Sapere ex libris

I got out my Norton's Anthology of Poetry today. It is heavy. When put it on the bathroom scale, the dial moves three tick marks. The pages are thin like tissue paper, and there are lots of them. It has poems from the Beowulf of long ago all the way to Leslie Marmon Silko and Yusef Komunyakaa, both poets I saw read when I was in college.

Here is a poem from somewhere in the middle of that anthology, from the great, gloomy Emily Dickinson -- a poem about descending into madness. It is so sunny a day here, one can read a melancholy poem with little more than a shudder -- I hope it is not overcast where you are --

You will notice that her poems lack titles -- they are most often designated by number in a chronological order assigned to them after her death, or else by their first line.

280

I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.

And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb.

And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead,
Then space began to toll

As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,And I
and silence some strange race,
Wrecked, solitary, here.

And then a plank in reason, broke,
And I dropped down and down--
And hit a world at every plunge,
And finished knowing--then--