Words by Laura Zolman Kirk
Imagery provided by Amherst College Special Collections
Many of us were introduced to Emily Dickinson during high school English class, finding her work elusive and over our heads. Yet, behind the oddly-placed dashes and lines that make our minds zing, there is a woman who―aside from sharing her complex thoughts in verse—doesn’t differ much from many of us trying to blaze a trail of our own.
Visit the Dickinson homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts on a late winter afternoon and you can watch the sun set from Emily’s bedroom window, just as she would have seen it working from home and just as she described it, likely from that very spot:
“Soft as the massacre of Suns/ By Evening’s sabres slain” (Fr1146).
Well, maybe not all of us would describe a New England sunset quite like Emily Dickinson did, but there is something alluring about experiencing her home-based muses as a modern-day visitor.
It makes her more real. Her poetics are often so difficult to grasp, intentionally construed so only those who work at her words enjoy them. However, looking out to see the same sights as she once did somehow makes her words more tangible.
At her core, Emily Dickinson was simply a woman who worked from home. She was distracted by dirty dishes, scribbled down lines while baking bread, and sent her poems directly to her readers through letters.
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