A WOUNDED deer leaps highest,
I’ve heard the hunter tell;
’T is but the ecstasy of death,
And then the brake is still.
The smitten rock that gushes,
The trampled steel that springs:
A cheek is always redder
Just where the hectic stings!
Mirth is the mail of anguish,
In which it cautions arm,
Lest anybody spy the blood
And “You’re hurt” exclaim!
First print Life VIII, 8
Johnson 165 | Franklin 181
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 20;
■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
TERESA PELKA.COM 