National Poetry Month: Emily Dickinson

"Bee! I'm expecting you!" Emily Dickinson

Bee! I'm expecting you!

Was saying yesterday

To someone you know

That you were due.

The frogs got home last week,

Are settled, and at work;

Birds, mostly back,

The clover, warm and thick.

You'll get my letter by

The seventeenth; reply

Or better, be with me,

Yours, Fly.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a family well known for educational and political activity. Her father, an orthodox Calvinist, was a lawyer and treasurer of the local college. He also served in Congress. Dickinson's mother, whose name was also Emily, was a cold, religious, hard-working housewife, who suffered from depression. Her relationship with her daughter was distant enough that Dickinson later wrote in a letter that she never had a mother.