Prácticamente sin salir de su hogar durante toda su vida, vestida por lo regular con ropajes blancos y enfrascada en la lectura de sus escritores preferidos, como William Shakespeare, John Keats, las hermanas Brönte, Ralph Waldo Emerson o Elizabeth Barrett Browning, los textos de la poeta Emiy Dickinson reflejan desde su complicado universo interno, una elevada inspiración lírica, honda sensibilidad y talento para la construcción de imágenes en una reflexión personal sobre algunas de las cuestiones clave del género humano: la muerte, la vida, la naturaleza o el amor.
En sus poemas, hermosos y lacónicos, profundas e intensas estrofas de, por lo general, cuatro versos, aborda estos asuntos universales con un sorprendente dominio en la imaginería, la metáfora o los símbolos, una rima y puntuación poco convencional que otorga gran originalidad a sus ritmos, y un prominente impacto emocional de cierta ambigüedad que enfatiza todavía más la complejidad dentro de la concisión de sus bellos poemas, tan económicos en el texto como hondos en su expresión emocional.
Estos son algunos ejemplos, tal como fueron conceptuados por la autora en su versión original, de su arte literario:
A wounded deer least highest
A wounded deer leaps highest,
I've heard the hunter tell;
'Tis but the ecstasy of death,
And then the brake is still.
The smitten rock that gushes,
The trampled steel that springs:
A cheek is always redder
Just where the hectic stings!
Mirth is mail of anguish,
In which its cautious arm
Lest anybody spy the blood
And, "you're hurt" exclaim
When night is almost done
When night is almost done,
And sunrise grows so near
That we can touch the spaces,
It ’s time to smooth the hair
And get the dimples ready,
And wonder we could care
For that old faded midnight
That frightened but an hour.
Snake
A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him, -did you not?
His notice sudden is.
The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.
He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,
Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun,
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.
Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;
But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.
There is a word
There is a word
Which bears a sword
can pierce an armed man.
It hurls its barbed syllables,
At once is mute again.
But where it fell
The saved will tell
On patriotic day,
Some epauletted brother
Gave his breath away.
Wherever runs the breathless sun,
Wherever roams the day,
There is its victory!
Behold the keenest marksman!
Time's sublimest target
Is a soul "forgot"!
Victory comes late
Victory comes late,
And is held low to freezing lips
Too rapt with frost
To take it.
How sweet it would have tasted,
Just a drop!
Was God so economical?
His table’s spread too high for us
Unless we dine on tip-toe.
Crumbs fit such little mouths,
Cherries suit robins;
The eagle’s golden breakfast
Strangles them.
God keeps his oath to sparrows,
Who of little love
Know how to starve!
We like March
We like March, his shoes are purple,
He is new and high;
Makes he mud for dog and peddler,
Makes he forest dry;
Knows the adder's tongue his coming,
And begets her spot.
Stands the sun so close and mighty
That our minds are hot
News is he of all the others;
Bold it were to die
With the blue-birds buccaneering
On his British sky.
