Emily Dickinson

The above illustration is from TeenReads.Com, which has an interesting take on the New England poetess. Whenever I have been away from her for a while, I love to read a few scattered poems by the poetess from Amherst, Massachusetts. Most recently, I have admired the following short poem:

I ’ve seen a dying eye
Run round and round a room
In search of something, as it seemed,
Then cloudier become;
And then, obscure with fog,
And then be soldered down,
Without disclosing what it be,
’T were blessed to have seen.

The images of the eye of the dying person running round and round, becoming obscured with fog, and finally being “soldered down” are a sobering, almost too intimate view of death. At the very end, Dickinson at last calls the dying person’s sight “blessed” without divulging the mystery of what was seen during those last few moments. A sense of mystery pervades the room, and our consciousness as readers.