More poems by Emily Dickinson

1.

After a hundred years
Nobody knows the place,--
Agony, that enacted there,
Motionless as peace.

Weeds triumphant ranged,
Strangers strolled and spelled
At the lone orthography
Of the elder dead.

Winds of summer fields
Recollect the way,--
Instinct picking up the key
Dropped by memory. 




2.  

"Nature" is what we see—
The Hill—the Afternoon—
Squirrel—Eclipse— the Bumble bee—
Nay—Nature is Heaven—
Nature is what we hear—
The Bobolink—the Sea—
Thunder—the Cricket—
Nay—Nature is Harmony—
Nature is what we know—
Yet have no art to say—
So impotent Our Wisdom is
To her Simplicity. 





3.


There is no Frigate like a Book

To take us Lands away, 

Nor any Coursers like a Page 

Of prancing Poetry – 

This Traverse may the poorest take 

Without oppress of Toll – 

How frugal is the Chariot 

That bears a Human soul.

"Hope is the Thing with Feathers"

Emily Dickinson

Here is a link to a biography of Emily Dickinson:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/emily-dickinson

You may also wish to read some of the critical analysis essays about this poet, some contained on the above website (www.poetryfoundation.org) or others that you can find on other sites.

Many of Emily Dickinson's poems can also be found as audio files, read by others, so if you are interested in listening to them read aloud, search for the audio versions. Her poetry has often been adapted into songs as well, and they may be easier to memorize as songs, so we can find some of those versions as well.

Here are the first three poems we will look at by this poet:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers - 

Related Poem Content Details

“Hope” is the thing with feathers - 

That perches in the soul - 

And sings the tune without the words - 

And never stops - at all - 

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard - 

And sore must be the storm - 

That could abash the little Bird 

That kept so many warm - 

I’ve heard it in the chillest land - 

And on the strangest Sea - 

Yet - never - in Extremity, 

It asked a crumb - of me.

A narrow fellow in the grass 

Related Poem Content Details

A narrow fellow in the grass 

Occasionally rides; 

You may have met him—did you not 

His notice sudden is, 

The grass divides as with a comb, 

A spotted shaft is seen, 

And then it closes at your feet, 

And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,   

A floor too cool for corn,

But when a boy and barefoot, 

I more than once at noon 

Have passed, I thought, a whip lash, 

Unbraiding in the sun, 

When stooping to secure it, 

It wrinkled and was gone. 

Several of nature’s people 

I know, and they know me;

I feel for them a transport 

Of cordiality. 

But never met this fellow, 

Attended or alone, 

Without a tighter breathing, 

And zero at the bone.

I dwell in Possibility – 

Related Poem Content Details

I dwell in Possibility – 

A fairer House than Prose – 

More numerous of Windows – 

Superior – for Doors – 

Of Chambers as the Cedars – 

Impregnable of eye – 

And for an everlasting Roof 

The Gambrels of the Sky – 

Of Visitors – the fairest – 

For Occupation – This – 

The spreading wide my narrow Hands 

To gather Paradise –

Poem Set #2

The Words Under the Words

for Sitti Khadra, north of Jerusalem

My grandmother’s hands recognize grapes,   

the damp shine of a goat’s new skin.   

When I was sick they followed me,

I woke from the long fever to find them   

covering my head like cool prayers.

My grandmother’s days are made of bread,   

a round pat-pat and the slow baking.

She waits by the oven watching a strange car   

circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son,   

lost to America. More often, tourists,   

who kneel and weep at mysterious shrines.   

She knows how often mail arrives,

how rarely there is a letter.

When one comes, she announces it, a miracle,   

listening to it read again and again

in the dim evening light.

My grandmother’s voice says nothing can surprise her.

Take her the shotgun wound and the crippled baby.   

She knows the spaces we travel through,   

the messages we cannot send—our voices are short   

and would get lost on the journey.

Farewell to the husband’s coat,

the ones she has loved and nourished,

who fly from her like seeds into a deep sky.   

They will plant themselves. We will all die.

My grandmother’s eyes say Allah is everywhere, even in death.   

When she talks of the orchard and the new olive press,   

when she tells the stories of Joha and his foolish wisdoms,   

He is her first thought, what she really thinks of is His name.

“Answer, if you hear the words under the words—

otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges,   

difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.”

Naomi Shihab Nye, “The Words Under the Words” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland, Oregon: Far Corner Books, 1995).

Two Countries

Skin remembers how long the years grow
when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel
of singleness, feather lost from the tail
of a bird, swirling onto a step,
swept away by someone who never saw
it was a feather. Skin ate, walked,
slept by itself, knew how to raise a 
see-you-later hand. But skin felt
it was never seen, never known as
a land on the map, nose like a city,
hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque
and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.

Skin had hope, that’s what skin does.
Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.
Love means you breathe in two countries.
And skin remembers--silk, spiny grass,
deep in the pocket that is skin’s secret own.
Even now, when skin is not alone,
it remembers being alone and thanks something larger
that there are travelers, that people go places
larger than themselves.

Blood

BY NAOMI SHIHAB NYE



“A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,”   

my father would say. And he’d prove it,

cupping the buzzer instantly

while the host with the swatter stared.

In the spring our palms peeled like snakes.

True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways.   

I changed these to fit the occasion.

Years before, a girl knocked,

wanted to see the Arab.

I said we didn’t have one.

After that, my father told me who he was,   

“Shihab”—“shooting star”—

a good name, borrowed from the sky.

Once I said, “When we die, we give it back?”   

He said that’s what a true Arab would say.

Today the headlines clot in my blood.

A little Palestinian dangles a truck on the front page.   

Homeless fig, this tragedy with a terrible root   

is too big for us. What flag can we wave?

I wave the flag of stone and seed,

table mat stitched in blue.

I call my father, we talk around the news.   

It is too much for him,

neither of his two languages can reach it.

I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,   

to plead with the air:

Who calls anyone civilized?





Where can the crying heart graze?

What does a true Arab do now?


Naomi Shihab Nye, “Blood” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems

Poem Set #1

My Father and the Fig Tree

 For other fruits, my father was indifferent.
He'd point at the cherry trees and say,
 "See those? I wish they were figs."
In the evening he sat by my bed
weaving folktales like vivid little scarves.
They always involved a figtree.
 Even when it didn't fit, he'd stick it in.
Once Joha was walking down the road
and he saw a fig tree.
 Or, he tied his camel to a fig tree and went to sleep.
Or, later when they caught and arrested him,
his pockets were full of figs.

At age six I ate a dried fig and shrugged.
"That's not what I'm talking about! he said,
"I'm talking about a fig straight from the earth –
gift of Allah! -- on a branch so heavy
it touches the ground.
I'm talking about picking the largest, fattest,
sweetest fig
in the world and putting it in my mouth."
(Here he'd stop and close his eyes.)

Years passed, we lived in many houses,
none had figtrees.
 We had lima beans, zucchini, parsley, beets.
"Plant one!" my mother said.
 But my father never did.
 He tended garden half-heartedly, forgot to water,
let the okra get too big.
"What a dreamer he is. Look how many things
he starts and doesn't finish."

The last time he moved, I got a phone call,
My father, in Arabic, chanting a song
I'd never heard. "What's that?"
He took me out back to the new yard.
There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas,
a tree with the largest, fattest,
sweetest fig in the world.
"It's a figtree song!" he said,
 plucking his fruits like ripe tokens,
 emblems, assurance
of a world that was always his own.

 -Naomi Shihab Nye

 from 19 VARIETIES OF GAZELLE

* Joha - A trickster figure in Palestinian folktales

Arabic Coffee

It was never too strong for us:
make it blacker, Papa,
thick in the bottom,
tell again how the years will gather
in small white cups,
how luck lives in a spot of grounds.

Leaning over the stove, he let it
boil to the top, and down again.
Two times. No sugar in his pot.
And the place where men and women
break off from one another
was not present in that room.
The hundred disappointments,
fire swallowing olive-wood beads
at the warehouse, and the dreams
tucked like pocket handkerchiefs
into each day, took their places
on the table, near the half-empty
dish of corn. And none was
more important than the others,
and all were guests. When
he carried the tray into the room,
high and balanced in his hands,
it was an offering to all of them,
stay, be seated, follow the talk
wherever it goes. The coffee was
the center of the flower.
Like clothes on a line saying
you will live long enough to wear me,
a motion of faith. There is this,
and there is more.

My Grandmother in the Stars

It is possible we will not meet again
on earth. To think this fills my throat
with dust. Then there is only the sky
tying the universe together.

Just now the neighbor’s horse must be standing
patiently, hoof on stone, waiting for his day
to open. What you think of him,
and the village’s one heroic cow,
is the knowledge I wish to gather.
I bow to your rugged feet,
the moth-eaten scarves that knot your hair.

Where we live in the world
is never one place. Our hearts,
those dogged mirrors, keep flashing us
moons before we are ready for them.
You and I on a roof at sunset,
our two languages adrift,
heart saying, Take this home with you,
never again,
and only memory making us rich.

E Group 3 Notes

1. Select a passage from a novel you have chosen to study where the appearance of a character in a specific setting raises unsettling questions for the reader. Outline how you would stage this appearance and setting for an audience, paying particular attention to elements of intrigue and/or surprise.
Scene: → ancient whale strands on the beach
 Why is this important:
● Two worlds collide
○ Family and whales
● Whale is both magical and real (Godly and normal)
● Whale strands himself on purpose to kill himself because he can’t let go of the past (with the whale rider)
Staging:
● First: Village
●  Actors in village point at audience (open sea/beach) say that whale has stranded
● Second: Beach
● The whale consists of just a tale which sticks out stage right, it is big
● Actors are around the tale try to drag it into the water
● Third:
● Whale moves (tale offstage) towards open sea (audience) actors sow direction to audience by pointing
● Kahu follows the way they point, walks up center aisle­ spotlight on her till blackout
2. Select a passage from a novel you have chosen to study in which the shifting moods of the characters involved combine to create a pivotal scene in the narrative. Discuss how you would stage this scene for an audience paying particular attention to the role of the actors.
Scene: after Kahu left with the whale and her grandfather realizes he had been looking for her all along
Setting:
● Beach, audience is open sea/ocean
● At the beach are Koro, Nanny Flowers, Rawiri, boys villager
Scene:
● this scene is right after the one for question one, Kahu has just gone into the water and left with the whale
● in this scene Koro’s mood and his attitude towards Kahu change as he realizes the is the successor he has been searching, the mood change is shown most clear when Nanny Flowers hands him the stone that Kahu has dived for
● before Kahu has left there is total pandemonium on stage as everyone is trying their best to help the stranded whale
● when she leaves they call after her and Rawiri tries to run/ after her (again the sea is the center aisle)
● after Kahu left Nanny Flowers is devastated she blames Koro because she believes that
Kahu only took the risk because she wants to prove herself to him
● Koro is hesitant until Nanny Flowers shows him the stone then you can clearly see a mood change in terms of facial expression
○ first realization­Koro notices that Kahu is the person he has been looking for for so long 
○ then consternation as he realizes the full extent of his mistake  

E Group 2 Notes

1st question: passage, pg. 116, Koro speaking
● Church area with seats and podium
● Standing on podium with ocean behind him
● Orange light around audience in front of him
● White spotlight on Koro (audience is looking upstage at Koro)
● Storm happening in the background with sound effects of rough ocean, wind and rain
● Koro should stand up straight, hands on the podium, not arrogantly, speaks softly and humbly as if he is begging for someone to hear him and how he longs to be heard
● When Koro says “real and unreal” have wave crash, sound of whale in sequence
● When he talks about the barrier, have motions with hands and have a whale sound and the sound of a person
● Have lightning in the background
● Arrow shoots across the back towards the sea in representation of “let it be done”
● Stage on auditorium­like stage
● Shows the connection between the gods (highlight this aspect)
● The importance of the gods have him talk about this 
●
Next question: passage, pg: 132, Kahu is taken away by the whales
● Fake waves in front of projector, fin of the whale sticking out and then you can see her face
● Nanny Flowers, Uncle Rawiri, Papa Aprina stage right near house, Nanny Flowers on ground crying showing loss of Kahu
● Show Kahu not smiling but have a very relaxed, calm face 
● Show Papa Aprina praying and realizing what has happened with the sound of waves in the background
● Have Kahu blow kisses to Nanny Flowers, Uncle Rawiri and Papa Aprina. Yell out as tears fall “I’m not afraid to die”
● This atmosphere shows a mix of sadness and acceptance for what happened
● Explain the connection between nanny flowers and Kahn
○ Kahu meant everything to nanny flowers
○ Their relationship
● In the paper make sure to explain the existence of the whales and how Kahunis the whale rider
● Kahu disappears with the whale as water shoots up and all the family members are huddled together, comforting one another
● This shows their love and longing for Kahu