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: Rain
The online Dickinson archive offers up 27 entries for the word “rain,” and those entries represent eleven different poems.
One of my favorites is “The wind began to knead the grass,” which I posted earlier in the week when I discussed “grass” – and of course, the first line includes the word “wind,” so of the seven natural elements noted in Bingham’s quote at the start of this post, this poem includes three of them – wind, grass, and rain.
Emily Dickinson sent a version of this poem to Elizabeth Holland, whom she had met nearly ten years before through Josiah Holland, Elizabeth’s husband and an editor at the Springfield Republican—the newspaper that printed five of Dickinson’s poems during her lifetime (all anonymously).
There are at least two versions of this poem (see below), and one interesting detail occurs in line 14. In one version, the cattle FLED to barns; in the other, the cattle FLUNG to the barns – and the online Dickinson lexicon confirms that the verb “fling” was used by Dickinson to mean “driven by violence; forced away.”
In addition to the opening image, I love lines 5 & 6 – “The leaves unhooked / themselves from Trees” – the image of the dust throwing the road away (lines 8 & 9), the low, gossiping Thunder, and the birds shuttering their nests (though I prefer the image of the lightning’s “livid claw” in the second version).
Are there lines or images that stand out to you?