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Classic and Contemporary Poetry
EMILY DICKINSON'S WRITING TABLE IN HER BEDROOM AT THE HOMESTEAD, by SHARON OLDS Poem Explanation Poet Analysis Poet's Biography First Line: The chair next to her writing table Subject(s): Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886) | |||
The chair next to her writing table is the chair my parents tied me to that day. Not the same chair, but a cousin of it, Hitchcock from Connecticut, factory beside sluice gates through which shad leap, rubefacted with roe. My cervical vertebra feels the peneblum. My swayback sways away from the lower bar, and I can almost still feel, with my buttocks, the maze of glazed string in the seat. My wrists do not remember being tied to the struts rising from the seat, it makes me uneasy to try to remember that. But I remember the alphabet soup she fed me, the pleasure of being spoon-fed, I wanted to read each dense message as if it were falling, intelligible manna. When I was alone in the roomI would drift . . . I had never been without pencil or paper - no scissors, no Scotch tape. I would sing, sometimes, loaf-shaped quatrains from the hymnal, but when someone approached I'd be silent. When my father came in, I wonder what it was like for him to come into a room with his child tied to a chair in it, I think he liked it,I think it felt right to him, he had great faith in me. I would be a chair that grew up and spoke well and went to his college. I was the maple they tapped, troughed, I was their Druid, they trusted me, they knew if there was to be sweetness ever come out of that house, it would have to come from me. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...VISITING EMILY DICKINSON'S GRAVE WITH ROBERT FRANCIS by ROBERT BLY WOMEN IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: AN INTRODUCTION: 2 by MARTHA COLLINS EMILY DICKINSON AND GERARD MANELY HOPKINS by MADELINE DEFREES SITTING WITH MYSELF IN THE SETON HALL DELI AT 12 O'CLOCK THURSDAY by TOI DERRICOTTE POPHAM OF THE NEW SONG: 5; FOR R.P. BLACKMUR by NORMAN DUBIE HOMAGE TO DICKINSON by LYNN EMANUEL A LETTER FOR EMILY DICKINSON by ANNIE FINCH MY LAST TV CAMPAIGN: WONDER BREAD by ALICE FULTON |
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