Emily Dickinson -- This is Immensity

Sometimes I feel like I've spent months of my life immersed in Dickinson. At the most I think it's been two weeks in another American Literature class, but there's nothing quite like two weeks straight of Dickinson capped with a ten page research paper that requires another week of reading about her poetry to convince you that you never want to read another Dickinson poem as long as you live.

Or at least for another semester.

Despite the almost ridiculous number of Dickinson's poems that I've read in the past year, there are a few that no matter how many times I read them catch me by surprise over and over again. This seems to happen more often than not particularly with her two or three line poems (none of which we covered in class, so a lot of this blog may seem a little bit extraneous).

I find 1548 in The Poems of Emily Dickinson particularly striking.

All things swept away
This - is immensity -

I'm not sure whether I love the irony of the concept confined to such a brief piece (read it out loud and then think about it for a few moments -- it's pretty mind-boggling) or the power that Dickinson manages to pack into seven words more, but I feel like there's no denying that the simplicity and complexity of the poem all wrapped up together is nothing short of brilliant. The idea of complete nothingness is incredibly disturbing, and it's striking that we feel such a need to consider it.



For those who care where I'm pulling my poems from, here's a citation:
Dickinson, Emily, and R. Franklin. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999. Print.