Emily Dickinson didn’t just have a passion for poetry–she also loved plants. Well, plants, bulbs, annuals, perennials, trees and shrubs – basically all things related to gardening. Throughout her life, Dickinson created a leather-bound herbarium and pressed over 400 specimens into it, all of which she labeled with the genus and species. This manuscript, along with some of her poems and letters make up only a part of The New York Botanical Garden’s newest exhibition entitled “Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers.” Opening this Friday in the Bronx, the show will feature three straight days of Dickinson’s poetry; visitors, staff and special guests can participate in any or all of the eight-hour sessions, the chronological marathon readings of her 1,789 poems.
As one critic mused, Dickinson “ was of the part of life that is always youth, always magical. She wrote of it as she grew to know it, step by step, discovery by discovery, truth by truth—until time merely became eternity. She was preëminently the discoverer—eagerly hunting the meaning of it all; this strange world in which she wonderingly found herself,—“A Balboa of house and garden,” surmising what lay beyond the purple horizon. She lived with a God we do not believe in, and trusted in an immortality we do not deserve, in that confiding age when Duty ruled over Pleasure before the Puritan became a hypocrite.”
I like a look of agony
Because I know it’s true
Men do not sham convulsion
Nor simulate a throe.
Dickinson struggled with life so she scarcely knew what to do with 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 played | |
| At wrestling in a ring; | |
| We passed the fields of gazing grain, | |
| We passed the setting sun. | |
| We paused before a house that seemed | |
| A swelling of the ground; | |
| The roof was scarcely visible, | |
| The cornice but a mound. | |
| Since then ’t is centuries; but each | |
| Feels shorter than the day | |
| I first surmised the horses’ heads | |
| Were toward eternity. |