A WORD MADE FLESH IS SELDOM:
A CONVERSATION BETWEEN CERTAIN POEMS OF
EMILY DICKINSON AND ANGELINA WELD GRIMKE
by Elaine Maria Upton
Page 7
Grimke seems ever aware of the tension between life in the body and death, as in "A Winter Twilight" or in "Grass Fingers."
Touch me, touch me,Did Grimke learn from Dickinson? If so, what did she hear?
Little, cool grass fingers,
Elusive, delicate grass fingers,
With your shy brushings,
Touch my face--
My naked arms--
My thighs--
My feet.
Is there nothing that is kind?
You need not fear me.
Soon I shall be too far beneath you
For you to reach me, even
With your tiny, timorous toes.
Before she died in 1958 after Dickinson's Complete Poems had been published, perhaps Grimke heard or read many of Dickinson's poems on death--the soul's taking leave of the body. In the best of her death poems, and I count many to be her best, Dickinson brings the word to life, so that the word become flesh in our living and dying. And we, as Grimke, following Dickinson might read/hear:
The distance that the dead have gone
Does not at first appear -
Their coming back seems possible
For many an ardent year.And then, that we have followed them,
We more than half suspect,
So intimate have we become
With their dear retrospect.(JP 1742)
