Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry: Her Harvest

Edited and introduced by Wesley McNair, Maine Poet Laureate

In this month of harvest, Thomas Carper of Cornish offers a sonnet about the literary harvest of Emily Dickinson.

Her Harvest by Thomas Carper

She stitched her life together. Folded leaves
Of manuscript, gathered and bound with thread,
Become the harvest of her days, the sheaves
That would survive long after she was dead.
We turn the pages, following where her hand
Recorded, as though glintings on a brook,
The bursts of thought that seem still to command
Untold attentions everywhere we look.
And yet we feel we never quite arrive
At the illuminations she achieved;
Her restless poems are ever more alive
As further revelations are received
When we seek for new meaning in what lies
Beneath the words that pass before our eyes.

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Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2011 Thomas Carper. Reprinted from Creators, Author manuscript edition, by permission of Thomas Carper. Questions about submitting to Take Heart may be directed to Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Special Consultant to the Maine Poet Laureate, at mainepoetlaureate@gmail.com or 207-228-8263. Take Heart: Poems from Maine, an anthology collecting the first two years of this column, is now available from Down East Books.