Dickinson Homestead 280 Main Street
The Poetry Walk is an Amherst tradition commemorating Emily Dickinson’s death on 15 May 1886. Launched by Amherst College students in the ’90s, today the Emily Dickinson Museum hosts the annual pilgrimage from the Homestead through downtown Amherst to the poet’s grave. For Dickinsonians, it’s not only a commemoration, but also a celebration of the poet’s life. The theme of the 2014 Poetry Walk is romantic love.
We gather under the Dickinson white oak (Quercus alba) in the garden
The white oak is leafing out on 17 May 2014. We imagine golden leaves emerging every spring since the Dickinsons planted a pair of sentinel white oaks to flank the Homestead after their return in 1855. One is lost; the other endures. We imagine golden leaves emerging to mark ED’s death on 15 May 1886.
romantic love is the theme of the 2014 Poetry Walk: volunteers gather under the white oak to read the first selection of love poems
Participants volunteer to read the thematic selection of poems. In the first group of poems read under the oak, the poet invokes the heart: i. e. “The Heart asks pleasure first” and “The Heart has narrow banks” also “The Heart has many Doors”
My favorite of these poems from the heart is an early one, #17 (of 1789), written in the summer of 1858 (did a flower accompany the letter poem?):
It’s all I have to bring today –
This, and my heart beside –
This, and my heart, and all the fields –
And all the meadows wide –
Be sure you count – sh’d I forget
Some one the sum could tell –
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell.
Perhaps ED sent the poem with a flower from her garden, maybe the poem itself is the offering, or the poet herself. We don’t know. It’s always best to keep the heart and mind open when reading ED.
Reading ED at the Homestead 17 May 2014 Poetry Walk
the white oak group reads ED love poems with heart
Next stop, the Evergreens, home of Austin and Sue Dickinson next door, an ongoing restoration project of the Emily Dickinson Museum which reunited the properties in 2004
At the Evergreens readers perform another selection of love poems
In this selection of romantic love poems, ED names and invokes love: “You love me — you are sure” and “The Love a LIfe can Show Below” also “Love — thou art high.”
I volunteer to read poem #380, a bit of a tongue twister. It is a letter poem ED sent to cousin [with the fabulous name] Eudocia Converse Flynt, July 1862. Did a flower accompany the letter poem? As in “It’s all I have to bring today,” the speaker conflates a flower, the poem, and the speaker herself.
You and I,did’nt finish talking. Have you room for the sequel, in your Vase?
All the letters I can write
Are not fair as this —
Syllables of Velvet —
Sentences of Plush,
Depths of Ruby, undrained,
Hid, Lip, for Thee —
Play it were a Humming Bird —
And just sipped — me —
the best performer on the Poetry Walk is a Dickinsonian enthusiast of about nine
Emily Dickinson is joined by Robert Frost in A Poetic Dialogue. This is a fantasy meeting, of course, because ED died nearly two decades before Frost was born. Frost taught at Amherst College. So what? Whitman would have been a much more provocative and interesting choice for a dialogue with ED. That I would enjoy.
We learned the Whole of Love –
The Alphabet – the Words –
A Chapter – then the
mighty Book –
Then – Revelation closed –
But in each Other’s eyes
An Ignorance beheld –
Diviner than the Childhood’s
And each to each, a Child –
Attempted to expound
What neither – understood –
Alas, that Wisdom is so large – And Truth – so manifold!
Is all we know of Love;
It is enough, the freight should be
Proportioned to the groove.
To conclude our commemoration of the poet, participants volunteer to recite a favorite poem or choose one to read from Poems of Emily Dickinson circulating in the group. At least a dozen participants read favorite poems; a biographer shares an excerpt from her book, and, for her encore, the amazing girl child selects ED’s rebellious poem of liberation: “I’m ceded–I’ve stopped being theirs” and belts it out. I swear she’s channeling ED.
I’m ceded, I’ve stopped being theirs;
The name they dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church,
Is finished using now,
And they can put it with my dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools
I’ve finished threading too.
Baptized before without the choice,
But this time consciously, of grace
Unto supremest name,
Called to my full, the crescent dropped,
Existence’s whole arc filled up
With one small diadem.
My second rank, too small the first,
Crowned, crowing on my father’s breast,
A half unconscious queen;
But this time, adequate, erect,
With will to choose or to reject.
And I choose just a throne.
And, I choose my favorite ED five-liner, which I recite from memory:
#1779
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.
Afterwards participants crowd around ED’s tomb to get a good shot
Laura and I linger among the tombstones waiting for the crowd to clear
Among the tombstones I get a text from Gerry: Church’s finally has Kousa dogwoods in stock, so we’ll plant Joanne’s tree Memorial weekend. Among the tombstones I call Henry and Jane, relay Gerry’s message, and make arrangements to order the tree. They are glad that Laura and I are enjoying our Berkshires trip, especially among the tombstones in Amherst West Cemetery on a poetry walk with the ghost of Emily Dickinson.
Dickinson family tombstones
We retrace our steps, stop at Rao’s for a coffee, sit in the warm Amherst sunshine and admire tulips backlit in a slant of afternoon light: a perfect day for a poetry walk with ED.
Resources
Images, Herbarium specimens, and poems from the Emily Dickinson Archive
For more on ED see my post: Imagining Emily Dickinson’s Garden
For more on the Master Letters:
The Master Letters of Fuller and Dickinson. Judith Thurman. The New Yorker, 2013
McKeon's Garden 
Great photos, superb article and yet more pleasant memories.
I loved my virtual Poetry Walk! I look forward to more of your blogs.