This is Penny's Emily Dickinson page.
 

Penny Harter Head
© Philip F. Gura 2000
All rights reserved.

Emily Dickinson as an adult?
Click on the image for more information.

Penny Harter

The Emily Dickinson Page

 
Penny Harter's Main Menu
Workshops
Publications
Hand H Events
Press Kit
Read My Work Online
From Here Press
Clicking on one of the links above takes you to the relevant page.
Click here for Penny's home page.

In Emily's Style?

I wrote the poems below after a period of teaching Emily Dickinson to eleventh graders in an American literature course. I had been playing the Julie Harris recordings of her letters during that week, and later, sitting in the English Independent Study area, wrote the first four of these spontaneously, one after the other. Later that day, I discovered that I had been writing on the 100th anniversary of her death, via the belated obituary published that day in The New York Times. A few days later, the fifth poem came.

Five for Emily D.

1.

I saw a spirit hover.
It floated on my sill
And whether it was wanting
Or only passing still,

I found the hands were open,
Birds slept upon the hair,
And silver wreaths of moonlight
Descended like a stair

Until a perfect circle
That soul and I were one,
And all the evening's chatter
Was over with—and done.

2.

If you would seek a fortune
Or plot to pirate gain,
Look upon your neighbor
And seek to plunder pain.

Your fortune will be heavy,
Your take a sorry lot,
But it will shine more sweetly
Than any gold you've got!

3.

Yesterday is finished.
Today is bare begun
Tomorrow is a spectre
Upon the circling sun—

All the endless hours
Compressing into one.

Yesterday is fallow.
Today is fruited full.
Tomorrow is the sower
Without a field to till—

All the endless harvests
One farm upon the hill.

4.

The trouble with a wave
Is that it needs a sea
Or rolls the same direction
Into eternity.

The trouble with a wave
Is that it needs to be
Connected to another
In fluid harmony.

A wave might push forever,
A solitary wall—
But there must be an ocean
For it to rise at all.

5.

We come from far beyond the stars,
We rise from deeper seas
Than any you have visited
Or sought upon your knees.

And though the mouth be stopt with mud,
the fingers wed to air,
the breath that echoes in the skull
can sing from anywhere.

Poems 1-4 first published in 1975 in The Higginson Journal of Poetry, No. 12. (Note: The journal is not connected with my husband, William J. Higginson.) Poem 5 is published here for the first time.

Emily Dickinson? The image at the top of this web page, possibly of Emily Dickinson as an adult, is reproduced from a photograph owned by Prof. Philip F. Gura, of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and is used here by his kind permission. For a discussion of the image and its possible connection with Emily Dickinson, as well as larger images of recto and verso, see his web page on the subject.

Penny   

This page first posted 23 January 2008 and last updated 28 January 2008. Copyright © 1975, 2008 Penny Harter. All rights reserved. No material from this web site may be copied on other web sites, produced in printed copies, or otherwise reproduced except as explicitly stated on a particular page, or by permission of the authors in writing. Please do not e-mail copies of this web page; rather, send the URL: http://penhart.2hweb.net/dickinson.html.

Penny Harter's Main Menu
Workshops
Publications
Hand H Events
Press Kit
Read My Work Online
From Here Press

Clicking on one of the links above takes you to the relevant page.
Webmaster contact.

     This is Penny's Emily Dickinson page.