I’ve been reading Emily Dickinson’s poetry all month, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of her poems, both in quantity and in depth of quality. She wrote more than 1700 poems that were found after her death. Some of them are rather like riddles; others are short epigrams. Still others are about nature and Emily’s observations thereof—or about love or death. She wrote a lot about death.

Here are few brief quotations that I collected from her poems and from her letters as quoted in the biographies I read:

• “To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.”
• “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?
• “A Letter is a joy of earth—/It is denied the gods—“
• “A letter always feels to me like Immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend. Indebted in our talk to attitude and accent, there seems a spectral power in thought that walks alone.”
• “My heart grows light so fast that I could mount a grasshopper and gallop around the world, and not fatigue him any!”
• “The only commandment I ever obeyed — ‘consider the lilies’.”

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise.
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

The last two are my favorite Emily Dickinson poems, although I can hardly be said to have tasted of her poetry since I’ve read maybe forty poems out of the 1700. But I plan to go on tasting.