Today’s poem is chosen and introduced by our Teacher of English and Classics Mr Macdonald-Brown

Meet Emily Dickinson, the nineteenth century American poet, and a pioneer of self-isolation. As a young woman, living in her parents’ house, she gradually retired to her bedroom – and there she stayed for the rest of her life, wearing a white dress and writing thousands of poems (only six were published in her lifetime).

The poems are amazing: violent, ecstatic, anguished, occasionally serene. Startling images, neurotic dashes and odd capital letters abound. She presents her self-imposed seclusion – the quietest of lives – as quite the emotional and spiritual melodrama.

So here she is – literature’s lockdown queen – musing, gloriously – like Shakespeare in last week’s sonnet – on the lows and highs of the Soul: from her awful ‘Bandaged moments’ to ‘moments of Escape’, when ‘she dances like a Bomb, abroad, / And swings upon the Hours…’, before finding herself shackled and stapled once more.

The Soul has Bandaged moments

The Soul has Bandaged moments –
When too appalled to stir –
She feels some ghastly Fright come up
And stop to look at her –

Salute her – with long fingers –
Caress her freezing hair –
Sip, Goblin, from the very lips
The Lover – hovered – o’er –
Unworthy, that a thought so mean
Accost a Theme – so – fair –

The soul has moments of Escape –
When bursting all the doors –
She dances like a Bomb, abroad,
And swings upon the Hours,

As do the Bee – delirious borne –
Long Dungeoned from his Rose –
Touch Liberty – then know no more,
But Noon, and Paradise –

The Soul’s retaken moments –
When, Felon led along,
With shackles on the plumed feet,
And staples, in the Song,

The Horror welcomes her, again,
These, are not brayed of Tongue –