All I Have to Bring: A Poetry and Literature Podcast

Today on All I Have to Bring: American poet Emily Dickinson: The Herbarium – a selection of her nature-themed poems.

Dickinson’s poems encompass many subjects, which are too broad for the scope of this episode – life and death, eternity and resurrection, victory and defeat, love, loss, and domesticity – but in the language of flowers, she touches on all of these in some small way. This episode is divided into five thematic sections: Innocence, Lands Away, Resurrection, Passion, and Farewell.

Time Stamps:

00:16 Introduction

05:00 Innocence

• It’s all I have to bring to-day
• Perhaps you’d like to buy a flower?
• Nobody knows this little Rose–
• Flowers–Well–if anybody
• “Whose are the little beds,” I asked
• A sepal, petal, and a thorn
• To make a prairie

10:17 Lands Away

• If the foolish call them 'flowers'
• As if some little Arctic flower
• Two butterflies went out at noon
• Some rainbow coming from the fair!
• A sloop of amber slips away
• Of bronze and blaze
• How the old mountains drip with sunset

17:33 Resurrection

• Some keep the Sabbath going to church
• Some things that fly there be
• Alter? When the hills do
• God made a little gentian
• Essential oils are wrung
• A lady red upon the hill
• The murmuring of bees has ceased

22:33 Passion

• I hide myself within my flower
• I taste a liquor never brewed
• If she had been the mistletoe
• If recollecting were forgetting
• If you wore coming in the fall
• Come slowly, Eden!

28:45 Farewell

• Within my reach!
• This was in the white of the year
• New feet within my garden go
• When roses cease to bloom, dear
• I have not told my garden yet
• I'll tell you how the sun rose--

33:15 Closing & credits

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References and further reading:

Emily Dickinson Archive //

Letters of Emily Dickinson

Poems: Three Series, Complete, by Emily Dickinson

Poetry Foundation: Emily Dickinson