Impossible to feign
The beads upon the forehead
By homely anguish strung. (pp. 192-193)

Dickinson also heartily approves of those who are willing to put themselves in danger, since it puts them in touch with their own deepest “creases”:

Peril as a possession
’T is good to bear,
Danger disintegrates satiety;
There’s Basis there
Begets an awe,
That searches Human Nature’s creases
As clean as Fire. (pp. 265-266)

She likes people who respect privacy:

The suburbs of a secret
A strategist should keep,
Better than on a dream intrude
To scrutinize the sleep. (pp. 271-272)

And she is utterly smitten with the transporting power of books, a love she reveals in poem after poem:

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.

 

This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul! (pp. 57-58)

Even though Dickinson is one of the most difficult poets to interpret, she is also, as these poems reveal, one of the most refreshingly straightforward.

In Dickinson’s work, apparent opposites—hunger and fulfillment, the self and God, death and life—turn out to have more in common than we’d thought. In her more explicitly religious poems, she violently overturns traditional Christian beliefs in order to create her own homespun theology. Despite her revisionary zeal, Dickinson never completely abandons her faith in God: “I know that he exists,” she writes, “Somewhere, in silence” (p. 49). Rather, she is determined to explore new forms that God’s “existence” might take. She is achingly up-front about her desire to know what God is really like:

The Look of Thee, what is it like?
Hast thou a hand or foot,
Or mansion of Identity,
And what is thy Pursuit? (p. 303)

But she also admits the possibility that we have invented the concept of life after death:

Immortal is an ample word
When what we need is by,
But when it leaves us for a time,
’T is a necessity. (p. 241)

She is capable of considerable anger about the rift between humans and God:

Is Heaven a physician?
They say that He can heal;
But medicine posthumous
Is unavailable. (p. 30)

Still, faced with this “unavailable” comfort, Dickinson responds not by giving up faith, but rather by constructing new versions of it. In several poems she asserts that the self’s depths bring us as close to God as we can hope to come, and allow us a glimpse of what she calls “Finite Infinity” (p. 272):

To be alive is power,
Existence in itself,
Without a further function,
Omnipotence enough. (pp. 266-267)

Other poems locate divinity in nature:

The color on the cruising cloud,
The interdicted ground,
Behind the hill, the house behind,—
There Paradise is found! (p. 53)

 

In the name of the bee
And of the butterfly
And of the breeze, amen! (p. 110)

Whether looking inward or out her window, Dickinson radically replaces the traditional image of a distant, all-powerful God with a local divinity residing right by her side. Although “Some keep the Sabbath going to church,” she writes, “I keep it staying at home.... / So instead of getting to heaven at last, / I’m going all along!” (p. 116). Dickinson never becomes complacent—she remains one of the greatest poets of loss—but she does find great solace in her bravely domestic cosmology:

Who has not found the heaven below
Will fail of it above.
God’s residence is next to mine,
His furniture is love. (p.