Love’s Baptism

I’M ceded, I’ve stopped being theirs;
The name they dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church,
Is finished using now,
And they can put it with my dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools
I’ve finished threading, too.

Baptized before without the choice,
But this time consciously, of grace
Unto supremest name,
Called to my full, the crescent dropped,
Existence’s whole arc filled up
With one small diadem.

My second rank, too small the first,
Crowned, crowing on my father’s breast,
A half unconscious queen;
But this time, adequate, erect,
With will to choose or to reject,
And I choose — just a throne.

First print Love poem XIV, 14
Johnson 508 | Franklin 533

■→IN POLISH

Text compared with the fascicle and published as in the first print by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson; does not require adjustment, public domain worldwide, no rights reserved.

■→Poems, first print by Higginson and Todd, page 60;

■→Notes for Emily Dickinson’s poetry;
Poems one-by-one print and fascicle comparison,
■→Resource for Emily Dickinson’s poetry;
■→Google Drive, manuscript fascicles.

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