Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

SYLLABLES OF EMILY DICKINSON 79

post,” here the bird ’s sheer speed makes “An easy Morning’s Ride.” Flippancy
tips the poem’s angle of vision, ousting any human dominion over nature.
Intimate with flora and some fauna in her environs, Dickinson still doubted
they were hers by poetic right. On Nature:

We pass, and She abides.

We conjugate her Skill

While She creates and federates

Without a syllable.

Still the speaker brings uncommon skill, as in one syllable, “raw,” of another
poem:

A Bird came down the Walk—

He did not know I saw—

He bit an Angleworm in halves

And ate the fellow, raw,

Walt Whitman, with butterfly, 1877.

Charles E. Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress.