Blazing in Gold – and
Quenching – in Purple!
Leaping – like Leopards the sky –
Then – at the feet of the
old Horizon –
Laying it’s spotted face – to die!
Stooping as low as the
kitchen window –
Touching the Roof –
And tinting the Barn –
Kissing it’s Bonnet to
the Meadow –
And the Juggler of
Day – is gone!
Link to EDA manuscript. Originally in Packet XXIII, Fascicle 13 (part), dated ca. 1861. First published in Drum Beat (29 February 1864), 3, from the lost manuscript ([B]); reprinted in the Springfield Daily Republican (30 March 1864), 6, and Springfield Weekly Republican (2 April 1864), 7; Poems (1891), 166, as two quatrains, from the fascicle (A), with the revision adopted and with readings incorporated from Higginson’s copy (C). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
This poem is an example of Dickinson’s use of what Cristanne Miller calls “a loosened ballad meter throughout in a repeated chiastic [crossed] rhythm (SuuS). ” This chiastic rhythm comes in the very first line, “Blazing in Gold – and / Quenching – in Purple!” and is magnified by the line break and enjambment across it. Another good illustration of Dickinson’s use of the ballad form, in a shortened or reduced form, is “Did we disobey him?” (F299A, J267).
Miller diagrams the poem’s form, showing how the lines vary from between 8-10 syllables, with between 3-4 beats per line. In illustration of the dampening effect of Higginson’s criticism of Dickinson’s rhythm, which we discussed in the introduction to this section, Miller also points out that
Dickinson syncopates the rhythm of her fascicle copy of this poem [reproduced here] through dashes and the splitting of metrical lines … but not in the copy published in Drum Beat in 1864 or the 1866 copy to Higginson, which contain no stanza division, split lines, or dashes.
Still, the ballad form is palpable in this poem and Miller attributes it to Dickinson’s reading of many poems in this form, especially Emerson’s “Each and All,” a poem she marked twice in the table of contents and along the margin of the page in the copy of Poems she owned. “Each and All” ends with the same chiastic rhythm:
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird; —
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.