Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Emily Dickinson, American poet who lived from 1830 to 1886, certainly one of the most famous American poets.

Sadly, as you might know, Dickinson, while a prolific poet was not known during her

lifetime particularly, I think even some of her friends were not aware the degree to which

she wrote and the degree to which she was so talented.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called As Imperceptibly as Grief, bar as its title

from the first line.

This is how it goes.

As imperceptibly as grief the summer lapsed away,

too imperceptible at last to seem like perfidy,

a quietness distilled as twilight long begun, or nature spending

with herself sequestered afternoon. The dusk drew earlier in, the morning foreign shone, a courteous,

yet harrowing grace as guessed who would be gone. And thus without a wing or service of a keel,

our summer made her light escape into the beautiful.

So this is obviously kind of an elegiac poem

for the passing of summer, I suppose,

the fading away of it.

One of the things that I love that Dickinson does is the way she kind of, particularly at the end of a poem, as in this poem, she kind of has a way of subverting your expectations.

I don't know if subverting is the right word. Doing the unexpected or kind of, well, here I'll explain.

So throughout this poem, you kind of anticipate that the next word is going to rhyme.

These are four four line stanzas here, quatrain.

So you sort of expect that you're going to get a rhyme. In the third stanza, for example, you get, the dusk drew earlier

...