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That poets are far rarer births than kings Your noblest father proved; like whom before, Or then, or since, about our Muses’ springs, Came not that soul exhausted so their store. Hence was it that the destinies decreed (Save that most masculine issue of his brain) No male unto him; who could so exceed Nature, they thought, in all that he would fain. At which she, happily displeased, made you, On whom, if he were living now to look, He should those rare and absolute numbers view, As he would burn or better far his book.

Dear Emily, my tears would burn your page, But for the fire-dry line that makes them burn— Burning my eyes, my fingers, while I turn Singly the words that crease my heart with age. If I could make some tortured pilgrimage Through words or Time or the blank pain of Doom And kneel before you as you found your tomb, Then I might rise to face my heritage. Yours was an empty upland solitude Bleached to the powder of a dying name; The mind, lost in a word’s lost certitude That faded as the fading footsteps came To trace an epilogue to words grown odd In that hard argument which led to God.

Weigh me the fire; or canst thou find A way to measure out the wind? Distinguish all those floods that are Mixed in that wat’ry theater, And taste thou them as saltless there, As in their channel first they were. Tell me the people that do keep Within the kingdoms of the deep; Or fetch me back that cloud again, Beshivered into seeds of rain. Tell me the motes, dust, sands, and spears Of corn, when summer shakes his ears; Show me that world of stars, and whence They noiseless spill their influence. This if thou canst; then show me Him That rides the glorious cherubim.

You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed, And no man claimed the conquest of your land. But gropers both through fields of thought confined We stumble and we do not understand. You only saw your future bigly planned, And we, the tapering paths of our own mind, And in each other's dearest ways we stand, And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind. When it is peace, then we may view again With new-won eyes each other's truer form And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain, When it is peace. But until peace, the storm The darkness and the thunder and the rain.

Had we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day. Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood, And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews. My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires and more slow; An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; Two hundred to adore each breast, But thirty thousand to the rest; An age at least to every part, And the last age should show your heart. For, lady, you deserve this state, Nor would I love at lower rate. But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust; The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. Now therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour Than languish in his slow-chapped power. Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball, And tear our pleasures with rough strife Through the iron gates of life: Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.

He's gone, and all our plans Are useless indeed. We'll walk no more on Cotswold Where the sheep feed Quietly and take no heed. His body that was so quick Is not as you Knew it, on Severn river Under the blue Driving our small boat through. You would not know him now ... But still he died Nobly, so cover him over With violets of pride Purple from Severn side. Cover him, cover him soon! And with thick-set Masses of memoried flowers— Hide that red wet Thing I must somehow forget.

Well, honest John, how fare you now at home? The spring is come, and birds are building nests; The old cock-robin to the sty is come, With olive feathers and its ruddy breast; And the old cock, with wattles and red comb, Struts with the hens, and seems to like some best, Then crows, and looks about for little crumbs, Swept out by little folks an hour ago; The pigs sleep in the sty; the bookman comes— The little boy lets home-close nesting go, And pockets tops and taws, where daisies blow, To look at the new number just laid down, With lots of pictures, and good stories too, And Jack the Giant-killer's high renown.

You change a life as eating an artichoke changes the taste of whatever is eaten after. Yet you are not an artichoke, not a piano or cat— not objectively present at all— and what of you a cat possesses is essential but narrow: to know if the distance between two things can be leapt. The piano, that good servant, has none of you in her at all, she lends herself to what asks; this has been my ambition as well. Yet a person who has you is like an iron spigot whose water comes from far-off mountain springs. Inexhaustible, your confident pronouncements flow, coldly delicious. For if judgment hurts the teeth, it doesn’t mind, not judgment. Teeth pass. Pain passes. Judgment decrees what remains— the serene judgments of evolution or the judgment of a boy-king entering Persia: “Burn it,” he says, and it burns. And if a small tear swells the corner of one eye, it is only the smoke, it is no more to him than a beetle fleeing the flames of the village with her six-legged children. The biologist Haldane—in one of his tenderer moments— judged beetles especially loved by God, “because He had made so many.” For judgment can be tender: I have seen you carry a fate to its end as softly as a retriever carries the quail. Yet however much I admire you at such moments, I cannot love you: you are too much in me, weighing without pity your own worth. When I have erased you from me entirely, disrobed of your measuring adjectives, stripped from my shoulders and hips each of your nouns, when the world is horsefly, coal barge, and dawn the color of winter butter— not beautiful, not cold, only the color of butter— then perhaps I will love you. Helpless to not. As a newborn wolf is helpless: no choice but hunt the wolf milk, find it sweet.

You give me a little courage, Mary, in your skittish dedication to her highness; I too can dare as humbleness may dare; if there’s anywhere to speak with you, it’s here at the wordy Anglo-Saxon periphery of the universe’s one great surge of praise though I’m lost here. Where’s the joyful noise? the syllables I managed to memorize before they were weighted down by meaning? and what’s all this complicated rhyme? Don’t mistake me—I’m not complaining; it’s just not my notion of a psalm for all my love of wrought, elaborate things— especially when they’re the sort that sings and yours do sing a stunning song— but they’re off-kilter without the awe inherent in my ancient holy tongue. I miss my amen sela, hallelujah though I do applaud you and your brother— going for the full linguistic bait-and-switch in the move from one language to another: David’s disarmingly direct speech a tour-de-force of formal contrivance (no form repeated more than once in each of a hundred fifty psalms!) in your show-off/virtuoso hands. Talk about such a song in such a land— but what else is there in dreary England? Its sole extravagance a trove of synonyms that endlessly perplexes and expands its mongrel, unbeautiful tongue— a language, frankly, crying out for poetry given its absence, even, of integrity not to mention intrinsic song. . . . (Its sound: water going down the drain according to my friend, an Italian, after riding in a compartment of Americans gurgling all the way from Florence to Rome.) Why not a convoluted scheme of intricately wrought meter and rhyme? So what if the Hebrew has no strict patterns? Aim for a parallel sublime; aren’t poems for the impossible? Though perhaps yours wouldn’t have been written had you known how daunting their task was; you had no Hebrew, used the Coverdale, Wyatt, Geneva Bible, as cribs for Latin, even psaumes de David, mis en rime Françoise . . . Clearly, your secret weapon was ignorance, also useful (look at me!) in writing a poem, your psalms fourth- and fifth-hand half the time. Unless (of course!) your stroke of brilliance was to focus on the one thing you could do: Sing and let your song be new which they are, profoundly, even to me, who know so many bits of the originals of what you claim you’re “translating” by heart. Still, I’ll be reading along, alternately put off and spellbound by your art- ifice, when my wary eye suddenly falls on something both completely known and new, my own—our own—ungainly language for a brief instant alien with grace, a black-on-white typescript mirage in which English letters turn into Hebrew or at least intercept its holiness. . . . How did you manage it, Mary? Your contemporaries called it piety— but I don’t believe that for a second. What motivated you was love of poetry, or rather of your legendary brother—lost so young—whom you would spend your whole life working to immortalize. . . . I’m not sure he needed you. No lighter touch exists in English poetry than his . . . a touch you often managed to approach in your grief-induced lyric resolve to force a bit of him to stay alive. Poetry as solace, as wizardry— and there he is, with you, all the time, clearly palpable in all your artistry. It was your eagerness to be with him that kept you going back to intervene with yet one more indomitable line, got you through all hundred-fifty psalms. Or maybe it was just your poet’s ruse (poetry often thrives on self-delusion) to trick yourself to rise to his occasion. . . . Unless he just provided the excuse to stake your own (quite vast) poetic claims, impossible to say from this vantage point: to distinguish collaborator from muse, self-doubt from false humility but, then again, there’s a poetry in mystery. Who will contradict me if I confuse my own passions with yours—so convenient, inevitable?—in a poem like this— though you and I—despite the labyrinth of misapprehension, class, religion reinforcing our dissociation (Jew from Christian, commoner from countess, twenty-first-century from seventeenth) come together in passion upon passion (forgive me, Mary, if dare too far): psalms, poetic forms, your genius brother (I mean both the poet and the man; no poem could manufacture that much charm). We’ve even suffered from a kindred harm: my version, albeit, fairly mild, though I too was admonished as a child about what a woman dared not do. Still, I have a vast cohort, while you were almost entirely alone. Better yet, I had the complete Dickinson (published just a year before I was born); I didn’t know it yet, but I had you . . . while you had to ransack antiquity for even fragments of poems by a woman. But of course you weren’t troubled by inequity— it was, frankly, all you knew— you might even have relished your position as sole woman poet, thinker, patron— lonely as it was—though you did encourage your precocious niece, Mary (later Wroth). And who can really estimate the damage of your appalling bargain: a brother’s death required to turn you into poet? Of course, in your time, death was everywhere. Perhaps you were pious—a last resort to shore up an attenuated heart against even further disrepair, immersion in the psalms a sort of antidote to life’s massive overdose of pain: from living with a sad, disfigured mother (small-pox scars from nursing a sick queen) mourning her husband’s lost affection to deaths of favorites—your sister, your brother, your only daughters, Katherine, then Anne. God made this day; he did us send it In joy and mirth then let us spend it Excellent advice, if it would hold— And maybe it does, when you can summon all that air or life enfold to distract you with a binge of exaltation . . . or if that fails, then an assiduous extravaganza of sublime detail calibrated to provide the wherewithal to face a universe we cannot alter if not with joy and mirth, at least with grace: a perfect, hand-illuminated psalter, the loops of all its letters filled with gold— a treasure, even, for an exacting Queen— offering a deity who’ll listen to a voice alternately humble, bold, beseeching, thankful, ecstatic, bleak, through which (hallelujah, Mary!) you still speak.

Midway the hill of science, after steep And rugged paths that tire the unpractised feet, A grove extends; in tangled mazes wrought, And filled with strange enchantment: dubious shapes Flit through dim glades, and lure the eager foot Of youthful ardour to eternal chase. Dreams hang on every leaf: unearthly forms Glide through the gloom; and mystic visions swim Before the cheated sense. Athwart the mists, Far into vacant space, huge shadows stretch And seem realities; while things of life, Obvious to sight and touch, all glowing round, Fade to the hue of shadows. Scruples here, With filmy net, most like the autumnal webs Of floating gossamer, arrest the foot Of generous enterprise; and palsy hope And fair ambition with the chilling touch Of sickly hesitation and blank fear. Nor seldom Indolence these lawns among Fixes her turf-built seat; and wears the garb Of deep philosophy, and museful sits In dreamy twilight of the vacant mind, Soothed by the whispering shade; for soothing soft The shades; and vistas lengthening into air, With moonbeam rainbows tinted. Here each mind Of finer mould, acute and delicate, In its high progress to eternal truth Rests for a space, in fairy bowers entranced; And loves the softened light and tender gloom; And, pampered with most unsubstantial food, Looks down indignant on the grosser world, And matter’s cumbrous shapings. Youth beloved Of science — of the Muse beloved, — not here, Not in the maze of metaphysic lore, Build thou thy place of resting! Lightly tread The dangerous ground, on noble aims intent; And be this Circe of the studious cell Enjoyed, but still subservient. Active scenes Shall soon with healthful spirit brace thy mind; And fair exertion, for bright fame sustained, For friends, for country, chase each spleen-fed fog That blots the wide creation — Now heaven conduct thee with a parent’s love!