Category: prompt

A question:

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FOR each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy.

For each beloved hour
Sharp pittances of years,
Bitter contested farthings
And coffers heaped with tears.

~Emily Dickinson

I find this one perplexing. In the first stanza, the speaker tells us that for every happiness, there must be an equal sorrow, and perhaps this is true. But in the second stanza, she shifts her argument to the extreme. Now she’s arguing that for each happy hour, we pay for it for years in bitterness and tears.

What is she doing here? I really don’t know quite what to make of this one. What do you think?

a permission slip

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I held a jewel in my fingers
And went to sleep.
The day was warm, and winds were prosy;
I said: “’T will keep.”


I woke and chid my honest fingers,—
The gem was gone;
And now an amethyst remembrance
Is all I own.

This is yet another straightforward poem in the tradition of many others. The speaker has lost something precious, and is left with a lovely memory.

What strikes me about this poem is the fifth line: “I woke and chid my honest fingers.” The speaker blames herself for her loss, but acknowledges that she is not really to blame. This rings so true for me as a woman–so often I blame myself for something that isn’t my fault because I’ve been taught to capitulate, to be diplomatic, to soothe other’s feelings first while bottling up my own.

So today, in honor of this poem, I’m offering you a permission slip. Today, you get to forgive yourself for all the things you’ve been feeling guilty about that aren’t really your fault. Today, you get to let those go.

Try it. See what happens.

Prompt: The wind

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Of all the sounds despatched abroad,
There ’s not a charge to me
Like that old measure in the boughs,
That phraseless melody

The wind does, working like a hand 5
Whose fingers comb the sky,
Then quiver down, with tufts of tune
Permitted gods and me.

When winds go round and round in bands,
And thrum upon the door, 10
And birds take places overhead,
To bear them orchestra,

I crave him grace, of summer boughs,
If such an outcast be,
He never heard that fleshless chant 15
Rise solemn in the tree,

As if some caravan of sound
On deserts, in the sky,
Had broken rank,
Then knit, and passed 20
In seamless company.

~Emily Dickinson

There’s so much loveliness in this poem–the wind as music permitted to be heard by both gods and humans; the “fleshless chant,”; the “caravan of sound”…….I could wax rhapsodic about this one. I love how Dickinson literally breaks ranks with her own stanza length by throwing in an extra line in the final stanza where she describes the wind as a caravan breaking rank.

But today’s post is not me geeking out or being baffled by another Dickinson poem. It’s a prompt for you.

What visceral effect does the wind have on you? Is it thrilling? Unnerving? Uplifting? Write a poem or paragraph in which you tease out that feeling through simile and metaphor à la Dickinson.

Words of encouragement

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Read, sweet, how others strove,
Till we are stouter;
What they renounced,
Till we are less afraid;
How many times they bore
The faithful witness,
Till we are helped,
As if a kingdom cared!

Read then of faith
That shone above the fagot;
Clear strains of hymn
The river could not drown;
Brave names of men
And celestial women,
Passed out of record
Into renown!

~Emily Dickinson

There is something rather un-Emily like about this poem. I don’t know if it’s that she usually isn’t trying to buck anybody up, or if it’s the more straightforward voice, or the address at the beginning, which sounds somehow more sonnet-y than usual.

Your prompt is to write some words of encouragement, and put them somewhere to be found and read.

Summer’s treason

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Sweet is the swamp with its secrets,
Until we meet a snake;
’T is then we sigh for houses,
And our departure take
At that enthralling gallop
That only childhood knows.
A snake is summer’s treason,
And guile is where it goes.

~Emily Dickinson

Nothing in this world is perfect, not even the most idyllic summer’s day. For the speaker in Dickinson’s poem, a snake can spoil that perfection instantly, souring the sweetness of the mysterious swamp for the intrepid child probing its depths.

What, for you, is summer’s treason? Is it the ubiquitous picnic-ants? The mosquitoes? The heat? Write a short poem in which you describe the subject of your summer loathing.

Prompt: impossible magic

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The one that could repeat the summer day
Were greater than itself, though he Minutest of mankind might be.
And who could reproduce the sun,
At period of going down—
The lingering and the stain, I mean—
When Orient has been outgrown,
And Occident becomes unknown,
His name remain.

~Emily Dickinson

What a feat it would be–to repeat a summer day. To do so would be to command time, to seize it, slow it, make it stop and circle back. These warm indolent days of summer can seem at once eternal and all too fleeting. Dickinson imagines the power of the person who could achieve this feat–capturing the fleeting beauty at its peak.

Your prompt–following Dickinson’s example, write a short poem in which you imagine an impossible power and its use.

sunset on Pamlico Sound

The mystery of a face

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A face devoid of love or grace,
A hateful, hard, successful face,
A face with which a stone
Would feel as thoroughly at ease
As were they old acquaintances,—
First time together thrown.

~Emily Dickinson

What a description–not even a complete sentence, yet thoroughly damning. The juxtaposition of “hateful” and “hard” with “successful” is especially interesting. I wonder who she’s talking about…did she have someone specific in mind, someone she knew? Was it a face glimpsed in passing on a street? Or is it merely a face imagined?

Your prompt: write a description of the person behind the face Dickinson is describing. Does the poet see that person as they are, or is there more behind that hard facade?

The mundane becomes magical

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SHE sweeps with many-colored brooms,
And leaves the shreds behind;
Oh, housewife in the evening west,
Come back, and dust the pond!


You dropped a purple ravelling in,
You dropped an amber thread;
And now you’ve littered all the East
With duds of emerald!


And still she plies her spotted brooms,
And still the aprons fly,
Till brooms fade softly into stars—
And then I come away.

~emily dickinson

Prompt: Who is the “housewife in the evening west?” A goddess? a spirit? something else? There’s all kinds of magic here to play with.

Image via Pixabay

may-flower

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PINK, small, and punctual.
Aromatic, low,
Covert in April,
Candid in May,


Dear to the moss,
Known by the knoll,
Next to the robin
In every human soul.


Bold little beauty,
Bedecked with thee,
Nature forswears
Antiquity.

~Emily dickinson

According to the title imposed on the poem after Dickinson’s death, this one is about the may-flower. I had to look it up, and this is what I found. My big takeaways: apparently they are highly fragrant, extremely delicate, and difficult to find. I’ve never seen one; the wildflower website I consulted says they grow in my state, but in sandy loam, which is the opposite of the red clay soil we have here in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains.

Regardless of species, though, spring’s flowers are precious, fleeting, lovely. Your prompt for today: go outside and find them. Enjoy the flowers for a few moments, no matter how busy you may be. You won’t regret it.

The woodpecker

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HIS bill an auger is,
His head, a cap and frill.
He laboreth at every tree,—
A worm his utmost goal.

~emily dickinson
Pileated woodpecker, via Wikipedia

This is a perfect little jewel of a poem. Every line conveys something essential about a woodpecker–each one tells us exactly what Dickinson is describing, though she never comes out and says it.

Your prompt, for this spring day, is to spend a little time watching the feathered denizens of your little patch of Earth. Then choose one and write four lines that unmistakably describe that particular creature, without naming it. Happy writing!