c. 1861 / Amherst

Taints of Majesty

Tags:: 1860s,; Amherst,; Emily Dickinson,; poetry

Of Bronze—and Blaze—
The North—Tonight—
So adequate—it forms—
So preconcerted with itself—
So distant—to alarms—
An Unconcern so sovereign
To Universe, or me—
Infects my simple spirit
With Taints of Majesty—
Till I take vaster attitudes—
And strut upon my stem—
Disdaining Men, and Oxygen,
For Arrogance of them—
My Splendors, are Menagerie—
But their Competeless Show
Will entertain the Centuries
When I, am long ago,
An Island in dishonored Grass—
Whom none but Beetles—know.

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Published In

Book of Nature

About the Text

Emily Dickinson, from her collected poems. Only ten of Dickinson's eighteen hundred poems are known to have been published in her lifetime. Subsequent to her death at the age of fifty-five in 1886, her posthumously published manuscript immediately impressed William Dean Howells, the late-nineteenth-century dean of American letters.

One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have.