"I Read My Sentence Steadily" by Emily Dickinson

Topics mentioned in this episode include:

-The antitheses of Emily Dickinson

-White = Infinity in 19th century American Lit.

-Fascicles!

-The Modernist, Feminist, and Queer claims on Emily

-Magnificent and trending writer Virginia Woolf

-A secular Memento Mori

-Ballad Stanzas and Common Meter

-The Amazing Grace phenomenon

-Why Ballad Stanzas sound so ballad-y

-Slant rhyme revisited

-Matthew's podcast Sleerickets! 

-Why Big Pun and Robert Pinsky use slant rhyme differently.

-Slant rhyme modulation!

-How to stack ambiguities like a pro (it involves big puns)

-Original sin and the birth of Death

-Did you just gender my soul???

-God as Plural: Jewish and Christian takes

-The morbidity of Keats and Dickinson, compared

-The Aghori 

-One more pun as a nightcap before eternal sleep

Text of poem:

I read my sentence steadily,
Reviewed it with my eyes,
To see that I made no mistake
In its extremest clause, --

The date, and manner of the shame;
And then the pious form
That "God have mercy" on the soul
The jury voted him.

I made my soul familiar
With her extremity,
That at the last it should not be
A novel agony,

But she and Death, acquainted,
Meet tranquilly as friends,
Salute and pass without a hint --
And there the matter ends.