Esoteric Emily Dickinson

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –
I keep it, staying at Home –

Emily wrote the above words in one of her many unnamed poems. When I read those words, at 16, I was liberated from organized religion.

Maybe I was Emily in a previous life, she calls out to me like no others.

On the night I found out I had cancer, I dreamed of Emily Dickinson, and it was the isolationist in me that marveled at her, I'm sure. I'll share her documentary at the end of this post, but she spent most of her life in her bedroom, she also died not knowing she would be immortal because of her words, or did she? Her words seem to suggest she knew she would live forever in words.

Fame is a bee.
It has a song –
It has a sting –
Ah, too, it has a wing.

She definitely thought of fame's immortality in her poem about death:

Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –

The Carriage held but just Ourselves –

And Immortality.



We slowly drove – He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labor and my leisure too,

For His Civility –



We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess – in the Ring –

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –

We passed the Setting Sun –



Or rather – He passed Us –

The Dews drew quivering and Chill –

For only Gossamer, my Gown –

My Tippet – only Tulle –



We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground –

The Roof was scarcely visible –

The Cornice – in the Ground –



Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses' Heads

Were toward Eternity –


But how did she know she would be famous? Her work was mostly rejected in her lifetime. How could she have known she would live "Eternity" in words?

Regardless,

there is no doubt that Emily,

was an,

 Esotericist.

~~ Eso Terry Poem to Emily.

The reason I wrote my poem calling Emily an Esotericist, is because of her own words in the following poem of hers:

’T WAS later when the summer went
Than when the cricket came,
And yet we knew that gentle clock
Meant nought but going home.

’T was sooner when the cricket went
Than when the winter came,
Yet that pathetic pendulum
Keeps esoteric time.

~Emily Dickinson