I Dwell in Possibility
Dickinson’s twelve-line ars poetica builds poetry as a house with more windows than prose and the whole sky for a roof — then spreads two narrow hands wide to gather Paradise.
Form
lyric
56 poems
lyric
After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes
The nerves sit, the heart questions, the feet go round. Nobody’s home. Dickinson’s anatomy of shock is the most precise poem about aftermath in English.
“Hope” is the Thing with Feathers
A bird that sings without words, costs nothing, and gets louder in a storm. Dickinson’s most quoted poem is a hymn to hope that works better than it probably should.
A Dream within a Dream
It sounds like serene wisdom — all we see is a dream within a dream. But Poe’s poem dramatizes that thought failing: the calm statement becomes a desperate question, and the speaker ends on a shore, weeping, as the sand runs through his hands.
The Tyger
Blake’s most famous poem never describes the tiger — it interrogates its maker, asking who could forge such “fearful symmetry,” and in the end who would dare. A poem made entirely of unanswered questions about the God who made both the Lamb and the Tyger.
When You Are Old
Written for Maud Gonne when Yeats was in his twenties, this three-quatrain lyric asks the beloved to picture herself old by the fire — and to see, too late, that one man loved her soul rather than her beauty.
Invictus
“I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul.” Henley wrote it from a hospital bed, one leg already amputated — a defiance not abstract but physical, and a bold claim of the human will against fate, judgment, and the dark.
The Look
Strephon and Robin kissed her in jest and play, and both are gone. Colin only looked, and that look stays. Teasdale’s tiny song makes the unspoken glance outweigh two real kisses.
There Will Come Soft Rains
Written as World War I raged, Sara Teasdale’s twelve-line lyric pictures nature carrying on in perfect indifference to human catastrophe — and asks how little our extinction would cost the spring.
The Kiss
She got the kiss she hoped for and found it wasn’t enough. Teasdale’s tiny poem isn’t about a bad kiss, but about the kind of person for whom the dream always outshines the real thing.
If—
Everyone knows it as the great inspirational poem of keeping your head and treating triumph and disaster the same. But “If—” is one unbroken sentence that withholds its reward to the final line, and beneath the calm runs a startlingly severe code of self-mastery.
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Death is polite, the ride is unhurried, and the speaker has been dead for centuries by the time she tells the story. Dickinson’s most famous poem is calmer than it has any right to be.