Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Emily Dickinson.

It's been a while since I have written Emily Dickinson poem on this podcast,

and probably something I need to do, I don't know, like once a month or whatever.

So it is time to do so.

And the poem that I'm going to read today is called, I Digginson lived from 1830 to 1886. She was an American poet, as you know,

one of the, if not the most famous of all American poets. So this is how it goes.

I died for beauty, but was scarce adjusted in the tomb when one

who died for truth was Lane in an adjoining room. He questioned softly, why I failed. For beauty,

I replied. And beauty, I replied.

And I, for truth, themselves are one, we brethren are, he said.

And so as kinsmen met a night, we talked between the rooms,

until the moss had reached our lips and covered up our names.

In their book, The Making of a Poem, Under Anthology of Poetic Forms, Mark Strand and Avon

Boland talk about this poem. And they say this. So there's two paragraphs here I want to read.

I just think they can, you know, as I've said in the past, say what I would like to say

precisely and much more eloquently. So this is what they say in this book.

Dickinson was a superb technician, original, volatile, and explosive in her arrangements of language

and image. But perhaps her most distinguishing strength is the perfect timing of the quatrains she used.

These four line charges carried the force of her vision. They were perfectly and intuitively spaced,

achieving maximum drama between stanza and stanza.

...