In regard to that quote, I am addressing those specific seven subjects in Dickinson’s poetry: snakes, flies, grass, stones, wind, rain, and the moon.
Today’s focus: Wind
The word ”wind” results in 213 entries on the online archive – and that accounts for about 80 poems (plus there are two with the word for “windy”).
However, not all of the uses mean the “wind,” as in the “perceptible natural movement of the air.” For example, in the poem “If you were coming in the fall,” Dickinson states, “If I could see you in a year / I'd wind the months in balls / And put them each in separate Drawers / For fear the numbers fuse” – so in this poem, she uses the word “wind” (rhymes with rind) as in to twist or coil something repeatedly.
One of my favorites of the “wind” poems is “How lonesome the wind must feel Nights.” There is a variant of that poem which begins “How spacious the wind must feel morns,” and the stanzas in that version progress in the opposite order, from morning till night.
Both of these poems are shown below – and note the change that editor Mabel Loomis Todd made with the final two lines of “Wild Nights! Wild Nights!” when she first published it in 1891. The word “tonight” was shifted to the final line.