Emily Dickinson is my favorite poet. She’s also a good poet to use to introduce older children to poetry. I’ve always been a little intimidated by long poems, especially when I first started reading poetry.
Dickinson’s poems are manageable as far as length. But don’t be fooled, she can say more in four lines than most can in one hundred. With grammar school students you may want to be a little choosy. Some of her poems can take multiple readings to understand.
One of the things I used to do with my son when he was very young, well before he could walk or talk, was quote poetry to him. Why not? I just figured he’d get used to the cadence, rhymes and the words and that it would help in the long run.
Most of my favorite Dickinson poems are in our book, Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson. Here are a couple:
A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.
And how about this one:
Fate slew him, but he did not drop;
She felled — he did not fall —
Impaled him on her fiercest stakes —
He neutralized them all.
She stung him, sapped his firm advance,
But, when her worst was done,
And he, unmoved, regarded her,
Acknowledged him a man.
However, one of my all time favorite Dickinson poems I could not use in the book, because it is not yet in the public domain, but I wanted to do something with the theme of the poem. So I created three images, faux magazine covers, to illustrate it in our book.
Take a look below and even if you don’t know the poem, try coming up with a your own poem based on the images. Dickinson’s poem is four lines long. If you give up, and that would be about 2 or 3 of you at this point not counting my Mom in heaven who reads absolutely everything I write, there’s an answer here.
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