Page:The complete poems of Emily Dickinson, (IA completepoemsofe00dick 1).pdf/13

INTRODUCTION herself and her reader in the direction of the escaping soul to new, incredible heights.

Doubly her life carried on, two worlds in her brown eyes, by which habit of the Unseen she confessed:

"I fit for them,

I seek the dark till I am thorough fit.

The labor is a solemn one,

With this sufficient sweet—

That abstinence as mine produce

A purer good for them,

If I succeed,—

If not, I had

The transport of the Aim."

This transport of the aim absorbed her, and this absorption is her clearest explanation,—the absorption in This excluding observance of That. Most of all she was busy. It takes time even for genius to crystallize the thought with which her letters and poems are crammed. Her solitude was never idle.

Her awe of that unknown sacrament of love permeated all she wrote, and before Nature, God, and Death she is more fearless than that archangel of portentous shadow she instinctively dreaded.

Almost transfigured by reverence, her poems are pervaded by inference sharply in contrast to the balder speech of to-day. Here the mystic suppressed the woman, though her heart leaped up over children,—radiant phenomena to her, akin to stars fallen among her daffodils in the orchard; and her own renunciation, chalice at lip, was nobly, frankly given in the poem ending:

"Each bound the other's crucifix,

We gave no other bond.

[vii]