I like to see it lap the Miles - (383)

By Emily Dickinson 1830–1886 Emily Dickinson

I like to see it lap the Miles -

And lick the Valleys up -

And stop to feed itself at Tanks -

And then - prodigious step

Around a Pile of Mountains -

And supercilious peer

In Shanties - by the sides of Roads -

And then a Quarry pare

To fit it's sides

And crawl between

Complaining all the while

In horrid - hooting stanza -

Then chase itself down Hill -

And neigh like Boanerges -

Then - prompter than a Star

Stop - docile and omnipotent

At it's own stable door -

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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