Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Tuesday, December 10th, 2024.

It is the birthday of Emily Dickinson, who gets featured a lot here on The Daily Poem,

but what can I say? It's her birthday, and she's a genius.

Today's poem is a short but powerful one in keeping with the theme of birthdays.

It is number 1292 in her complete poems

and takes its title from the first line

in this short life that only lasts an hour.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments,

and then read it once more.

In this short life that only lasts an hour, how much, how little is within our power?

Emily Dickinson was born on this day, December 10th, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts,

and as a young woman, she showed great passion for the sciences.

She was very taken with chemistry and then with botany and other realms of natural philosophy.

And it was through this interest that she first became

enamored of the descriptive power of writing. It seemed to her that the scientific observer who

could exercise the greatest power or influence was the one who could accurately describe the things

that he saw. Sounds simple enough, but if you've ever read the essays of high school students

or the books published by university presses, you'll know that it is a rare gift indeed.

And it was one that Dickinson set to honing in herself. But over time, her thinking on this

matter developed through the writing of her own poetry. And she came to the place where the power

to offer minutely accurate description had to be balanced by a recognition that not everything in the human

...