- Studying botany from an early age, some believe she was better known as a gardener than a poet during her lifetime.
When our friends at HTML Giant recently asked what people thought was the all-time overrated piece of literature the first comment was, “Anything by Emily Dickinson,” and I think I felt a cleaving in my mind.
A few days later I acquired Helen Vendler’s Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries from the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, just released in September. Inside Vendler gives extraordinary close readings of 150 poems. Here’s a great radio interview with Vendler about the book.
Here is poem 861:
They say that “Time assuages”-
Time never did assuage –
An actual suffering strengthens
As Sinews do, with Age –
Time is a Test of Trouble –
But not a Remedy –
If such it prove, it prove too
There was no Malady –
***
And from Vendler:
When Dickinson lost her only “playmate,” her dog Carlo, Higginson expressed sympathy. She wrote back, saying, “Thank you, I wish for Carlo,” and continuing with the second stanza of “They say that ‘Time assuages’ – “. But she added, “Still I have the Hill, my Gibraltar remnant. Nature, seems it to myself, plays without a friend.” She never acquired another dog.