Welcome back to The Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Thursday, December 10th, 2020.

Sorry for getting this to you a little late today. I ran into that age-old modern problem

for the daily podcast, and that being computer problems. I keep running into technology problems. The

challenge today being that well my charger broke both my computer chargers broke and so

my computer is dead. So here I am recording the voice memos app on my iPhone and so I

apologize in advance for the low hum or the static that you're hearing,

particularly if you're listening with headphones.

But I did want to make sure to get you a poem here on December 10th, because today's the

birthday of one of our most important poets, one of the most important American poets, one of the

most important poets at all.

That of course is Emily Dickinson.

So what I'm going to do today is I'm just going to keep it short and sweet, and I'm just

going to read you three different Dickinson poems from different times of her life.

I'll limit my comments, and mostly I'll just let you hear from Emily Dickinson today.

She had such a sense of music in her poetry and such a sense of how to employ form that they speak for themselves just perfectly well, I think.

So the first poem that I'm going to read is called In a Library. It goes like this.

A precious, moldering pleasure tis to meet an antique book in just to address his century war.

A privilege, I think, his venerable hand to take, and warming in our own a passage back or two to make to times when he was young.

His quaint opinions to inspect, his knowledge to unfold on what concerns our mutual mind, the literature of old.

What interested scholars most? What competitions ran when

Plato was a certainty? And Sophocles a man, when Sappho was a living girl, and Beatrice wore the gown

that Dante deified. Facts, centuries before, he traverses familiar, as one should come to town,

...