All overgrown by cunning moss, (146)

By Emily Dickinson 1830–1886 Emily Dickinson

All overgrown by cunning moss,

All interspersed with weed,

The little cage of “Currer Bell”

In quiet “Haworth” laid.

This Bird – observing others

When frosts too sharp became

Retire to other latitudes –

Quietly did the same –

But differed in returning –

Since Yorkshire hills are green –

Yet not in all the nests I meet –

Can Nightingale be seen –

Reprinted electronically by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983, 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Source: The Poems of Emily Dickinson Edited by R. W. Franklin (Harvard University Press, 1999)

Biography

A poet who took definition as her province, Emily Dickinson challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work. Like writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, she experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints. Like writers such as Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she crafted a new type of persona for the first person. The speakers in . . .

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