Emily Dickinson Embraced Madness in the Spring

A Little Madness in the Spring

by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

A little Madness in the Spring

Is wholesome even for the King,

But God be with the Clown --

Who ponders this tremendous scene --

This whole Experiment of Green --

As if it were his own!

Lee Remick reads Emily Dickinson's poems, "This Is My Letter to the World" and "Dying" with an introduction by John Gielgud.

This is my letter to the world,

That never wrote to me,-

The simple news that Nature told,

With tender majesty

Her message is committed

To hands I cannot see;

For love of her, sweet countrymen,

Judge tenderly of me!

Dying

I heard a fly buzz when I died;

The stillness round my form

Was like the stillness in the air

Between the heaves of storm.

The eyes beside had wrung them dry,

And breaths were gathering sure

For that last onset, when the king

Be witnessed in his power.

I willed my keepsakes, signed away

What portion of me I

Could make assignable, —and then

There interposed a fly,

With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,

Between the light and me;

And then the windows failed, and then

could not see to see.