
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