VOICE ONE:
'Tis not that dying hurts us so --
'Tis living hurts us more;
But dying is a different way,
A kind behind the door --
VOICE TWO:
Some historians wish that Emily's poems had reached the best American writers of her day: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau or Walt Whitman. These men could have overlooked her strange way of living to see only her ability.
Historians also say it is possible that Emily chose to write to someone like Higginson so she would not be understood.
VOICE ONE:
To hear an oriole sing
May be a common thing
Or only a divine
It is not the bird
Who sings the same unheard,
As unto crowd.
VOICE TWO:
So little is known about Emily's life that many writers have created a life for her. They talk about the things that interest them as if they interested Emily, too. But one writer says part of the joy in studying Emily is what we cannot know. Emily herself said: "I never try to lift the words which I cannot hold. "
VOICE ONE:
I cannot live with you,
It would be life,
And life is over there
Behind the shelf
So we must keep apart,
You there, I here,
With just the door ajar
That oceans are,
And prayer,
And that pale sustenance,
Despair!
VOICE TWO:
Emily Dickinson sewed the pages of her poems together with thread and put them away. She also seems to have sewed her life together and put it away, too. Step by step, she withdrew from the world. As she grew older, she saw fewer visitors, and rarely left her house.
The time of Emily's withdrawal was also the time of the American Civil War. The events that changed America's history, however, did not touch her. She died in eighteen eighty-six, at the age of fifty-five, completely unknown to the world.
No one wrote about Emily Dickinson's poems while she was alive. Yet, more than one hundred years since her death, she has come to be seen as one of America's greatest poets.
VOICE ONE:
The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will contain
With ease -- and you beside.
VOICE TWO:
After Emily died, her sister Lavinia found Emily's poems locked away. Lavinia wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson and demanded that the poems be published. Higginson agreed. And a few of Emily's poems about nature were published. Slowly, more and more of her poems were published. Readers soon learned that she was much more than a nature poet.
In her life, Emily was an opponent of organized religion. Yet she often wrote about religion. She rarely left home. Yet she often wrote about faraway places. She lived quietly. Yet she wrote that life passes quickly and should be lived to the fullest.
Will we ever know more about the life of Emily Dickinson? As she told a friend once: "In a life that stopped guessing, you and I should not feel at home. "
We have the poems. And for most readers, they are enough.
VOICE ONE:
Surgeons must be very careful
When they take the knife!
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the Culprit – Life
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ANNOUNCER:
You have been listening to the Special English program People in America. This program was written by Richard Thorman. Your narrators were Kay Gallant and Harry Monroe. Listen again next week at this same time on VOA for another story of People in America.
This is Shirley Griffith.
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