This is A Portarit of the Author, Zora Neal Hurston.

Here’s a feature on Emily Dickinson and our poem. Please click on her name then, when you get to the next site choose “listen to the show” form the options on the left. Listen to the feature-it’s about 15 minutes long. Then read and complete the rest of the assignment.

This is the poem we’re talking about. It helps to read it through a couple of times before you listen to the show.

Consider:

• Look up the Fireside poets mentioned in the show. Find a poem by Longfellow-read it and discuss the differences between him and Dickinson in your reply.
• Look Up Billy Collins. Read one of his poems and post a link to it on your reply.
• Look up Walt Whitman. Read one of his poems and post a link to it on your reply. Why do you think he might be considered “scandalous”? Explain your choice.
• Find and image that you think fits Dickinson’s poem. Insert it or a link to it in you reply. (Extra credit if it’s a moving rather than static image.)
• Find and insert or link to some music that you think goes along well with Dickinson’s poem. Explain your choice.

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

Or rather, be passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.

We paused before house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then ’tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity.

Here’s the Poem Billy Collins:
Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes (Yes, That’s really the title)

First, her tippet made of tulle,
easily lifted off her shoulders and laid
on the back of a wooden chair.

And her bonnet,
the bow undone with a light forward pull.
Then the long white dress, a more
complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back,
so tiny and numerous that it takes forever
before my hands can part the fabric,
like a swimmer’s dividing water,
and slip inside.

You will want to know
that she was standing
by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,
motionless, a little wide-eyed,
looking out at the orchard below,
the white dress puddled at her feet
on the wide-board, hardwood floor.

The complexity of women’s undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebook
it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything -
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes
whenever we spoke.

What I can tell you is
it was terribly quiet in Amherst
that Sabbath afternoon,
nothing but a carriage passing the house,
a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

So I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,
the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that reason is a plank,
that life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye.