NO rack can torture me,
My soul’s at liberty.
Behind this mortal bone
There knits a bolder one:
You cannot prick with saw,
Nor rend with scymitar.
Two bodies therefore be;
Bind one, and one will flee.
The eagle of his nest
No easier divest
And gain the sky,
Than mayest thou;
Except thyself may be
Thine enemy;
Captivity is consciousness,
So’s liberty.
First print Time and Eternity XXXV, 35
Johnson 384 | Franklin 649
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 147;
Semicolon for stanza end; thematic arrangement for the poetic self.
■Notes for Emily Dickinson’s poetry;
Poems one-by-one print and fascicle comparison,
■Resource for Emily Dickinson’s poetry;
■Google Drive, manuscript fascicles.
The world may never have seen her original handwriting, if her skill was taken for supernatural. 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
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