(
A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him, - did you not,
His notice sudden is.The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once at morn,Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun, -
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was educated at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, was one of the founders of Amherst college). She began writing around 1850; as a poet she was a pioneer, experimenting with language, meter, and rhythm. After the late 1860s she never left her family's property, but carried on extensive correspondences with a number of literary contemporaries. All but seven of her nearly 1,800 poems were published posthumously.
Major works include Poems by Emily Dickinson (1890), Poems: Second Series (1891), Poems: Third Series (1896), and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1894, 2 vol.).
