Sarah Hampson Reads and Ponders Emily Dickinson at the Globe and Mail

Asked if there's a book that "would make life on a desert island bearable," Sarah Hampson remarks that reading Emily Dickinson's poetry "provokes fresh thoughts about her personality. Emily is a friend you can never get to fully know even though you want to and will keep trying. The ultimate anti-celebrity, she remains largely inscrutable, which in today’s world seems like a perfect aspiration. Write beautifully. Leave people guessing about who you really are. That feels like a good motto." More from the Globe and Mail,:

Some people I know have favourite movies that they watch when they’re sick: a kind of alternative medicine. But for me, that sort of emotional fix comes in other ways. One of them is reading the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

But I don’t turn to her just when I’m unwell, having one of those days when my mind or my body can’t or doesn’t want to function happily in the world. I often take her with me on holidays, no matter the season. Even if I don’t carry a copy of some of her poems, I carry certain favourites in my head.

There’s a certain Slant of Light,

Winter Afternoons –

That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –

We can find no scar,

But internal difference,

Where the Meanings, are -

I first sat down with Emily when I was a student at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., in the late seventies. I was an English literature major, and a friend of mine and I were in a class on 19th-century American literature. As with many people who have favourite writers, I remember the moment of encounter with the words as much as the words themselves. So, when I read the verse, That Love is all there is/ Is all we know of Love/ It is enough, the freight should be/ Proportioned to the groove, I see my brilliant friend, Molly, bent over her manual typewriter in her room under the eaves of a Victorian dormitory, bashing out her analysis of Dickinson’s work in her Lanz nightie when I was trying to do the same – and not so brilliantly. I remember sitting on her bed, talking about the freight being proportioned to the groove.

Continue at Globe and Mail.