As if some little Arctic flower
As if some little Arctic flower,
Upon the polar hem,
Went wandering down the latitudes,
Until it puzzled came
To continents of summer,
To firmaments of sun,
To strange, bright crowds of flowers,
And birds of foreign tongue!
I say, as if this little flower
To Eden wandered in —
What then? Why, nothing, only,
Your inference therefrom!
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 1, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
“As if some little Arctic flower” was originally written in 1890 by Emily Dickinson. The poem would later be published in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Little, Brown, and Company, 1924). In the book’s foreword, Dickinson’s niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi wrote of her aunt, “Her poems reflect this direct relation toward the great realities we have later avoided, covered up, or tried to wipe out; perhaps because they were really so great we become so small in consequence. All truth came to Emily straight from honor to honor unimpaired. She never trafficked with falsehood seriously, never employed a deception in thought or feeling of her own. […] Mystic to mystic, mind to mind, spirit to spirit, dust to dust. She was at the source of things and dwelt beside the very springs of life, yet those deep wells from which she drew were of the wayside, though their waters were of eternal truth, her magnificent one of the certainties of every immortal being.”
Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. While she was extremely prolific as a poet and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, she was not publicly recognized during her lifetime. She died in Amherst in 1886, and the first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890.