Another Emily Dickinson poem appropriate for the first day of April:
April
An altered look about the hill;
A Tyrian light the village fills;
A wider sunrise in the dawn;
A deeper twilight on the lawn;
A print of a vermillion foot;
A purple finger on the slope;
A flippant fly upon the pane;
A spider at his trade again;
An added strut in chanticleer;
A flower expected everywhere;
An axe shrill singing in the woods;
Fern-odors on untravelled roads,--
All this, and more I cannot tell,
A furtive look you know as well,
Receives its annual reply.
From: Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson, original editions edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson, Gramercy Books (originally published in Poems, 1890; Second Series, 1891; and Poems, Third Series, 1896.
Links within the poem take you to the Emily Dickinson Lexicon, a scholarly but very accessible resource. Here is an introduction from the website:
The Emily Dickinson Lexicon is a dictionary of alphabetized headword entries for all of the words in Emily Dickinson’s collected poems (Johnson 1955 and Franklin 1998 editions). The scope of the Dickinson lexicon is comprehensive. A team of lexicographers and reviewers has examined almost 100,000 individual word occurrences to create approximately 9,275 headword entries. The EDL includes proper nouns, person names, and place names that are not usually listed in general dictionaries of the English language. Because high-frequency function words such as a, of, and the are important for Dickinson studies, the EDL includes basic definitions for 168 words that were omitted from Rosenbaum's concordance (xi) with their 38,235 occurrences.
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