“Every day life feels mightier, and what we have the power to be, more stupendous.” — Emily Dickinson

“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 way I know it. Is there any other way.” — Emily Dickinson to Thomas Higginson

Emily Dickinson was born on this day in 1830. It is not known why she withdrew from society so completely. Theories abound. Books have been written. What we have are her poems. A wide interior life lived in one house. (Terrence Davies’ miraculous film A Quiet Passion, starring Cynthia Nixon as Emily, is a fascinating meditation on this idea.) Michael Schmidt wrote:

“We have the legend, but the crucial facts in the recorded life are absent. Dickinson’s reticence seems part of her poetical strategy: if we could assign the poems to specific emotional events, we would ground them. As it is, they are a miracle and a mystery of language.”

The legend of the publication of Dickinson’s poems posthumously is … complicated, and it’s made up of confusion, mixed-motives, and frustration. Even now, it’s challenging to find a published version of her poetry that keeps her syntax intact, all those breathless dashes. All of that stuff was ironed out and eradicated in the initial edition, and … it’s been like a game of telephone over the years. Famously, Thomas Higginson and Mabel Todd brought out a volume after her death, in which they “neatened up” her unique punctuation (and also erased every reference to “Sue”). It’s bowdlerized, as is the “legend” spread about her being this shy retiring recluse. The story was told by Mabel Todd and it’s stuck. Boy, has it stuck. I highly recommend the wildly entertaining and yet also informative Wild Nights with Emily, starring Molly Shannon as Dickinson. I reviewed for Ebert. I adored it. We owe Todd and Higginson a huge debt. I know, I know. But they butchered her language and the confusion persists to this day.

Joseph Cornell made some of his most famous “boxes” for Emily Dickinson. He built those boxes as spaces she might inhabit. He was “preparing a place” for her. Or … preparing to imprison her? So many of his Emily boxes are empty. With open windows. Has she flown the coop? Interesting: he was creating a box for her, where he could hold her and keep her – but he always left the window open.

Here is the most famous Emily Dickinson box, called “Toward the Blue Peninsula”:

It’s like she just left, hopped out the open window.

More on Dickinson after the jump:

 
 

In Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia theorized connected Emily Dickinson to the Marquis de Sade. Lol. Camille, always making new friends. But she makes her case very well. From the jump, people picked up on Dickinson’s almost sexual response to things, especially pain. Dickinson’s insistence on boundaries, limits, restraints has more in common with the erotic underbelly of literature, the sado-masochism of some of history’s criminal poet-writers. Dickinson was addicted to sensation. Her poems throb with it. Sensation is something inflicted upon her. She is constantly pricking herself with a pin, gasping at the pain. Dickinson stole from no one. She read widely, loved poetry, but she had her own voice from the start. Dickinson sounds like no one else. Generations of writers imitate her. She is one of the few poets where you can recognize one of her poems just by looking at it.

Michael Schmidt wrote, in his wonderful book Lives of the Poets:

She sewed her poems into little books and put them away, one after another, in a box, where after her death her sister found them, nine hundred poems “tied together with twine” in “sixty volumes.” And it’s not an untenable theory that the beloved whom she mourns, departed, may be Christ, the soul’s lover, rather than a particular man — or a particular woman.

214

I taste a liquor never brewed —
From Tankards scooped in Pearl —
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of Air – am I —
And Debauchee of Dew —
Reeling — thro endless summer days —
From inns of Molten Blue —

When “Landlords” turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove’s door —
When Butterflies – renounce their “drams” —
I shall but drink the more!

Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats —
And Saints – to windows run —
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the — Sun —

In the poem below, we could read whatever we want into it, it’s not “clear”: who is “You” – the answer would depend on where you are at in your life. You could read it as being addressed to God. Or it could be to a great lost love, a love that marked you forever. “Because you saturated Sight / And I had no more Eyes / For sordid excellence / As paradise”. I have felt that way about a man.

640

I cannot live with You —
It would be Life —
And Life is over there —
Behind the Shelf

The Sexton keeps the Key to —
Putting up
Our Life — His Porcelain —
Like a Cup —

Discarded of the Housewife —
Quaint — or Broke —
A newer Sevres pleases —
Old Ones crack —

I could not die — with You —
For One must wait
To shut the Other’s Gaze down —
You — could not —

And I — Could I stand by
And see You — freeze —
Without my Right of Frost —
Death’s privilege?

Nor could I rise — with You —
Because Your Face
Would put out Jesus’ —
That New Grace

Glow plain — and foreign
On my homesick Eye —
Except that You than He
Shone close by —

They’d judge Us — How —
For You — served Heaven — You know,
Or sought to–
I could not —

Because You saturated Sight —
And I had no more Eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise

And were You lost, I would be —
Though My Name
Rang loudest
On the Heavenly fame —

And were You — saved —
And I — condemned to be
Where You were not —
That self — were Hell to Me —

So We must meet apart —
You there — I — here —
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are — and Prayer —
And that White Sustenance —
Despair —

QUOTES:

Alison Brackenbury:

She is the spider, not the fly.

Emily Dickinson, letter to Thomas Higginson:

I had a terror–since September–I could tell to none–and so I sing as the Boy does by the Burying Ground–because I am afraid.

James Baldwin, on what moves him about Emily Dickinson:

Her use of language, certainly. Her solitude, as well, and the style of that solitude. There is something very moving, and in the best sense funny. She isn’t solemn. If you really want to know something about solitude, become famous. That is the turn of the screw.

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language:

Dickinson, at her strongest, has something in her lyrics that recalls the swiftness and compression of Shakespeare’s mind.

The Norton Anthology of American Literature:

Among the English Romantics, she valued John Keats especially; among her Englishc ontemporaries she was particularly attracted by the Brontes, the Brownings, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and George Eliot. None of these, however, can be said to have influenced her literary practice significantly. Indeed, not the least notable quality of her poetry is its dazzling originality. Thoreau and Emerson, especially the latter, as we know from her letters, were perhaps her most important contemporary American intellectual resources, though their liberal influence seems always to have been tempered by the legacy of a conservative Puritanism best expressed in the writings of Jonathan Edwards. Her chief prosodic and formal model was the commonly used hymnals of the times with their simple patterns of meter and rhyme.

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn:

Dickinson’s archaic, Anglo-Saxon capitalizations (which, along with her innovative, syncopated dashes, were condescendingly “corrected” and removed in the first posthumous collections of her works) give her nouns concreteness as well as philosophical breadth.

Richard Chase:

No great poet has written so much bad verse as Emily Dickinson. [Is it because of] the Victorian cult of ‘little women’…Her coy and oddly childish poems of nature and female friendship are products of a time when one of the careers open to women was perpetual childhood.

Emily Dickinson, letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson:

When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse — it does not mean — me — but a supposed person.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae:

Wordsworth’s nature is chthonian and deeply female. But it isn’t in Dickinson because she got Wordsworth through Emerson, and Emerson is in American flight from the female. Through her feminine personae, the poet pretends to be what she seems to be to the social eye. She has gone out the front door of her gender and come in the back. Sentimentality restores her poetic equilibrium. It adds representational weight to the light end of the sexual seesaw. Her feminine personae are mental calisthenics by which she dissuades herself from sadism.

Oh, Camille. Never change.

Dickinson, letter written to a friend after the friend’s house burned down:

Dear friend,
I congratulate you.
Disaster endears beyond Fortune —
E. Dickinson

Unbelievable. The woman’s house burned down and THIS is Emily’s response. I quoted this in my review of Wild Nights with Emily.

Randall Jarrell:

Whitman, Dickinson and Melville seem to me the best poets of the nineteenth century here in America.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae:

Less melodious than Sappho, Dickinson’s conceptually vaster, for she assimilates two more millennia of western experience. No major figure in literary history has been more misunderstood. Ignored in her own time, Dickinson was sentimentalized in her renascence…The academic view of her remains too genteel. The horrifying and ruthless in her are tempered or suppressed. Emily Dickinson is the female Sade, and her poems are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadomasochistic imaginist. When she is rescued from American Studies departments and juxtaposed with Dante and Baudelaire, her barbarities and diabolical acts of will become glaringly apparent.

Michael Schmidt:

The language is not literary. It enacts heard experience. Kinsmen, unexpectedly met, chatting late into the night from their different places: it brings beauty and truth into intimate focus. Strange: These are the same great terms of Keats’s ‘cold pastoral’.

Emily Dickinson on Walt Whitman:

I never read his book – but was told that he was disgraceful.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae:

In Dickinson, it is not rhythm but image that is regressive. She uses metaphors more literally than anyone else in major literature. Her lurid concretization is her mode of Late Romantic materiality, that contraction from idea to think we have followed through French and English Decadence. In her poetry, things become persons and persons things and all press physically on each other in nature’s brutal absolutism.

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language:

Whitman, with Emily Dickinson, is one of the two great American poet-originals. He does not have Dickinson’s cognitive originality; what is new in Whitman is expressed in gesture, nuance, rhetorical stance, the mythology of the self.

Emily Dickinson, letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson:

My Mother does not care for thought.

Emily Dickinson, age 14:

I am growing very handsome indeed!

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language:

A nonconformist in religion from her childhood on, Dickinson is not post-Christian like Emerson and Whitman, but rather a sect of one, like Milton and Blake.

from “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law”
By Adrienne Rich

Knowing themselves too well in one another:
their gifts no pure fruition, but a thorn,
the prick filed sharp against a hint of scorn…
Reading while waiting
for the iron to heat,
writing, My Life had stood–a Loaded Gun–
in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum,
or, more often,
iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird,
dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life.

Emily Dickinson to a newspaper editor:

Who writes those funny accidents, where railroads meet each other unexpectedly, and gentlemen in factories get their heads cut off quite informally? The author, too, relates them in such a sprighly way, that they are quite attractive. Vinnie was disappointed tonight, that there were not more accidents–I read the news aloud, while Vinnie was sewing.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae:

Dickinson’s lurid metaphors are surprise renovations, polychrome statues and stained-glass windows added to a white New England church.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

The late nineteenth-century poets Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins fall outside the period’s boundaries. Yet these three figures stand like giants at the threshold, precursors who heralded key developments in the early twentieth-century poetry that is generally called “modern.” Their groundbreaking poetry, disdained by or largely unknown to their contemporaries, found both readers and disciples in the twentieth century.

Emily Dickinson on her father:

His heart was pure and terrible, and I think no other like it exists.

Michael Schmidt:

There is in her resignation a willed acceptance: not sorrow but something harder and wiser, that takes off pain into the deeper darkness. The impulse is religious but the consolations, like the abstractions, are not orthodox.

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn, on “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers”:

In Dickinson’s first draft, dated three years earlier, nature romps on merrily above the deep freeze of the dead: the breeze “laughs”; a bee “babbles”; “sweet” birds “pipe”–pert, pretty sounds unprocessed by the sluggish cadavers’ “stolid Ear.” The final version makes a stunning leap forward in power and authority. Pictorial style shifts from a frilly, pastoral rococo to rigorous abstraction, as the charming, summery scene yields to a majestic, inanimate panorama. It is severe moments of epic vision like this that make Dickinson unique among women poets.

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language, on “A word made Flesh is seldom”:

This poem (with many others) might be called the Gospel of Emily Dickinson. She has, though, no good news to proclaim.

Emily Dickinson to Thomas Higginson (written when her mother was still alive):

I never had a mother. I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.

Adrienne Rich:

More than any other poet, Emily Dickinson seemed to tell me that the intense inner event, the personal and psychological, was inseparable from the universal; that there was a range for psychological poetry beyond mere self-expression.

Emily Dickinson, letter to Thomas Higginson, 1862:

Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive? The mind is so near itself it cannot see distinctly, and I have none to ask.

Samuel Bowles, shouting up the stairs at Emily. Emily finally did come down.

Emily, you wretch! No more of this nonsense! I’ve traveled all the way from Springfield to see you. Come down at once.”

Emily Dickinson, responding to Thomas Higginson’s request for a photograph:

Could you believe me–without? I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur–and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves–Would this do just as well?

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language:

Dickinson after all is a High Romantic poet, influenced by Emerson and Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats. Walt Whitman had rethought the relation of the poet’s self to his own vision. Dickinson, more radically, rethought the entire content of poetic vision, as the English High Romantics had done before her. But again, Dickinson is even more radical: each of her poems starts out fresh as though it could be a cosmos reimagined.

Emily Dickinson, letter to Thomas Higginson:

I had no Monarch in my life, and cannot rule myself, and when I try to organize–my little Force explodes–and leaves me bare and charred.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae:

Dickinson’s poetry, as an art of sexual personae, comes from Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. She thinks in theatrical or masquelike terms. She writes capable screenplays of agony and ecstasy where someone is tortured, dying, transfigured. The poems are sexual scripts, like Sade’s. Dickinson turns Wordsworth’s nature into an inferno, ring upon ring of pain.

Joyce Carol Oates:

[Emily Dickinson] was not an alcoholic, she was not abusive, she was not neurotic, she did not commit suicide. Neurotic people or alcoholics who go through life make better copy, and people talk about them, tell anecdotes about them. The quiet people just do their work.

Emily Dickinson, letter to a friend whose cousin drowned:

Dear friend,
What a reception for you! Did she wait for your approbation?
Her deferring to die until you came seemed to me so confiding–as if nothing should be presumed. It can probably never be real to you.

I mean, Jesus, Emily.

Elizabeth Bishop, letter to Robert Lowell, December 2nd, 1956:

Did I really make snide remarks about E. Dickinson? I like, or at least admire, her a great deal more now, probably because of that good new edition, really. I spent another stretch absorbed in that, and think, (along with Randall) that she’s about the best we have. However, she does set one’s teeth on edge a bit of the time, don’t you think?

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Since William Blake, no other poet had found such inspiration in the Protestant hymnology and in the biblical imagery it employs. Nor, whatever her sense of life’s copiousness, which at times almost embarrasses her, can she long forget the terrifying approach of death, a presence that inspires in her something like sexual excitement.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae:

It is a sentimental error to think Emily Dickinson the victim of male obstructionism. Without her struggle with God and father, there would have been no poetry.

Emily Dickinson, letter:

Nature is a Haunted House–but Art–a House that tries to be haunted.

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language:

[Dickinson’s] splendid arrogance is compensated for by terror, not of extinction but of meaninglessness. She is Hamlet-like both in accepting a final silence and in at least approaching nihilism. Again rather like Hamlet, she can win any argument with anyone, except herself.

Emily Dickinson, letter to a friend whose infant had an operation on his foot:

How is your little Byron? Hope he gains his foot without losing his genius.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae:

One of Dickinson’s stunning achievements is her prophetic vision of intergalactic nothingness. A funeral turns into a science-fiction film: “Boots of Lead” cross her soul, “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”…Dickinson’s glimpses of futuristic desolation, minimal in Jules Verne, preced H.G. Wells’s by thirty years. What of her lead boots? Only we, her true contemporaries, can identify them, for we have seen them walk on the moon.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson:

A step like a pattering child’s in entry & in glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair & a face a little like Belle Dove’s; not plainer – with no good feature – in a very plain & exquisitely clean white pique & blue net worsted shawl. She came to me with two day lilies which she put in a sort of childlike way into my hand & said ‘These are my introduction’ in a soft frightened breathless childlike voice — & added under her breathe Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers & hardly know what I say — but she talked soon & thenceforward continuously — & deferentially — sometimes stopping to ask me to talk instead of her — but readily recommencing…I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her.

Higginson is often criticized by modern-day critics. Michael Schmidt makes the important point, though, that Higginson actually felt he was in the presence of something extraordinary and powerful, and that most editors would not have responded to Dickinson’s query at all. Higginson remained a friend and correspondent. He read a Emily Bronte’s poem “No Coward Soul Is Mine” at Dickinson’s funeral service:

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Her poems are like John Donne’s and George Herbert’s in their assumption that difficult states of mind require hard words and troubled syntax.

Emily Dickinson, letter:

Every day life feels mightier, and what we have the power to be, more stupendous.

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems in the English Language:

Cognitive originality, the particular mark of Shakespeare and of Emily Dickinson, requires enormous intellectual agility as the reader’s share.

Emily Dickinson, letter to Thomas Higginson:

There seems a spectral power in thought that walks alone.

William Carlos Williams:

Emily was my patron saint. She was also an American, seeking to divide the line in some respectable way… She was an independent spirit. She did her best to get away from too strict an interpretation. And she didn’t want to be confined to rhyme or reason. (Even in Shakespeare, the speech of the players: it was annoying to him to have to rhyme, for God’s sake.) And she followed the American idiom. She didn’t know it, but she followed it nonetheless. … She was a wild girl. She chafed against restraint. But she speaks the spoken language, the idiom, which would be deformed by Oxford English…She was a real good guy. I thought I was a better poet because the American idiom was so close to me, and she didn’t get what the poets were doing at that time – writing according to a new method, not the English method, which wouldn’t have made much sense to an American. Whitman was on the right track, but then he switched to the English intonation, and followed the English method of recording the feet, he didn’t realize it was a different method, which was not satisfactory to an American. Everything started with Shakespeare.

Emily Dickinson, letter to cousins:

No one has called so far, but one lady to look at a house. I directed her to the cemetery to spare expense of moving.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

In the same letter that disclaimed any knowledge of Whitman, she told Higginson she had read John Keats and Robert and Elizabeth Browning for poetry; John Ruskin, Sir Thomas Browne, and the biblical Book of Revelations for prose. She might have added, from among her contemporaries, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who probably stimulated her preference for imperfect rhymes and her eagerness to see nature as an emblem, as well as Charlotte and Emily Bronte, George Eliot, and many others…The variety of her reading and the vigor of her correspondence belie the assumption that she was merely provincial.

Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, December 12, 1958:

Old nineteenth-century New England must have been fearful–in what other country would Thoreau, Melville, Whitman and Dickinson have been so overlooked?

Emily Dickinson, letter to cousins of a fire in Amherst:

I sprang to the window, and each side of the curtain, saw that awful sun. The moon was shining high at the time, and the birds singing like trumpets.
Vinnie came soft as a moccasin, “Don’t be afraid, Emily, it is only the fourth of July.”
I did not tell that I saw it, for I thought if she felt it best to deceive, it must be that it was.
She took hold of my hand and led me into mother’s room.

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language:

Though I read and teach her constantly, I remain a bewildered idolator, struggling to understand her enigmatic sublimities. With Emerson, Whitman, and Henry James, she seems to me our highest national achievement in thought and the arts.

Emily Dickinson, letter to Susan Gilbert:

I must wait a few Days before seeing you–You are too momentous. But remember it is idolatry, not indifference.

Emily Dickinson, letter to Susan Gilbert:

I want to think of you each hour in the day. What you are saying–doing–I want to walk with you, as seeing yet unseen.

Michael Schmidt:

The original take on her was sentimental: she had fallen in love with a man – a married man, perhaps — (various candidates were proposed) and been rebuffed. Or had she succumbed to agoraphobia? Or had some other emotional trauma affected her? Her poems both dramatize and conceal whatever it was. We were not to know and, in the end, we never will.

James Baldwin:

I read many plays and a lot of poetry as a kind of apprenticeship. You are fascinated, I am fascinated, by a certain optic – a process of seeing things. Reading Emily Dickinson, for example, and others who are quite far removed from one’s ostensible daily concerns, or obligations. They are freer, for that moment, than you are partly because they are dead. They may also be a source of strength.

Emily Dickinson, letter, December 1861, about a neighbor’s son killed in the Civil War:

Poor little widow’s boy, riding to-night in the mad wind, back to the village burying-ground where he never dreamed of sleeping! Ah! the dreamless sleep!

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae:

Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening…Amherst’s Madame de Sade still waits for her readers to know her.

Emily Dickinson, note to her cousins, shortly before her death:

Little Cousins,–Called back–Emily.

Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes
by Billy Collins

First, her tippet made of tulle,
easily lifted off her shoulders and laid
on the back of a wooden chair.

And her bonnet,
the bow undone with a light forward pull.

Then the long white dress, a more
complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back,
so tiny and numerous that it takes forever
before my hands can part the fabric,
like a swimmer’s dividing water,
and slip inside.

You will want to know
that she was standing
by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,
motionless, a little wide-eyed,
looking out at the orchard below,
the white dress puddled at her feet
on the wide-board, hardwood floor.

The complexity of women’s undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebook
it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything –
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes
whenever we spoke.

What I can tell you is
it was terribly quiet in Amherst
that Sabbath afternoon,
nothing but a carriage passing the house,
a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

So I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,
the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that reason is a plank,
that life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye.

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8 Responses to “Every day life feels mightier, and what we have the power to be, more stupendous.” — Emily Dickinson

  1. Kent says:

    I love the mystery of Emily Dickenson and Joseph Cornell. They seem a perfect match and I’m glad they found each other. Of course, she had a rival in Hedy Lamarr.

    • sheila says:

      Yes, Hedy!!

      I love all of Cornell’s boxes that he made for women – he had excellent taste! Each one seemed to bring out something different in him. I love how the Emily ones are either empty or inhabited only by a parrot. Kind of haunting!

      • Kent says:

        I first saw Cornell boxes at the Peggy Guggenheim museum in Venice. Her entire private collection has a great deal of mystery to it. The palazzo as well. Before Guggenheim it was the residence of Marchesa Luisa Casati. Good place for a seance if you like painters, poets, poisoners and the fascisti between the wars.

  2. ted says:

    Ample make this bed.
    Make this bed with awe;
    In it wait till judgment break
    Excellent and fair.

    Be its mattress straight, 5
    Be its pillow round;
    Let no sunrise’ yellow noise
    Interrupt this ground.

    Damn. What a poem.

  3. Mike Molloy says:

    Link below has Jeffrey Wright reciting “my life had stood a loaded gun”, a beautiful rendition.

    https://twitter.com/DickinsonMuseum/status/1732445412265455741

    Sorry for a twitter link, feels like bad manners, but I couldn’t find the video at the Dickinson Museum’s web site.

    Meanwhile I’m watching the list of comments on recent viewing/review posts pile up as I don’t find time to read the threads. Feeling like a bad blog visitor.

    • sheila says:

      “feels like bad manners” hahahaha
      I stopped going there once it became X – but this also means I’m missing out on amazing things like the clip you just shared.

      I got goosebumps!! Incredibly moving. He has one of the best voices!

      You are not a bad blog visitor!! You visit, period!

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