I’LL tell you how the sun rose —
A ribbon at a time!
The steeples swam in amethyst,
The news like squirrels ran!
The hills untied their bonnets,
The bobolinks begun;
Then I said softly to myself,
“That must have been the sun!”
But how he set, I know not.
There seemed a purple stile
Which little yellow boys and girls
Were climbing all the while,
Till when they reached the other side,
A dominie in gray
Put gently up the evening bars,
And led the flock away.
First print Nature XXII, 22
Johnson 318 | Franklin 204
Text compared with the fascicle and prepared for publication by Teresa Pelka, available under any of the following licenses:
■Creative Commons License 4.0, BY-SA 3.0, and License 2.5.
■→Poems, first print by Higginson and Todd, page 94;
Dash alone for thematic development, dash and comma for premise and consequent, cf. ■→Notes for The Outlet; fascicle exclamations for ribbons and squirrels as tokens of lively enthusiasm.
■Notes for Emily Dickinson’s poetry;
Poems one-by-one print and fascicle comparison,
■Resource for Emily Dickinson’s poetry;
■Google Drive, manuscript fascicles.
Feel welcome to Poems by Emily Dickinson prepared for print by Teresa Pelka: thematic stanzas, notes on the Greek and Latin inspiration, the correlative with Webster 1828, and the Aristotelian motif, Things perpetual — these are not in time, but in eternity.
■PDF Free Access, Internet Archive

