The speaker
A private astronomer of awe, sometimes small as a bird, sometimes the whole circumference.
Realism & Victorian · Lyric poems · c. 1858–1886
Poems
Emily Dickinson
Fascicles of extreme compression. Death is a polite caller; God is a hesitant correspondent; the brain is wider than the sky. The dash does the work of breath and of fracture.
American lyric
Characters
Death
Kindly, civic, and not to be rushed.
Themes
Immortality and the slant
Truth that must come aslant or not at all.
The inner circumference
A room, a brain, a grave: three enclosures that open.
Motifs
Punctuation as a physiology of thought.
Hope, and the thing with feathers, and the thing that does not land.
A house the soul keeps measuring.
Echoes
Other works that share a motif with this one.