Emily Dickinson Quotes: Lines From Her Poems

The best Emily Dickinson quotes are whole arguments packed into eight lines: success, madness, hope, a snake in the grass, a fly in a death room. Below are thirteen of them, each copied from the three volumes of Poems her friends published after her death, with the series, section and number where each poem sits, and a note on what the poem is doing.

One warning before the quotes. These are the 1890s texts, and they are not exactly what Dickinson wrote. Her editors smoothed her punctuation (the Gutenberg transcriber notes that her dashes became commas and semi-colons), and Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s own preface admits that the titles have been assigned, almost invariably, by the editors. The editions most scholars now use came much later: Thomas H. Johnson’s in 1955 and R. W. Franklin’s in 1998, both from Harvard’s Belknap Press. What follows is Dickinson as the first readers met her.

Emily Dickinson quotes on life

1. A letter nobody answered

This is my letter to the world, / That never wrote to me,—

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Emily Dickinson, Poems, Series One (1890), prefatory poem

The editors put this poem in front of everything else, as a kind of doorway. It works as one: a poet who barely published introducing herself, posthumously, to a public she says never wrote back. The second stanza asks the sweet countrymen to judge her tenderly, which is a lot to ask of strangers and exactly what the book is betting on.

2. Success

Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne’er succeed.

Emily Dickinson, Poems, Series One, “Life” I, titled “Success”

This is one of the handful printed in her lifetime. The 1890 volume notes that it appeared in A Masque of Poets at the request of “H.H.”, her friend Helen Jackson. The poem ends on a dying soldier who hears the victory music he will never share, and the logic is ruthless: only the loser knows what winning means.

3. The majority

Much madness is divinest sense / To a discerning eye; / Much sense the starkest madness.

Emily Dickinson, Poems, Series One, “Life” XI

The turn comes a few lines later, when the poem names who decides: ‘T is the majority / In this, as all, prevails. Agree and you are sane; object and you are handled with a chain. It is an eight-line essay on conformity, and it ends with a restraint, not a moral.

4. Hope

Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul, / And sings the tune without the words, / And never stops at all,

Emily Dickinson, Poems, Series Two (1891), “Life” VI, titled “Hope”

The most quoted Dickinson line on greeting cards, and the cards tend to stop before the poem gets tough. The last stanza says the bird has sung in the chillest land, / And on the strangest sea, yet it never asked her for a crumb. Hope here is not a reward. It is a lodger that feeds itself.

5. The brain

The brain is wider than the sky, / For, put them side by side, / The one the other will include / With ease, and you beside.

Emily Dickinson, Poems, Third Series (1896), “Life” XLIII, titled “The Brain”

Three stanzas, three measurements: wider than the sky, deeper than the sea, and finally just the weight of God. The comparisons get bolder as the poem goes, and the closing image, that the two differ only As syllable from sound, is a poet’s idea of the smallest possible distance.

6. A frigate

There is no frigate like a book / To take us lands away, / Nor any coursers like a page / Of prancing poetry.

Emily Dickinson, Poems, Third Series, “Life” XVI, titled “A Book”

Mabel Loomis Todd’s preface to the Third Series explains that poems Dickinson sent in letters were mostly left out, with three or four exceptionally strong ones, as “A Book,” kept in. The poem’s point is economic as much as romantic: this journey costs no toll, so the poorest can take it. For more lines in this spirit, see our quotes about reading.

Dickinson on nature and love

7. Winter light

There’s a certain slant of light, / On winter afternoons, / That oppresses, like the weight / Of cathedral tunes.

Emily Dickinson, Poems, Series One, “Nature” XXXI

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Filed under “Nature” by the editors, though it is really about despair. The light leaves no scar, / But internal difference, / Where the meanings are. Anyone who has felt a mood change with the angle of the sun at four o’clock in January knows this poem from the inside.

8. The snake

A narrow fellow in the grass / Occasionally rides;

Emily Dickinson, Poems, Series Two, “Nature” XXIV, titled “The Snake”

The word “snake” never appears in the poem; the editors’ title gives the riddle away. Dickinson’s own trick is to describe the animal sideways: the grass parting as with a comb, a whip-lash in the sun that wrinkled, and was gone. That last verb is one of the best in American poetry.

9. Wild nights

Wild nights! Wild nights! / Were I with thee, / Wild nights should be / Our luxury!

Emily Dickinson, Poems, Series Two, “Love” VII

Twelve short lines, and the most openly erotic poem in this list. The middle stanza throws away navigation altogether, Done with the compass, / Done with the chart, and the ending wants to moor / To-night in thee. The speaker is a boat, and the beloved is the harbour.

Dickinson quotes about death

10. Beauty and truth

I died for beauty, but was scarce / Adjusted in the tomb, / When one who died for truth was lain / In an adjoining room.

Emily Dickinson, Poems, Series One, “Time and Eternity” X

Two dead people chatting through a wall, like neighbours in a boarding house. The other one decides the two are one, which sounds like a reply to Keats’s urn (see our piece on ekphrasis), and then the moss grows over their lips and covered up our names. The grand idea gets the last word for about a stanza.

11. The morning after

The bustle in a house / The morning after death / Is solemnest of industries / Enacted upon earth,—

Emily Dickinson, Poems, Series One, “Time and Eternity” XXII

Grief as housework. The second stanza is about The sweeping up the heart, / And putting love away like linen that will not be needed until eternity. It is the least abstract poem about mourning I know, and anyone who has cleared a relative’s house will recognise the industry.

12. The carriage

Because I could not stop for Death, / He kindly stopped for me; / The carriage held but just ourselves / And Immortality.

Emily Dickinson, Poems, Series One, “Time and Eternity” XXVII, titled “The Chariot”

Death as a polite gentleman caller, which is funnier and more frightening than a skeleton. The drive passes a school, fields of gazing grain and the setting sun, then pauses at a house that is A swelling of the ground. The poem ends centuries later, on the dawning guess that the horses’ heads were toward eternity. “The Chariot” is the editors’ title, not hers.

13. The fly

I heard a fly buzz when I died; / The stillness round my form / Was like the stillness in the air / Between the heaves of storm.

Emily Dickinson, Poems, Third Series, “Time and Eternity” XLVI, titled “Dying”

The family at the bedside is waiting for something grand, when the king / Be witnessed in his power. What arrives is a fly, With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz. The last line, I could not see to see, is a perfect description of losing consciousness, and possibly the strangest line in the book. It fits our list of the weirdest quotes in classic literature.

Quick reference: Emily Dickinson quotes and their poems

How the poems reached print

Dickinson died in Amherst in 1886, and the Series Two preface describes what her sister found: poems carefully copied on sheets of note-paper, and tied in little fascicules, each of six or eight sheets. The Emily Dickinson Museum lists the three volumes that followed, all from Roberts Brothers of Boston: Poems in 1890, the Second Series in 1891 and the Third Series in 1896.

The same preface reprints a letter of 1884 from Helen Jackson, the “H.H.” of the first poem above, urging Dickinson to make her literary legatee and executor. For a different side of Dickinson, the one who shuts the door on visitors, see our book quotes about solitude.

Sources

• Emily Dickinson, Poems, Series One, ed. Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson, Project Gutenberg
• Emily Dickinson, Poems, Series Two, ed. T. W. Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, Project Gutenberg
• Emily Dickinson, Poems, Third Series, ed. Mabel Loomis Todd, Project Gutenberg
• Emily Dickinson Museum, Major Editions of Dickinson’s Writings