Everyday Canvas

An Emily Dickinson Riddle

Prompt: "To see the summer sky is poetry, though never in a book it lie-true poems flee." Write your thoughts about this.

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I think these lines point to the importance of perspective, how we look at things. Sometimes the poetic beauty of a summer sky is impossible to reflect in its total meaning into any writing or a visual art piece. Thus, even in the best of poetry books or any other writing, the real poetry escapes for its truth lies in the first glimpse or vision of nature that we experience.

This, in fact, is a sliver of a riddle by Emily Dickinson possibly embedded in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was a correspondent, advisor, and editor to Emily Dickinson. Higginson and Dickinson had shared interests in language and nature, and Dickinson read everything Higginson wrote and admired him. Theirs was a friendship through letters only. It is believed that Dickinson took Higginson’s metaphors and restyled and condensed them and, then, sent them back to him as subtle flattery. These lines, therefore, are abstract, elusive in meaning, and conceivably pointing to the repercussion of Dickinson's reading something by Higginson.