I subscribe to the weekly Substack of Pádraig Ó Tuama called Poetry Unbound. This week, he shared an untitled poem by Emily Dickinson on the occasion of her 195th birthday on December 10. He writes, “This poem is from Sheet 5, put together by Emily Dickinson in the summer of 1863. She often put little packages — facsimiles, she called them — of poems and sent them to friends.”
A friend told me that you can sing the “The Yellow Rose of Texas” with any of Dickinsons’s poems. Try it with this one.
You cannot put a Fire out—
A Thing that can ignite
Can go, itself, without a Fan—
Upon the slowest Night—
You cannot fold a Flood—
And put it in a Drawer—
Because the Winds would find it out—
And tell your Cedar Floor—
