Nature
by EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886)
NATURE, the gentlest mother,
Impatient of no child,
The feeblest or the waywardest,—
Her admonition mild
In forest and the hill
By traveller is heard,
Restraining rampant squirrel
Or too impetuous bird.
How fair her conversation,
A summer afternoon,—
Her household, her assembly;
And when the sun goes down
Her voice among the aisles
Incites the timid prayer
Of the minutest cricket,
The most unworthy flower.
When all the children sleep
She turns as long away
As will suffice to light her lamps;
Then, bending from the sky,
With infinite affection
And infiniter care,
Her golden finger on her lip,
Wills silence everywhere.
| “Awake ye muses nine, sing me a strain divine, Unwind the solemn twine, and tie my Valentine!” Dickinson said in her earliest known poem, dated March 4, 1850, published in the Springfield Daily Republican in 1852. |
Emily Dickinson Contemporaries
Frédéric Mistral
Adam Lindsay Gordon
Ellen M.H. Gates
William Allingham
Recent Comments