The Lady in White

Today, if my math hasn’t failed me, would be Emily Dickinson’s 182 birthday.  She has been a favorite poet of mine since I first studied her as an undergraduate.  And as a teacher, I spent, perhaps, too much class time on her poems.  I had my favorites, and we had to cover some of the famous ones--“Because I could not stop for death” for example--and I have little doubt that I overdid Dickinson.  I usually showed the video of Julie Harris’s Tony Award winning performance in The Belle of Amherst, a video I still have and still watch occasionally.

In March of 1993 I had just covered Dickinson in class when my mom died.  It was a very difficult time, of course, but I was greatly heartened when one of my favorite classes gave me the gift of one of my most loved Dickinson poems beautifully mounted and framed; I still have it, treasure it, and have it displayed prominently in my apartment:

                       318

I'll tell you how the Sun rose --
A Ribbon at a time --
The Steeples swam in Amethyst --
The news, like Squirrels, ran --
The Hills untied their Bonnets --
The Bobolinks -- begun --
Then I said softly to myself --
"That must have been the Sun"!
But how he set -- I know not --
There seemed a purple stile
That little Yellow boys and girls
Were climbing all the while --
Till when they reached the other side,
A Dominie in Gray --
Put gently up the evening Bars --
And led the flock away --

Dickinson’s influence on poets is enormous, and I recently ran across a poem that I think reflects that influence.  Not stylistically, of course, but in matters of the heart--and in coming to terms with the loss of someone dear--I think this modern poem by Andrea Cohen is a direct descendant of the poetry of The Lady in White, Emily Dickinson:

The Committee Weights In

I tell my mother
I’ve won the Nobel Prize.

Again? she says.  Which
discipline this time?

It’s a little game
we play: I pretend

I’m somebody, she
pretends she isn’t dead.