Poll-etry

With Kamala Harris rising in the polls and DonOLD Trump flailing and fading, I thought I’d check into some election and campaign words used in Dickinson’s poems.

To get to the heart of the matter, here’s the list of words I checked and how often they appear in poems:

Campaign:  5 poems

Election:  4  (“elect” in 1 poem; “elected” in 1; “election” in 2)

Vote:  3 (“vote” in 2; “voted” in 1)

And then – for those of you interested –

Couch:  1 poem
Sofa:  2 poems
Weird:  0  (LOL – no surprise here)

“Couch” was used in a poem I posted just the other day, “She died at play.”  That came about when I looked into how many athletic terms were used in Dickinson’s poetry.  That led me to “She lay as if at play” (which used the word “sport”) – and then that led me to mournful poems about the death of a woman.  However, “She died at play,” the poem with “couch,”  is actually a riddle poem – about the sunset. 

Of the poems that use the word “election,” the most well-known – and perhaps the most enigmatic – is “Mine – by the right of the white election.”

Take a look at that poem below.  What do you make of that?