Nature, the gentlest mother

The poem was printed in the 1890 selection of Emily Dickinson’s work, which her sister Lavinia pushed into print after finding nearly 1,800 poems in the house. She lived almost all her life in the family house in Amherst, Massachusetts, and sent many poems to friends in letters. Project Gutenberg carries the 1890 collection.

Where this text comes fromNature is given a character here, and it is a specific one: a mother with no favorites and no impatience, who does not scold the weakest child. That is a strange thing to assert in 1890 and stranger still coming from a poet whose other work is full of frost, funerals and things that stop. The poem sets up a proposition and then spends its length testing it, which is how most of her work behaves. What you copy is the opening claim.

What you might not noticeWhere Dickinson wrote a dash, the printers of this text set two hyphens in a row. That double hyphen is not punctuation she used; it is a compositor solving a problem her manuscripts created. Source

What it trainsFour hyphens in 416 characters, and none of them joins a compound: they arrive as two pairs, side by side, with no space inside the pair and none before the word that follows. Typing that deliberately is the one skill this passage drills, and every modern habit fights it. Around the pairs sit nine commas and a single semicolon. Sixteen capitals appear and only two of them open a sentence, because ordinary nouns take a capital here wherever they happen to fall in the line. Two sentences average thirty-four words, and the longest word, conversation, is twelve letters.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg